Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Let science decide?

In response to Ed Babinski:

Ed: There is a sense in which I maintain that it would be a violation of naturalism to say that an atom can be affected by higher level configurations, since the physical level is, according to my defintion of naturalism, the physical is causally closed. On the other hand, certainly certain cells will be more likely to exist in virtue of the fact that they are part of a system that exhibits fitness to survive, and my argument is not about that. What I think doesn't work is a gradualist bridge between the nonintentional and the intentional. Add up the nonintentional all you want, and the information cannot entail anything about what intentional state exists.

Don't jump to the end of the argument. Lewis thought, for instance, that the mind was divinely illuminated, but his argument, by his own admission, is consistent with Absolute Idealism and Pantheism. He himself accepted a theistic account, but the AFRs, strictly speaking, don't prove that theism is the only answer. These essays are by an Absolute Idealist, Daniel Hutto.
http://www.herts.ac.uk/humanities/philosophy/dh.html

When I hear people say "Let science figure it out, I often wonder if the relevant conception of science would ever permit us to find out that dualism is true if it is in fact true. According to many forms of methodogical naturalism; the very forms of methodological naturalism that are used to argue that ID is pseudoscientific, if dualism were true we would never know that scientifically, because science ceases to be science once it appeals to that kind of entity. "Our commitment to materialism," says Lewontin, "is absolute." So saying "Let science decide" ends up being a "heads I win, tails you lose game." If the analysis of the brain gives is an adequate account of intentionality, hurray for naturalism. If it fails to produce an adequate account of intentionality, it can take out a promissory note. What could possibly falsify a materialist account of the mind?

4 comments:

Victor Reppert said...

What I was referring when I was talking about higher order confiugration was the doctrine of the causal closure of the physical. This is a doctrine formulated by naturalists, not by me. If the higher level configurations are really physical configurations, then what the atom does is a function of the total physical state of the world. I'm not sure what you mean by higher level. What is clear is that if you know the positons of the basic stuff and the laws the govern them, then you know everything you need to know to predict what the atoms are going to do. It doesn't matter what the macrosystems are called. On the other hand, if the so-called higher-order states are physical states writ large, then the claim that they cannot be affected by higher order states would be false.

In other words, if somehow the laws governing an electon change in virtue of it being part of a brain, as opposed to its being part of a tree or part of a rock, this would be a kind of emergence that would not be accepted by orthodox physicalists.

Victor Reppert said...

IDers have mathematical models for detecting design. The claim their claim is testable, and that it could be refuted if, for example, Darwinists could explain the emergence of the bacterial flagellum.

Victor Reppert said...

Look, it just isn't my position that macrosystems are irrelevant. What I hold is that naturalists should maintain that physics is closed, but it isn't part of my argument that the macrosystem of which it is a part is irrelevant. The laws of physics have to be the same regardless of the macrosystem, but that's it. Nothing more complicated than that.

Victor Reppert said...

I think we can settle the question of whether something is the result of intelligent design without knowing how the designer did it. For example, researchers knew perfectly well that smoking causes cancer (based on statistical evidence) before they had any idea by what mechanisms the cancer was caused.

If it was an omnipotent designer that did the designing, then I take it the designer did it through the exercise of omnipoent power. Darwinism claims there was a process, intelligent design does not assert that there was a process, so therefore they don't have to explain what the process was. But it could have been a process; offhand, I don't see how ID can rule out the possibility that the design comes from advanced space aliens who evolved on another planet. People who believe that biological systems are the result of design can call that one based on what they consider to be antecedently probable. Theistic design theorists will attribute it to God, atheistic design theorists will have to find something other than God to explain it.