How does mind move matter? To me, the question appears rather uninteresting. A simple collision is all that’s required to move matter.
How does the mind act at all, and what are the acts of the mind?
1. Simple apprehension
2. Judging
3. Reasoning
Alan Fox asserts that knowledge consists of apprehension.
Elizabeth Liddle claims that she agrees with Alan, but fails to incorporate her belief in the construction of mental models with Alan’s reductionist denial of the incorporation of mental models.
Does knowledge consist only of what can be sensed, as Alan Fox claims?
Or does knowledge consist of only what can be sensed and modeled, as Elizabeth claims?
Can science resolve the question of what can be considered knowledge, as Alan Fox claims?
What does God say?
God divided everything, in proverbs, into WISDOM, UNDERSTANDING, KNOWLEDGE. Thats what humans can aspire to regarding intelligence of KNOWING.
Knowledge is the less smart part of this. This is what most people and students can acquire in their early lives. its a accomplishment but a rather easy one.
Anyways origin issues are not that complicated.
One side says their ideas are based on the evidence of nature after investigation by intelligent people and another side says they got it wrong and heres why and also there is a witness by a creator par excellence.
Somebody is wrong here.
Its up to god deniers and evolutionists to show their evidence.!
I have nevdr seen it yet.
No problem in true scientific subjects!!
Interesting, Mung, you’ve gone from 20th century protestant presuppsitionalism (in the other thread) to 13th century catholic speculative theology.
Keep going, you’ll get to Plato yet!
hotshoe:
So, in stark contrast to your refusal to read Meyer, you’ve willingly read Plato? Do tell.
OK, a collision with what? If the mind is immaterial – neither energy nor matter – what form does this collision take? A collision transfers a portion of kinetic energy to the object hit. This means (via the Laws of Thermodynamics) that the incoming ‘thing’ had kinetic energy in the first place. Kinetic energy is a property of moving objects, material things.
We can easily conceive of objects suddenly getting energy from outside the realm of physics, but thermodynamics seems dead set against this. Energy can only be transferred or converted.
From a previous thread:
Let me just answer the “how do we know” questions. There is no other way of learning about the world except through our sensory inputs. Other commenters, Mike Elzinga for example, have already made the points, so no need to repeat. Communication and storage of information has caused a huge expansion in what we know. And by “know”, I mean it in the pragmatic sense. I choose to accept the information that arrives through my senses as real information. I can test this information by sharing, reading, experimenting. Alternatively, I could make things up and ignore contra-factual evidence. I find it more satisfying, personally, to admit to myself that I don’t know, rather than make something up as scientific knowledge is, apparently an expanding resource. What we don’t know today, we may know tomorrow.
Where have I denied the power of human imagination?
So, there’s this thing called “epistemology,” also called “the theory of knowledge”. (True! Really! I’m not making it up!) And there are people who do this really seriously and at very sophisticated levels, for a living. And a lot of them write books, which are accessible to non-specialists and readily available in any bookstore, not to mention the fabled wonders of the Internet.
I know that several folks here have a decent background in epistemology and philosophy of science, and I do enjoy talking about these issues with you all. I’m not taking the “one must be a specialist to have the right to be be taken seriously” attitude. (Trying not to, anyway. Sorry if I come across as a pompous jerk, sometimes.)
But what I am saying is that there is a real body of literature out there, there are better and worse answers to these questions that some very intelligent people have been creating and critiquing for a very long time, and it’s worth one’s time to get a rough sense of the lay of the land before re-inventing all the wheels.
There is also the entire field of COGNition.
And I listen to Bach, but not Lady Gaga.
True, and that can be the answer for every post in this blog. Don´t ask read the books of people that is smarter than you!
Lizzie,
Yes. In fact, “epistemology” is from the Greek, and “cognitive science” from Latin. (“episteme”, “cognitio,” “knowing”; “logia,” “scientia,” “discourse concerning or study of”).
When I first studied epistemology in the late 90s, the question was about how cognitive neuroscience would change epistemology. I think there’s still a lot of discussion about whether cognitive science is relevant to epistemology.
On the one hand, there are extremely good reasons for being averse to an entirely a priori, from-the-armchair enterprise. On the other hand, epistemology is usually construed as a normative project, whereas cognitive science is usually construed as a descriptive project, so if we take the naturalistic fallacy seriously and want to avoid it, not all of epistemology can be reduced to cognitive science.
As in metaphysics, epistemology is still troubled by the need for a via media that avoids both apriorism and scientism.
petrushka,
I hope you’re not seriously comparing Lady Gaga to Stephen Meyer, because that’s a major put-down of Lady Gaga that she does not deserve. And I also hope you’re not seriously suggesting that people who love Bach can’t love Lady Gaga as well. Or that people who love Plato can’t also love, for example, Nietzsche.
Blas,
I understand that some people just don’t have the time and/or energy to sit down and read even an introductory work in theories of knowledge. We have jobs and families and all sorts of other obligations that severely constrain our time, and reading philosophy isn’t exactly relaxing. And I understand that some people don’t have the personality to enjoy reading or get much out of it, much as I find them baffling. I simply don’t think that there’s any excuse for laziness, that’s all.
I struggled to think of an apt musical analogy. I said Lady Gaga because, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never listened. There are tens of thousands of musical groups, just as Amazon sells tens or hundreds of thousands of different books.
How we spend our time depends of things like reviews and the opinions of friends. I’m not going to read a book at random. I read about books and occasionally see something that induces me to acquire and read one.
I’ve probably spent several hours reading about Meyer. Much of what I’ve read is from people friendly to him, such as Meyer himself at Evo News and Views. Nothing I’ve read piques my interest. I don’t see any new arguments or new lines of reasoning.
Other people who are considered friendly to ID have covered this ground. In particular, Kooning and Shapiro were recommended by the folks at DU. I bought and read their books. They go to great length about the evolution of proteins and the rates of such , without seeing any suspicious variation in rates.
They also confirm Marshall’s claim that post-Cambrian evolution is not about new proteins.
So who am I to spend my time with: qualified people who have spent lifetimes studying genomics, or the lawyers at DI?
My answer is that at the moment I have 171 Mozart CDs in a carousel (great garage sale find), and in a few months I might fire up a Lady Gaga YouTube video to see if I’m missing anything.
But if Mung wishes to present a reasoned argument why I should read Meyer, he’s welcome to. Childish taunts just cause me to scroll past Mung’s posts. I am completely immune to taunts.
*Edited for spelling.
Here’s the rough overview I use when I teach epistemology:
Skepticism: we cannot know anything. (In some versions, this involves a conception of knowledge so demanding that finite, embodied creatures cannot meet the standard; in its most powerful version, it involves an argument that no epistemological view can avoid all three horns of Agrippa’s trilemma.)
Rationalism: we can know some things, and some of the things we can know are known through reason alone. (Most philosophers today will admit that logic and mathematics are known through reason alone, because 19th-century attempts to establish logic and mathematics on a purely inductive basis are generally regarded as failures. The remaining question is whether anything else besides logic and mathematics — for example, very general truths about reality — can be known through reason alone.)
Empiricism: we can know some things, but everything that we can know is known through the senses. (Here everything depends on what “the senses” refers to, and if the senses are just causal intermediaries between us and things or somehow obstruct our cognitive grasping of things.)
Follow-up questions: what attitude should we take towards skepticism? can skepticism be refuted? If so, how? If not, should the skeptic be ignored? Are there decisive reasons for or against either rationalism or empiricism? Is there alternatives to ‘either rationalism or empiricism’, e.g. Kantianism, pragmatism, etc.? Does knowledge require language, or do animals and infants know things? If so, what are the differences between ‘animal knowledge’ and the knowledge of rational beings?
Other questions: does one’s social or economic position affect one’s epistemic position? Is there a difference between “knowing-how” and “knowing-that”? Are there substantive, important differences between “Western” conceptions of knowledge and those of other cultures, e.g. indigenous cultures?
petrushka,
There was an interesting discussion a few weeks ago here about “pseudo-science”. There is certainly “pseudo-philosophy,” though the criteria are murkier, and it’s a lot harder to specify what exactly distinguishes pseudo-philosophy from bad philosophy.
I disagree.
What you can learn from sensory inputs is far too little.
We mainly learn by producing behavioral outputs, with trial and error testing of that behavior.
Learning from inputs alone: the large scale version of this is known as “philosophy”.
Learning with the trial and error testing of behavioir: the large scale version of this is known as “science”.
I’ll put it to you that science works better than philosophy.
petrushka,
Lady is a Tramp with Tony Bennett. The girl can sing, and has a great sense of humour.
As a mathematician, I deny that we know mathematics by reason alone.
Philosophy is ideally conducted by talking and listening, writing and reading responses. It is tested by feedback from other people.
My point is that it makes no product that is not self-referential. One can analyze philosophical statements for self-consistency and logical coherence, but they have no traction with the real world unless they make testable, empirically engaged predictions. In other words, unless they are scientific statements.
To the extent that philosophers make statements about how science is best conducted, they are recommendations regarding efficiency and productivity. Science occasionally drives into a ditch, but over decades and centuries it self-corrects. It does so because ultimately science is steered by technology and by profitable products.
Tony Bennett is also on my ignore list. I’ve heard him, but he doesn’t speak to me.
There’s really no penalty for not liking a musical style or performer. It doesn’t take much exposure to decide. There’s far too much stuff I do like.
Same with books and authors. I can become interested in a book by reading a single paragraph if it’s intriguing. I’ve read dozens of paragraphs by Meyer, including his defenses of his book at ENV.
It appears that to the extent he’s right, others have done better, and to the extent he’s original, he’s simply wrong. If he had any compelling argument, it could be summarized in a few hundred words.
The summaries I’ve seen are simply wrongly reasoned.
I disagree.
And I disagree that we disagree! 😉 I shall proceed to demonstrate.
Absolutely! We are limited by our cognitive ability, our opportunities to learn and the length of our lives.
(I’m unhappy about the disappearing “u” but I’ll let it pass.)
Absolutely. But without the inputs we have nothing to base experience on. Without learning, put in an environment of sensory deprivation from birth, we can learn nothing.
Ah, here you have me! I rather have formed the prejudice that philosophy is rationalist and not empirical.
I agree!
I agree!
I agree! 😉
Bach vs Mozart?
No contest! Bach writes music like a mathematician. Mozart is an artist.
I’ll take both, thank you.
One thing that must be understood about pre-romantic music is that performers were expected to improvise, like jazz musicians. The written notes are a skeleton on which to hang a performance.
At the very least they must interpret.
Music evolves!
That it is not my point. Any blog is a virtual place where ordinary people read and comment what other ordinary people like to say. All the subjects of this blogs has plenty of bibliography made by smart people, most of them since 2500 years ago.
Always you can say go and read and study, but then why come here at a blog and read and comment?
I find this curious. Let me say a bit more how I understand the assertion that mathematics is based “on reason alone” — by which I mean that it is not empirical. So perhaps I set the wrong tone by treating “by reason alone” as an adequate term for “not empirical.”
(And of course there’s a lot at work in figuring out what “reason” is. But I take reason itself to be a social process that evolves over history — not need not be committed to something like Platonic intuition into the essences, a sort of weird quasi-perception, in order to be a rationalist — even though, traditionally, most rationalists were Platonists.)
By saying that mathematics is not empirical, what I have in mind that that the justification procedures used in mathematics are not susceptible to confirmation or refutation by sensory observations. (The joke I tell I my students is that we’ll never see a headline that reads, “scientists discover that 2+2 not always 4”.)
Put in those terms, do you disagree? If so, why?
Let me just answer the “how do we know” questions.There is no other way of learning about the world except through our sensory inputs. Other commenters, Mike Elzinga for example, have already made the points, so no need to repeat.
I think that you are evading the problem. An electromagnetic wave hits your retina and start an electrochemical impulse. How we reach the idea of light or the existance of a source of light?
Rationalism, as defined by KN, seems utterly indefensible. I agree with Neil on this.
I’d really like someone to explain by what other route we can receive information about the environment we inhabit besides our sensory inputs.
See this Utube audio where I’d liked to have written the script!
I don’t know the precise details of how the chemical reaction induced by a photon exciting a rod or cone in the visual cortex is interpreted in the brain. I don’t know exactly how the brain models the real world from the sensory inputs it receives. I suspect scientific progress will continue by chopping up the problem into manageable slices of experimental research.
The mistake here — which, granted, is an easy one to make — is to not distinguish between
(1) non-sensory sources of information about the environment
and
(2) knowledge that isn’t about the environment we inhabit at all.
The orthodox rationalist would be committed to (2), not to (1). Someone who is engaged in a priori metaphysics — and this is not my jam! — would be saying that logical considerations about compatibilty and incompatibility between concepts indicate to us what must be, can be, and cannot be the case about reality. Since we’re operating at the level of possibility and necessity, we’re not dealing with “information about the environment we inhabit” (i.e. actuality) at all.
As best I can guess, that’s what the rationalist metaphysician would say in his or her defense. I don’t work in that area, and I have my own (strong) feelings about how worthwhile it is, but it doesn’t strike me as an completely absurd pursuit, either.
I have difficulty imagining instances of one or two.
I would say “non-sensory sources of information about the environment” is an oxymoron so your 1) I suspect would not bear a moment’s scrutiny. Re 2) I guess that would depend where the limit of our environment is drawn. For the overwhelming majority, that will never extend beyond Earth’s atmosphere but scientifically, it extends to the limit of the observable universe. I’m still unconvinced that a rationalist can tell me anything useful that was not based on empirical experience.
Has anyone here looked at Helen Keller’s life?
petrushka,
Not in detail. I see from Wikipedia that she became deaf/blind at 19 months, rather than, as I thought, from birth. She, and her teacher, deserve our admiration for triumph over adversity. Is there something about her story that contradicts my conviction that we can only learn about the world via our sensory inputs?
Knowing is completely based on experience. Knowing is an extension of doing and receiving feedback.
I agree!
I think you’re missing the point of what the rationalist is claiming. She is claiming that there are aspects of reality other than what is empirically accessible to us, regardless of the spatial or temporal range of our sensory intake. But the rationalist, unlike the mystic, doesn’t think that divine revelation is necessary to appreciate these aspects — reason alone can do the trick.
Now, the traditional rationalists — the wildly inventive and speculative philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries — were committed to something like “intellectual intuition” — a sort of special ‘seeing’ ‘by the mind alone’. And I share the empiricist sentiment that there’s no such thing. That’s why I’m a Kantian, or more precisely, a Kantian pragmatist.
Coming at it from the cognitive psychology end, I’d say that a lot of knowing is connected with selecting an appropriate course of action, including, to take Blas’s example, knowing where the light is coming from.
In fact I’d say that the concept of “where” itself is intimately bound up with our need to navigate the world.
To repeat my pet idea: I think it’s no coincidence that living things with brains are also things that move. Living things without brains tend to have roots. Although even they grow towards the light.
I agree that it is not empirical. I do not agree that it based on reason alone.
I suppose I could also say that reason is not empirical, but that reason is not based on reason alone.
Philosophers tend to define knowledge as justified true belief. I’ll grant that justified true mathematical belief is based on reason alone. But I do not concede that mathematical knowledge is justified true mathematical belief. Nor, for that matter, do I grant that knowledge (as ordinarily understood) is justified true belief. That’s my big disagreement with philosophy.
Having taught undergraduate math classes, I can tell you that we do have students who try to learn mathematics by gaining justified true mathematical beliefs. We have a name for these students. We call them “flunkouts.”
I pretty much agree with that. However, I disagree with the obsession with justification that we see coming from philosophy. That’s not to deny the importance of justification. What I deny, is its centrality.
Let me compare this with biology. We could say that the genome of a biological organism is an a priori construct out of random genetic code letters (or amino acids, or whatever). That’s pretty much one of the attacks that creationists use. Biologists, however, point out the importance of the filtering and directional steering of natural selection.
Now think of formalism as a philosophy of mathematics. We could think of mathematicians taking random formal strings of symbols and applying logic. But that omits the importance of the selection processes whereby they choose which strings of symbols are worth looking at.
So sure, we start with axioms and prove theorems. It is my contention that the most important part of mathematics is before you have the axioms. And that’s where I don’t see it as all reason.
Take arithmetic as an example. Arithmetic is an idealization of the empirical practice of counting. The theorems owe nothing to empirical input. But the choice to idealize counting does have it origin in the useful empirical practice of counting.
I take “information” to be Shannon information. Or otherwise said, information is a sequence of symbols. Naturally occurring signals are not information.
Sure, we receive information when we read a book or listen to a speech. But when I am bird watching, I am not receiving information. My perceptual system is constructing information, not receiving it. It is using natural signals in that construction. But there’s a construction nonetheless.
I see much of our knowledge coming from that construction. We do a lot of trial and error learning to develop good ways of constructing information. And we settle on the best ways that we can find. Those methods of constructing information that happen to work, are the basis of our knowledge. Only part of that comes from the signals. An important part comes from what we have discovered to be the effective ways of constructing information.
Samuel Johnson is said to have kicked as rock, and said “I refute it thus”. By kicking a rock, he generated information which he took to refute Berkeley’s idealism.
Yes,
That still doesn’t explain how mind moves matter if you don’t belive the mind is material.
Do you believe the mind is material, Mung?
If the mind is not a label for an aspect of the brain, and the mind is elsewhere, we have no reason to believe that plants do not have minds and souls.
Neil Rickert,
I like where you’re coming from here. Would it be fair to say that it’s a question of knowing how to organize one’s (information? knowledge? experience?) to see which questions are worth asking [in science] and which axioms are interesting (??) [in mathematics].
petrushka,
Just for historical embellishment: Aristotle thought that plants did have souls, because he thought of soul (psuche) as the “form” (morphe) of a living thing. In effect, he used “psuche” to refer to what we call “metabolism”.
I’d buy that definition of Soul. It makes as much sense as Mind.
I can’t speak for Christians in general, but Anglicans and Episcopalians have — as a non-negotiable article of faith — a belief in resurrection of the body and eternal life in that body.
That’s somewhat different from what we hear from Robert Byers and such.
But in order to navigate the world you do not need the concept of “where” or the concept of “light”.
How we “link” the signal with the concept? How we arrive to a “concept”?
If you do not know the process how can you affirm that learning it is all about sensory signals?
If you do not know the all the details abut how Higgs boson gives mass to particles, how can you affirm that gravity it is all about mass?
Or do you think gravity is just as likely to be about angels pushing particles?
Why do you act as if an absurdly specific level of answer is needed before you will accept the general explanation which is in accordance with our scientific understanding of reality? Is it just “spiritual” and “mental” things that you act so absurdly about? Or is it every item of western scientific knowledge that you reject?
Kantian Naturalist,
Aristotle wasn’t aware cellular metabolisms. Perhaps Aristotle would say our soul is the accumulation of billions of lesser souls, but I doubt Aquinas would agree. Certainly the Catholic catechism holds that only God can create our soul, and that we are unique in its possession.
I don’t really have an answer to that. Different mathematicians have different ideas as to what is interesting or important. They don’t differ greatly, but the differ enough that I can’t guess what actually motivates them.
As for knowledge, it seems to me that knowledge in both mathematics and physics is mostly knowing how rather than knowing that. I’m inclined to think that’s true about ordinary life, too, though it is more obviously true about mathematics and physics.