Victor, "For Tegmark, the universe is a “set of abstract entities with relations between them,”" Tegmark is a kook who sell woo.
"Scientific American" does not say the universe is mental, they just publish far out woo to sell magazines, and it works, just look how rich Depak Chopra has gotten selling woo, people are credulous.
You have no argument from reason. You have no arguments at all. All you have is some quote mining from a few crackpots.
Lawrence Krauss seemed like a very rational guy, then he decided, apparently, to cash in on woo, and it worked. He made up a nonsense book title and sold a lot of books. Then we found out he is actually a dirtbag who sexualizes interviews with young female applicants.
I am not saying you are anything like that, I don't know you or or personal life and I really don't care. My point is that serious physicists and modern philosophers are almost entirely materialists because that is what makes sense, that is what mountains of evidence shows, and because there are no sound arguments for god or the soul on offer, none whatsoever.
Kevin, You have no particular reason to believe much about me, other then the implications of my manifest capacity to post here.
So, you have good evidence, good reason to believe, that I an literate in English, I know how to access the internet, and I know how to manipulate some sort of data device.
There really are not all that many arguments for god or the soul on offer. A few typical ones are arguments from: motion teleology beginnings design reason fine tuning consciousness
They all fail immediately. The Five Ways of Aquinas are particularly bad.
Victor seems to think the argument from reason is pretty terrific, but he can't seem to state what that argument is beyond quoting some diffuse prose from Balfour and Lewis.
So, turning to Wiki we find this "1. No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes." That is clearly nonsense. That asserts that logical operations cannot be performed by non-rational elements. Today we have computers that provide clear counterexamples.
But, even without such computers, purely on philosophical grounds, that suffers from the fallacy of composition. Complex systems do things that small bits don't do.
A few hydrogen atoms in space will not fuse. When enough of them come together in a star they do fuse.
The so-called "argument" from reason is specious immediately, as are all the other arguments for god or the soul on offer.
This is preciseely the computer argumenbt that Haldane used to rebut his previous argument from reason. when he retracted it in 1954. But then computerrs are, of cousre, pro9ducts of ihtelligent design, and derive their meanings from template derived from humans. Computer movements mean something or nothing depending on how humans interpret it. How do you get rational agents where not existed before, if there are no intelligent causes in the universe to begin with?
I won't wait for Stardusty's ansswer to this. I already know what it is. Just as there is a Blind Watchmaker that simulates the effects of intelligencee while actually being blind and stupid, there is a Blind Programmer that does the same thing.
This is from Patricia Churchland:
If AI has taught us anything, it is that effects which seem to require an intelligent homunculus can really be done by stupid elements properly hooked up.Who hooked us up? Evolution.
Just look at the vast numbers of living species. Everything from single cell organisms to us. Tracing the set of living species from simplest to most complex is highly analogous to evolution over some 4 billion years.
Simple multicellular animals don't have brains, just some rudimentary nerves. Animals with more developed brains do more complex things.
Even something as small as an insect brain can do some very complex tasks. We assume they do everything they do robotically, with no self awareness as we think of it. But even an insect does display a robotic self awareness in that the sense/brain/motor control system is a feedback control system.
Step by small step of complexity, function, and consciousness is represented in the variety of living species, which had their analogs in evolutionary development many millions of years ago.
Consciousness is not something that suddenly popped into being. Just look at apes and work your way down the list of mammals until you get to something like a mouse. From a mouse work your way back from lizards to lungfish. From lungfish work your way back to fish.
A fish has a sort of robotic self awareness in a highly developed sense/brain/motor control system. It took a little more than 500 million years to get from fish to us.
When you discover a watch on the beach you know it was made by an intelligent watchmaker because there is no mechanism in the device for it to be part of an evolutionary process. That is not the case for us.
We have all the mechanisms needed to be part of an evolutionary process. Our body plan is nearly identical to the other apes, which is pretty much the same in all mammals. We reproduce the same way, our DNA chemistry is the same, our internal organs an bones are nearly the same, and our brains are nearly the same as other apes.
Nearly all modern scientists and philosophers are materialists because mountains of evidence shows that materialism is the case. Immaterialism, by contrast, is devoid of evidence.
Churchland is right, we have gotten as far as producing the philosophical zombie in less than 100 years of digital computer development.
How long do you suppose it will take before AI bots start telling us they have all the same self awareness we have? What will people do 50 years from now when AI claims to feel the sensory perception of color as we do, only vastly more so? What if that only takes 10 more years?
StardustyPsyche said: //serious physicists and modern philosophers are almost entirely materialists because that is what makes sense, that is what mountains of evidence shows, and because there are no sound arguments for god or the soul on offer, none whatsoever.//
It's certainly the case that physicists are overwhelmingly materialists. Philosophers are not, but they almost all believe the brain produces consciousness (so no soul or afterlife).
However, it's not because it makes sense. Indeed, the way the material world is defined (all that is measurable) rules out materialism, since consciousness is not wholly measurable.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I think the problem here is that science has been so incredibly successful in describing the world that the "intelligentsia" conclude that it is reasonable to infer that the methods of science are susceptible to explaining all aspects of reality. Consciousness should be no exception. Couple this with the fact that scientists tend to be quite poor at philosophy, but yet at the same time enjoy a high level of prestige. Thus, scientists opinions carry a great deal of weight. Hence, when they continually extol the outstanding successes of science, but at the same time depreciate the value of philosophical thought claiming it doesn't deliver the goods, we have fertile grounds for reaching fatuous conclusions. Fatuous conclusions, moreover, not just about how consciousness fits into the physical world, but on more general questions pertaining to the nature of reality which rightfully belongs to the province of philosophy.
Professional philosophers operate in this environment that scientists have created. Those that offer dissenting views are ferociously attacked.
StardustyPsyche said: //Nearly all modern scientists and philosophers are materialists because mountains of evidence shows that materialism is the case. Immaterialism, by contrast, is devoid of evidence.//
Actually, if anything, there is more evidence for immaterialism. Of course, if evidence was particularly relevant here, then both materialism and immaterialism (and dualism etc) would all be scientific hypotheses. But they are philosophical, or more specifically, metaphysical hypotheses.
Ian, "However, it's not because it makes sense. Indeed, the way the material world is defined (all that is measurable) rules out materialism, since consciousness is not wholly measurable." You have that backwards.
Materialism rules out consciousness as an immaterial substance that is somehow an ontologically real feature of the cosmos.
Consciousness is a process of material.
Besides, your definition of materialism makes no sense. Human beings are limited in our capability to measure. In fact, the whole notion of "measurement" is philosophically dubious because there is, at base, only the experiment wherein the both subject and measurer interact and change each other.
"the "intelligentsia" conclude that it is reasonable to infer that the methods of science are susceptible to explaining all aspects of reality." Who says that? Science is a human endeavor. Human beings are limited. There is no reason to suppose that any human endeavor must extend to all aspects of reality. Who does not realize that? Sounds like a strawman derived from a quote mine of some crackpot woo seller.
Ian, "Actually, if anything, there is more evidence for immaterialism." ROTFLMAO
"A very brief introduction to Immaterialism" Not a drop of evidence for immaterialism presented.
"But they are philosophical, or more specifically, metaphysical hypotheses." Ok, so you don't actually have any evidence for immaterialism, you just philosophized it. To come up with the notion of immaterialism you could just as well have simply closed your eyed and dreamed up the idea.
Ian, "You're not advancing any arguments for me to address." Do you suppose you were?
All you did above was make a series of mostly baseless and erroneous assertions.
"Actually, if anything, there is more evidence for immaterialism." Do you consider that to be some sort of argument? I mean, I literally burst out laughing when I read that. But, nevertheless, I went to "A very brief introduction to Immaterialism" to see what all this vast evidence for immaterialism is.
But, as I suspected, there is no evidence at all for immaterial presented at "A very brief introduction to Immaterialism". Do you think there is?
Victor, Everything you do in this world is evidence of mind independent objects.
The philosopher who sat contemplating the unreality of his food died of hunger.
Hold your breath as long as you can. Now, I most definitely do not wish any self inflicted harm on you, rather, I am counting on the likelihood that you are like every other person I have ever interacted with on this subject.
You can tell yourself there is no such thing as mind-independent air and "simply" choose to stop breathing.
I'll wager that in a very short time you will find holding your breath continuously without end is not so "simple".
But go ahead, give it a try, if you do not have the patience to starve yourself of "simpler" non-mind independent food.
It is very "simple", right? There is no such mind independent stuff as air, and you can prove it by just holding your breath, permanently.
Then, please, by all means, tell me how long it took you to live as though there really is some real mind independent stuff we call air.
There's stuff independent of my mind, no problem. But is that stuff independent of any mind? A thought in God's mind can still give me the sensation of being kicked in the stomach.
At this point in physics we know from blackhole thermodynamics that our experience of the physical emerges as a holographic duality. For example the * interior* of a blackhole is a nonphysical collection of the quantum states of everything that was accreted at the horizon. Hence the interior is similar to an encrypted block cipher. There is good warrant for reductive metaphysical idealism( priority cosmopsychism). So, a non physical ontologically prior intellect must semantically determinate, or fix the meaning of the syntax from which any spacetime emerges. Theism ( prior mind ontology), offers the best truthmaker in a Kripkean sense for why we have semantically determinate information among infinite incompossible forms( information realism).
Victor, "A thought in God's mind can still give me the sensation of being kicked in the stomach." You can make up whatever fictional characters you want, up to you.
You can speculate that a google Plank scale angels nudge every photon along through space, whatever, so what?
17 comments:
Victor,
"For Tegmark, the universe is a “set of abstract entities with relations between them,”"
Tegmark is a kook who sell woo.
"Scientific American" does not say the universe is mental, they just publish far out woo to sell magazines, and it works, just look how rich Depak Chopra has gotten selling woo, people are credulous.
You have no argument from reason. You have no arguments at all. All you have is some quote mining from a few crackpots.
Lawrence Krauss seemed like a very rational guy, then he decided, apparently, to cash in on woo, and it worked. He made up a nonsense book title and sold a lot of books. Then we found out he is actually a dirtbag who sexualizes interviews with young female applicants.
I am not saying you are anything like that, I don't know you or or personal life and I really don't care. My point is that serious physicists and modern philosophers are almost entirely materialists because that is what makes sense, that is what mountains of evidence shows, and because there are no sound arguments for god or the soul on offer, none whatsoever.
there are no sound arguments for god or the soul on offer, none whatsoever
Is there any reason, for you or anyone else, to believe you would recognize such an argument if it was presented to you?
Kevin,
You have no particular reason to believe much about me, other then the implications of my manifest capacity to post here.
So, you have good evidence, good reason to believe, that I an literate in English, I know how to access the internet, and I know how to manipulate some sort of data device.
There really are not all that many arguments for god or the soul on offer. A few typical ones are arguments from:
motion
teleology
beginnings
design
reason
fine tuning
consciousness
They all fail immediately. The Five Ways of Aquinas are particularly bad.
Victor seems to think the argument from reason is pretty terrific, but he can't seem to state what that argument is beyond quoting some diffuse prose from Balfour and Lewis.
So, turning to Wiki we find this
"1. No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes."
That is clearly nonsense. That asserts that logical operations cannot be performed by non-rational elements. Today we have computers that provide clear counterexamples.
But, even without such computers, purely on philosophical grounds, that suffers from the fallacy of composition. Complex systems do things that small bits don't do.
A few hydrogen atoms in space will not fuse. When enough of them come together in a star they do fuse.
The so-called "argument" from reason is specious immediately, as are all the other arguments for god or the soul on offer.
This is preciseely the computer argumenbt that Haldane used to rebut his previous argument from reason. when he retracted it in 1954. But then computerrs are, of cousre, pro9ducts of ihtelligent design, and derive their meanings from template derived from humans. Computer movements mean something or nothing depending on how humans interpret it. How do you get rational agents where not existed before, if there are no intelligent causes in the universe to begin with?
I won't wait for Stardusty's ansswer to this. I already know what it is. Just as there is a Blind Watchmaker that simulates the effects of intelligencee while actually being blind and stupid, there is a Blind Programmer that does the same thing.
This is from Patricia Churchland:
If AI has taught us anything, it is that effects which seem to require an intelligent
homunculus can really be done by stupid elements properly hooked up.Who hooked us up? Evolution.
Victor,
"Who hooked us up? Evolution."
Right.
Just look at the vast numbers of living species. Everything from single cell organisms to us. Tracing the set of living species from simplest to most complex is highly analogous to evolution over some 4 billion years.
Simple multicellular animals don't have brains, just some rudimentary nerves. Animals with more developed brains do more complex things.
Even something as small as an insect brain can do some very complex tasks. We assume they do everything they do robotically, with no self awareness as we think of it. But even an insect does display a robotic self awareness in that the sense/brain/motor control system is a feedback control system.
Step by small step of complexity, function, and consciousness is represented in the variety of living species, which had their analogs in evolutionary development many millions of years ago.
Consciousness is not something that suddenly popped into being. Just look at apes and work your way down the list of mammals until you get to something like a mouse. From a mouse work your way back from lizards to lungfish. From lungfish work your way back to fish.
A fish has a sort of robotic self awareness in a highly developed sense/brain/motor control system. It took a little more than 500 million years to get from fish to us.
When you discover a watch on the beach you know it was made by an intelligent watchmaker because there is no mechanism in the device for it to be part of an evolutionary process. That is not the case for us.
We have all the mechanisms needed to be part of an evolutionary process. Our body plan is nearly identical to the other apes, which is pretty much the same in all mammals. We reproduce the same way, our DNA chemistry is the same, our internal organs an bones are nearly the same, and our brains are nearly the same as other apes.
Nearly all modern scientists and philosophers are materialists because mountains of evidence shows that materialism is the case. Immaterialism, by contrast, is devoid of evidence.
Churchland is right, we have gotten as far as producing the philosophical zombie in less than 100 years of digital computer development.
How long do you suppose it will take before AI bots start telling us they have all the same self awareness we have? What will people do 50 years from now when AI claims to feel the sensory perception of color as we do, only vastly more so? What if that only takes 10 more years?
StardustyPsyche said:
//serious physicists and modern philosophers are almost entirely materialists because that is what makes sense, that is what mountains of evidence shows, and because there are no sound arguments for god or the soul on offer, none whatsoever.//
It's certainly the case that physicists are overwhelmingly materialists. Philosophers are not, but they almost all believe the brain produces consciousness (so no soul or afterlife).
However, it's not because it makes sense. Indeed, the way the material world is defined (all that is measurable) rules out materialism, since consciousness is not wholly measurable.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I think the problem here is that science has been so incredibly successful in describing the world that the "intelligentsia" conclude that it is reasonable to infer that the methods of science are susceptible to explaining all aspects of reality. Consciousness should be no exception. Couple this with the fact that scientists tend to be quite poor at philosophy, but yet at the same time enjoy a high level of prestige. Thus, scientists opinions carry a great deal of weight. Hence, when they continually extol the outstanding successes of science, but at the same time depreciate the value of philosophical thought claiming it doesn't deliver the goods, we have fertile grounds for reaching fatuous conclusions. Fatuous conclusions, moreover, not just about how consciousness fits into the physical world, but on more general questions pertaining to the nature of reality which rightfully belongs to the province of philosophy.
Professional philosophers operate in this environment that scientists have created. Those that offer dissenting views are ferociously attacked.
StardustyPsyche said:
//Nearly all modern scientists and philosophers are materialists because mountains of evidence shows that materialism is the case. Immaterialism, by contrast, is devoid of evidence.//
Actually, if anything, there is more evidence for immaterialism. Of course, if evidence was particularly relevant here, then both materialism and immaterialism (and dualism etc) would all be scientific hypotheses. But they are philosophical, or more specifically, metaphysical hypotheses.
See 2 blog posts by me:
A very brief introduction to Immaterialism
More on George Berkeley and his Immaterialism
Ian,
"However, it's not because it makes sense. Indeed, the way the material world is defined (all that is measurable) rules out materialism, since consciousness is not wholly measurable."
You have that backwards.
Materialism rules out consciousness as an immaterial substance that is somehow an ontologically real feature of the cosmos.
Consciousness is a process of material.
Besides, your definition of materialism makes no sense. Human beings are limited in our capability to measure. In fact, the whole notion of "measurement" is philosophically dubious because there is, at base, only the experiment wherein the both subject and measurer interact and change each other.
"the "intelligentsia" conclude that it is reasonable to infer that the methods of science are susceptible to explaining all aspects of reality."
Who says that? Science is a human endeavor. Human beings are limited. There is no reason to suppose that any human endeavor must extend to all aspects of reality. Who does not realize that? Sounds like a strawman derived from a quote mine of some crackpot woo seller.
Ian,
"Actually, if anything, there is more evidence for immaterialism."
ROTFLMAO
"A very brief introduction to Immaterialism"
Not a drop of evidence for immaterialism presented.
"But they are philosophical, or more specifically, metaphysical hypotheses."
Ok, so you don't actually have any evidence for immaterialism, you just philosophized it. To come up with the notion of immaterialism you could just as well have simply closed your eyed and dreamed up the idea.
@StardustyPsyche You're not advancing any arguments for me to address.
Ian,
"You're not advancing any arguments for me to address."
Do you suppose you were?
All you did above was make a series of mostly baseless and erroneous assertions.
"Actually, if anything, there is more evidence for immaterialism."
Do you consider that to be some sort of argument? I mean, I literally burst out laughing when I read that. But, nevertheless, I went to "A very brief introduction to Immaterialism" to see what all this vast evidence for immaterialism is.
But, as I suspected, there is no evidence at all for immaterial presented at "A very brief introduction to Immaterialism". Do you think there is?
Don't you need to provide evidence of mind-independent physical objects? Otherwise, the immaterialist ontology is simpler.
Victor,
Everything you do in this world is evidence of mind independent objects.
The philosopher who sat contemplating the unreality of his food died of hunger.
Hold your breath as long as you can. Now, I most definitely do not wish any self inflicted harm on you, rather, I am counting on the likelihood that you are like every other person I have ever interacted with on this subject.
You can tell yourself there is no such thing as mind-independent air and "simply" choose to stop breathing.
I'll wager that in a very short time you will find holding your breath continuously without end is not so "simple".
But go ahead, give it a try, if you do not have the patience to starve yourself of "simpler" non-mind independent food.
It is very "simple", right? There is no such mind independent stuff as air, and you can prove it by just holding your breath, permanently.
Then, please, by all means, tell me how long it took you to live as though there really is some real mind independent stuff we call air.
There's stuff independent of my mind, no problem. But is that stuff independent of any mind?
A thought in God's mind can still give me the sensation of being kicked in the stomach.
From one commentator on Faceebook:
At this point in physics we know from blackhole thermodynamics that our experience of the physical emerges as a holographic duality. For example the * interior* of a blackhole is a nonphysical collection of the quantum states of everything that was accreted at the horizon. Hence the interior is similar to an encrypted block cipher. There is good warrant for reductive metaphysical idealism( priority cosmopsychism). So, a non physical ontologically prior intellect must semantically determinate, or fix the meaning of the syntax from which any spacetime emerges. Theism ( prior mind ontology), offers the best truthmaker in a Kripkean sense for why we have semantically determinate information among infinite incompossible forms( information realism).
Victor,
"A thought in God's mind can still give me the sensation of being kicked in the stomach."
You can make up whatever fictional characters you want, up to you.
You can speculate that a google Plank scale angels nudge every photon along through space, whatever, so what?
"From one commentator on Faceebook:"
Sounds like a Deepak Chopra devotee.
Quantum woo sells, more's the pity.
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