Comments by _J_
551. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #54833 by _J_ on July 9, 2007 at 4:27 am
Dr Benway
An individual is free to entertain any number of hypotheses about the world. But he can't take the rest of us along for a ride without evidence.
Yes - and he ought to be aware of the ways in which his private belief are likely to affect his public behaviour, too.
Example: A man says he saw a ghost. I'd welcome his account, but I wouldn't take it at face value. I'd need some way to corroborate his story first. I'd expect the man to recognize my need, and if he were to insist I believe him without evidence, that would cause me to wonder about his character.
I like this example in particular because it reminds me of something a scout leader once said to me. He was telling ghost stories. He asked me whether I believed in ghosts and I (probably about twelve at the time) said I wasn't sure. 'I have a friend', he said, gravely, 'who didn't believe in ghosts - until he spent a whole night talking to one'
Ghosts are a fun thing for a kid to believe in – certainly a lot more fun than telling your scout leader that his friend needs psychiatric attention. But it'd be nice to think that people were sharp enough to see through this ploy when making more important decisions. Imagine a used car salesman saying 'I knew you'd look at it and think "What a piece of shit", but another guy thought that about one I sold him last year and now he says it's the best car he's ever driven.' (Actually, you can probably find a salesman who'll be happy to use this tactic…) Surely god would be able to conjure up something a bit more persuasive this?
I find that this simplistic argumentative tactic crops up over and over again with believers I speak to and that it either generates or feeds upon an astonishing failure to tell the difference between evidence and plain manipulation. One Christian friend of mine with whom I've once or twice discussed the god question, after hearing me summarize some of the main issues sceptics have with religion, resorted to 'Well, it says in the bible that people will think god's message is foolish, but that really it is the fools who will not believe'. When I pointed out that if Thomas – one of Jesus' own followers – needed first-hand evidence to believe in the resurrection, we – living two millennia later and never having met the man – surely require a lot more, she said 'That means we're even more blessed for having faith without needing to see it for ourselves'. When I suggested that god, if he really existed and really wanted us to believe in him, could do a lot better than the evidence given in the bible, she said 'I'm not sure that he could'. The notion that a real god might actually give something more than circumstantial and hearsay evidence didn't even register as a possibility with her and she seemed to regard my suggestion to the contrary as outrageous.
You know, I sometimes get the impression that if god were suddenly to appear amid a puff of angels ('Sorry, fell a sleep for a bit, there, what year is it…? Oh, you're joking! You'll be wanting some more proof, then…'), whilst we atheists would be eating our hats alongside our humble pie, the people who'd be the most completely flabbergasted would actually be believers. God just doesn't do that sort of thing, darling.
552. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #54830 by _J_ on July 9, 2007 at 4:16 am
Hi, Paul – 1120
steve99 in 1122 has basically made the arguments I was going to bring to bear, but much more clearly and concisely than I'd have managed. I'd just add:
- Why do you find a multiplicity of universes less likely than a reality-transcending, super-intelligent über-being?
- Even if you reject the notion of many co-existing separate universes, subscribing to a sequence of universes in the 'big bang, big crunch, back to square one' mould would still deal with the problem of improbability of life.
- When you talk about 'intelligent life, which would not have if the slightest tiny detail were changed', you are only considering life as we know it. Mightn't certain hypothetical other universes with different physical properties readily give rise to intelligent life forms completely different in nature from us? Life forms who might just as easily (and just as mistakenly) suppose that only a universe like their own could support intelligent life?
- How clear are we about the actual improbability of the conditions for life, anyway? I agree with steve99 in finding John Wheeler's ideas fascinating (though quantum post selection gives me brain-freeze), but even laying aside all explanatory attempts by physicists, aren't we in rather a poor position for confidently calling the conditions of life 'hugely improbable'? It seems to me we're doing something a little like what Scott Atran castigated everyone at Beyond Belief for: using an 'n' of 1. Perhaps the processes that form the physical properties of a universe will virtually always give rise to conditions capable of generating some kind of life. Perhaps they virtually never will. One way or another, we know of only one universe – ours – and it has given rise to life. To make very confident claims about the unlikeliness of this is surely a little incautious. To use such claims to declare the need for a designer is positively presumptuous.
Anyway, far more important than all of this: how do you feel about crop circles, these days…?
553. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #54667 by _J_ on July 8, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Hi, PaulEmecz,
Nice to see you on this thread.
I have to say, I gave Dave a bit of a slap,
Were I one of your friends, it wouldn't be long before people were asking concerned questions about why I seemed to keep falling down the stairs...
Scientists can't disprove 'Aliens Make Crop Circles', no. Nor can they show that crop circles aren't caused by mass circular movements of hedgehogs or artistically inclined whirlwinds - all speculative theories that were put forward some years ago before the folks with the ropes and the planks demonstrated what they'd actually been doing all these years.
Similarly, scientists can't prove that Nessie isn't just hiding every time people make a serious effort to spot her, they can't prove that all those old women in the middle ages were not actually witches, and they can't prove that, if you dig down deep enough in just the right spot, the moon is not in fact made out of nicely matured camembert.
What scientists (and anyone employing the scientific method or, more loosely, critical thinking) can do is show firstly that there are simple explanations within our realm of direct experience that can fully account for crop circles, and secondly that there isn't a jot of evidence for the aliens, or the whirlwinds, or the hedgehogs.
This doesn't mean that scientists have ruled out the possibility of intelligent life existing in the universe. Many are very keen on that possibility and eager to find out whether such life exists. It just means that, when they know that crop circles can be created by people with planks (and that many definitely have been), they consider this a far more likely explanation than highly advanced alien life forms who have carefully hidden from us their origins, their travel to our planet, their descent to the planet's surface and their subsequent departure, pausing only to draw a simple geometric pattern that could equally well have been knocked up by a couple of men on their way home from the pub.
Perhaps you don't find this kind of 'This seems a lot more likely than this, so we'll stick with it until new evidence changes our minds' attitude very convincing. If so, you are at odds with the methods that have doubled your life expectancy and vastly reduced infant mortality over the last four centuries. I also wonder how you can make any reasonable predictions in the course of your daily life. ('My car worked fine yesterday, but I guess the fuel could just explode at random, being inflammable. I'll walk today...')
Dave, if you're reading: chin up! Hopefully, when the aliens get here, they'll bring something more interesting than crop circles!
554. Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much
Comment #54651 by _J_ on July 8, 2007 at 11:10 am
Cairnarvon
Thanks for the link. It's sort of reassuring to read that my high school geography teacher was probably right after all.
Fair enough: scratch the DDT example. Or turn it round, as you suggest. The rampant confusion on the issue (as neatly, if unwittingly, demonstrated by yours truly) at least serves further to illustrate the ease with which important matters can be misrepresented, misunderstood and misused (by me, at least).
555. Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much
Comment #54603 by _J_ on July 8, 2007 at 4:50 am
28. Comment #54576 by Cairnarvon
Are you fucking kidding me?
29. Comment #54578 by Dr Benway
Amen brother.
Alright, hands up, maybe that was a really bad example. I'm not saying people should feed it to their budgies and keep a pot on the dinner table. And I can't bear the thought of desperately trying to resuscitate a limp, mortally poisoned Dr Benway.
But I wasn't 'fucking kidding' either. The 'start-stop-maybe start again-keep it going a bit-completely axe it' application of DDT in malarial countries appears to have led to literally millions of preventable human deaths over the last few decades. Presumably this is why the WHO and USAID are now in favour of returning to regulated use.
Perhaps I should have used witch-trials or eugenics as my example of a long-since rejected, formerly widely-recognised 'truth'.
But actually DDT demonstrates perfectly the bigger point that it's all bloody complicated. Please remember that the only point I was making is that it's this 'all for it' or 'all against it' knee-jerk-ism that I'm worried about.
Seems to me we have exactly the tool we need in science, but that the political and communications framework we live in serves science really, really badly, with the result that we lurch from crisis to crisis. Whipping millions of people up into an emotional fervour about an issue may be a necessary strategy - if you are damned sure about the factual basis of what you're getting them excited about. Call me a grumpy pedant, but I'm not wholly persuaded that we really are that sure. Looks like gut instinct first and retrospection to follow a few years down the line. And we've been this way many times before.
556. Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much
Comment #54553 by _J_ on July 7, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Environmental answers are never simple.
I'll agree with you. That's pretty much what I was trying to say. (About the environment.)
557. Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much
Comment #54550 by _J_ on July 7, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Dr Benway,
But what about malarial birds? Eh? Eh?
(Too much wine. Please ignore.)
558. Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much
Comment #54549 by _J_ on July 7, 2007 at 5:54 pm
18. Comment #54537 by ranjani
Hi, Ranjani. No presumption - just saw an opportunity to segue into something I thought worth saying. And as for 'monopol[ies] on critical thinking', I'll say this: looking at your posts on this thread, your thinking is nothing if not 'critical'. ;)
Live Earth is a(nother) collection of pop concerts taking place 'all around the globe' with a big unifying charity theme. This time the theme is 'Agreement with Al Gore'. A friend of mine has gone to the London one. I'm jealous.
559. Won't anyone stand up for God?
Comment #54524 by _J_ on July 7, 2007 at 4:14 pm
35. Comment #54520 by He-man Daunted World
Nice comment, but moreover: excellent choice of name!
560. Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much
Comment #54522 by _J_ on July 7, 2007 at 4:10 pm
6. Comment #54459 by ranjani
sornord:
I am not sure what you meant by "tree hugging hippie crap". I hope you are not referring to people like Dr.Wilson who are staunch conservationists, environmentalists and many others like him. Ironically the same critical skills that you bemoan the loss of are the tools of all these scientists that have brought the issue of AGW to the fore,not to mention human activity driven species extinction. Just an observation.
I'm going to stick my neck out and probably get my head cut off, but I'd like to suggest a little observation following your observation, here.
I've been watching a bit of Live Earth today, and I can't shake the gnawing feeling of people getting very excited about doing something for the wrong reasons. So many of the celebrities interviewed didn't know diddlysquat about the environment. All they know is that the zeitgeist (that bloody word again) is currently roaringly in favour of feeling terrifically worried about the environment and frowning angrily at anyone who doesn't recycle their beer cans.
I'm not saying the environment's fine and dandy and we should all merrily go on burning fossil fuel's till doomsday. I am saying that it actually seems to be a very complex issue with a lot of scientific data pointing in both directions. I do recognise that some scientific consensus has been emerging over the last couple of years, but this seems far from the sort of agreement that would give us a clear strategy for what we should be doing. There is a familiar attitude problem here, I think. I'm concerned that all we're doing is replacing a 'head in the sand' attitude to the environment with an almost equally ignorant 'The End Is Nigh' one. For the majority of people, I suspect, this decision is not being made because they know anything of the science. It's being made because suddenly everyone is doing it and it makes you feel righteous and people will call you an arsehole if you don't. (Sound like anything else that gets discussed on this site...?)
As a species, we have a track record for jumping wholesale onto scientifically questionable bandwagons and later wishing we hadn't (Banning DDT, anyone?) With the best intentions in the world, forging ahead with flawed knowledge is just asking for trouble. And our science, wedged uncomfortably between politically motivated funding and sales-motivated media representation struggles to give us the sort of data we really need to make big decisions about important questions like 'What's really going on with the environment and what can we realistically do about it without making matters worse?'
Bloody-minded industrialism, uncritical and ill-informed sanctimonious environmentalism, alien-abduction conspiracy theorising, sexism, racism and damn-near every religion and ideology under the sun - it all seems like part of the same general problem to me. And Jon D. Miller is quite rightly pointing straight at it. People need to know their facts, or at least be able to trust that the people they democratically elect do. The root problem is enabling the people who collect and identify those facts to do their work without the biases of political influence, and to express them to the public without media distortion.
Whew. Rant, there! Sorry.
561. Won't anyone stand up for God?
Comment #54505 by _J_ on July 7, 2007 at 2:35 pm
And that is why The Holy Potato (no 'e') Lord created the edit button...
Wow. Now, if the bible had one of those...
562. Won't anyone stand up for God?
Comment #54502 by _J_ on July 7, 2007 at 2:00 pm
(Note the correct use of capitals)
...but non-standard use of 'e'. Is 'Potatoe' the spelling of True Believers? ;)
563. Won't anyone stand up for God?
Comment #54496 by _J_ on July 7, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Aw, bless. What a list of knee-jerk infantile bleating. I had to resist the urge to duck the toys flying out of the pram.
Someone should point Mr/s Daily Mail (please tell me the editor didn't write this pap) to our very own Dawkins/McGrath comment thread for a ringside seat in the Dianelos Takes On All Atheists on Philosophy, Psychology, Quantum Mechanics and Whatever Else You've Got fight. There're enough words in there for ten theist apologists to plagiarize tiny irrelevant books from.
564. The new preface to The God Delusion paperback and Q&A
Comment #54378 by _J_ on July 6, 2007 at 4:53 pm
30. Comment #51174 by 5537P06
I think the last person to comment messed up on his math. The formula should be ignorance/intelligence=god.
Not entirely. If you're either sufficiently ignorant, or sufficiently disposed to interpret facts in favour of your theism, you can justify god, irrespective of your actual intelligence. But, the more intelligent (and dedicated to supporting the god hypothesis) you are, the more thoroughly you will rationalise your god. So, a very intelligent theist will rationalise a god who can 'survive' the arguments of atheists conversant in quantum theory, neorology - you name it. A less intelligent one will just stick to 'God diddit'.
So, in a sense: 'ignorance x intelligence=god'. Although, perhaps what is really meant is:
ignorance or desire to believe = belief in god
and
intelligence (and selectively decreased ignorance) = sophistication of god-supporting rationalisation.
(For any theists reading: you may regard me as very arrogant for suggesting this. I may be wrong, but this is nevertheless a simplified approximation of the sort of attitudes I have largely experienced so far among theists.)
Of course, as maths goes, the statement is sheer bollocks. I probably agree, largely, with the speaker's worldview, but I still wanted to slap him when I heard him say this, for debasing scientific thinking just to voice a punchy soundbite. Science is about truth, not soundbites, and there was no need for this in a Q&A with Richard Dawkins amid a sympathetic audience. Perhaps, with the cameras and nerves and whatnot, his ego and desire to sound clever got the better of him. (That would almost certainly happen to me.)
565. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #54150 by _J_ on July 5, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Dianelos (1077)
Oh, God, I just can't help myself! I'm a hopeless addict. I've given myself a five-minute limit (sorry if the quality takes a nose-dive…).
Thanks for your response, and for your extremely generous assessment of my philosophical competence!
Cutting to the chase, two points of objection, connected:
1
If a belief works best in life how can it be false? I don't know
I think you do. You have just supplied your answer, here:
2) What if God does not exist? What if naturalism is in fact true? Well, what of it? Even if God (as I mean the term) does not in fact exist, I only win by believing that God does exist. […] if naturalism is true and my conscious experience should stop at death, I will have by then enjoyed life at its fullest possible expression.
Which leads to:
2
It should be pretty clear the reality as I understand it is much more beautiful than the rather bleak reality of naturalism.
I wouldn't be too sure. I have acknowledged this to be a logical possibility but I don't think that it is a fact. My opinion is that naturalism will ultimately provide all of the benefits of theism, and more besides.
We are, perhaps, on a cusp. Millennia ago, few people would have found atheism as satisfying as theism, as theism offered straightforward, uplifting answers to questions that naturalism could not even approach. Today, we can do much better. A lifetime of study would not equip one to fully appreciate the awesome beauty and complexity of our naturalistic understanding of reality.
(Maybe that's a naïve historical view. So be it – it's not essential to my point.)
My personal experience suggests that today, for me at least, naturalism can give a fuller and better appreciation of existence than theism. It's just much, much harder – less intuitive, slower to come by. It feels like more effort, and backsliding into theism is a constant risk. (Forgive my for the negative connotations in the phraseology – I'm dashing off a description of my own experience, here.)
Anecdote: in spite of my hankerings for theism, and my suspicion that it was more readily emotionally satisfying than my atheism, I had a wonderful experience earlier this year. I was walking home from a newsagent's one morning in late winter. Classic stereotypes: blue sky, birds singing, crisp air and frost on the grass and garden walls. And I suddenly had a visceral, emotional experience of what I can honestly call naturalistic, atheistic joy. It was different in some respects to the joy I used to get from theism, but entirely equivalent and easily as powerful. I felt a wonderful sense of kinship with everyone alive. And the fact that we weren't merely the creations of some other, superior so-and-so who already knew it all and whom we'd never equal was inspiring, for everything was new and had never been done before, and all of us faced the exhilarating challenge of forging ahead and making whatever we chose to out of our immeasurably valuable gift of life.
('Gift' isn't the best word here, because it implies a giver and that seems to pull exactly against the sense I want to give. To my knowledge, English lacks a good word to capture the feeling of receiving something wonderful without being actively given it. Anyone know better?)
As I raised wing chun as a metaphor before, let me continue with martial arts. I read on a website that, in choosing a martial arts club to join, one shouldn't worry too much about the specific art. They're all highly effective (well, most of them) so long as they're taught well. Some take longer to become proficient at than others (wing chun is a tricky one, which is probably why I gave up so soon!) but all will pay dividends with perseverance. The key is to find a club you like and to stick it out.
But once you've committed, you do tend to develop a loyalty to your martial art. You regard it as the best one, or the right one. You see the weaknesses in the others and learn how to deal with the weaknesses in your own (which aren't really weaknesses, just less strong points, really). And this attitude is, of course, nonsense. But it's wholly natural.
I said before that I can see how your theism works for you, and I've lost any desire to try to coax you out of it. But I don't think it follows from your personal dedication to it that it is actually the best view of the world, or that naturalism offers a bleaker, poorer one. On the contrary, I suspect naturalism to have access to riches that can outshine those of any theism. But (like wing chun, I gather…) they demand some persistence to attain.
It's all too easy to confuse the joys we experience with the means through which we experience them, and then to discount alternative modes of experience which lack those means. This is a mistake. Sometimes, the other car isn't making a wrong turn: its driver just knows a better route. Maybe some time with a map book is in order.
(Well, that was 30 minutes. I'll never learn.)
Cheers, Dianelos,
J
566. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53850 by _J_ on July 3, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Downunder, Dianelos and the rest,
I need to do an epeeist and take my leave – suddenly a lot to do in a short time, and it's not going to happen while I'm playing Disprove the Deity here. And, unexpectedly, an opportunity to bow out gracefully has arrived in the form of your very useful post 1050, Downunder, which has just made me pause and take stock.
Of course, as you'll have realised, this discussion thread hasn't really been about advancing ideas for social and political reform, or self-help, or ending poverty, or anything that really amounts to making one's life better. It's been about arguing over the case for theism – in this case, Dianelos' theism – in an attempt to show whether it's solid or false.
But actually, on reflection, I see that you have a very good point. Dianelos, you've said more than once that you're here to show that your theism 'works better' than atheism. And – at the risk of being crushed under an avalanche of scorn – I think you've convinced me.
Qualifications, now, quickly! You've not convinced me that there's a god. And you've not convinced me that we should all be theists. I'm not persuaded that an increase in the number of people holding a theistic faith would make the world a safer, fairer or, on average, happier place. (Indeed, I suspect the opposite to be the case.) And I think it would be a world slightly worse equipped to tackle the sorts of problems that we can best tackle through methodological naturalism (thank you, Dr Benway for that useful piece of Wikipedia) because, whilst you have managed to insulate your methodological naturalism from your metaphysical theism, I find that for a great number of theists the tide of supernaturalism too easily sloshes over the flood barriers.
But you have given me about as strong an indication as I can get in a-thousand-and-odd posts that your particular kind of theism is probably the 'best' philosophy for you. Or, at least, a perfectly good one.
If you'll allow me, I'm going to draw a comparison. I used to attend classes in wing chun a few years ago. We once had a visiting teacher from Melbourne (I'm in England, so he'd really gone out of his way) come to teach a session. I remember him telling us something about how wing chun should be taught, and also how it should be used.
He said that each individual practitioner, once they had mastered the forms and their applications, would adapt it to suit them. If they kicked well, they might develop a more kicking style; if punching was their thing, they might become punch-heavy. And so on. This, he said, was natural and correct, and if it meant that the result was that good practitioners of wing chun ended up doing something substantially different from what they were initially taught (like Bruce Lee did, for example), that was fine. They were making the principles work for them.
But, he went on, too many teachers then made the mistake of going on to teach the new styles that they had developed for themselves. This, he maintained, was completely wrong. A student who might need a kicking style would end up learning a punching one because of the experiences of her differently-talented sifu, for instance. No, he said: when teaching, one had to revert back to the core principles. Get those taught thoroughly and then let the student develop for themselves.
If Dianelos was, like David Robertson, a religious leader, teaching his own Dianelosian variant of Christianity (that's right, isn't it, Dianelos?) I'd have something to object to, perhaps. But he isn't. Dianelos is more like a highly advanced wing chun practitioner, exposing his art to as many different opponents as he can in order to hone it to suit him, and him alone. Dianelos knows far more about every area that has come up in discussion, from philosophy to quantum mechanics, than I do. Whatever suspicions I may have of the logic underlying his theism, it's clearly enough to support the faith of Dianelos' very intelligent, very well-read, very enquiring mind. And he's even willing to spend weeks of his time debating it with atheists, apparently honestly developing his thoughts as he goes along.
(This, by the way, is one of the problems with organised religions, I think. On the one hand, reinterpretations of religions are very desirable, because they allow faiths to move with the zeitgeist. On the other, the fragmentation and infighting we see in the world's schismatic faiths has more to do with squabbling over personal interpretations of details than taking note of the moral climate in the world at large. Ditch the details and the interpretations: stick with the core principals. Let religious people construct their faith - or journey out of faith - through an open, personal interaction with the world, not through rote-learning of the specific doctrine of a denomination of a denomination of a denomination.)
Given that, as far as I can tell, Dianelos' faith supports just the same kind of morality that I myself would espouse; given that Dianelos is maintaining an open dialogue with the world at large and not shutting out non-theistic input; and given that he's managed to keep his faith from corrupting his respect for methodological naturalism, I just can't find anything to object to in Dianelos carrying on with his personal form of wing chun – I mean theism.
So, Dianelos, whilst I'm still an atheist, I've got to hand it to you. You've convinced me. It seems to be possible for an intelligent and curious person to satisfactorily rationalise a theistic faith, far beyond the intellectual point that I've ever heard another theist stretch to, and apparently positively to benefit by that faith: in their attitude, in their feelings about the world and themselves, and probably in their behaviour towards others. Well done!
Downunder – where does this leave me with your questions about living a better life within an atheistic world view? I'll tell you what, I find that pretty tricky, personally.
You see, for all that Dawkins comments that it is 'not very dignified' for adults to have imaginary friends, I suspect that for many people religion might more properly be regarded as a potent psychological tool – and that doesn't sound so undignified, does it? Of course there are many atheists, especially on sites like this, who either have never been, or certainly don't miss being, religious. But I think, from my personal experience, that replacing the moral and behavioural guidance offered by a good religion with something equally effective can be very difficult for many people. Whilst I think that today I have a fuller understand of who and what humans are and what this world is that we are a part of, I still don't think I have been able to match the motivations and supports that my religion – in spite of its prejudices and ignorance and simplicity – gave me. I wouldn't go back to religion. But doing atheism well is an ongoing challenge.
It's wholly possible that through our advancing naturalistic investigations of the world, we could find simultaneously that there is certainly (or almost certainly) no god, but that nevertheless holding a particular kind of false theism is actually the best (happiest, most productive) way of living. This might put us in a bit of a paradoxical spot.
I don't think that we are exactly in that spot, as a race. I think that a lot of individuals may be in something like that spot – for example, again, Dianelos' highly refined personal theism seems to hit the nail on the head for him. But I optimistically expect that as our knowledge advances, we will reach a level of understanding of ourselves at which we can replace the benefits of religion with equally powerful – or more powerful – equivalents that are wholly consistent with our understanding of the world. It won't come quick and it won't come easy, but I hope that it will come.
(I think also that Dawkins is right to try to keep children insulated from the advances of specific religions. I suspect that much of the value people associate with religion, and much of the difficulty we can have in finding similar value elsewhere, comes from a psychological addiction to whatever religion we've been a part of.)
In the here and now, there is plenty of information available to help address questions about how we ought to live. But, as is the way with science, it isn't in the form of the reassuringly certain divine wisdom of the bible. It's all 'it seems' and 'it's probable' and 'studies reveal'. So, whilst we should attend to these findings, it's ultimately up to us to pay attention to each other and try to live responsibly, I suppose.
We can do worse than look at the bible itself - and at other religious texts, and philosophical texts, and literary texts that have, over the millennia, sought to explore and express how to live a good life. And we can consider current attempts to provide concise statements, like the example of secular commandments given in The God Delusion.
As a personal recommendation, I'd suggest a book that I read a month or two ago: The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. This gives a very accessible overview of a lot of psychological studies, using them to explore ten big ideas about how to live a happy and meaningful life; ideas chosen because of their recurrence in different cultures, philosophies and religions around the world. I usually have quite an acute bullshitometer when it comes to psychology, and I found this book satisfying, thought-provoking and quite inspiring. I'm already considering re-reading it.
Anyway, I'm not in a position to give life tips to anyone, given what a pig's ear I've been making of my own life - least of all someone with your life experience, Downunder. Sorry for going on at such length, again. And thank you for making me reflect a bit instead of just ploughing on with the argumentation.
Dianelos - I'll pop back on here a few times to see whether you have anything to say to me, whether to this, or to my last post, or to 995, which you suggested you wanted to comment on. Otherwise, thanks for talking to me and best wishes. Say hi to your god for me if you're ever talking to him – I still don't believe in him, but as probably non-existent gods go, he sounds like a good one.
Otherwise, I'm now going to make a serious effort not to take part anymore, at least for a few weeks. God knows how successful that'll be.
Cheers, y'all,
J
Oh, and remember the real Golden Rule: Be Excellent To Each Other.
567. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53848 by _J_ on July 3, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Oh, Dianelos, I'd just written the long post that I'm about to place here, and then, when I logged in to do it, I found your 1053!
Quick replies:
Please be careful not to confuse the two meanings that "consciousness" has in the English language, namely 1) the capacity of having conscious experience, and 2) given that one has that capacity, the state in which one does indeed have some conscious experiences as contrasted to the state of unconsciousness (e.g. under anesthesia) when, presumably, people are not having conscious experiences.
Anything that lacks Type 1 must necessarily also lack Type 2, which is contingent on the former. So any lack of consciousness is a Type 2 lack (and maybe a Type 1 one, as well). All of Chalmers' zombies seem to me to require conscious experiences in order to do any of the things you suggest, like typing patient emails to stubborn atheists. Otherwise, you're saying that all of human behaviour (like typing emails) must be motivated by something other than consciousness. Consciousness, in this interpretation, becomes the impotent observer I described earlier (feeling, perhaps, a little like a schizophrenic person feels when, apparently due to a physical, neurological fault in their brain, they feel themselves not to be the cause of their own actions). How can a consciousness that doesn't have its hands on the controls realistically attain virtue?
I might take a look at Chalmers' book. I'm just not quite getting it so far, in spite of your nice concise restatement of it. I don't think I can imagine this zombieverse without any logical contradiction – it seems to me that consciousness is wholly necessary to the kind of behaviour you are attributing to it. I might need walking through this at greater length. (And I'm not too worried about people trying to sneak a theism on me, by the way. Avoiding theists would be as bad as the behaviour of theists who spurn the words of atheists. If they succeed: well done to them. Maybe they were right all along.)
'Mary's Room' makes more sense to me. Thank you for this example.
But according to all naturalistic views of reality physical change is caused either deterministically or randomly – there is nothing in naturalism's understanding of reality that allows for the causality of the will. Therefore our first-person data about what will is contradicts the naturalistic worldview. Naturalists are of course aware of that. Their answer: our first-person data about will are an illusion.
Personally, my uneducated response here is that that's a very poor response for naturalists to be making! I don't actually see why will causes serious problems for naturalism – or, at least, I think it's probably too early to call. It seems to me to be a bit of a non-problem stemming from a failure to fully understand or conceptualise the workings of the brain. But, being hugely uninformed on this, I will avoid further engagement.
Although, I suppose, if I take the 'Thomasina's Formula' idea I was talking about earlier to its natural conclusion, I suppose I might find that this implies a kind of total determination. Perhaps I find will, or free will, in the many probabilities therein. As suggested before, I doubt we will ever know enough to be sure of this.
I'm not sure whether I have some sympathy for the 'rather desperate "identity theory of mind"', or whether I perhaps just don't quite understand what 'the mind is identical to the brain' means. No, nothing lights up red in your brain when you look at a strawberry; no, someone peering through a window into your skull wouldn't see a tiny replica of the world that you perceive. However, I think, to return to the The Matrix for inspiration, what they see would be an encoded representation of exactly your perceptions, just as those green descending lines of data are an exact representation of the simulation that is the Matrix.
Sometimes this argument reminds me of the 'there must be a god because the world is so unbelievably just right for us to evolve in it'. That argument falls apart when you start to consider that the universe could, for all we know, have been many other things, and in any of them that give rise to life, the life forms therein could raise exactly the some fallacious argument. Similarly, red has to seem like something if we are going to perceive it in any reliable way at all. It happens to seem like what we call red. It could have seemed different, and we'd be saying just the same thing. But, in raising this observation, I may be straying from the point.
So a naturalist must find a way to account for consciousness, or else (as Chalmers did) must add consciousness to naturalism's traditional view of reality.
Fair enough – in the long term. I think Chalmers' reaction is like giving up ten metres into an 800 metre race. Let naturalism keep on at it whilst it is still making advances. Don't show your hand before you have to. To quote Carl Sagan again (saying something fairly unremarkable) immediately after his famous 'But I try not think with my gut': 'Really, it's okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in'.
On epiphenomenalism (thanks for that) I guess I'm with Searle. I don't accept this as a good view of consciousness, but I currently suspect it follows from Chalmers' reasoning. I'm not sure how Chalmers gets to avoid it just be being mysterious about what consciousness physically (or non-physically) is (or 'is'). I still don't really see that his musings necessarily lead to the conclusion that 'consciousness cannot be reduced to matter' – only to the conclusion that if matter does account for consciousness, it does so in a way that Chalmers doesn't understand. Yet. Again, maybe I should read his book.
:-) For a moment I thought I had written the above quote, but I haven't have I? You just took out a clause out of my sentence, but you can't do that I think.
Hmm, yes, I know! But I did it slowly, in stages, showing my working… I'm not sure that it's a false paraphrase. I mean:
I am not sure I see anything wrong with that statement. It has the form "It's possible to do A which evidences that there no X that would render impossible to do A".
Yes. Or, in short, 'It's possible to do A, therefore it's possible to do A'. All well and good, but for Chalmers, A seems to be 'imagining something' which he then uses to reach a Conclusion B (consciousness can't be down to matter). Your statement of his argument seems not to touch this – just to circle back and restate A. I don't see how this helps with anything.
But there's so much that I'm clearly not understanding in this argument about consciousness that I can fully believe that something in your statement of the argument is whistling through my head without touching whatever it is that makes me, personally, conscious. I can let it drop.
Thanks for taking the time to explain. I still feel like bottom of the class, but I found your explanations fascinating. An interesting subject.
Now, onto that other post…
568. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53770 by _J_ on July 3, 2007 at 4:54 am
Hi, Dianelos,
Okay, just quickly:
1031 – The Chalmers argument still baffles me. I'm aware I may be making an argument from personal incredulity, here, and am almost certainly making one from insufficient data, so I won't pursue it too far. But I am currently at a dead loss to see the logic of the argument. Here:
Chalmers somehow has no problem imagining a zombie world in which consciousness is absent but all of the actions that proceed from it are not, and does not consider this a contradiction of the world as we understand it
What actions are these? The very point of the argument is that the zombies in the zombieverse would act exactly like we do without breaking any physical laws but rather by exactly following them.
No, they wouldn't. If they were not conscious they wouldn't behave as we do at all, so far as I can tell (except for basic automatic physical processes - heartbeat, for example). At the risk of being facetious, we can find actual examples of beings that are physically exactly like us but that lack consciousness, here in our own world. They are usually wired up to life-support machines: coma patients. If you'd like to see how this affects their behaviour, try asking one!
The entire history of natural evolution from the most primitive cells up to Beethoven would take place, bit by bit, exactly like in our universe following exactly the same physical laws. That's why the problem of consciousness is considered so hard: consciousness is clearly a huge fact, but naturalism appears incapable of explaining what it's good for from the point of view of evolution.
This problem seems to me to stem from a large measure of uncertainty in what we actually mean by consciousness. I can see how this is part of the hard problem of consciousness. But it seems an absurd interpretation to suggest that consciousness can be removed without an effect on behaviour – or with so little effect as to have no impact on evolutionary selection pressures. Unless, that is, you suppose all behaviour – from cell locomotion to the composition of the Ninth Symphony – to be handled somehow automatically, with 'consciousness' as a totally impotent spectator, simply observing what's going on. In which, case, your notion of the universe as a construction for your achievement of virtue becomes nonsensical: you would have no conscious ability to decide to engage in virtuous or sinful actions; merely to watch and silently applaud or boo as your body goes about whatever actions it mysteriously and independently goes about.
The same issue comes up when you respond to phil rimmer in 1032.
The zombie argument is a deeply flawed one for me. It presumes you can posit a world where consciousness is removed, yet all behaviours remain the same. Truly, in a thought experiment you can do this. But is it realistic? I contend it is far from realistic.
I agree. It's not realistic. And neither does Chalmers's argument claim it is. His argument only claims that it's possible to imagine that universe, which evidences that there is not one single piece of third-person (i.e. objective) knowledge we have about our own universe that would contradict and therefore make it unimaginable to visualize a universe just like ours but without consciousness.
And with this I'm back to my giant oranges. Part of that quote again:
[Chalmers's] argument only claims that it's possible to imagine that universe...
…you say: and I can imagine the oranges. I am doing so now. What a pointless exercise it is.
But wait: you continue:
…which evidences that there is not one single piece of third-person (i.e. objective) knowledge we have about our own universe that would contradict and therefore make it unimaginable…
Where is this going, I wonder? My oranges certainly contradict the universe as it appears to exist, as you noted in replying to me: '…there are plenty of third person data in our universe that shows that we are not giant oranges.' But the oranges and the zombies are still in the same boat – you have acknowledged phil rimmer's point and accepted that Chalmers' thought experiment is 'not realistic' either. But patience, grasshopper, for your sentence concludes:
…to visualize a universe just like ours but without consciousness.
'to visualize'? Is that all? Well, hang on, if you take all of the subordinate detail out of that sentence, what's left is:
His argument only claims that it's possible to imagine that universe, which evidences that [we are able to] visualize a universe just like ours but without consciousness.
Fabulous. Well done, that man. 'Our ability to imagine something is evidence of our ability to imagine it'. He's good, this Chalmers. Ten out of ten for tautology, but a flat fail for saying anything meaningful. How on earth is this supposed to form the basis of an observation about the nature of consciousness?
I'm with phil rimmer. Yes, we can imagine it, but if we spend the time doing so thoroughly, all that the thought experiment actually does is help us to explore what we mean by consciousness. By my (loose) understanding of consciousness, there is no way a world like our own could have evolved without consciousness, unless we substitute unknown processes in consciousness' place to simulate all of the human and animal behaviours that we usually attribute to consciousness (like the autopilots in the driverless cars I mentioned earlier). Only if you take a very particular view of what consciousness is can this thought experiment lead to the sort of conclusion you seem to suggest – the view I described above, of consciousness as merely an impotent spectator in world of otherwise-determined actions – which appears to me to completely rubbish the idealistic theism you apparently hold.
But maybe I'm still missing something.
1033
As for you finding it arbitrary and made-up, I wished people learned more about naturalism's various suggestions about how reality actually is, instead of just believing people like Dawkins that it's all fine and well in naturalism's house where don't you know everything is very objective and scientific, whereas theism has all the subjective and implausible and unscientific theories driven by peoples' wishful thinking.
I understand you saying this. And I suppose I prompted it with my hyperbolic disbelief at the panpsychism hypothesis.
But the reason I feel, like Dawkins, that 'it's all fine and well in naturalism's house' is that scientific naturalism can generate and entertain wild and wonderful hypotheses like this one, but will not accept them as true (or 'probably true') until they've been through the ringer of scientific testing. As a starting point hypothesis, I suppose panpsychism is fine. We would try to test it out by devising experiments to detect whether livers and onions are indeed conscious. But we wouldn't boldly claim panpsychism as scientific naturalism's best attempt at a theory of consciousness without serious, hard, tested and corroborated evidential back-up. I'm quite happy with this. It's worked for the last four centuries and it doesn't seem to have given up yet.
I suppose that it's quite possible to be naturalistic in one's worldview without applying the sort of critical thinking that is formalised by the scientific method. I suppose that the millions of people who thought they were being abducted by aliens ten years ago were 'naturalistic' in the sense that they weren't appealing to anything immaterial (though some were). But their reasoning was completely contrary to that which underpins the type of scientific naturalism that I'd endorse, and is barely less fanciful than the god hypothesis (if at all).
Oh, and to tie up this particular thread:
1036
So what group of things have the capacity for conscious experience in your opinion? What are the necessary ingredients of a suitable ..er.. receptacle(?)?
Beats me. That's a question for naturalism to answer. It's naturalism that claims that consciousness is a property that some material systems have, and it's therefore naturalism that must explain the sufficient conditions that a material system must fulfill to have that property.
Quite right. The minimum sufficient conditions that a material system must have to fulfil the property of consciousness appear to be possession of a working brain. How, precisely, the level of sophistication of that brain relates to the border between consciousness and unconsciousness (and just where and what that border is) I take to be a matter for continuing exploration.
[By the way, Dianelos, please don't mind the sarcasm in my posts! It's not an attack; I'm just enjoying myself. I'm well aware that it'll only make me look the sillier when you point out where I'm wrong. ;) ]
569. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53757 by _J_ on July 3, 2007 at 3:30 am
epeeist, like Logicel, I'd like to wish you all the best. It's been nice chatting with you, and I sincerely respect your ability (or, at least, your intention) to kick the comment posting habit through sheer willpower. (I think I may have to physically break my connection.)
Anyway, good luck with the move. I hope it doesn't cut down your opportunities to vent your inclination to play with bladed objects. In the meantime, I shan't be venturing north of Hyde without my Masai spear...
570. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53684 by _J_ on July 2, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Dianelos,
There is a naturalistic view, called panpsychism, according to which all material systems that interact with their environment (down to individual atoms) are conscious beings...
That counts as a naturalistic hypothesis? Unless some evidence has been presented for all of these quasi-consciousnesses, it sounds a lot like Just Making Things Up.
And who selects the units here, anyway? If the heart has a degree of consciousness, does the left ventricle have half as much? How about the aorta? Does my fingernail have a little less consciousness after I clip it? This all sounds totally arbitrary.
it has one thing in its favor: It eliminates the problem of actually detecting the presence of consciousness, as per that hypothesis consciousness is everywhere.
No, I think it just ignores this problem! It's like saying you don't have to have any evidence for the presence of god if you just say 'Oh, he's omnipresent!' Spreading the problem around isn't the same as solving it.
Sounds like a fun speculation, this idea, but unless there's some kind of amazing body of evidence for it that I have never heard about, it's on the shelf next to the Loch Ness Monster.
(By the way, I realise you weren't positively endorsing that particular hypothesis, Dianelos.)
571. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53670 by _J_ on July 2, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Hi, Dianelos,
I have problems with Chalmers' argument (which perhaps just confirms my naturalism). Trying to answer quickly (must…stop…debating…for…today…at least…) and thus seriously risking making a mistake, here are two.
…the fact that we can imagine such a universe without encountering any conceptual problems proves that there is nothing in the huge amount of knowledge we have about our own universe that contradicts the possibility of that zombie universe existing.
I don't think that this is a fact at all! I can similarly imagine a universe in which we are all giant oranges, or any of infinite other variations. However, my imaginings are contradicted, to a greater or lesser degree, by that mass of scientific knowledge that we have.
Chalmers' zombieverse is no exception. As our scientific knowledge has expanded, we have been able to discover processes that make sense of our being the way we are. Our study of humans, animals and fossils, suggests a development of brain and body that can account – not in perfect detail, but increasingly well – for our feelings, habits, sensory abilities and behaviour.
A zombieverse in which everyone behaved as though they shared these qualities with us, but in fact did not (as unconscious, unfeeling zombies) doesn't make a jot of sense and directly contradicts our understanding of how our universe works. It implies a kind of complexity without causation, and that is not something we observe of ourselves. What you describe is like seeing a motorway full of cars, technologically identical to those we use, all driving themselves along without any actual humans inside. This clearly contradicts our understanding of how things work. To make sense of it, we'd have to imagine some sort of automatic driving system in there (defying the point of the thought experiment) leaving the similarly serious problem 'Why the hell are they doing that with no passengers?' Once we've imagined autopilots and passengers, the whole thought experiment has become pointless.
Seems to me that Chalmers has pushed an argument through without looking at it closely enough to recognise the gaps. If he fills them in, he's left saying either 'We can imagine that things could be different in ways that defy the nature of the universe as we understand it' (in which case, this would only be a revelation if he'd missed the entire history of science-fiction) or 'We can imagine that things could be different in ways that don't defy the nature of the universe as we understand it' (only a revelation if he'd missed the entire history of all fiction – and politics, too).
Second problem:
Chalmers somehow has no problem imagining a zombie world in which consciousness is absent but all of the actions that proceed from it are not, and does not consider this a contradiction of the world as we understand it (which makes me seriously worry about Chalmers – but, I've done that point).
He leaps from here to the conclusion that, because he can't see what a contradiction to this flight of fantasy might look like (he should be able to…but never mind), consciousness must be an ingredient separate from physical material existence, and thus endorses dualism.
Yet the position he has jumped to suffers all the same problems that motivated the jump. As our scientific knowledge proceeds, the things that might have suggested to us the 'existence' (whatever that means when it doesn't mean 'physical existence') of such a consciousness are increasingly explained away. Just as you said for the (claimed) non-emergence of anything to contradict Chalmers' Land of the Dead, it is absolutely the case that the advance of naturalism increasingly chases the notion of non-physical consciousness into smaller and smaller gaps, and renders it a less and less likely hypothesis.
Basically, Chalmers looks to me to have knocked up a very, very dodgy thought experiment, drawn some conclusions about some problems he thinks it suggests and used them as a justification for a view of the real world that suffers equally bad (or worse) problems. He has smelt the breakfast bacon whilst slumbering in his cabin bunk, had a dream that the ship is on fire and dashed headlong to leap overboard into a lifeboat that is actually sinking.
But I've answered hastily. Hopefully someone else will make a better job of this.
Before I wrap up on this, can I just say again that it completely baffles me how Chalmers can jump from his ability to imagine weird and wonderful things to the conclusion that this constitutes any kind of meaningful comment on reality. Almost speechless in my incredulity, I would like to hand over to an anecdote from Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World (I don't think I've reproduced this one here before, but apologies if I have):
At a dinner many decades ago, the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to the toast, 'To physics and metaphysics'. By 'metaphysics', people then meant something like philosophy, or truths you could recognize just by thinking about them. They could also have included pseudoscience. Wood answered along these lines: the physicist has an idea. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it seems to make. He consults the scientific literature. The more he reads, the more promising the idea becomes. Thus prepared, he goes to the laboratory and devises an experiment to test it. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are checked. The accuracy of measurement is refined, the error bars reduced. He lets the chips fall where they may. He is devoted only to what the experiment teaches. At the end of all this work, through careful experimentation, the idea is found to be worthless. So the physicist discards it, frees his mind from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else
The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.
572. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53654 by _J_ on July 2, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Dr Benway
That's a moon!
I can't argue with you there. And I rest my case.
573. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53652 by _J_ on July 2, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Dr Benway,
I certainly see what you mean with your reordered Russian Dolls. A matter of perspective.
And, once again, I agree with your comments.
I suppose, though, it's worth thinking that the physical 'laws' of our universe precede and shape the rise of chemical, and later biological, complexity. If we were to fiddle with the physical settings, everything chemical and biological would change from there down (or up) as a consequence. The order of influence here is not reversible. I think that's why my dolls are ordered in the way they are.
Mind, I'm almost getting a little worried about the strength of epeeist's commitment to the physics camp. (Though I suppose it's hard to argue with the physical reality of a sabre tip).
574. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53637 by _J_ on July 2, 2007 at 11:20 am
phil rimmer
Radio4 on the BBC still has Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in its listen again section. (Up until this Saturday)
Thanks for pointing that out! I should have thought to do so myself. As I write he's being interviewed on Radio 4's Front Row. He's 70 this year. Radio 4 is producing several of his plays in a dedicated season.
He's sooooo good.
575. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53618 by _J_ on July 2, 2007 at 9:15 am
Dianelos, 1002
Ah, good! I'm delighted! (It's always easier to be interesting, I find, when one just resorts to quoting at great length from someone much more talented than oneself.)
...especially considering your previous clarifications that you are "not here" :-)
Yes, tricky issue, existence, isn't it? ;)
576. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53616 by _J_ on July 2, 2007 at 9:08 am
Dr Benway
It's fair to say reality ought to be consistent with itself at both the atomic and the ethological levels. But neither level is more causal or more "real" than the other.
Ah, we agree just fine!
It's a bit like the observation that biology is (sort of) a specialism within chemistry, and chemistry is (sort of) a specialism within physics, and they're all fields within the larger exploration that is Science. I suppose, in the theoretical 'Thomasina's formula' situation of total naturalistic knowledge, the distinctions between the sciences would have blurred away to nothing, the frontier lands between, say, biology and chemistry having been comprehensively filled.
Naturalistically, the point is: 'It's all stuff'. But I think it's nearly always misleading to phrase it as 'It's all just stuff'. There's a lot of stuff going on with all that stuff...
577. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53601 by _J_ on July 2, 2007 at 7:38 am
epeeist, 999
I am not objecting at all, it is a good example. Unattainable in the days of Newtonian mechanics and even less attainable in the light of Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle.
Ah - great! Sorry, misconstrued you there. I getcha.
Will take a look at your gallery, cheers!
(Just have. 'I've often fancied learning to fence' - how predictable am I?)
And - unless I've been pipped to the post - in the grand game of RD thread Connect Four, the thousandth post is MINE!
578. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53597 by _J_ on July 2, 2007 at 7:00 am
epeeist, 996
And your expanded example with fully defined Laplacian determinism falls apart as soon as you stir in some quantum mechanics.
Fair enough. As I said, I only have a very dim idea about quantum mechanics, so I'm not even going to try to disagree with you there. Anyway, what little I do know suggests you're right. Arcadia is good for complexity theory, thermodynamics, Fermat, Newton, landscape gardening and Byron, but I guess you'd want Copenhagen for quantum theory.
But help me out here. Are you objecting to the details of the examples (for example, Thomasina's 'atoms and a formula' statement of determinism - set in 1809, remember)? Or are you arguing with the broader argument that I was using these quotes to illustrate: that one does not need to leap out of scientific naturalism into supernaturalism in order to reach a more full understanding, or appreciation, of reality as we perceive it? And that to do so frustrates our ongoing productive (scientific, naturalistic) attempts to do so? And that the knowledge we (scientifically, naturalistically) gain, whilst ever more fully expanding our understanding of such wonders as whatever music you are listening to today, does not (in spite of its mechanicism) threaten to undermine these experiences (for some of the reasons I gave)?
Dr Benway, 997
Well. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. You can't understand and describe the behavior of a bird by looking at its atoms.
If you know what every one of those atoms is doing, how it relates to all of the other atoms in the bird, how the atoms of the bird interact with those outside the bird, what forces act upon those atoms and what other things the atoms effect, I think you can. This knowledge isn't gained just by looking at the atoms, no. It's gained through all of the fields of research that have anything to say about birds. Ultimately, we will understand why the tufted titmouse is incurably addicted to mooning RD site thread visitors. Our knowledge, gained through these various avenues of scientific investigation, will not - I naturalistically anticipate - lead us to suppose that there is something essential that is somehow present in the bird without being materially part of the atoms of which it is comprised. To suggest otherwise appears to me to be stepping into supernaturalism.
Anyway, this is exactly what I was saying in my last post. 'The whole is more than the sum of its parts' is an excellent way of putting it, so long as no one misunderstands it to imply '...so something that mysteriously isn't one of its parts must therefore have been added'.
epeeist again,
Thursday night, West Hill School, Stalybridge - see you there...
Tempting - only 13 miles from me, and I've often fancied learning to fence. But I'm not sure winding up your prospective teacher is necessarily the best starting point...
579. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53577 by _J_ on July 2, 2007 at 5:18 am
Hi, Dianelos,
Just chipping in with my childishly naïve take on this, again! I can't really engage with the QM debate – well beyond my incompetence threshold.
I'll fall back on literature again. I was quoting Arcadia at you earlier. That play is to a very large extent about knowledge and the ways in which we pursue it, retain it, lose it, regain it, misunderstand it, half-grasp it and so on. Let me throw in another passage from that play:
[By the way, it's 1809 and Thomasina is a 13 year-old girl of unusual intelligence. Septimus is her tutor – usually played by a phenomenally handsome and talented young actor. I'm in a production next year.]
Thomasina Septimus! Am I the first person to have thought of this?
Septimus No.
Thomasina I have not said it yet.
Septimus 'If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton's law of motion, what becomes of free will?'
Thomasina No.
Septimus God's will.
Thomasina No.
Septimus Sin.
Thomasina (derisively) No!
Septimus Very well.
Thomasina If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write a formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.
Septimus (pause) Yes. (Pause.) Yes, as far as I know, you are the first person to have thought of this.
I'm interested in the below comments of yours:
986:
That's very interesting. How else can a naturalist explain your experience of the sheer glory of her music but mechanically in the end?
That's an important question because maybe I'm doing naturalism injustice. Maybe there are versions of it that work better than what I think. It seems clear to me that mechanical explanations can go only so far. So, if naturalism allows for non-mechanical explanations then maybe I am wrong about the limitations of naturalism.
[…]
But for me the far greater piece of evidence is that my theistic explanation strikes me as very adequate, indeed objectively speaking as much more adequate than the strongest version of naturalism I know about. (But maybe there are versions of naturalism that are stronger than my strongest one.)
991:
You write "I wouldn't be sure that these [i.e. explanations about the glory of music] are mechanical." But if you doubt about that, then you must be thinking of some other possibility, no? I wonder, what kind of possibility? What else besides mechanical explanations might there be?
I think you're asking us to think about a 'Thomasina's formula' of naturalistic understanding, but simultaneously dismissing such an understanding, perhaps out of an imaginative failure to appreciate just what a vast thing it is you are invoking.
You see, I'd agree with you, up to a point. I suggest that naturalism, taken to a its ultimate extreme, would indeed suggest an entirely mechanical understanding of even epeeist's example. It is a perfectly chosen example, too, for representing creative art at its most creatively arty. Are you familiar, epeeist, with GE Lessing's essay on the Laocoon, in which he suggested that 'All art constantly aspires to the condition of music'? – referring, I think, to its combination of formality and fluidity, mathematics and emotion, permanence (in written score) and ephemerality (in each unique performance).
But what we're appealing to here is such a total naturalistic (or mechanistic, or 'materialistic', as David Robertson seems to prefer) understanding of things that to view naturalism in the guise of such perfect achievement is tantamount to a straw man argument.
Think about epeeists' 'Emma' example. Our knowledge of acoustics and vocal folds and ear drums will advance, as will our psychological and experiential understanding of the effects of musical forms on listeners. But that won't do it for epeeist's described experience. We'd have to know about Emma's own vocal chords, and perhaps we'd also need a total understanding of the functioning of her own mind as she goes about the act of singing – why she makes the choices she makes, exactly, neuron by neuron, nanosecond by nanosecond, what the processes that lead to her performance are. Emma is unlikely to submit to the necessary biopsies, and I doubt epeeist would want her to.
Furthermore, we'd need a complete record of the entirety of Emma's life experience and all of the effects this has had on her, physically and mentally. Perhaps if Emma had been raised in something like The Truman Show this might be possible – but I suspect we'd then be talking about quite a different Emma than the one we've got.
Then, of course, we need all the same information about epeeist, so it's his brain, eardrums and biography that are next on the lab table.
Let's not forget the exact acoustics of the recording venue – down to every mote of dust, the humidity and temperature, the movements of the air, every object lying in the room and its orientation, Emma's own hairdo, hemline and heartbeat. Then the same for the room in which epeeist is listening to it. Then the precise characteristics of the recording device and playing device. Some of these are such miniscule factors as to be certainly negligible – but there are many, many, many of them, and we are seeking total naturalistic knowledge, here.
Our understanding of this information will reach us through the interpretative work of the scientists involved, and through the filter of our own sense organs, expectations and experiences. So we need too be fully analysed and interpreted ourselves.
When you say:
The mathematical law L is precise even if it only assigns precise probabilities. In contrast the personal character C is intrinsically creative and therefore fundamentally unpredictable.
I think you are simultaneously right and wrong, in a way that upsets your argument. Practically speaking, yes, personal character C is intrinsically creative and therefore fundamentally unpredictable. So indeed are all of us, to a more or less obvious extent. But in the total-knowledge, Thomasina's formula of naturalism that you also invite us to imagine ('How else can a naturalist explain your experience of the sheer glory of her music but mechanically in the end?') Emma's creativity in its every aspect would not be so 'fundamentally unpredictable'. Any unpredictability that it retained would be appreciable in terms of probabilities defined by our absolute understanding of all things.
This type of understanding is theoretically the ultimate destination of naturalistic enquiry. But it is lunacy to suppose that our naturalistic view of the world could ever come close to such omniscience. The amount of details available for us to study and to know will necessarily always exceed our actual ability to study and to know them. Each one of us is, moment by moment, through the very course of living, adding to the sum total of things to be known. Exactly as in Thomasina's words:
although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.
You question the naturalists' search for mechanical explanations, asking 'What else besides mechanical explanations might there be?' But when you appeal outwards to the supernatural you seem to do nothing more than turn the avenue of investigation into a cul-de-sac. The 'struggle on' halts: we abandon the laboratories and look instead to our own speculation to fill the gap with something we like the sound of. Another chunk of drama for you:
Thomasina God's truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?
Septimus We do.
Thomasina Then why do your equations only describe the shapes of manufacture?
Septimus I do not know.
Thomasina Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet.
Septimus He has a mastery of equations which lead into infinities where we cannot follow.
Thomasina What a faint-heart!
Calling a halt to the march of naturalistic enquiry is not only a faint-hearted option, I think, but an unnecessary one. We can instead turn inwards. Surprise and mystery remain ever present within our mechanical understandings, alive and well in the dense network of probabilities and unknown details that fills the spaces in the broader framework of naturalistic scientific description. When our maths have described the rose, we will not therefore have reduced every unique individual rose to a list of numbers; when we understand the mental processes of love in general, we will not be less touched by the rose on our own pillow.
Our knowledge will always be partial. The quote I gave from Hannah in an earlier post is actually part of a speech in which she goes on to criticise a conception of the afterlife as 'the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views'. She concludes:
If the answers are in the back of the book, what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.
This isn't, in the broader context of the issue, the depressing remark that it sounds like. Quite the opposite. This failure acknowledges that our continuing attempts to explain the wonders of the world will never explain them away. By naturalistic enquiry we gradually increase our knowledge, step by step, advancing into a world that remains, and will always remain, exciting, inspiring, and surprising.
And so, in the quotation I am about to repeat, Septimus' despondency when touched by the notion of what it would be like to actually know everything mirrors the overreaction that apparently leads you to reject naturalism. Thomasina – the real genius of the play – has it right. There is no need to step back from the attempt, no need to insert some form of supernaturalism as a safety net to prevent us from falling into the black hole of total knowledge. We are never going to know it all. Not to the last, soul-destroying detail. As epeeist understands, we will always be capable of being enchanted by the music.
Septimus When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
Thomasina Then we will dance.
* * *
By the way, epeeist
…the reason for Britain not doing well at fencing is solely caused by rule changes that don't benefit us, etc.
Absolutely right. I blame the teachers, myself…
580. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53499 by _J_ on July 1, 2007 at 6:09 pm
phil rimmer,
You may have killed the maggot in other people. Worse, they may thank you for it, which will make you want to do it again.
I like this. Furthermore, you have somehow managed to turn a maggot into a metaphor for something desirable. This might be the best bit of connotation-reversal since The Vagina Monologues took on Dr Benway's favourite c-bomb.
I am applauding with the hand that isn't typing (if you can't imagine what that sounds like, I suspect Dianelos will have a philosophical answer... ). [ ;) Dianelos! ]
581. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53495 by _J_ on July 1, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Dr Benway, 982
That's right. You know the play too, then?
582. Floods are judgment on society, say bishops
Comment #53493 by _J_ on July 1, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Ah. Twats in Hats.
Proof, if any were needed, that intelligence is not positively correlated with ownership of a silly costume.
583. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53432 by _J_ on July 1, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Epeeist – 972,
"Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate."
Thanks for that quote – it's an excellent one. In fact, it deserves to sit alongside a couple of lines I like, taken from my favourite play (Arcadia):
Hannah It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the same way we came in.
…and:
Septimus When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
Thomasina Then we will dance.
Just thought I'd share.
584. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53430 by _J_ on July 1, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Hi, Dianelos – 970,
You've understood my point just fine.
But I am not here to justify the truth of these worldviews; after all I too think they are wrong. I am not even here to justify my own worldview, but only the claim that my worldview (idealistic theism) works better than naturalism under all criteria, including under the criterion of ethical empowerment.
My position is that idealistic theism is capable of 'working better' (in many senses) than unadorned naturalism as a daily working approach for most individuals, but is also capable of working far less well (most obviously in some of the examples you mention). I don't think that superiority to naturalism is inbuilt in theism.
It seems to me that all theists actually rely on what I would call naturalism (but which you seem to just regard as 'reason') to a very large degree, but they hem it in with their theistic interpretations. The switch from naturalistic reasoning to theistic speculation (and I do think that it is speculation masquerading as reasoning) constitutes a glitch, as the former system of thinking contradicts the latter. The point at which this contradiction occurs is chased into wild and wonderful places by theists seeking to justify their faith. Either it is pushed to a point at which to pursue it any further would require a degree of time and effort that the individual theist is unwilling to invest (for example, learning about what evolution actually is, or what neurology has to say about the brain), so the theist can comfortably feel that god presents no problems within their personal understanding of the world. Or, in the case of someone with your very impressive knowledge of many fields, the contradiction (as I see it) becomes extremely blurred by the theist's particular interpretation of their understanding of their knowledge (I still, even now, don't understand how your philosophy can really turn what seem to be a couple of unjustifiable leaps of assumption into a semblance of sense).
Theism strikes me as being in a precarious position: the best method of avoiding the abuses and excesses of theism lie in paring its assumptions down towards naturalism, but to do so is to step ever closer to a way of understanding that undermines the whole of theism.
This reminds me very much of the problems of placebo-based treatments. A placebo treatment may 'work better' for a patient than a chemically effective alternative. But to leave the nature of the treatment as a placebo unrecognised is to limit and confuse our understanding of medicine and to leave patients wide open to exploitation. On the other hand, to carefully explain to all patients that the treatments work only as placebos would rob the treatments of their effectiveness – to understand the effect is to destroy it. So, there is a balance between the costs and benefits of knowledge and ignorance, which is in a different place for each of us, at different times and in different contexts.
The ideal situation would be to have such a full mastery of medicine and psychology as to be able to completely reproduce and outdo all placebo effects without resorting to deception. I, perhaps idealistically, hope this to be possible in the long term. And I have similar hopes with regard to religion.
That's my current general perspective on the field!
585. The Panel
Comment #53401 by _J_ on July 1, 2007 at 9:06 am
Bonus points to Kirsty Wark for shattering the image I had of her with 'Fuck! I don't know! Why is the sky blue?'
A pat on the back for a less-than-characteristically-Jewish oath from Robert Winston, in 'I can't remember now. Um. Oh Jesus.'
And a perfumed letterbomb to the Guardian for making me feel ignorant, but at least pointing out that I could be worst.
586. Nato accuses Taliban of using children in suicide missions
Comment #53372 by _J_ on July 1, 2007 at 4:59 am
Lucky that David's on holiday, or we'd be counting the seconds before he attacked 'Richard's' decision to post this article here as a cynical attempt to tar all religion with the brush of extremist child abuse.
On the main issue: this is a horrible, horrible story.
587. God Hates the World
Comment #53309 by _J_ on June 30, 2007 at 5:44 pm
BillySands
You must be thinking of my cousin, LL.
Got your message. You did Meru and Kili? Good move.
588. God Hates the World
Comment #53239 by _J_ on June 30, 2007 at 8:55 am
Di is interesting. Her view of what life is, and must be, and cannot possibly be, doubly so.
By the way: if you ever want a photo from Uhuru peak, you can have one of mine... ;)
589. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53237 by _J_ on June 30, 2007 at 8:32 am
Dianelos,
Thank you for the reply! I don't have time to wade back in to respond at the minute, but I've read it and I appreciate your spending the time.
(Congratulations on hitting Page 20, by the way! Champagne when this passes 1000 posts...)
590. God Hates the World
Comment #53236 by _J_ on June 30, 2007 at 8:19 am
the great teapot, 249 and LeeC, 250,
Have you guys ever read Jorge Luis Borges' short 'story', Three Versions of Judas. Fantastic. I love it. I happened to read it during my Christian phase (it's just one of many in Borges' collection Artifices) and I'm sure it encouraged me to think about the (il)logic of The Atonement. It's a short biography of a character called Nils Runeberg, who publishes his own surprising new take on the story. Here, let me rip out a couple of quotes that more or less sum it up:
Ergo, Judas' betrayal was not a random act, but predetermined, with its own mysterious place in the economy of redemption. Runeberg continues: The Word, when it was made Flesh, passed from omnipresence into space, from eternity into history, from unlimited joy and happiness into mutability and death; to repay that sacrifice, it was needful that a man (in representation of all mankind) make a sacrifice of equal worth. Judas Iscariot was that man. Alone among the apostles, Judas sensed Jesus' secret divinity and His terrible purpose. The Word had stooped to become mortal; Judas, a disciple of the Word, would stoop to become an informer (the most heinous crime that infamy will bear) and to dwell amid inextinguishable flames.
[…]
God, argues Nils Runeberg, stooped to become man for the redemption of the human race; we might well then presume that the sacrifice effected by Him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by omissions. To limit His suffering to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous. To claim that He was man, and yet was incapable of sin, is to fall into contradiction; the attributes impeccabilitas and humanitas are incompatible. […] God was made totally man, but man to the point of iniquity, man to the point of reprobation and the Abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the lives that weave the confused web of history: He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; He chose an abject existence: He was Judas.
Sadly, Runeberg's ideas are not well received. But Runeberg understands why:
God did not want His terrible secret spread throughout the earth. […] Drunk with sleepnessess and his dizzying dialectic, Nils Runeberg wandered the streets of Mälmo, crying out for a blessing – that he be allowed to share the Inferno with the Redeemer.
It strikes me as a stronger and better-rationalised interpretation than any I've heard advanced by a Christian.
591. God Hates the World
Comment #53233 by _J_ on June 30, 2007 at 7:50 am
Paul Creber,
Di on the Free Church of Scotland website...tore your case to shreds with her relentless reason and formidable intellect...
Di's wonderful example...Dawkins's "raised conscience". Priceless.
What can I say? She's a special lady. I knew I was out of my league within the first paragraph of her last post:
Now that I have tapped into the highest conscience available to man on planet earth, Richard Dawkins website, I'm in the clouds! Of course, RD will dispute that if I had studied English at University, I would know that there is no such thing as higher conscience; I must be referring to higher awareness. It sounds more human.
Interpretations on a postcard...
592. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53154 by _J_ on June 29, 2007 at 5:39 pm
steve99,
The big difference between Dianelos and Wee Free is that Dianelos comes across as a likeable fellow - someone who will debate with enthusiasm and politeness, and I have even, in recent discussions, sensed some wavering in his position. I have a lot of respect for that.
Yes, absolutely! In fairness, the Rev. Robertson is usually okay with me (although I get the impression I've somehow annoyed him, lately). But Dianelos is a pleasure to talk to. So far as it is possible to determine illocutionary force from writing, he hasn't raised his voice once, but has remained patient and good humoured. Wherever else this argument goes, his temperament is very admirable. (In fact, I'd say his conduct is a better argument for his theism than his philosophy is...)
I'm not well enough versed in the maths, logic and physics to check all the guy ropes, but bugger me if the tent doesn't appear to be floating in thin air...
Often it is! The well-known English mathematician Ian Stewart has described maths as like building a house from the first floor downwards...
Interesting stuff, and great quote! (I was, of course, referring to Chateau Dianelos, though...)
593. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53151 by _J_ on June 29, 2007 at 4:50 pm
steve99
Ah. That more or less coincides with the feeling I get from it. Which is that a lot of philosophical obfuscation is used basically to throw up enough confusion to hopefully disguise the fact that the basic argument don't make no sense. (Apparently also persuading Dianelos himself.)
I'm not well enough versed in the maths, logic and physics to check all the guy ropes, but bugger me if the tent doesn't appear to be floating in thin air...
Anyway, you go for the maths. I might even learn something.
594. God Hates the World
Comment #53150 by _J_ on June 29, 2007 at 4:41 pm
BillySands
They can't deal with memes though.
Fingers crossed, I guess.
I don't know about other religions so well, but Christianity provides a great framework for rationalising, and the psychological incentives to maintain one's faith are very strong. I think many Christians are motivated by their faith to explore doubts, but only on the unspoken condition that they always beat them (which can involve 'humbly' laying them on one side as 'Unresolved, pending settlement in God's favour').
Which means that we get a lot of people who engage in debate apparently with an open mind, but who'll rationalise in circles and then shut up like a clam if the pressure gets too much.
Bah. Maybe I'm just getting bitter. More wine, please...
595. God Hates the World
Comment #53141 by _J_ on June 29, 2007 at 4:04 pm
BillySands
...proof god knew about human eggs
Which would, of course, prove everything. Guess God didn't stick out GCSE Biology as far as DNA.
Communication between me and DR, Richard and Friends seems to fall down at their complete inability to understand what 'evidence' is. I think it has to do with cutting away bullshit and finding out which things actually, reliably, demonstrably, cause what other things. They think it has to do with pointing at stuff and shouting 'Evidence!'.
'Running rings around' people gets stale fast when they don't even realise it's happening.
596. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53134 by _J_ on June 29, 2007 at 3:34 pm
My mind's on something else, so the following might be total and utter nonsense. But, as I try not to let that sort of thing hold me back:
Dianelos believes he has direct, objective, unquestionable self-knowledge (which is different in nature (somehow) from knowledge of things beyond himself).
So, he proposes that existence at large is created by something similar in nature to Dianelos, and is deliberately created to be similar to Dianelos. So existence, with Dianelos within it, is taken to be 'self-similar' and Dianelos is able to know all things as he knows himself. Hence, knowledge of Stuff becomes possible.
But.
Shouldn't this work backwards? If my self-knowledge is the basis of my knowledge of external things, then ought I not to be able to know other people's selves (which are to the external world as I am to it) as I know myself?
I don't. Really, I don't. (Stop thinking that, you - I really don't!)
I may have missed something staringly obvious here, so forgive me for wasting your time. Or several things. But isn't this leap of supposition at least as sound as that which Dianelos is making in the first place, to get from his self knowledge to knowledge of the world at large? In fact, doesn't it follow more readily from the preceding assumptions of the argument than his does?
(Sorry for the second person, Dianelos. I'm very, very unsure of my ground in this post, so I'm addressing this out to everyone. I may be bollocating wildly.)
Anyway, even if this argument is full of holes (which I am increasingly sure it is) I'd like some analysis of the assumptions that Dianelos makes in this chain of self-knowledge to world-knowledge. It just doesn't strike me as having anything at all to back it up, except looking to be a roughly tidy shape as unprovable philosophical speculations go.
597. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath
Comment #53129 by _J_ on June 29, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Dear lord, if it's not philosophy, it's maths. I thought it couldn't get any worse. Tomorrow it'll be statistics.
I can see why my purely verbiage-based arguments get completely ignored.
Back under my rock, then.
598. God Hates the World
Comment #53127 by _J_ on June 29, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Paul,
Di scares me. But she seems to be an embodiment of the point I've been trying to get across to David - that religions screw up people's priorities and allow them to lose track of piffling little things like life and death.
(Best be nice, though - from her last post, it seems that she silently haunts these pages, in search of things to misinterpret and object to.)
If your response is to Richard, I look forward to hearing it. I am sick to death of the old 'Sounds like those atheists have as much faith as us!' chestnut.
scottishgeologist,
Anyway, if you go to it - what is the most common word on the page? Yes, "Dawkins" !!! Dawkins forum threads, Wee Fleas Dawkins articles, its all there.
True. And yet, if you go to the forum and search for 'Dawkins', what message do you get (along with three hits?):
You may have meant to search for Hawkins.
At least they've got a sense of humour.
599. God Hates the World
Comment #53097 by _J_ on June 29, 2007 at 10:14 am
Hi, Paul,
Yeah, a few days ago I submitted an overlong response to David's last reply to my last overlong reply to his...
Anyway, it's probably jammed things up a bit. And I'm not expecting it to go through - if it goes through at all - until David returns from his holiday.
Sorry if that's what's holding your own response up. Perhaps another moderator will clear yours, if it's not directly to David?
At least the hiatus gives some time to breeeeaathe for a change.
600. God Hates the World
Comment #53091 by _J_ on June 29, 2007 at 9:49 am
frannk (hi, by the way) and others,
On the 'How to swear properly' discussion, I suggest that all you need is to tag an 's' on the end:
'By gods!'
'Good gods!'
'In the name of gods and all that is holy...'
Easy to say, easy to remember. There are so many, after all. Why be exclusive?
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