User Illusion

 Perhaps the idea of a mentalistic explanation requires some explanation. A moment ago I went out to get the mail. I believed that getting the mail would be a good thing, I know where the mailbox is, and so I fulfilled my intention to go out to the mailbox and get the mail. My actions had a purpose which I fulfilled. My feet moved, due to signals sent from my brain, but the ultimate reason why the atoms in my brain did what they did is that because they were directed by something possessing a purpose. Or, perhaps the atoms themselves had an inherent purpose. Something desired by some entity brought it about that the atoms moved the way they did.

            But these types of explanations are typically excluded from basic physics. In fact, not only purpose, but intentionality or about-ness, normativity, and first-person perspective are also excluded.  The four fundamental forces postulated by physics, gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, are blind forces, which do not act for reasons. If gravity operates on boulders falling in an avalanche, they will neither avoid my head to spare my life nor strike me to punish my wickedness.  No, the gravitational force has no mental life, and genuinely physical particles have no mental life either. But what happens at the mindless level of basic physics, according to materialism, determines what goes on at all levels. It is true that physical events sometimes produce results that an intentional agent would choose, indeed that is how natural selection works. But in the final analysis, if materialism is true, it looks as if the idea of intentions or purposes or desires or motives producing actions is bound to be an illusion. 

In honor of my Arizona Diamondbacks in the World Series--Sister Wynona Carr's The The Ball Game.

 

The rise and fall of the new atheism

Feser on eliminativism

 Here. 

Max Planck on consciousness

 I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Max Planck

Is Introspection worthless?

From Patricia Churchland.  

The brains in our skulls function as they do largely because they are the product of a long evolutionary history. That fact is, of course, not a fact the brain's biological evolution gave it automatic knowledge of; rather, it is something brains have learned as a result of a long period of scientific evolution. Introspection reveals almost nothing about how nervous systems work, and from an evolutionary perspective, there is no reason why it should. If anything, human brains have a positive tendency to be misled about their nature. They tend to suppose they are not part of the biological order, that they are the result of special creation, that nervous tissue itself is not relevant to the understanding of the mind, and that introspection yields incontrovertible truths about a nonphysical mind, about the nature of free will, experience, knowledge, meaning, and language. What the evolutionary and neurobiological perspective makes evident, however, is that to understand how the brain works, introspection is unreliable. Rather, we must do experiments addressing a variety of levels of organization, and we must engage in real theorizing about how the brain functions

Here. 

God and materialism

 I have argued in defense of God by arguing against materialism. But what if God is just an unusual kind of material entity. After all, matter is just what science describes. If you include God as a theoretical entity in a scientific explanation, then God becomes a an unusal mateiral entity. No skin off the nose of  Christians, right? If we can predict the activitiies of God to some extent (and we can) we can form testable theories about God. 

No??????

Behaviorism and the Paradox of the Thinking Behaviorist

 Arthur Lovejoy, in 1922, describes the Behaviorism of his time.

With this, of course, images and ideas, as well as 'mind;' 'consciousness,' and other familiar categories of the older psychology, are eliminated from the descriptive analysis of perception and thought. " I should throw out imagery altogether," writes Watson. " I believe we can write a psychology and never use the words consciousness, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery, and the like." 1 The researches of Angell and Fernald (aside from other considerations) "pave the way for the complete dismissal of the image from psychology." 2 And this does not mean that these things are merely to be excluded from consideration for reasons of methodological convenience; it means that we have no reason to believe in their existence, that they are not verifiable facts of experience. Those who "grope in a laboratory to discover the ' images ' that the in- trospective psychologist talks about " will find nothing but proc- esses in the larynx. " It is," Watson declares, " a serious misunderstanding of the behavioristic position to say," as one would-be expositor of it has said, "that of course a behaviorist does not deny that mental states exist. He merely prefers to ignore them." He ignores them, Watson explains, " in the same sense that chemistry ignores alchemy and astronomy ignores horoscopy. The behaviorist does not concern himself with them because, as the stream of his science broadens and deepens, such older concepts are sucked under never to reappear."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2178913.pdf

Determinate meaning and the case for God.

 Here. A paper by Daniel Bonevac. This is similar to Ross. 

The early Church Fathers argued that the only answer is that there is a transcendent causal power making that relation possible. The power cannot be the forms themselves, or the form of the Good, as Plato thought, for our relation to them is precisely the point at issue. Nor can it be generated from finite minds themselves. The best explanation of our relation to the transcendent identifies the transcendent power with God. (17)

 a. If realism is true, then, given a content bearer b, among our possibilities are skeptical scenarios for b.

 b. Content bearers have specific contents.

 c. A content bearer b can have a specific content only by virtue of some fact.

d. If there were a fact by virtue of which b had a specific content, there would be grounds for discounting skeptical scenarios for b.

 e. There could be grounds for discounting skeptical scenarios for b only if b’s content is grounded in something transcendent. 

f. Something independent of individual, finite minds can ground content only if there is something with causal power, independent of individual finite minds, that makes such grounding possible.

 g. Only a transcendent causal power could make possible grounding in something transcendent. 

h. Nothing natural is transcendent.

 i. Anti-realism grounds content in some feature of a collection of finite minds.

 j. A finite collection of finite minds does not suffice to explain the grounding of content. 

k. An infinite collection of finite minds does not suffice to explain the grounding of content.

 l. The best explanation for the existence of a supernatural, transcendent causal power grounding content in the transcendent includes an infinite mind and, in particular, the existence of God. 

m. So, there is a God. 

AI and its limits

 Here. 

Lewis's AFR and Plantinga's EAAN

  Plantinga's is an argument that is designed to be consistent with externalism. I have thought of it as the argument from the reliabillity of our rational faculties, though I think he ends up appealing to mental causation. However, I think there are some aspects of science that seem to require internalist accounts of knowledge. Sure, there's other knowledge, but for science to work a scientist has to be able to present his or her experimentaal process so that someone else can follow the same process and check to see if the result is the same. There are some kinds of knowledge where wee can say "It doesn't matter about the process so long as it's a reliable one." But if we are relying on that kind of knowledge in order for science to be possible, it won't work.

From Lewis's essay Bulverism

 But our thoughts can only be accepted as a genuine insight under certain conditions. All beliefs have causes but a distinction must be drawn between (1) ordinary causes and (2) a special kind of cause called “a reason.” Causes are mindless events which can produce other results than belief. Reasons arise from axioms and inferences and affect only beliefs. Bulverism tries to show that the other man has causes and not reasons and that we have reasons and not causes. A belief which can be accounted for entirely in terms of causes is worthless. This principle must not be abandoned when we consider the beliefs which are the basis of others. Our knowledge depends on our certainty about axioms and inferences. If these are the results of causes, then there is no possibility of knowledge. Either we can know nothing or thought has reasons only, and no causes.

Teleonomy and evidence

 Materialism, ordinarily understood, means that all causation is mechanistic. Consider materialistic determinism. The basic elements are in some position at the beginning if there was one, and everything that happens to every basic element of the universe that is necessitated by the laws of physics.  All other states that exist are states that follow necessarily from those basic physical states. On chance-and-necessity physicalism, there is a brute chance factor involved, but nothing at the base level is teleological, normative, perspectival, or intentional. You may get, as Churchland indicates, effects that one might think require intelligence, but they are in fact produced by stupid elements properly hooked up. This is teleonomy, not teleology, the quality of apparent purposefulness of structure in living organisms due to evolutionary adaptation.

 When a Darwinian materialist says “The purpose of your eye is to see” it is not literally true. There are no true purposes in a materialist universe. However, the power to see did result in the eye being selected for.  In the same way, if a materialist says that he accepts materialism because the evidence supports it, this is also not literally true.

The relevance of logical laws

 IV. Argument from the Psychological Relevance of Logical Laws

My fourth argument concerned the role of logical laws in mental causation. In order for mental causation to be what we ordinarily suppose it to be, it is not only necessary that mental states be causally efficacious in virtue of their content, it is also necessary that the laws of logic be relevant to the production of the conclusion. That is, if we conclude “Socrates is mortal” from “All men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man, then no only must we understand the meanings of those expressions, and these meanings must play a central role in the performance of these inferences, but what Lewis call the ground-and-consequent relationship between the propositions must also play a central role in these rational inferences. We must know that the argument is structured in such a way that in arguments of that form the conclusion always follows from the premises. We do not simply know something that is the case at one moment in time, but we know something that must be true in all moments of time, in every possible world. But how could a physical brain, which stands in physical relations to other objects and whose activities are determined, insofar as they are determined at all, by the laws of physics and not the laws of logic, come to know, not merely that something was true, but could not fail to be true regardless of whatever else is true in the world.
We can certainly imagine, for example, a possible world in which the laws of physics are different from the way they are in the actual world. We can imagine, for example, that instead of living in a universe in which dead people tend to stay dead, we find them rising out of their graves on a regular basis on the third day after they are buried. But we cannot imagine a world in which, once we know which cat and which mat, it can possibly be the case that the cat is both on the mat and not on the mat. Now can we imagine there being a world in which 2 + 2 is really 5 and not 4? I think not.
It is one thing to suggest that brains might be able to “track” states of affairs in the physical world. It is another thing to suggest that a physical system can be aware, not only that something is the case, but that it must be the case; that not only it is the case but that it could not fail to be the case. Brain states stand in physical relations to the rest of the world, and are related to that world through cause and effect, responding to changes in the world around us. How can these brain states be knowings of what must be true in all possible worlds?
Consider the difficulty of going from what is to what ought to be in ethics. Many philosophers have agreed that you can pile up the physical truths, and all other descriptive truths from chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology, as high as you like about, say, the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and you could never, by any examination of these, come to the conclusion that these acts we really morally wrong (as opposed to being merely widely disapproved of and criminalized by the legal system). Even the atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie argued that if there were truths of moral necessity, these truths, and our ability to know those truths, are do not fit well into the naturalistic world-view, and if they existed, they would support a theistic world-view. Mackie could and did, of course, deny moral objectivity, but my claim is that objective logical truths present an even more serious problem for naturalism, because the naturalist cannot simply say they don’t exist on pain of undermining the very natural science on which his world-view rests.
Arguing that such knowledge is trivial because it merely constitutes the “relations of ideas” and does not tell anything about the world outside our minds seems to me to be an inadequate response. If, for example, the laws of logic are about the relations of ideas, then not only are they about ideas that I have thought already, but also they are true of thoughts I haven’t even had yet. If contradictions can’t be true because this is how my ideas relate to one another, and it is a contingent fact that my ideas relate to one another in this way, then it is impossible to say that they won’t relate differently tomorrow.
Carrier responds somewhat differently. He says:
For logical laws are just like physical laws, because physical laws describe the way the universe works, and logical laws describe the way reason works—or, to avoid begging the question, logical laws describe the way a truth-finding machine works, in the very same way that the laws of aerodynamics describe the way a flying-machine works, or the laws of ballistics describe the way guns shoot their targets. The only difference between logical laws and physical laws is that the fact that physical laws describe physics and logical laws describe logic. But that is a difference both trivial and obvious.
What this amounts to, it seems to me, is a denial of the absolute necessity of logic. If the laws of logic just tell us how truth-finding machines work, then if the world were different a truth-finding machine would work differently. I would insist on a critical distinction between the truths of mathematics, which are true regardless of whether anybody thinks them or not, and laws governing how either a person or a computer ought to perform computations. I would ask “What is it about reality that makes one set of computations correct and another set of computations incorrect?”
William Vallicella provides an argument against the claim that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations:
1. The laws of logic are empirical generalizations. (Assumption for reductio).
2. Empirical generalizations, if true, are merely contingently true. (By definition of ‘empirical generalization’: empirical generalizations record what happens to be the case, but might have not been the case.)
3. The laws of logic, if true, are merely contingently true. (1 and 2)
4. If proposition p is contingently true, then it is possible the p be false. (True by definition)
5. The laws of logic, if true, are possibly false. (From 3 and 4)
6. LNC is possibly false: there are logically possible worlds in which p & ~p is true.
7. But (6) is absurd (self-contradictory): it amounts to saying that it is logically possible that the very criterion of logical possibility, namely LNC, be false. Therefore 1 is false, and its contradictory, the clam that the laws of logic are not empirical generalizations, is true.
Logic, I maintain, picks out features of reality that must exist in any possible world. We know, and have insight into these realities, and this is what permits us to think. A naturalistic view of the universe, according to which there is nothing in existence that is not in a particular time and a particular place, is hard-pressed to reconcile their theory of the world with the idea that we as humans can access not only what is, but also what must be.

Two ways of criticizing the AFR

 

There seem to be two lines of criticism of arguments from reason. One is to argue, a la Moore and Anscombe, that causal antecedents of belief are irrelevant to rationality, because reasons are not causes. The other is to argue that, along the lines of Haldane and Churchland, that mechanistic causation and rational inference are compatible, explaining the confluence in terms of Darwinian survival advantage. The former line of critique denies that reasons are causes, the other claims that reasons are causes, but are a species of ordinary physical causation.

From James Ross's Immaterial Aspects of Thought

 Some thinking (iudgment) is determinate in a way no physical process can be. Consequently, such thinking cannot be (wholly5) a physical process. If all thinking, all judgment, is determinate in that way, no physical process can be (the whole of) any judgment at all. Furthermore, "functions" among physical states cannot be determinate enough to be such judgments, either. Hence some judgments can be neither wholly physical processes nor wholly functions among physical processes.

Here. 

Wholes and parts, minds and brains

 The argument from reason, I am being told, has a problem because it focuses exclusively on the parts (atoms) and doesn't take wholes seriously. 

If this argument in Hume's Dialogues is right,  wholes are products of "an arbitary act of the mind." Wholes, including brains, depend on being thought together by minds. 

In such a chain too, or succession of objects, each part is caused by that which preceded it, and causes that which succeeds it. Where then is the difficulty? But the WHOLE, you say, wants a cause. I answer, that the uniting of these parts into a whole, like the uniting of several distinct counties into one kingdom, or several distinct members into one body, is per|formed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind, and has no influence on the nature of things. Did I show you the particular causes of each in|dividual
in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable, should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty. That is sufficiently explained in explaining the cause of the parts.

The Blind Programmer

 

Patricia Smith Churchland, however, in response to a version of the Argument from Reason presented by Geoffrey Madell, attempts to defend materialism by suggesting that although humans, unlike computers, are not products of intelligent design, the evolutionary process simulates intelligent design in such a way as to provide reason:

There is a fatal tendency to assume that intentionality cannot just be a function of the neurons and their connectivity, but that there must be someone in the head who interprets neuronal signals, who sees the activation patterns of the visual cortex, who takes the data and makes a free decision, and so on. As Dan Dennett has tirelessly pointed out, postulating homunculi does not explain anything - it just defers the question. And on this, even someone as wedded to intrinsic intentionality as Searle, agrees. 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.

So, not only do we have a Blind Watchmaker, we have a Blind Programmer.

But stupid elements cannot select in the interests of truth, and can they add up to determinate meanings? Without determinate meanings it is never clear what anyone means by anything, and logic is impossible.

Determinism

 Determinism is the view that given what happened in the distant past (which you and I had nothing to do with) the future is inevitable. Such past events can simply be the positions of the material particles in the universe as of, say, July 13, 1950 at 12:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time. Or the set of past event could include choices God might have made to predetermine that such and such will happen. Whether it's physical or divine, given that past state, the future is inevitable. If you play a CD with Ariana Grande's music, you will hear her songs the same way every time you play it, and you won't hear Demi Lovato instead. It's predetermined.

Let's call the set of events over which you had not control X.

The argument against moral responsibility might be stated this way.

1) You are not responsible for X. (It happened before you were born).

2) Necessarily, if X occurs, Y occurs (Y is some action you performed. Think of the worst thing you ever did. Make that Y).

3) Therefore, you are not responsible for Y.

See. you're off the hook.

The framework of meaning

 

The argument from reason says that reason cannot emerge from a closed, mechanistic system. The computer is, narrowly speaking, a mechanistic system, and it does “follow” rational rules. But not only was the computer made by humans, the framework of meaning that makes the computer’s actions intelligible is supplied by humans. As a set of physical events, the actions of a computer are just as subject as anything else to the indeterminacy of the physical. If a computer plays the move Rf6, and we see it on the screen, it is our perception and understanding that gives that move a definite meaning. In fact, the move has no meaning to the computer itself, it only means something to persons playing and watching the game. Suppose we lived in a world without chess, and two computers were to magically materialize in the middle of the Gobi desert and go through all the physical states that the computers went through the last time Fritz played Shredder. If that were true they would not be playing a chess game at all, since there would be no humans around to impose the context that made those physical processes a chess game and not something else. Hence, I think that we can safely regard the computer objection as a red herring.