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?
Ka-BLAM! {applause}
It’s a tough one. What philosophers call a heavyweight problem. And those who don’t just say “God” (as if that helped) aren’t likely to give a quick answer to it, or be too confident in anything they say. If you take a look at the SEP article on personal identity, you’ll see the basic answers that have been given and the objections to them. The British empiricists, like Locke and Hume, thought that what made some person at time 1 identical to a person at time 2 a matter of the relationship between the bundle of experiences–including the memories–constituting the person(s) at those two times. Of course, they weren’t materialists. But there are counter-examples available to that approach, of course, including those involving amnesiacs.
The other point is that we don’t normally require things to be identical down to the atom for them to be identical at two different times, whether those things are sentient or not. (My question to FMM on that was an attempt to get to what HE thinks about this stuff.) Generally we use some kind of continuity through time standard. The sci-fi hypotheses fart around with those which is the main reason that we have a lot of trouble figuring out what to say about them.
I kind of think the “designed purpose” (i.e., designed by God) approach is question-begging. I mean, the reason somebody ELSE couldn’t fulfill that same purpose is either that God is mysterious or that it needs to be the same person and the replacement just isn’t.
Yes, that’s where I thought FMM would go here. I was surprised by his taking the position that whatever the distinction is both publicly observable but nothing that even the best science could ever detect. It’s a more interesting claim because it doesn’t just make Spock into somebody who can do what FMM thinks God can do.
This is what happens when you take a question that is entirely a matter of social convention, and attempt to argue it as a matter of truth and logic.
What matters, I suppose, are that such arguments are how social convention are made and modified.
But that’s because for most of history we didn’t know about atoms.
If you would have told the Greeks that tables and chairs are really just some weird phases of energy that come and go, and change all the time, they might have had even more skepticism about reality.*
*Notwithstanding that Rumraket thinks it would be even more support for the materialist’s beliefs, ha.
Isn’t that a problem for IDists too? I mean it’s you who insist that living forms are very much like watches and machines, with all their interdependent parts carefully assembled for a purpose and all that crap.
dazz,
You think its a problem for those who believe there is a collective consciousness to the universe?
Yea, I don’t really think so. I’d say its more like evidence.
Can someone point me to some pre-scientific writings wherein the currently observed behavior of atoms is predicted as the tell-tale sign of the supernatural?
And once you’ve done that, can you then also point me to where it is established that the existence of the (still undefined) supernatural also entails, or even implies, the existence of an omnipotent God with an interest in human affairs?
And the Lord said, “let momentum and position be canonically conjugate variables by having uncertainty in momentum multiplied by uncertainty in position be greater than or equal to half of Planck’s constant”. And he saw that it was good!
I agree problem with this concern, as per my previous post on rejecting Job’s answer for this case.
FWIW, I have a book about QM called “sneaking a look at God’s cards”.
You might want to avoid tangling with an LGBT advocate.
Einstein called non-locality “spooky action at a distance”. Does that count?
Some philosophers would agree with you on that.
It just seems weird to me to claim that we’re machines made of physical parts and then get your knickers in a bunch at the idea that we’re made of atoms.
But anyway, I hope (well, not really) that you understand now you’ve just erected a straw man for you to beat to death. Haven’t you? I’m not holding my breath here since you consistently ignore the fact that many here don’t identify themselves as materialists, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t imply they must believe in the “supernatural”
phoodoo,
Hmmm. Most of what I remember about the pre-Socratics can be summed up as follows:
Democritus was an atomist.
Heraclitus said you can’t step in the same river twice.
Or anybody with an opinion about childrens’ trans rights….
I think it’s just a legal question.
Cards, huh? So it turns out he doesn’t play dice after all!
No illogical is
A synonym for intuition is: hunch, feeling, feeling in one’s bones, gut feeling, funny feeling, inkling, sneaking suspicion, suspicion, impression
None of which Spock would consider logical basis for knowledge.
Funnily enough, I’ve just read a Scott A paper where he says the reverse: public behavior is algorithmic but not predicable (under certain empirically testable assumptions).
The magic ingredient is unknowable initial conditions, where unknowable is defined in a way open to scientific investigation.
And, yes, it involves QM.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159
With cards he doesn’t have to show his hand.
Right, but I believe the early atomists view of tiny particles is almost the antitheisis of the modern idea of atoms. Their ideas were that everything is made of discrete tiny particles, that are clearly real, and solid and permanent one assumes.
Interestingly though, some of the Indian Buddhists, like Dharmakirti believed that atoms flashed momentary into and then out of existence. Interesting that this idea came from the theists-huh Rummy?
And there’s this:
And:
So it seems the materialists believed that you COULD understand the nature of the whole, by just looking at its component parts. That’s what materialism was.
Do you think that is what materialists today believe?
As opposed to the entities discovered by modern science which we also call atoms, but which aren’t real?
What?
Why? So did all the even more wrong ones too. There at least two camps arguing, both of them Buddistic, having their ideas of the functions of the “real” grounded in their different interpretations of Buddhist ideas. These qualities were but one of a whole ensemble many of which are now also known to be wrong and not at all descriptive of the behavior of atoms.
It was part of a whole tradition of various theologians and theistic philosophers all developing large amounts of mostly wrong ideas over centuries. After centuries of speculation and guessing, someone somewhere finally guessed some properties right. LOL
And that’s all supposed to lend credence to the existence of the “supernatural”, an idea you have yet to even define what means. That just makes it ad-hoc, question-begging nonsense. Never mind all the even more absurd entailments you pile on top, like somehow the behavior of atoms means everything has a purpose, or a cause outside the universe.
Probably not most of them. I assume most would take the relational properties to be physical as well. Bruce and KN would know better than I do, though.
Did you mean to write “predictable” there?
If “the supernatural” is defined as the statement that “there are things which have [the properties we observe that atoms have] then I agree the supernatural exists.
What does that mean? Does that mean the universe has a purpose, or a cause outside of it? That Gods exist, that they care about humans, that life was designed by a conscious intelligence, that we get a 2nd chance at a better life after our “supernatural” atom-made bodies die? Nope. We’d still be at square one. Having a new label for a category in which we put atoms. Whoop-de-doo, how profound.
That thing which we already agreed exists (atoms), exists! And we’ve decided to label them as “supernatural”. What’s next?
I meant “not predictable”. Essentially because it depends on conditions at creation of universe which are not knowable under certain scientifically investigable conditions. There is an important point that I did not mention, however. The predictor is not allowed to destroy the system to be predicted. (This permits QM no cloning theorem to be applied).
Aaronson thinks that impossibility of such a predictor is a necessary condition for the compatibilitism he is willing to support. Of course, he recognizes that science alone cannot be used to justify free will, but he thinks free will “casts this empirical shadow”.
FWIW, although the context and purpose are different, unkowable IC at origin of universe is reason for randomness in Bohmian interpretation (since the particles are deterministic).
ETA: Aaronson also uses the idea of the predictor in his solution to Newcomb’s paradox. See comment #4 at link below for a reference to the above issue.
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=30
That’s correct. For the Greek and Roman atomists (Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc.) the atoms are the only things that satisfy Parmenides’s criteria for being: they are eternal and unchanging, though they are infinitely varied in size, quantity, and position. (Epicurus realized that they could not be infinitely varied in size, or else there would be atoms as large as the universe, so he put an upper and lower limits on their size.)
The term “atom” comes from the Greek “atomas“, literally “un-cuttable”, “that which cannot be cut”. This is why the very idea that we could “split the atom” was such a massive change in Western consciousness in the 1950s.
The modern concept of the atom, which is (I think?) basically something like a stable balance between various energies, which in turn are understood ultimately in mathematical terms as fluctuations in a quantum field. This would have delighted the Pythagoreans, who taught that the ultimate foundation of all things is numbers, and the Heracliteans, who taught that there is no Being but only Becoming.
I don’t know if this is directed at anything I wrote, but here is where I am coming from.
For me, supernatural when applied to (purportedly) scientific explanation means not in accord with Methodological Naturalism. I also think MN emerges from current practices of domain of science under consideration, and not from philosophical fiat.
So if practices of sciences change, so could MN, and hence so could boundary of the supernatural.
It seems difficult to see how an OO God could ever be said to be part of MN. But maybe under Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, the creator of the simulation could fulfill the requirements. Going by memory, I think some have speculated about possible scientific means to determine if indeed we are living in a simulation.
I don’t think atoms are supernatural. Nor do I think that we need to rely on God to find meaning and purpose in human lives.
My Einstein reference was mean to show that he could be read as thinking non-locality as part of a completed QM was not acceptably MN.
I don’t know of any contemporary philosophers who proudly wave the “materialism” banner. The person who comes closest is probably Alex Rosenberg. I think he calls his position “scientism” — I guess he’s trying to be cute by appropriating a term of abuse? Anyway, his view is that the facts about fermions and bosons determine all the other facts that there are. To be honest, I don’t know if Rosenberg has sufficient background in physics to be entitled to his claims. His background is in biology, and I worry that his picture of fermions and bosons is a world of colliding billiard-balls — which is not what the philosophy of quantum mechanics seems to give us, if Ladyman and Ross are to be believed.
You are definitely right about that.
Of course, the core issue is that we have no idea what QM tells us about reality. When it comes to fundamental physics, talk of “components” or “parts” or even “properties” is pointless without that interpretation.
I was listening to Jenann Ismael on reductionism, and her view was that all could in principle be “implicitly” described by a completed fundamental physics. But the interviewer did not challenge her on the meaning of ‘implicitly’. Possibilities there could I suspect provide a lot of maneuvering room for a non-reductivist.
Has anyone had a look at this?
I’ve read books by the one of the authors, Jeffrey Bub, and he is definitely reliable.
Substitute smallest currently known entity.
I’ll defer to Israel’s expertise, but based on what you said, I wonder how much is being done by the very idea of a completed fundamental physics. It might be that it’s just part of the very idea of a completed fundamental physics that everything could be described by it. That’s not the same as saying that we actually have or even could have a completed fundamental physics. For all we know, it could just be a contingent fact about the kind of representational systems that we’ve evolved that we’re not capable of unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics.
You could be right. I don’t know Spock enough to say for sure.
I do think that you might be underestimating the power of intuition. When I think of intuition I think of an “oracle” from computability theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine
That sort of thing is just what you need to solve some problems and it would be highly illogical not to use it in certain circumstances.
The real question is whether determining which candidate is the real Kirk is the sort of problem that requires an oracle.
I think it is.
peace
I don’t know whether you are being serious with this one but if you are. You are showing ignorance of what the actually Trinity is.
It most certainly does not mean that three equals one at the same time and in the same respect.
I suspect you know that but just could not help yourself.
peace
Just to be clear I don’t think that “science” could ever “detect” the difference between two physically identical beings who each claim to be Kirk but I do think once a person has detected a difference his conclusion can (possibly) be verified using scientific means and methods.
peace
In that case the part after the initial conditions is algorithmic but the entire process is not.
I think a good deal of what persons do is algorithmic. It’s only when you take them in their entirety that the whole is not algorithmic.
The observed behavior of persons that is not algorithmic and is also not random is what we call a personality.
peace
Just to be clear, this was a popularization (Closer to the Truth). Specifically, closer to the truth stuff. Her talks at the Rothman institute on YT, as well as her paper in Scientific Metaphysics, are more technical. But they are not on reductionism.
Are there properties we observe that atoms in general have that are not reducible to physics? I would say no.
Are there properties we observe that persons have that are not reducible to physics? I would say yes.
The real question addressed in the thought experiment is whether in the end Kirk is just a pile of atoms.
peace
Thanks for that clarification.
Serious. I don’t want to get into this trinity biz again with you. I just think, like most theists as well as atheists have over the centuries, that it’s nuts
Fine,
There is a huge difference between thinking it’s nuts and claiming that it holds that three equals one at the same time and in the same respect.
peace
Then why the comment??
Did you just feel the need to drive by scoff for some reason?
peace
I think this is the problem with saying anything is reducible to physics. Because whatever we find to be the properties or tendencies, that’s just what we call physics. So if things appear and disappear, that’s physics. If time bends, that’s physics. If we can communicate from one mind to the next with thoughts, well, it must be physics. If atoms from different galaxies can communicate, well physics.
As such, what would be considered not physics? This is the problem for Rumraket, which he can’t grasp. At some point, there has to be properties that come close to our imagination of what a world with unnatural origins would look like. Things coming in and out of being, time changing, the past being the future or vice versa, solid objects being made out of dissipating mist, reality being what our minds make it…the list goes on and on.
Any movie, made 2000 years ago, which suggested all of these possibilities, would most certainly qualify as a movie about mysticism and existence beyond the form. That might be as close to a God as one could expect to touch here on Earth.
And if its not as close as one could expect to touch what is? And whatever they thing would be, wouldn’t many also just call it physics? What can’t be called physics?
Its kind of funny, if one thinks, The Greeks warned you! Don’t try to play God.
I think its another one of those facts I mentioned, that can be thought of as a mystical property of the world-there is enough energy in a tiny speck way too small for any of us to see, to destroy all the villages in one’s community. That would have been pretty outrageous fiction back in the day.
And now we just say, “Huh, whattya know, well that’s physics for ya!”