Comments by Dianelos Georgoudis

701. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55243 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 10:21 am

LeeC (post 1191, or #55136):

If something cannot affect my conscious experience then it can't affect me in any way.

Silly question then, if you were unconscious, (drugs, bang to the head or deep sleep) – would someone cutting your arm off while you were unconscious affect you in anyway?

Sure, it would affect me when I regained consciousness. As I wrote a few lines before the part you quote here: "And I say that something exists if it might affect me (even if only in an indirect roundabout or delayed way),"

Care for an experiment? Lets just keep it as a though experiment for now, since what I am about to describe will not be pretty. Lets cut off your arms and legs… will you still have consciousness? Yes. Lets remove some organs… and replace them with either machines or someone else organs. Will you still have consciousness? Yes – so it is not in the liver, heart or lungs? Shall we go on? I think you will find that we are closing in on the head area here… or do you have a better solution? It must be somewhere inside the body right?

No, not right. Pity you did not continue with your thought experiment. Let me try: I finally keep only your brain alive via some kind of machinery that pumps oxygenized blood in it and so on. You still have consciousness, right? Now as a final step I switch off the machinery and your brain dies. What happens to your consciousness? According to naturalism your consciousness disappears, there is no Lee anymore having any conscious experiences. According to theistic idealism your consciousness is still there experiencing the afterlife, perhaps discussing ontology with Dianelos based on the new premises.

But maybe you think there is some scientific evidence one way or the other about what happens to consciousness after death? Well, in fact there isn't. And there never will be because according to scientific method consciousness is an unnecessary hypothesis for understanding physical phenomena, and therefore from the scientific point of view consciousness does not even exist before death. The only thing that exists from the scientific point of view is a brain producing intelligent behavior which it ceases to produce at death.

702. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55235 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 10:06 am

_J_ (post 1189, or #55127):

Happily, Krogercomplete in post 820 did make sense of me when he wrote "As I understand your position Dianelos, we actually do live in God's Matrix."

That is not making sense of your position. The Matrix cleaves to a basic naturalistic rationale that is absent from your worldview. The Matrix does not address the problem of consciousness in its postulation of a simulated world; it only addresses the matter of what our conscious awareness is conscious of. When characters in The Matrix emerge from the Matrix, they find themselves simply in another material world, still relying on their brains and sense data to get along.

As it turns out I have already commented on this in post 135 (or #47348).

The Matrix idea just shows the obvious: That reality need not be anything like what we see around us. So reality may well be as theistic idealism describes. There is no a-priori or intrinsic problem in that hypothesis. I understand that theistic idealism is at first counterintuitive, but naturalism's hypothesis that reality consists of the universe's wavefunction (never mind the "many worlds" times the multiverse interpretation) is counterintuitive too. You don't want me to try to compare which worldview is more counterintuitive, do you? ;-)

703. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55230 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 9:54 am

_J_ (post 1185, or #55120):

Right: so your information count is based on the constructs of matter – the same approach you used for naturalism. Except that for naturalism you tried to be consistent and count upwards after breaking things down to a countable unit (arbitrarily stopping at atoms and ignoring that, once you do get down to fundamental particles, there are huge grey areas of Here Be Dragons that we're still building Large Hadron Colliders to help us explore, making something of a mockery of this whole flight of imaginative mathematical whimsy…but never mind).

No, let's mind. I made clear that "we'll ignore the added complexity of elementary particles". If I hadn't ignored that added level of complexity then naturalism's worldview would have come out even more complex still.

But, for theism, this 'complexity' counting makes damn-all sense if matter is but 'patterns present in our conscious experience'.

Why not? Science discovers such patterns, and indeed discovers that the visual information that our brain processes is limited by the number of cells in our retina.

You have no way of measuring complexity at all. So, you incongruously use matter (rods and cones) as your starting point, but inconsistently fail to break them down to their constituent atoms.

Why should I break it down to their constituent atoms? Science has shown beyond any reasonable doubt that individual atoms in our retina do not affect the visual information that passes through our optic nerve.

You take these cells as sufficient representation of our ability to see, making no mention of the 'complexity' represented by the light that they actually register, or the objects that that light has reflected off (if you regard these as unnecessary, then why bring up eyes and photoreceptors in the first place?).

Because according to science the complexity of the light or of the objects the light is reflected from does not matter, whereas the number of rods and cones in our retina does matter.

So, let's forgive your (unforgivable) skipping back and forth between matter-counting and matter disregarding.

I have no idea what you mean; after all matter exists both in naturalism's understanding of reality and in idealistic theism's. (Idealistic theism does not accept the objective existence of matter as what produces our experiences, but that's irrelevant; all scientific observations and laws still hold.) So, in order to compare the complexity of naturalism and theistic idealism I used the scientific knowledge that both worldviews share. Naturalism (actually by now a rather simple form of naturalism) claims that reality consists of the physical universe we observe - so I estimate the complexity of that reality using science. Theistic idealism claims that reality consists of the conscious experience of God and us - so I estimate the complexity of that reality using science. That's an objective calculation. Feel free to ask anybody who knows a little science to independently compute the relevant complexities and I claim they would arrive at basically the same result: that naturalism at its simplest is much much more complex reality than idealistic theism.

I trust my calculations are correct. There is really no contest, as the universe is simply too large, so if the universe were objectively real (as naturalism holds) its complexity would turn out to be much higher than the complexity of us observing it. Which may explain in part why God has created for us the experience of such an really huge universe: maybe so that theistic idealism would trump naturalism under any imaginable criterion ;-)

704. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55220 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 9:20 am

_J_ (post 1184, or #55113):

So, let's say all I do is accept the scientific evidence about stuff we can observe. And I say: 'That's all we know; I can go no further until we have more evidence'.

The stuff you can objectively observe is the same that science uses: physical phenomena. You can't go any further than science if that's the only evidence you use. And science does not care about what reality produces the physical phenomena it studies, because it only studies exactly that: physical phenomena. And there are many worldviews, indeed many naturalistic worldviews, that could produce exactly the same phenomena, so you can't use scientific evidence to decide which worldview is more reasonable. That's a simple idea which I must have repeated for the fourth of fifth time now.

I know perfectly well that what we see around as looks real and that we, since toddlerhood, are used to thinking that it is real. But what we see around us is really only a representation created in our brain. For example you see light? Well actually the light you see exists only in your skull, because what you perceive as light is caused by some particular process in your brain. There is no such thing as the light you perceive anywhere else but in your brain. Outside of your skull the one thing that exists is the universe's wavefunction according to one naturalistic worldview, and that's nothing like the light you perceive: the wavefunction is not bright, is not colored, is not soothing. Significantly, there may be other realities that could produce exactly the same light you perceive, for example, most naturalists would agree that the light you perceive might be produced by a computer simulation. So, what you see around you may look real but need not be so. In fact according to the current naturalistic descriptions of reality, it is not so (you don't see a wavefunction, do you?). What I mean is that even naturalism implies that what you see is not real. Get over it; reality is more interesting than what we see around us since we were children.

705. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55209 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 8:53 am

LeeC (post 1182, or #55107):

A gap is a gap however large it maybe, so you have "read my mind" - you are using the god of the gaps, and you know it.

Of course I am using God of the gaps: I connect the failings of naturalism and I find they form a remarkably precise God-shaped gap. It's like if you consequently follow the implications of naturalism you'll find that God is missing. Which I must say is kind of neat and kind of telling.

Also don't let naturalist rhetoric cloud your judgment. Gaps are a good thing; historically science has advanced when it found gaps in its previous understanding which required a paradigmatic shift.

706. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55204 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 8:43 am

_J_ (post 1180, or #55102):

Might we not be best to attempt the task of dealing with the causes of this problem and face up to the reality that doing so will cause a certain amount of pain, rather than allow the problem to swell and escalate - in the same way that we inoculate against a disease by suffering through a mild dose of it?

Do you really think that's a good idea? Because it seems to me quite obvious that evil begets evil, so the inoculation analogy doesn't work at all.

707. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55201 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 8:39 am

_J_ (post 1173, or #55087):

Our understanding of morality is not total, but is sophisticated and constantly improving. Through psychology, neurology, zoology and our understanding of evolutionary principles, we have a basis of understanding that it as least sufficient for us to not to require a supernatural agency in morality.

What basis would that be? If life is nothing more than a planet-wide chemical reaction it's simply arbitrary (and hence base-less) to define any part of it as good and any other part of it as bad. That's the problem. Which does not imply that naturalists are therefore ethical-less people. It just implies that their worldview is kind of incoherent.

Conscious experience is a vexed question, on this thread at least! But what grounds could you have for suggesting that naturalistic (ie non supernatural, godless) enquiry cannot explain conscious experience? It seems to me that the most you can say is that you haven't seen a full and convincing explanation yet

Nobody is asking for a full explanation or anything like that. The point here is that naturalism claims as a fundamental proposition that consciousness is produced by matter when in fact it has absolutely no justification for that belief – and of course no physical evidence whatsoever either. I mean when theists claim that God created the universe then naturalists, rightly, ask for a justification for that belief. But, conversely, when naturalists claim that material things can become conscious without any justification, except that it must be so because if it weren't so then naturalism wouldn't make any sense, now suddenly the requirement that beliefs must be justified on reason, objective evidence, and whatnot – well, is kind of forgotten. Now it's like, we don't know yet, we are working on it, etc. You know, I think next time a naturalist asks me how theism justifies its claim that God exists I will answer the same: We don't know yet, we are working on it.

This can also be said of naturalistic science, as it has toppled mystery after mystery in the centuries since the scientific revolution.

There is no such thing as "naturalistic science". There is only science, full stop. It's a myth that only the naturalistic worldview is compatible with science; indeed some of the greatest scientists in history including Newton were theists. As far as I am concerned here we have a phenomenon of an obviously false meme ("only naturalism is compatible with science") banding with another almost as obviously false meme ("naturalism is the best description of reality") for both to replicate like crazy in the minds of people.

708. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55191 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 8:16 am

Steve99 (post 1170, or #55070):

But there is a much deeper problem: That in the naturalistic understanding of reality the very concept of an objectively good or bad act is meaningless.

It is only a problem if you want to believe that acts are objectively good or bad independent of any observer. But that is only what you want to believe. You have no evidence that this is the case, so it is no problem for naturalism.

I am afraid we just keep talking past each other :-(

Above I am not claiming that objective ethical propositions are true, just that they are meaningful – so whether I want to believe that such propositions are true or not is entirely irrelevant. Also I do have evidence that this is the case. I've argued in many posts now that to assume that only physical evidence matters is to beg the question. You'll never understand the theistic position, and will never be able to compare theism with naturalism and therefore be justified in any worldview you adopt, as long as you keep using naturalism as premise.

709. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55185 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 8:02 am

Dr Benway (post 1198, or #55163):

I think you've asserted many times that your worldview cannot be falsified.

Where did I assert that?

Here:

2. Theistic worldviews are trivially and entirely compatible with scientific knowledge, because God, being omnipotent and all, could produce all the phenomena that science studies.

I see, but that's only asserting that theistic worldviews cannot be falsified by scientific evidence. I am afraid that you like most naturalists assume that the only kind of evidence there is is scientific evidence, namely some objectively observable physical phenomenon. But that's not so, see post 1131 (and also posts 1092, and 1094). Also note that if the only kind of evidence there is were scientific we couldn't ever decide whether naturalism or idealistic theism is more reasonable.

Again, assume for a moment that reality is super-natural or goes beyond nature; surely it's not reasonable to expect or demand physical evidence for non-physical existents?

Well, as what goes for the goose goes for the gander, can you suggest any such falsification of naturalism?

Jesus returning in clouds of glory, surrounded by all the hosts of heaven.

Right, point taken. Even though I once spoke with a naturist who in effect argued that if he ever observed Jesus returning in clouds of glory he would rather believe that some extraterrestrial and far more advanced civilization were playing games with us. Here is a better kind of evidence (which I took from Sagan's "Contact"): that we should discover the gospels codified letter by letter in the digital expansion of pi.

710. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55172 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 7:31 am

SharonMcT (post 1162, or #54986):

There is a vast difference between religious indoctrination of children and teaching religious history.

In post 1138 I suggested neither. Here is what I wrote there:

I would like children to be exposed to different ontological worldviews about reality, including naturalism and theism, to be given the opportunity to study the best arguments for or against them, and to actually think about these issues for themselves.

I think that if people get the chance in an academic (read non-dogmatic, non-fundamentalist) environment to compare the best arguments for each of these worldviews most of them will realize that the intellectual underpinning of naturalism is flimsy and mostly consists of the myth that only naturalism is compatible with science.

711. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55171 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 7:31 am

Steve99 (post 1161, or #54952):

According the idealistic theism reality consists only of the spiritual realm, and that the physical facts and phenomenal order we perceive are caused by God's will.

How?

How questions are not always meaningful. We've already discussed this in several posts, including posts 168, 629 and 640.

712. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55155 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 6:10 am

Phil Rimmer (post 1160, or #54943):

But free will does not exist in reality, according to your understanding. So if we experience that it exists it is some kind of illusion.

But, I am under no illusion, am I?

You mean that not only you believe you don't have free will, but you also experience having no free will.

You're the one with the illusion.

Well, strictly speaking, direct experience is the only kind of knowledge that cannot be illusory. What we deduce from our direct experience may be illusory. So for example my experiencing the pencil break when you put it in a glass of water is not an illusion, for I really experience that. What's an illusion is to deduce from my experience that once you take the pencil out of the water it will still see it broken.

And I truly believe you and I have the same mental experiences.

Well I experience having free will, and (if I understood you correctly) you don't. So there either exists a huge difference in the way we experience life or there is a huge difference in the way we use words. Frankly, I'd rather believe we have some semantic problem here. Here is how naturalist philosopher (and one of the major figures in the philosophy of the mind) John Searle responded when asked by Susan Blackmore if he thought he had free will: "Well, I don't have a choice about that! We all think we have free will, and there's no way we can think away our own free will, because even if you try to think it away in a decision-making situation – if you just say, 'Well, look, I'm a determinist so I just wait and see what happens' – that is itself intelligible to us only as an exercise in freedom. Immanuel Kant pointed this out to us a long time ago, that it's characteristic of conscious decision-making that you can't proceed except on the presupposition of free will.[snip]"

I am responsible for my actions.

But you also think you couldn't possibly have avoided some past action of yours, correct? If so what you mean by "responsibility" is completely different from what I mean. For me one is responsible for an action only if one could have avoided that action but didn't.

713. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55145 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 5:41 am

PeterK (post 1159, or #54927):

Just for my own point of reference, would you agree that God at one time existed as pure consciousness before anything else existed?

Well, according to idealistic theism it's still true that only pure consciousness exists. But now, apart from God, there are many other persons (i.e. conscious subjects) around. If you are asking if that this was always so, or whether there was a time that the only person around was God, then the answer is I don't know. Reasoning about reality is useful for finding out about the presence and the future because such knowledge is meaningful/testable/falsifiable in one's present or future experience. How reality was way back in the past before any humans existed is not useful knowledge as far as I can see, and I am not sure we have sufficient evidence to argue this question one way or the other. But who knows, maybe one day you'll be able to directly converse with God, and then ask Him/Her that question :-)

714. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55142 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 5:30 am

Steve99 (post 1158, or #54914):

You mean the idea that reality consists of a gargantuan number of physical universes, each with its own randomly selected values of fundamental constants and that we happen to exist in one of the extremely rare universes in which these values are such that intelligent life can evolve?

You need to read what I posted. The values are not necessarily randomly selected. I gave the example of the Mandelbrot set. Read it again. The entire set of values of constants may well be determined by a very simple process, and our particular set are as much a part of that process as the vast range that we aren't in. This is why multiverse theories simplify things.... just like anyone discovering the complexity of pictures of the Mandelbrot Set would realise its underlying simplicy when they found out the generating process.

Unfortunately the idea of a cellular automata kind of generator of universes doesn't help at all to make the multiverse more plausible. Here is why: The problem of the fine-tuning of the physical constants is not that the likelihood of a universe having physical constants that are compatible with the evolution of life is 1/10, or 1/100. If that were so then a naturalist philosopher would simply shrug and say: we are lucky, so what? The problem is that these values must be exact to a mind-bogglingly precision of something like one part in 10^100 for life to evolve – and one can't really argue that we are that lucky. So we need at least one of the universes generated in the multiverse to be one of the mind-bogglingly extremely unlikely ones that can produce life, correct? But if it is a cellular automaton does not produce at least a good approximation of random values for the fundamental constants then almost certainly that cellular automaton will not produce a universe that is compatible with life. But if a cellular automaton does produce a good approximation of random values (i.e. probably solves the problem of the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants we observe) then it does not simplify anything, as we are dealing with the same number of actual universes. I mean it's not really critical to explain "how or by which mechanism" the universes in the multiverse are created; one can just as well assert that reality is such that these universes are randomly created. After all the similarly sounding but entirely different idea of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics does not explain either "how or by which mechanism" the universe is split into various copies at each quantum event.

Maybe you are under the impression that naturalists are always careful to describe the mechanism that underlines their assertions, but that's simply one more myth. We saw that Einstein who believed in the objective reality of both mass and spacetime did not worry at all about what mechanism makes the former bend the latter.

Oh, good, another made-up looking and untestable naturalistic worldview.

That is your worldview, not the one of Paul Davies. It is entirely testable. The delayed choice experiment on which this worldview is based has been done, and has given positive results.

The delayed choice experiment simply verified a prediction of quantum mechanics that was known since the very beginning of the 20th century. Such an experiment does not count as a positive result neither for Davies's ontology nor for mine nor for anybody's worldview that is compatible with QM. It did falsify Einstein's ontological ideas about causality though.

First the matter of playing fast and loose with time is not wild. It is established scientific fact.

No, not really. There is no negative arrow of time in scientific theories. QM which allows for superluminal speeds predicts that it is possible to observe a clock's hands moving backwards, but this does not amount to time flowing backwards, for the obvious reason that while we are making this or any other observation we keep experiencing time flowing forwards. It's only naturalistic worldviews (often produced by scientists) who play fast and loose with the time arrow. You must not think that what scientists do is necessarily science, even though it does happen sometimes that scientist's ontological speculations can result in science in the end as the example of Bell's theorem shows.

Secondly, do you realise you are basically quoting Davies' ideas? After ridiculing what he is saying, you are coming up with just the same thoughts!

No, I wasn't aware of that, and if so it's quite neat. But I doubt it's so because my suggestion has nothing to do with the future negotiating with the past or redefining what time is; rather my suggestion is based on a simple generalization of standard quantum mechanics and its Copenhagen interpretation.

715. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55124 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 4:17 am

_J_ (post 1157, or #54882):

We could hardly live anywhere else! Someone wins the lottery most weeks and amazingly it's always the person with the winning ticket.

Right, and that's why I wrote in post 1154 that the multiverse hypothesis works. I only added that it looks completely made-up. (Some people also criticize it because there is no scientific evidence whatsoever for that hypothesis, but these people are unaware that here we are discussing ontological hypotheses and not scientific ones).

716. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55123 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 4:09 am

Dr Benway (post 1152, or #54842):

I think you've asserted many times that your worldview cannot be falsified.

Where did I assert that?

In fact there are many ways to falsify my belief that the worldview of theistic idealism works better than the worldview of naturalism: Explain to me how something material could become conscious on naturalistic principles. Find naturalistic explanations that are better than theistic idealism for my first-person data. Show why naturalism produces more experiential gains or is more ethically empowering than theistic idealism. Or suggest other criteria than the ones I have suggested, and under which naturalism works better than theistic idealism. Or, conversely, find any problems with theistic idealism, say concerning its explanatory power or coherency.

Or maybe the above sounds too philosophical or else too subjective for your taste. You want a falsification that consists of an objective observation the kind that science uses. Well, as what goes for the goose goes for the gander, can you suggest any such falsification of naturalism?

I realize that my prediction that we shall all continue to experience life after we die does not count, because you want some falsifiable prediction in this life. Well, I have suggested such a prediction: That intelligent computers (who I believe will be conscious beings and are therefore persons in my sense) will tend to adopt a theistic worldview of reality.

717. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55121 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 4:08 am

_J_ (post 1151, or #54841):

And yet I find it childishly easy to imagine the sort of evidence that such a god could give if he actually existed.

You mean something like reordering the stars in the night sky to read one different verse of the New Testament every night, or something like that? I agree that God could do that, but that's irrelevant. The real question is not what God could do, but what God would want to do. And there are reasons why God would not want to give us this kind of Mickey-Mouse kind of evidence. Why do I call it Mickey-Mouse? Because it would be kind of childish and too easy. There is nothing good in our experiential environment that can be gained trivially easy, so why would one suppose that God would want knowledge of His/Her existence and attributes to be trivially easy to gain?

What's more such a physical demonstration would be misleading, and God surely does not wish to mislead us. Why misleading? Because even without any such physical evidence of God's existence people find it very easy to confuse physical phenomena with reality. If there were physical phenomena that spoke of God's existence then it would be even more difficult to us to understand that reality is much more than the physical phenomena we experience.

In fact one thing you can't understand without God is consciousness itself.

So you keep saying! But even if I accepted your insuperable misgivings about naturalistic approaches to consciousness, I still don't share your reasoning on positing god as an explanation.

They are not just my misgivings – many serious naturalist philosophers have such misgivings too, and have even produced a list of paradoxes entailed in the idea that something material could become conscious. Also, we have the objective fact that nobody has really suggested the slightest idea of how anything material could become conscious, and in general that the advance towards solving the hard problem of consciousness in the last decades has been exactly zero. Of course, maybe there is a solution – but I find that "maybe" increasingly difficult to sustain in reason.

As for me positing God as an explanation – I am positing a worldview which does not require an explanation for consciousness. According to idealistic theism the whole of reality is consciousness, and indeed the whole of reality is God. Why then use the concept of God in the first place? Because that concept expresses how the whole of reality is organized, namely as a person.

If naturalists had no idea about how life could come into existence ('All life, conscious or unconscious!') then you could call that| 'the mother of all gaps'.

No, all the gaps that science has closed in the past and some it is working to close today are objective gaps. They are about explaining objectively observable phenomena, say the complexity of the species, the very existence of life, the movement of the planets, why the night sky is as bright as it is, and so on. Consciousness is not such an objectively observable phenomenon, and that's why it's not clear why consciousness represents a gap for science in the first place – I only argue that consciousness represents a huge gap for naturalism. Incidentally, it's wrong to call consciousness a phenomenon, for consciousness is a different category: it is the space where all other physical phenomena take place.

In short the problem of consciousness is a problem of first-person data, and there is indeed a chasm between explaining third-person data and first-person data. You see, third-person data has been used by science only to explain third-person data. Naturalism pretends to use third-person data to explain first-person data, which looks impossible. One might say that it only looks impossible because of a failure of imagination, or even because of a fundamental limitation of human intelligence (as philosopher McGinn does), but to claim that a sufficiently complex configuration of matter could become conscious strikes me like saying that a particularly complex way of mixing black and white pigment could produce colors. I think there is already sufficient evidence and arguments to justify in reason the belief that it's impossible to explain the presence of consciousness in a material world. On the other hand theistic idealism can easily explain the presence of physical phenomena in a world of consciousness. It's really easy to use first-person data to explain third-person data.

If nobody comes up with some testable idea of how something material could become conscious in the next 50 years or so[…]

It doesn't seem reasonable to you that the biggest and most difficult questions might take the longest to answer?

But I am not asking for a full explanation of consciousness in 50 years. I am asking just for some kind – any kind – of testable idea. The fact is that nobody can suggest any idea at all for decades now of how something material could become conscious. Let me give you an analogy: Suppose we asked somebody and Ancient Greece: How can we travel to the moon? And that person after thinking for less than 50 seconds would answer: "Well, it's not easy: you first have to find a very tall person who can reach as far as the moon when standing on his toes on the summit of the highest mountain on the Earth, and them ask him for the favor to pick you up and place you on the moon." Now, that's a very stupid idea of course, and in fact virtually nothing like the idea that more than two millennia later did bring us to the moon. But stupid or not at least it's some idea. It's even testable to some degree (very tall people standing on a mountain peak can indeed raise you closer to the moon). Well, for several decades now the finest naturalistic minds, scientific and philosophic, working on the problem of consciousness have not even managed to produce anything approaching that stupid idea. I think that's a unique situation in the history of knowledge.

718. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55098 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 2:42 am

Dr Benway (post 1149, or #54838):

For example a famous piece of scientific evidence is that when one measures the speed of light in different frames of reference the result is always the same. Even though I believe this is true with a high degree of confidence, such belief is strictly speaking based on hearsay.

But it need not be based upon hearsay.

I agree, and that's why we call that kind of evidence "objective". But if I wanted to split hairs here I would point out that even though I agree with you latter proposition, it's only because of hearsay too :-) There is a more basic point to be made here: All evidence is in the end subjective – we only call objective a particular class of evidence which we have reason to deem reliable as a class.

To be precise, I am not saying that gratuitous torture is objectively wrong, only that the proposition "gratuitous torture is objective wrong" is meaningful.

To be precise, I am not saying that gratuitous torture is objectively wrong, only that the proposition "gratuitous torture is objective wrong" is meaningful.

No, I am only pointing out the obvious: that propositions "X is true" and "X is meaningful" describe very different claims.

719. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55097 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 2:34 am

Steve99 (post 1147, or #54834):

This is a fundamental failure of naturalism, and will remain so while nobody is able to at least propose some testable idea about how something material could become conscious.

Please provide a testable idea about how something supernatural could become conscious.

Haven't you been reading my posts since #333? According to my worldview reality is the supernatural realm and its basic constituent is consciousness, so to ask me how consciousness could become conscious, is like me asking you how matter could become material. The only reasonable question you can ask me is how come consciousness produces matter – and the answer is that consciousness does not produce matter; matter does not exist objectively but only exists as an orderly pattern present in our conscious experience. We've gone over this many times. I was under the impression that I was making some sense :-) Happily, Krogercomplete in post 820 did make sense of me when he wrote "As I understand your position Dianelos, we actually do live in God's Matrix."

720. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55091 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 2:20 am

Alovrin (post 1143, or #54828):

Humor and ridicule are invaluable weapons when dealing with falsehoods.

Humor and ridicule are also invaluable weapons for dehumanizing other people. Haven't you seen all the smiling faces in the photos from Abu Ghraib? Do you think that was accidental? Soldiers since time immemorial are stimulated to ridicule and belittle their enemies (it's easier to kill them that way) – the Abu Ghraib tragedy was only the logical conclusion of that.

One basic principle of human decency (and this goes way beyond the theism versus naturalism debate) is that you never cause gratuitous pain to others, and especially not for fun. That's why I thought the recent publication of cartoons that ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad was ethically wrong. I don't myself find reasonable that Muslims are so sensitive in that department, but what one believes about Islamic reasonableness in that department is irrelevant to the fact that those who published those cartoons fully well knew that they would cause others gratuitous pain.

721. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55089 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 2:06 am

Steve99 (post 1142, or #54825):

Religious ideas are real and are serious; believing in God is really nothing like believing in fairies.

It is precisely the same. [snip]

Believing in God and believing in fairies is clearly not precisely the same thing, see post 708, or #50347.

In both cases people are believing in invisible supernatural beings because of a lack of understanding of the scientific and rational explanation for things.

It seems you are equating "scientific" and "rational" here, no? :-) I agree that science is rational, but not that anything rational must be scientific. If that were so my marrying my wife would have been irrational.

As for rational explanations of things – can you describe how those who don't believe in God rationally explain how our brain produces consciousness? Because if they can't explain this greatest fact of all – if they don't have the very slightest inkling of an idea of how to explain it - then by your own measure they are like believing in an invisible process that somehow makes consciousness magically spring out of our brain. Sounds like believing in fairies, no? ;-)

722. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55085 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 1:45 am

Steve99 (post 1137, or #54801):

We were discussing your claim that I have evidence with which my worldview does not fit. So what is the evidence I have with which my worldview does not fit?

Well, for one, the evidence that the world is not deterministic.

Oh, there is a misunderstanding here. I have justified my worldview in posts 333 and 470. Can you point out where I use that evidence? In fact as I explained in post 1131 "evidence" is for me any proposition I believe with a very high degree of confidence. "Reality is not deterministic" is not such a proposition for me. Maybe the misunderstanding comes from my claiming that at face value quantum mechanics appears to be saying that reality is not deterministic, but then I explained that there are at least two interpretations of quantum mechanics that assert a deterministic reality. I even argued that even if reality is not deterministic one can always claim to understand it deterministically.

I mean: For me it's self-evidently true that objective ethical precepts (such as that gratuitous torture is objectively wrong) are meaningful.

And that is the problem. Because that is no proof or evidence for anything, as you know. You are an intelligent fellow, and so you know that millions of people have held 'self-evidently true' beliefs that we know are nonsense (such as the flatness of the Earth).

We have already discussed (see post 571) that all reasonable people rely on intuitions, i.e. on self-evidently true propositions. For example you rely on your intuition that there is some kind of reality out there that produces the phenomena you experience, right? The fact that some intuitions can be wrong, and that some intuitions have been shown to be wrong (for example Einstein's scientific intuition that there can't be any non-local phenomena) is irrelevant. We can't very well reason about anything without using some intuitions we trust. The very premise that the inductive method is reasonable is an intuition. I can give you an entire list of intuitions that naturalism depends on. So to wave the "that's only an intuition" flag again is a red herring.

In short: I intuitively know that the proposition "gratuitous torture is objectively wrong" is not a meaningless proposition. What about you? I asked this before: Do you believe this proposition is meaningless?

But in any case what you believe about these issues in no way affects me, does it now?

Yes, it does. Because it means that a major platform of your worldview is false.

Do you really mean that? :-) Are you saying that my disagreeing with something you believe implies that a major platform of my worldview is false? Are you claiming to be like the inerrant Pope or something? Doesn't this stance strike you as very slightly dogmatic?

Or maybe you mean that your own personal beliefs about "reality substance" and so on should be accepted as "facts" by me?

They aren't my personal beliefs. They are the beliefs of just about every philosopher and scientist who has ever lived.

Well, I am quite well read in both science and philosophy but I don't recall ever reading anything about "reality substance". I just googled "reality substance" and couldn't find anything about this concept either.

Your personal beliefs about this are so widely recognised as being mistaken that there is even a classical logical fallacy that describes them - "reification".

Well, as far as I can see you use reification because it sounds kind of applicable. Or maybe you misunderstand what reification means, or maybe you make the wrong inferences from it. I wouldn't know – you just keep repeating that I am committing the "reification fallacy" without specifying why. Actually the reification fallacy is a very primitive kind of fallacy. Here is how it works: We often use metaphors when we speak (for example when we say "natural evolution selects those organisms that produce more offspring") and the reification fallacy consists in literally believing such metaphors (of course evolution is not really selecting anything – evolution is a blind process). But all that is entirely irrelevant to my argument; and I try to avoid using metaphors anyway. Or maybe you think that the reification fallacy implies that objective propositions need say nothing about reality. If so, I wonder why you think that; I mean what does the reification fallacy have to do with whether objective propositions must or mustn't claim something about reality?

So you don't know if there is something objectively real out there, something that does not depend on anybody's opinion? Your mind is open to the idea that maybe there is no objective reality at all?

Yes.

Then your mind is open to solipsism. Here we are discussing what worldview about objective reality is the most reasonable, so the stance that maybe there is no objective reality at all, that everything – including our seeing the moon – depends on somebody's opinion and has no independent reality by itself, well such a stance is kind of self-defeating not to mention kind of absurd, don't you think? I mean to keep an open mind is fine and good, but in order to advance in understanding you must make some decisions and advance some steps. One extremely reasonable decision to make is that objective reality does exist. Another that you are not the only mind that exists. Another that induction works. Another that reality did not come into existence 10 minutes ago.

Surely you are not saying that the Bell Inequality implies that physical reality is not deterministic, are you?

Yes, of course I am. That is what it implies.

I know something about the Bell's Inequality, but I don't see where it implies determinism one way or the other. Could you justify your claim?

Incidentally, how do you explain that 20 years after the experimental verification of Bell's theorem many physicists keep insisting on one of the two deterministic interpretations of reality (Bohm's and "many worlds") while others insist on a non-determistic interpretation of reality?

You can't just take something that supposedly deals with consciousness and morality, and spread it out to cover the no universe, with no evidence for that.

I have been justifying my worldview as compared to naturalism since post 333 now, and have given plenty of evidence, including the evidence that naturalism is having a very hard time accounting for consciousness and for the meaning of objective ethical propositions.

Incidentally, the fact that we are conscious is the greatest piece of evidence possible. We come to know of any other piece of evidence, including all objective evidence that science uses, via consciousness. Consciousness is the only evidence that is absolutely certain, and the only evidence that stares us in the face for every single second of our waking life. Makes you think that that's precisely the kind of overwhelming evidence that God would give us for His/Her existence, no?

723. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55066 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 10, 2007 at 12:14 am

Steve99 (post 1126, or #54691):

I have never understood this argument. Even if there were a designer, why would this help us with morality? Suppose the designer did hard-wire some sense of morality into us - how do we know anything about the morality of the designer? I am afraid that going to a universe-designer for any sense of morality solves nothing.

You are right that from assuming some hard-wired sense of morality one cannot infer anything about the designer's morality. Indeed, one of the worldviews I described in post 870 is of two demons playing ethical chess with us.

But the problem is not the epistemology of ethics in naturalism, i.e. how a naturalist is to find out what is ethically good or bad. Even though the lack of such an epistemology is a serious enough problem for naturalism. That's the crux of Hume's "is-ought" problem that Dr Benway introduced in post 765: "Given our knowledge of the way the [naturalistic] world is, how can we know the way the world ought to be?" But there is a much deeper problem: That in the naturalistic understanding of reality the very concept of an objectively good or bad act is meaningless. See about this post 778 or #51639.

You seem to try to avoid that problem by asserting that objective propositions can be meaningful even if they don't make any claim about reality. But in fact all propositions are supposed to say something about reality; we use "objective" only to make clear that a proposition refers to a part of reality that is not inside peoples' skulls as it were, i.e. does not just describe somebody's particular personal opinion. So all propositions in general, and objective propositions in particular, are by definition supposed to claim something about reality. If they didn't, why would we care one way or the other about them? I mean even the proposition "fairies exist" claims something about reality.

Incidentally I find your position irrational for one more reason: You often ask me for how to test a proposition I claim - and I agree that all meaningful propositions must be testable. But, as I asked you before, if you have any proposition (never mind an objective proposition) that does not refer to anything that exists in reality, how do you test it?

724. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #55061 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 9, 2007 at 11:10 pm

LeeC (post 895, or #53033):

We could debate what you mean about reality, but this would just be words to me - so lets not just yet.

Nonetheless as we are discussing which is the most reasonable worldview about reality it's important to clarify this term. For me reality is all that exists independently of one's opinion. And I say that something exists if it might affect me (even if only in an indirect roundabout or delayed way), or if it can explain what might affect me. And for something to affect me it must impact on my conscious experience.

Let's take these definitions in reverse: If something cannot affect my conscious experience then it can't affect me in any way. If something cannot possibly affect me in any way then it is meaningless to say that it exists. And finally many things that exist are created by me (for example my ideas, my tastes, and so on), so objective existence (i.e. reality) is all that exists independently of me. (While speaking of objective existence one kind of takes oneself out of the picture and thinks what would exist even if one wouldn't.)

To repeat myself, I believe the scientific method can be used to explain much about life [snip]

It is demonstrable false that the scientific method can be used to explain the very fact that we experience life: our consciousness. So it can't explain the singlest greatest fact of all in our life. The reason is that our consciousness and all it contains (e.g. experiences) are first-person data, data that are private and not objectively observable from the outside (which would be third-person data) – and the scientific method allows only third-person data. Some philosophers such as David Chalmers insist that data are data, and if science can deal with third-person data it can also deal with first-person data. This is true but would require a transformation of the scientific method. And I suppose many scientists would not agree with such transformation; it's an article of faith in science that only objective, publicly verifiable data are allowed because subjective and private data are often misleading.

That's the reason why for many years both psychologists and philosophers embraced behaviorism, i.e. the idea that in scientific discourse one should not and cannot speak of subjective data, such as consciousness and "how it is like" to experience this or that (say the color red). According to behaviorism scientists can meaningfully speak only of objectively observable behavior, such as what people say, including what they say about conscious experiences. Behaviorism strikes me as entire reasonable (in fact it strikes me as a direct implication of the scientific method), but has become unpopular lately. Why? Because according to naturalism all that exists can be studied by science and it is extremely difficult, not to say laughable, to claim that consciousness does not exist, that there is nothing like what red looks like, and so on. What's more consciousness struck people as an extremely big deal and they were curious to investigate it. So now the discourse proceeds in some kind of epistemological limbo: as everybody believes that the brain produces consciousness (I don't, but no matter) the general idea is to study what's objectively observable in the brain, while believing subjects' description of their first-person data, and try to find a way to use the former to explain the latter. What this mostly amounts to is finding correlates between brain structure and subjects' testimonies. But as many have pointed out, no matter how perfectly we map the correlations between brain states and conscious states it doesn't advance one iota the explanation of how the brain becomes conscious in the first place. Some other philosophers (mostly following Dennett) try another track: to declare that any property of consciousness we know of by direct experience, but which goes beyond plain behaviorism, is - you guessed it - an illusion, and by this trick remove any of the hard aspects of the hard problem of consciousness. So, it's really a mess. And people who work in the field know it's a mess. A very good book to read about this is "Conversations on consciousness" by Susan Blackmore, where she interviews most of the well known people in the field, both philosophers and scientists. Another is John Searle's "The mystery of consciousness" which is a very interesting book because here you have an eminent naturalist philosopher discuss and fairly knock down the ideas about consciousness of his fellow eminent naturalist philosophers, in individual chapters. I personally like Searle a lot (even though I disagree with him on the fundamental issue on strong AI), for I like how he speaks his mind without any calculation.

One addition I make to the method - it is added philosophy really - and this is Occam's razor. If I have two (or more) theories that are equal, in that they can explain the observations, then I will choose the simplest method over the complex since this is more likely to be true. (As I said, it is a philosophy no science here)

Right, that's what Occam's razor says, and it applies beyond science too.

So, with my scientific methodology, I accept that there are areas/subjects I cannot explain - they are outside science. This does not mean something does or does not exist... it just means it is outside science to be able to confirm it. Luckily I have my razor to help me chose which of these "unscientific" theories is more likely to be correct.

Right, but Occam's razor (or the principle of economy) is not the only criterion that help one choose what is more reasonable. Or in other works Occam's razor applies exclusively only when two alternative explanations work exactly as well under all other reasonable criteria. As you say, Occam's razor applies only in those situations where "I have two (or more) theories that are equal".

you got me confused with "ontology", but don't let this stop you.

Well, as we are doing philosophy, it's not a bad idea to use basic philosophical terminology. "Ontology" is the study of what's real. When one discusses the existence or non-existence of God, or whether the physical universe objectively exists or not, one is doing ontology.

I wrote:

all these descriptions (or worldviews) [of reality] produce exactly the same phenomena that science studies, and are therefore exactly equivalent from science's point of view. So it's impossible to decide which of these different worldviews is more probable (i.e. is more reasonable to believe in) based on scientific knowledge

Now in what follows in your post I am afraid there is a misunderstanding. You inferred from "all worldviews are equivalent from science's point of view" that "all worldviews are equivalent". But they aren't. Starting in post 333 I described an entire list of criteria with which one can compare worldviews, including the criterion of economy (or Occam's razor), and then argued that idealistic theism works much better under these criteria than naturalism. In other words it's true that no worldview works better than the other from science's point of view (as long as it exactly produces the phenomena that science studies). But it's false that no worldview works better from our point of view.

Three, idealistic theism (my own view), according to which God directly produces all our experiences (including our observation of nature) without the intermediation of an objectively real physical universe.

No evidence for the existence of this god. Any such evidence could be tested with the scientific method (you could debate whether god himself could be tested but not the evidence) the lack of such evidence makes this view unlikely – extremely unlikely. So here we have a different view, it is different from Option 1 – you say I cannot use science to decide between the two? So I will use Occam's razor – Option 1 is the best.

First of all there is no scientific evidence for any ontological worldview (including naturalism), so your first point is moot.

As for your second point of Occam's razor. Let's assume for the sake of discussion that naturalism works as well as theistic idealism under all other criteria. So let's create an artificial situation in order for Occam's razor to apply, and investigate which worldview is less complex. In fact let's overlook one of naturalism's great troubles, i.e. how to account for the existence of two entirely different things, namely matter and consciousness, and let's assume that there is a good explanation of how it's all matter deep down. (Idealistic theism does not have this problem, because it asserts only the existence of consciousness and easily accounts for matter as patterns present in our conscious experience). But let's overlook all that and simply compare one to one the complexity of the two worldviews.

Further, let's not use the most sophisticated or advanced naturalistic worldviews. These, via string theory, assert that our universe is an 11-dimentional spacetime continuum in which mainly but not only 1-dimentional strings wiggle away. In turn our universe is only one of "many worlds", and by "many" we mean a really gargantuan and furiously growing number to cover all possible quantum states of the universe since the Big Bang. And in turn these many worlds are supposed to form but one element of the multiverse, each element of which instantiates a particular combination of values of the fundamental constants. I mean you are looking here at really mind-boggling complexity, almost as if somebody were doing their best to maximize naturalism's complexity beyond imagination. (I must say the fact that naturalists have found in necessary to merily add levels and levels of complexity to their worldview just to keep it making sense does not look good.)

But let's overlook all that too, and assume the simplest possible naturalistic worldview: reality consists only of the universe we actually see, and that universe consists only of atoms in some particular configuration (we'll ignore the added complexity of elementary particles). Even so, have you ever considered how complex that worldview is? Should you write down just the number of atoms in the universe you'd get a number of 80 digits. And, taking into account that the diameter of our universe is about 90 billion light years and that the position of an atom can be described in Angstroms, just to describe the position of one atom you'd need an 87 digit number. And we haven't yet described the speed vector of that one atom, nor its other physical properties (temperature and whatnot). And we have only described our universe in one instant without taking into account its history. If you'd add everything together you'd probably get to a number of about 300 digits. So even at its simplest that's a pretty complex worldview, don't you think?

So how does idealistic theism compare? Well here we have one God and about 6 billion and counting people existing in a field of conscious experience. Of course the experience of each one of us is complex: just look around and you'll see quite a bit of information. How much? Well there are about 6 million cone cells and about 90 million rod cells in the human eye. Let's assume they produce visual information at 40Hz and that each visual quale can be described by a 7 digit number. Finally let's assume a lifespan of 100 years. Then the entire complexity of one person's visual experience fits in a number of about 26 digits, or 36 digits for all persons. That's only our visual experience, but everybody agrees that's by far our most complex experience. How would one reasonably estimate the complexity of the whole of our experience? Well let's generously assume that the whole of our conscious experience is a thousand times more complex than our visual experience. This would add only 3 digits the idealistic theism's complexity, which now stands at 39 digits. Of course we did not take into account God's complexity. That's tricky. For all we know God's complexity need not be much more than the complexity of us all. But let's assume that God's experiential complexity is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times more complex than all of us put together. We end up with a nice round 100 digits of complexity – still much much much less complex than the most simple naturalistic worldview.

So in short, idealistic theism trumps naturalism even in Occam's department.

725. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54879 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 9, 2007 at 8:13 am

Phil Rimmer (post 1123, or #54685):

if personal will does not exist then, according to naturalism, a person's actions can be fully explained by the previous state of the physical universe (plus maybe some randomness).

Yes, but I said free will EFFECTIVELY exists. In no current, practical sense is the future state of our mind predictable except in some limited sense, though theoretically it is predictable.

But free will does not exist in reality, according to your understanding. So if we experience that it exists it is some kind of illusion.

So, by adopting the the concept of free will we have engineered a society of individuals that seems attractive to us, to whit, individuals possessing the attributes of responsibility and an enhanced (even foolhardy)impression of themselves as agents of change. The concept both stimulates the creative ability of the individual and holds her to account for too much independence of thought, a nice balance.

Right, but responsibility does not really exist either, because we can't really choose a course of action and therefore be responsible for it – we can't avoid doing anything that we in fact do. So responsibility is only a concept people come to while being mechanically driven around by the planet-wide chemical reaction that life is all about. So "responsibility" is an illusory concept.

Illusions here, illusions there, that's what naturalism says is really there ;-)

Your Spiritual free will requires an actual transfer of information from the spirit world to work. Your Spiritual free will requires an actual transfer of information from the spirit world to work. To direct the flow of thoughts in your brain your spirit self must somehow stop some thoughts and initiate others. The spirit self must transfer the direction to be followed. Or are you suggesting the something other???

No, I am not a dualist. I don't believe that reality is composed of some spiritual realm there and a physical realm here, so that information from there must be transferred to here, or vice-versa. According the idealistic theism reality consists only of the spiritual realm, and that the physical facts and phenomenal order we perceive are caused by God's will. Our brain too does not objectively exist; it only exists as a pattern present in the physical phenomena we observe, the same way that apples, galaxies, and gravity exist. All information we know about is created by personal will, be it God's or ours.

By the way as David Chalmers, who is a dualist, points out the famous transfer of information problem is not really a problem. After all the reality described in The Matrix movie is dualistic and allows for such transfer without breaking any laws of logic, so actual reality might work like that too. Dualism has its problems but transfer of information is not one.

726. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54871 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 9, 2007 at 7:50 am

Steve99 (post 1122, or #54682):

In other words, to believe that these laws, which very precisely allowed the evolution of intelligent life, which would not have if the slightest tiny detail were changed, were just the result of hugely improbable chance, would be to accept the very unlikely in the face of a far better explanation.

There are two explanations I have come across that seem to have some power to me.The first is the multiverse one.

You mean the idea that reality consists of a gargantuan number of physical universes, each with its own randomly selected values of fundamental constants and that we happen to exist in one of the extremely rare universes in which these values are such that intelligent life can evolve? I agree that this hypothesis works, but have you any idea how made-up it looks? Of course I am not against worldviews that look made-up :-) but remember that what goes for the goose goes for the gander. Speaking of which, as you often ask for testability, how do you suggest this hypothesis can be tested?

The other explanation is one being explored by Paul Davies, based on ideas by the great physicist John Wheeler. This is that time is not what we think it is, and neither is causality. The past and future are the result of an on-going 'negotiation'. Conscious life arises in the universe because it selects past values of physical constants that allows it to arise, simply by observing. This sounds pretty wild, but it is interesting.

Oh, good, another made-up looking and untestable naturalistic worldview.
Incidentally some time back I proposed my own version of a naturalistic worldview that would explain the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, which I think looks less made-up, less wild, and less complex that the previous two. Here it is:

You know how quantum mechanics describes any material system by its wavefunction, which is a superposition of all possible quantum states with the respective probabilities. The most obvious interpretation (the Copenhagen interpretation) affirms that when somebody makes an observation that superposed wavefunction "collapses" into one actual observed and therefore real state. Now consider a generalized version of the wavefunction which includes the values of the various fundamental constants as parameters of equal probability. Now after the Big Bang the universe's wavefuncton evolves without any collapse because there is no conscious being there to make an observation. So all possible universes allowed by quantum mechanics exist concurrently as superposed states in that wave function. In exactly one of these universes the values of the physical constants and the sequence of quantum events are such that the first material system with the appropriate structure to produce a conscious being evolves. Of course we don't really know how a material system of a particular structure can produce consciousness, but a basic premise of naturalism is that it can. So that organism performs the very first observation in the universe's history which collapses the wavefunction into one actual universe, namely the one in which that organism evolved. From that point in time onwards the continuous observations by that organism and its descendents keep the universe real evolving through one particular track. That's the universe we too observe, as we are all descendents of that first organism.

Nice, huh? I mean my hypothesis explains the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants by just generalizing quantum mechanics's simplest interpretation, affirms the existence of only one universe and is therefore much less complex than the multiverse with its gargantuan number of actual universes (it's 10^99, or 10^99^99?), and is much less wild than Davies's with its spooky negotiation between future and past and playing fast and lose with the arrow of time.

727. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54839 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 9, 2007 at 4:45 am

Dr Benway (post 1121, or #54676):

(I will comment on your post 1112 later)

Private belief can be and ought to be free ranging. Collective belief must be limited by evidentiary rules.

I am not sure about "free ranging"; it seems to me that all beliefs should be justified. Anyway, assume for a moment that my worldview is true. What kind of evidentiary rules should apply for it to become collective belief?

728. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54837 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 9, 2007 at 4:40 am

PaulEmecz (post 1120, or #54675):

My view is that, based on all the best science I can get my hands on, intelligent life should not exist in this universe.

If you mean the problem of the so-called fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, then I agree. But I would like to make clear that this is not a problem for science. Science studies physical phenomena as they are. And physical phenomena are such that they display order and part of this order is the particular value of the fundamental constants.

Incidentally what is a far more serious problem is that based on all the best science conscious life should not exist. And in fact, strictly speaking, from science's point of view consciousness does not exist. Science studies physical phenomena, and you don't need the "consciousness hypothesis" to explain any physical phenomena. For example the way people behave including all they say can, at least in principle, be fully explained by science based only on the physical state of their brain. In fact science can explain why people say what they say without actually knowing what they mean. A scientist could explain an Alien's talk without understanding anything of that Alien's language. The scientist would simply find out what state of the Alien's physical body causes the respective talk, and would therefore explain it 100% as far as science is concerned, because it would explain 100% the physical phenomenon of that Alien's talk.

Concepts such as "consciousness", or "meaning", or "will", etc do not form part of the scientific discourse. Why not? Because they are not needed for explaining phenomena. But few people would say that therefore consciousness, meaning, or will do not exist. Incongruently enough many of the same people find that as science does not require of the God concept for explaining phenomena it follows that God does not exist.

729. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54829 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 9, 2007 at 4:13 am

_J_ (post 1118, or #54667):

Scientists can't disprove 'Aliens Make Crop Circles', no.

Actually, for all practical purposes scientists (or rather the perpetrators themselves) did prove that these crop circles were not made by aliens. But I though PaulEmecz's point in post 1117 was that from this it does not follow that Aliens do not exist. That's an example of the "inductive fallacy". So from "these crop circles were not made by Aliens" one shouldn't infer that nothing is made by Aliens (and therefore Aliens do not exist). Similarly from "the origin of the species does not require the God hypothesis" one shouldn't infer that nothing requires the God hypothesis.

In fact one thing you can't understand without God is consciousness itself. At this juncture a naturalist often responds: Oh, here comes the God of the gaps again. But consciousness is not just "a gap" in naturalism's understanding of reality. It's not like: Naturalism explains (via science) the origin of the species, the origin of the sun's brightness, the origin of the planets' movements, the origin of the Earth's weather patterns, and can at least (via science) offer some plausible ideas about how a hypothesis might look like that explains the origin of life, of human intelligence, and maybe even of the values of the fundamental constants – and if we don't know how a hypothesis might look like that explains the origin of consciousness then this is only one remaining gap. It's not like that because consciousness is the single greatest fact there is, the most important thing there is, indeed what defines what's important. As naturalist philosopher John Searle puts it: "In a word, consciousness is our life. If you think about the sequence of our life, the things that matter to us after birth and before death are forms of consciousness, and so the funny thing is not, why is consciousness important, but, how can anything else be important. And the answer is, of course, that other things are important in relation to consciousness." And the fact that naturalists have really no idea about how anything physical could become conscious is not just one gap, but the mother of all possible gaps.

This is a fundamental failure of naturalism, and will remain so while nobody is able to at least propose some testable idea about how something material could become conscious. I once asked a naturalist how long it would be reasonable to wait for an answer, and he responded 2,000 years because it took as long to explain the nature of light. But surely today knowledge advances far quicker than in the past, and I don't think that many people will we prepared to give naturalism the benefit of the doubt for 2,000 years. If nobody comes up with some testable idea of how something material could become conscious in the next 50 years or so then my guess is that most naturalists will follow Chalmers into dualism. And, frankly, the fact that despite the quick advances of neurophysiology (and the relevant imaging apparatus) in the last few decades has not brought naturalists one iota closer to solving the hard problem – does not look good at all.

730. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54810 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 9, 2007 at 3:09 am

Downunder (post 1114, or #54591):

1112#54565, DrBenway had the spectators enthralled, scored good points for his side, while Dianelos considers the next move.

Actually I was away for two days at a minuscule island (less than one square kilometer), where some friends were baptizing their daughter. There wasn't any time for or even access to the Internet there.

Shear weight of the vociferous B supporters against D's 1-man team will require some magic from D to stay in play.

:-P I hope not everyone here thinks that our discussion here is some kind of spectator sport, because I certainly don't.

731. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54808 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 9, 2007 at 3:01 am

LeeC (post 1113, or #54568):

Still no reply to my post number 895 (Comment 53033)?

Hi Lee, I haven't forgotten about this post and it's the second time you ask me to respond to it. I will; I have the answer in my head :-) But I am a slow (not to mention long-winded) writer and no matter how much I try to jump back and forth to respond both older and newer posts, there are always some interesting posts I never seem to find time to discuss.

732. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54804 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 9, 2007 at 2:52 am

SharonMcT (post 1111, or #54509):

I believe that education is the key. Children need to be educated, not indoctrinated. It takes far too much time and effort to undo the damage that religion does to a child's mind. We have to remain vigilant in our efforts to be sure that children are learning "how" to think, not "what" to think.

I very much agree that education is the key. What's more I sometimes think that education is the only solution for all the problems of society. I also fully agree that education is about learning how to think and not what to think. But precisely for this reason, we should not hide ideas from people, that we should neither ridicule nor in any way keep people from studying the ideas or the books of those who disagree with us. I am sure we all agree on that. For this same reason then religious ideas should not be concealed and the study of religious ideas should not be discouraged in any way. I personally do not agree that religious ideas (of all traditions) should not be taught in school, for the same reason that I don't agree that political ideas (of all colors) should not be taught in school: these are very important ideas that help us understand human history, our own society, and our fellow people. But they should only be taught at an age that children are mature for critical thought, i.e. when they can judge for themselves. And I extremely strongly disagree with the idea that one part of society representing one particular worldview should be given the right to decide for all of society what should or shouldn't be taught at school; for me this amounts to fascism; freedoms of thought implies freedom of ideas.

There are some practical issues here. One cannot try to teach in school any one idea somebody has come up with, so one must choose those ideas that are more important or relevant for one's understanding, including one's understanding how many people think. There is also the practical issue of how much space to give to individual ideas. In that sense, and in that sense only, I would have so-called "creation science" taught in school along with the fact that according to virtually the entire scientific community it lacks any scientific grounds and along the fact that is has been pushed on the political arena as a means to further religious fundamentalism (one page of a textbook and one hour of a teacher's time would be quite sufficient for all that). Much more importantly, I would like children to learn about both religious and political ideas (including political nationalism), how these have been used for doing good and for doing evil, how these explain much of history and much of today's society and today's conflicts. I would like children to learn about ethics, and indeed about the ethics of science. I would like children to be exposed to different ontological worldviews about reality, including naturalism and theism, to be given the oportunity to study the best arguments for or against them, and to actually think about these issues for themselves. I'd rather have those dogmatic people who judge those who disagree with them as irrational or of being the root of all evil or of being deceived by the devil – to stay out of the educational system. The last think I want is an educational system that is dogmatic, polarizing, or hate-mongering in any way, or that teaches children to be conformists and to think alike. I want an inclusive and transparent educational system that teaches understanding and tolerance and actively exposes all rationalizations for hating or despising others. This, incidentally, includes nationalism. In my own country, Greece, the history schoolbooks give a distorted view of reality in order to further the idea that Greece did everything well and that evil neighbors and even our lying allies have been responsible for everything that went wrong in our history. Which, come to think of it, is the same way of how even serious US magazines color their reporting of reality too.

Let me give you an example of "coloring reality" out of my own experience. I am a sometime editor of Wikipedia, which is a really marvelous educational tool (education does not stop at school – what we are doing here is education too). Well, I once found a bit of factual data I thought was quite relevant: that in many Muslim countries Osama bin Laden is actually very popular, considered a hero by a large portion of the population, his tapes sold everywhere, and so on. So I inserted this piece of very relevant information in the respective Wikipedia article. Well, everybody jumped on me for that and they quickly first watered down that piece of information, and then completely deleted it. What's interesting is that no-one actually claimed this piece of information was wrong; rather some Americans thought I was justifying bin Laden, and some Muslims thought I was badmouthing their own countries. See, that's what I dislike: when people try to control or color the flow of ideas (including what is taught at school or is included in encyclopedias) in order to serve their own personal agendas or in order to stop people from thinking differently than they do.

Religious ideas are real and are serious; believing in God is really nothing like believing in fairies. The ideas of naturalism are real and serious too; believing in naturalism is really nothing like following the devil into perdition. So, let people decide for themselves how reasonable these ideas are.

733. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54793 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 9, 2007 at 1:42 am

Dr Benway (post 1110, or #54453):

If there is no will in what sense can a person be responsible for their actions?

Behavioral contingencies shape behavior. Coercion is in service to the future, never the past.

But if there is no will but rather peoples' behavior is caused by mechanical processes, then there can't be any coercion, can there? Actually, in human affairs punishment would only represent a mechanical reaction to a particular class of actions – similar to the way that in Newton's mechanics an action causes a reaction. We can't even decide whether to apply or not coercion or punishment, because after all we don't have will to choose one way or the other.

What I am only saying here is this: The worldview that there is no personal will (beyond maybe some kind of illusion) implies that a huge part of the way people understand reality is in fact wrong and that a huge number of concepts people use in everyday life are in fact meaningless. We ourselves and society and culture are nothing more than parts or properties of a planet-wide chemical reaction that proceeds only according to mechanical laws. I am not here arguing that this ontological view is wrong; I am only arguing that such an ontological view has implications that are incredibly far-reaching and that most people would judge to be unacceptable if they actually thought about them. As far as I am concerned the premise itself "free will does not exist and your experience of free will is an illusion" is as unacceptable as the premise "the color red does not exist and your experience of the color red is an illusion". Not only I, but anybody who realizes that there are worldviews that do not imply any such absurdities (nor of course the different class of absurdities that religious fundamentalism implies ), must find these other worldviews much more reasonable.

As I have explained before for me "objective" means "pertaining to reality, and hence independent of anybody's personal opinion".

I think that's too extreme. "Objective" is operationally defined as "that which has been independently corroborated."

Sounds good, but I don't see how you can corroborate any positive claim about the reality that causes the phenomena we observe (no matter for now independent corroboration). It's true that you can independently corroborate physical phenomena and the patterns of order that are present in them; that's what science does. But ontology is about the reality that produces these phenomena. We all agree about the phenomena and their implicit order. The big question that ontology discusses is what objectively reality out there causes these phenomena and their order; naturalism is one answer, theism is another. So, as there are various possible answers, the question is how we decide which answer is more reasonable.

Thus there are degrees of objectivity.

I would say that in ontology there is only one degree of objectivity: something either objectively exists or it doesn't. But I agree that there are degrees in our confidence about the truth of objective propositions. (Of course objective propositions are called objective because of the meaning they carry, and not because they are true. Objective propositions can very well be false. For example I believe that the proposition "The physical universe objectively exists" is false.)

734. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54783 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 9, 2007 at 1:04 am

Steve99 (post 1109, or #54445):

You are free not to agree with any of these of course, but I don't see what in my worldview does not fit, on the contrary everything fits very well.

No, it doesn't. Let me try yet again to explain what does not fit. If something is objective it is objective. It does not need any kind of 'reality substance' to arise from. As I explained over, and over, it is nonsense to claim that God defines many things we know are objective, such as mathematical truths.

We were discussing your claim that I have evidence with which my worldview does not fit. So what is the evidence I have with which my worldview does not fit?

Why is it nonsense - because we know that these truths could not be otherwise, God or not.

Let's see. We agree that the temperature of something is caused by the wiggling of the molecules in it. Now suppose I told you "We know that this truth could not be otherwise, the wiggling of molecules or not." What sense would that make?

I mean: For me it's self-evidently true that objective ethical precepts (such as that gratuitous torture is objectively wrong) are meaningful. And any meaningful objective proposition must express some property of objective reality (whether the proposition is true or false is irrelevant to the meaning of the propoisition). Naturalism has problems with that because in naturalism's understanding of reality there is nothing objectively real out there that is ethically good or bad, and that's why some naturalists claim that these propositions are not really meaningful. But theism does not have a problem with that because according to theism God is objectively real so there is an objective property of goodness in reality.

Now you keep repeating that "something objective does not need any kind of 'reality substance' to arise from". I understand you believe that (even though I find it irrational, and I have explained why I find it irrational). But in any case what you believe about these issues in no way affects me, does it now? You are free to believe whatever you like, including that objective truths can be completely divorced from reality. As far as what I find reasonable and as far as the evidence I have, idealistic theism fits perfectly. And that's what I am arguing.

Of course, and indeed some things in my worldview are objective. So again, what is it that doesn't fit?

The facts don't fit.

What facts exactly? Can't you be a little more specific? Or maybe you mean that your own personal beliefs about "reality substance" and so on should be accepted as "facts" by me?

Further, I must say am rather surprised: Doesn't your worldview require that some things be objective?

I actually don't know. I don't claim that kind of certainty, like you do. My mind is open.

So you don't know if there is something objectively real out there, something that does not depend on anybody's opinion? Your mind is open to the idea that maybe there is no objective reality at all?

As I have explained ad nauseam, there are kinds of reality (such as abstractions) that are not the same as the physical reality that for some strange reason you insist must form the basis of everything in naturalism.

But I agree with you that "there are kinds of reality that are not the same with physical reality". But most naturalists do not agree with that, so they ask for physical tests to confirm any objective claim. Which of course is begging the question: if the whole of reality is bigger than physical reality then to ask for physical confirmation is to assume the conclusion.

As for my "huge misunderstandings of quantum mechanics" I have no idea what you are referring to. Could you explain what huge misunderstandings are these?

You just don't get the deep meaning of what is implied by the Bell Inequality and subsequent work.

So, what is my huge misunderstanding about the deep meaning of what is implied by the Bell Inequality and subsequent work? Could you be more specific? Maybe by quoting me saying something about the Bell Inequality that you think is a huge misunderstanding? Surely you are not saying that the Bell Inequality implies that physical reality is not deterministic, are you?

2. Theistic worldviews are trivially and entirely compatible with scientific knowledge, because God, being omnipotent and all, could produce all the phenomena that science studies.

A theist worldview which is trivially and entirely compatible with scientific phenomena may be compatible, but is redundant, as it can't be distinguished from an infinite number of alternative compatible worldviews.

So you agree with proposition #2 (it does not make any claims about redundancy). So are there any numbered propositions in post 1041 you disagree with?

What you have is not a world-view, but a consciousness-view and a morality-view.

Well, it's all of that. After all, reality is all there is, so it must indeed account for consciousness and for morality and for physical phenomena and for how it feels when it hurts and so on. So all of that is subsumed in one's description of reality: one's worldview.

735. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54771 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 8, 2007 at 11:52 pm

Steve99 (post 1097, or #54329):

You say that you take as evidence your feeling that gratuitous torture is objectively wrong. But what is this evidence of? It is nothing more than evidence that you have the feeling... it is NOT evidence that gratuitous torture IS objectively wrong.

To be precise, I am not saying that gratuitous torture is objectively wrong, only that the proposition "gratuitous torture is objective wrong" is meaningful. Now the context of our discussion is that (as I wrote in post 1092 #54194) in order to ascertain how reality is "we must take all evidence we have, all data, be they objective or subjective and everything we know about these data (via science or whatever) and then consider which worldview fits the whole evidence best." If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the only evidence that counts is the kind of objective observations that sciences uses; everything else are only "feelings" as you put it, and therefore not reliable.

By "evidence" I mean any proposition that is evidently true, i.e. any proposition I believe with a very high degree of confidence and therefore expect a worldview to conform with. There are several kinds of evidence: objective experience (such as seeing the moon, or feeling how hard walls are), subjective experience (how red looks like, how pain hurts), intuitions (there is an external reality that causes my experiences, the inductive method is reasonable, objective ethical precepts are meaningful, there are other minds, reality did not start 10 minutes ago, I have will, etc), knowledge (factual knowledge such as what my name is, scientific knowledge, mathematical knowledge, etc). Now there exists a general impression that any kind of evidence except the kind of evidence that science uses is unreliable, but this is a fallacy. For example all propositions I am absolutely certain about are subjective and not scientific at all (e.g. "I am a conscious being", "right now I am experiencing seeing my computer's monitor", and so on). Compared to other evidence I have, scientific observations have a lower level of reliability for me. For example a famous piece of scientific evidence is that when one measures the speed of light in different frames of reference the result is always the same. Even though I believe this is true with a high degree of confidence, such belief is strictly speaking based on hearsay.

You are completely free of course to rely only in the evidence that scientists use in their work. But doing so, I believe, is 1) unjustified in reason as there is other evidence that is more reliable still, and 2) self-defeating, because by allowing only for scientific evidence your understanding of reality can go only as far as science goes, namely to discover patters present in our objective observations of physical phenomena – and therefore discover nothing about the reality that causes these observations.

A few more comments in this context:

1) Reasonable people believe in propositions not based in scientific evidence all the time (see for example the list of intuitions above) and also use non scientific evidence every day in their lives, indeed use it to make some major decisions (such as whom to marry), so it's not like it's irrational to use any evidence that does not fit the scientific method.
2) Even though one cannot use a scientific instrument to measure non-scientific data, but one can ask other people about their subjective experience or intuitions and confirm one's own. I am confident that most people agree with the two pieces of non-scientific evidence I have used here, namely that the proposition "gratuitous torture is objective wrong" is meaningful, and that people have personal will.
3). All evidence can be wrong, but this fact is far less relevant for my argument than what one may think, because the very fact that theistic idealism works so well on all fronts (even for science!) counts as evidence that the subjective data I am using are correct. Conversely, should I reject the two pieces of non-scientific evidence you (apparently) disagree with, theistic idealism would still fit the rest of the evidence better than naturalism.

Now what happens if all worldviews one can think of contradict some evidence one has? Well, if that happens it means either that none of these worldviews are correct, or else that some of one's evidence is wrong. In the case of my own evidence though there are many worldviews that do not contradict it, so I have to apply other criteria to decide which is more reasonable to adopt. But naturalism does contradict the evidence I have so I discard it right away.

For thousands of years in the history of humankind many people have thought about how reality is, and they have come up with basically three ideas: naturalism, i.e. the idea that reality consists basically of the mechanical universe we observe around us, the Eastern atheist religions, i.e. the idea that what we observe around us is not real and that the unseen reality and its laws govern our lives, and the Western theistic religions, i.e. the idea that reality is centered in an unseen and most powerful person. The difference between the Eastern atheistic religions and the Western theistic ones is far less than it might appear at first. They all affirm that fundamental reality is unseen and is good, that our life here has a deep meaning, that there is a way of life that agrees with that meaning, that there is life after death and that how we live here affects the afterlife, and, roughly, that people's destiny is in the end to be united with that fundamental reality. In fact in what really matters in the implications of these worldviews, namely how we should act in our lives, both theistic and atheistic religions teach the same thing: charity, non-violence, simplicity/poverty/humbleness, some kind of spiritual exercise to relate with the transcendental, etc. Sometimes it seems to me that these two major religious traditions describe the two sides of the same coin: You see, God is not only a person, but is also the whole of reality. God's will is personal but is also realized in the structure and lawful nature of the whole of reality. So the Western traditions stress the personal side and the Eastern traditions stress the reality side.

incidentally, I don't recall you ever having stated your position in relation to the two pieces of non-scientific data I am using:

Do you believe that to say "gratuitous torture is objectively wrong" is meaningless?

Do you believe that you don't have personal will?

The problem is that your ideas are not testable.

I think they are. See point 3 in post 532 (#49301), or post 849 (#52549).

But probably you don't like these tests, so let me turn the table on you. Naturalism claims that what causes our experience is the physical universe which exists objectively. In other words that the existence of the physical universe does not depend on anybody's opinion. How do you test this idea? What goes for the goose goes for the gander, so I am really curious about your answer.

such as your problems with abstraction and reification

Well, we have discussed this issue a lot (posts 773, 795, 827, 851, 858, 860, 873, 885, 887, 890, 891, 910, 957, 962). I think we have arrived at a dead end, because for me it's irrational to believe that a proposition can be objectively true and also be completely divorced from reality.

There is no relationship between truth and beauty at all. It is true that most animals in the world suffer from parasites. How beautiful is that?

It forms part of a beautiful whole :-) Not to mention that the evolutionary niche that parasites found for themselves will strike an evolutionist as quite beautiful. Also many parasites create a symbiotic and therefore useful relation with their hosts. This works on many levels; I understand parasite pruning plays a very useful role in societies of monkeys – some ethologists see here the very beginnings of ethical behavior, which is surely a beautiful thing. – But never mind all that, I see your point. My meaning was that that the relationship of beauty and truth works in a deeper (more abstract) level.

736. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #54441 by Dianelos Georgoudis on July 7, 2007 at 5:56 am

Steve99 (post 1107, or #54438):

In general I think it would be better if you'd be more specific.

Why do you keep ignoring repeated arguments that show that your worldview does NOT fit perfectly well?

As I argued in post 1092: "Rather we must take all evidence we have, all data, be they objective and subjective and everything we know about these data (via science or whatever) and then consider which worldview fits the whole of evidence best." First of all do you agree with that?

Let me continue, assuming you do agree. I find that theistic idealism fits perfectly well with all data I have, both objective and subjective. You now claim that theistic idealism does not fit with my data. Fair enough. So, could you please point out exactly what of the data I have theistic idealism does not fit with?

your worldview requires that objective things need a deity to 'instantiate' them. It has been explained to you clearly over and over again that this contradicts what 'objective' means.

As I have explained before for me "objective" means "pertaining to reality, and hence independent of anybody's personal opinion". Further, according the idealistic theism all reality is exhausted in God, so, for example, objective goodness is objectively instantiated in how God objectively is. You are free not to agree with any of these of course, but I don't see what in my worldview does not fit, on the contrary everything fits very well.

Your worldview requires that some things are objective.

Of course, and indeed some things in my worldview are objective. So again, what is it that doesn't fit? Further, I must say am rather surprised: Doesn't your worldview require that some things be objective?

I'll let you into a secret, Dianelos - I am not a naturalist, at least not the way you think of the term. However, I am certainly not a theist.

That's good to know, as I find naturalism completely unsustainable in reason. Could you say some more about your worldview?

Your view of what naturalism claims and the way science works, which includes huge misunderstandings of quantum mechanics, bears little relation to mainstream thought.

Well, it's true that mainstream naturalism does not consider that all objective mathematical truths describe properties of the physical universe, as the strongest version of naturalism I can conceive affirms. But again, as I explained in post 858 when co