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I took a huge number of metaphysics courses during grad school and, over time, I changed my mind about pretty much everything, other than my dogged commitment to the law of non-contradiction. Then I stayed stuck, because, of course, I eventually landed on the correct answers. I thought t
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2 years ago
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2 years ago
Regarding Free Will -- I think you are saying (or else I'm freely interpreting you as saying) that the question of whether we have free will or not is much less interesting than taking it as a given and then asking what sort of metaphysics will support both a deterministic world and free will.
2 years ago
Wouldn't that be the definition of agnosticism?
Atheism would be to believe (oh paradoxal) that God does not exist, even if one can not prove that.
2 years ago
2 years ago
Only using a standard of "prove" that no sane person ever applies to any topic *except* the existence of God when they're trying to sound polite and reasonable and avoid tagging themselves as atheists.
2 years ago
(re the conscious-less zombies, that's one of my pet peeves -- all the evidence we have indicates there's no special consciousness to be explained -- we feel the way biological machines with a certain kind of design should feel; someone who wants to talk about conscious-less but otherwise identical to us zombies might as well want to talk about unicorns -- there's no reason to think either exists, or that they have any relevance to whether there's any particular problem with consciousness.)
2 years ago
I don’t particularly mind being called an atheist–I don’t think sticking to agnostic will get me brownie points with the Angel of Death or anything–except that the public representatives of the breed are so unpleasantly evangelical. (Well, and my grandmother would cry if she found out). I want to join the Episcopalians of the atheist movement.
2 years ago
2 years ago
To be an atheist is simply not to be ontologically committed to God in your conception of the world. You aren't. You are an atheist. It's OK. You can still hate Dennett.
2 years ago
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I think Isaac Newton had metaphysics all wrapped up in one line: "All is matter in motion".
There is one conundrum that you do not seem to have addressed though: what is the definition of God? If I, as a Newtonian, define God by saying "the physical universe is the body of God" (a phrase I am lifting from the Upanishads, by the way), that gives you all kinds of implications such as "God exists", "Nothing but God exists", "I am a part of God", "I have an ontological committment to the existence of God".
... and the realist becomes a true believer, not an atheist at all.
KP
2 years ago
;)
my favourites:
"I changed my mind about pretty much everything, other than my dogged commitment to the law of non-contradiction."
---------------
Free will: "We have it."
Ontology: "You don’t just get to decide whether or not you are one.)"
---------------
2 years ago
To quote the classics:
Dole Office Clerk: Occupation?
Comicus: Stand-up philosopher.
Dole Office Clerk: What?
Comicus: Stand-up philosopher. I coalesce the vapors of human existence into a viable and meaningful comprehension.
Dole Office Clerk: Oh, a bullshit artist!
2 years ago
2 years ago
"Modal statements about fundamental kinds (”gold might have had a different atomic weight”) may be grammatical but are not meaningful."
They're meaningless? Weird. What about "Necessarily, all red objects are colored" or "Necessarily, I am Alex B."? Are these meaningful? If so, what laws are involved?
Nice post, anyway. Hope you weren't too bored writing it.
2 years ago
On free will: my position is that free will is a sort of a mental abstraction—the universe follows causal laws and such, but free will is a description of some of the higher-level interactions. Saying "you don't have free will, your actions are determined," is sort of like saying, "that's not a stool, it's a collection of protons, neutrons, and electrons." The second characterization is strictly accurate, but that doesn't make the first false. Since "who I am" is described by my past history and my choices, the statements "I chose to do X," "my genetics, biology, and past history led me to be the kind of person who chooses to do X," and "My genetics, biology, and past history caused me to do X" are all equivalent and express the same idea, just in different manners. Is this sort of like what you're saying? Sounds like it might be, but I'm not sure.
Ontology: you begin with the statement, "to be is to be the value of a bound variable," but the rest of your paragraph talks about when you should "believe" something exists. Do you think these beliefs can be true or false—that they describe an underlying reality of what actually exists—or that they're just collections of stories we tell to explain our experiences, but aren't really true or false? I basically side with Rorty, who was influenced by Quine, on this one: asking what the universe is really like, or what really exists, is pretty futile. We tell different stories, and argue about which ones hold together better or are more useful for our lives, but saying that one of them is really true is pointless.
2 years ago
Is "our" = "the scientific community"? Should one's belief rest on a consensus opinion of a collection of scientists? But scientists are just people -- their consensus opinion changes over time, is subject to the vagaries of history, chance, and social pressure, and in many, many cases, there is no consensus yet. Plus, a large proportion of today's scientific theories are bound to be largely incomplete, if not downright wrong. And anyway, the scientific method exhorts one to cultivate an attitude of *doubt*, not an attitude of belief.
Finally, of course, science is simply not very good at establishing beliefs about non-replicable experiences. Perhaps I told you I saw a fairy in my garden the other night. A scientist would naturally suspend belief until the experience had been replicated, preferably with some kind of recording devices present. But fairies are capricious creatures, and it's often hard to get them to cooperate. Even if fairies "really do" exist, they will, by nature, never sit still and allow scientists to do experiments on them. So should I trust the scientific consensus on something that cannot be experimented on, or should I trust my own eyes?
2 years ago
More simply, there is no special problem about people thinking they want some things when they actually don't. I can't find a reason to suspect the case should be any different concerning beliefs.
2 years ago
2 years ago
I discuss a deflationary view of ontology here. [Intro: "We all have an intuitive grasp of what it is for entities to exist. My parents exist whereas Santa doesn't, and all that. But what of abstract objects? When philosophers argue about whether numbers truly exist, what is in dispute here? Even ontological debates about material entities seem dubious: does there exist an individual entity which is a table, or are there merely particles arranged table-wise? What's the difference? These don't seem to be debates about how the world is. Everyone agrees that there is table-ish stuff in the world. They merely dispute how to count or describe it..."] I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
2 years ago
Jeff - is the mere fact that someone had a visual experience as of fairies really sufficient reason to accept that they exist? Or, given our background knowledge, should we instead think it more likely that they were hallucinating? Assuming the latter, I argue here that this is also what the person themselves should conclude.
2 years ago
2 years ago
If the scientific community reached an apparently mad consensus, I guess it would raise the following question: which is more likely, that the bizarre claim is true, or that the scientists are all deluded? I grant that there may be (at least hypothetical) situations in which the latter conclusion would be the most reasonable.
2 years ago
However, if we want to study the natural world, we use science to do so. Science provides us secondary explanations for things in our natural world, but it does so partly by observing cause-effect relationships in said world. In effect, there is a presumption that things in our world must follow a certain rules. It is this presumption that makes science work. And science works quite well when we restrict our study to things in that natural world.
God, however, is not subject to any of the rules of nature, not one. That is why you cannot use the study of nature to prove or disprove the existence of God. It is also one reason why God is a different from other things in which we choose to believe or disbelieve.
2 years ago
I'd love to believe in your anti-platonism about universals. But I haven't yet seen an argument that justifies a belief in it. Then again, I haven't looked as hard as I should have. (I hate abstract objects, and I would LOVE to hear a great argument against platonism of all kinds.)
Your claim about there being only one kind of possibility isn't easy for me to believe either. It's difficult for me to shake the idea that talk about possible worlds is useful for helping us understand our concepts and/or the meanings of our words. Of course. that doesn't mean that there are other possible worlds. But it might mean that there is another kind of possibility than the one you think is real.
Cool post.
2 years ago
2 years ago
I'm now thinking that what you meant was "atomic number", since that is what defines a gold atom.
2 years ago
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(It might bear mentioning, that Jaki -- a physicist and leading historian of science -- holds two Ph.D.'s, one in physics (written under Victor Hess, the nobel laureate discoverer of cosmic rays), the other in theology).
To wit:
"It would be a mistake to assume that science finds new entities in the ontological sense. Science merely uncovers new aspects in the vast gamut of material existence. Were it otherwise, one would endorse the Platonic fallacy that it is the quantitative properties that give existence to material entities. Moreover, were such the case, nothing would exist that cannot be given a quantitative formulation. In that case, such words as conscience, free will, purpose, moral responsibility, to say nothing of the soul, would be so many empty words, standing for anthropomorphic illusions. But, there would be no scientists who would investigate things freely and be conscious of the fact they are investigating.
The distinctness between quantitative and non-quantitative (qualitative) realms of knowledge is not a starting point for human knowledge. Sensory knowledge begins with the registering of external reality, or 'things' in short. This is true eventhough what is most directly perceived in things is their size. This is why the category of quantities holds first place among all categories [cf. Aristotle, Categories, 16a]. Sensible qualities cannot be understood unless quantity is presupposed and neither can we understand something to be the subject of motion unless we understand it to possess quantity. Quantities do not admit analogical degrees of understanding. This constitutes their radical difference from other categories and even from substance and existence. The inseperability of quantities from matter justifies the quantitative character of the scientific method. Compared with it, all other considerations about science are of secondary importance.
2 years ago
2 years ago
2 years ago
I like the title, it 'dares' me to read on. :)
"Free will: The universe is either deterministic or it isn’t. This has nothing to do with free will. We have it. [...] It is frequently possible to have done other than what we did in fact do. The trick is understanding the relevant sense of “possible,” which has nothing to do with ultimate issues about the nature of causation."
I can't do other than what I did. I can turn left or I can turn right or I can get out of my car and take a nap in the middle of the road, but I have to choose one, and by making a choice I have to choose NOT to do all the others; and NOT choosing to do something is as much of a choice as doing it.
"Ontology: Quine is right. To be is to be the value of a bound variable. That is, if something plays a role in our best explanation of some phenomenon, you should believe it exists."
"To be is to be..." a tautology. (fun with words!) :)
Knowledge is not static (especially scientific knowledge). Ethics are not static. Moral agency is not static. Why should God be static?
If we exist as bound variables, what's to stop "God" from being the set of all values for x?
"Modality: There is exactly one possible world, the actual one."
Donald Trump: "Free-Will, you're fired!"
"[I]f a man can’t use clubby, exclusive, abstruse jargon on his own blog, where can he?"
Heck yes. Viva la blogs. :)
2 years ago
I agree that we have free will.
But where does our free will come from? If I can choose to do A or B, and my choice isn't determined simply by the current state of my brain, or by some simply random process inside my brain, then there has to be something acting outside the realm of nature to allow "me" to "choose." That there is something outside of nature allowing me to have free will wouldn't prove the existence of God, but it would prove that everything we see in "nature" is not everything that exists.
I saw an argument similar to this somewhere else. The author said that we give natural laws too much credit, and turn them into God. He thought it was perfectly non contradictory to say that everything followed natural law, and that our choices aren't predetermined by natural law. But it seems to me that either all of you is completely subject to natural law, including that which supposedly gives you free will--or it's not.
I think it is a contradiction to believe in "free will" and also to believe that everything, including us, always precisely follow deterministic natural laws (even including natural laws which involve random probability--a random event involves no choice by us).
Now an aside. I am not that knowledgeable about philosophy, which probably shows in my previous discussion. However, it seems to me that something I read at one time must absolutely be true. The statement "the only things which exist are the things we can observe directly or indirectly with our senses" is a self-stultifying statement. There is nothing you can observe with your senses that will prove that there is nothing you cannot observe with your senses. It is simply impossible to claim, with certainty, that the natural world observed with our senses is all there is.
2 years ago
"It is simply impossible to claim, with certainty, that the natural world observed with our senses is all there is."
First of all, we don't ever claim "with certainty" even the things we can observe. Empirical claims are necessarily probabilistic, not deductive proofs.
But my real point (and Will would probably agree with me) is that what you cannot observe isn't very interesting! It might be true that something "exists" beyond our ability to observe it, but that what difference does its existence make to us, as observers?
This is exactly what Will was getting at when he said:
"That is, if something plays a role in our best explanation of some phenomenon, you should believe it exists. Otherwise, not."
So it is perfectly correct to claim that an entity does not exist, if we can't observe it (e.g. "the natural world is all there is").
Also, there is the matter of burden of proof. The naturalist has no obligation to prove that nature is all there is. It's up to the non-naturalist to adduce evidence for the claim that nature is not all there is.
(Of course, how he would be able to adduce such evidence is another matter. What would evidence of a non-natural entity look like, if it's not observable??? Good luck with that...)
2 years ago
"First of all, we don’t ever claim “with certainty” even the things we can observe. Empirical claims are necessarily probabilistic, not deductive proofs."
"It might be true that something “exists” beyond our ability to observe it, but [then] what difference does its existence make to us, as observers?"
I think we apparently agree that there can't be certainty that there is nothing outside what we might call the material world or the realm of pure naturalism.
So, what do we do? Exactly what we've done throughout history. If we observe events in the natural world which cannot be explained by the mechanical operation of natural laws, that constitutes proof of something operating outside those natural laws. So if we observe something non natural, that is the extra-natural intruding on the natural world. Then there is something more than the material world, and it sometimes affects the material world.
The existence of nature itself, the existence of life, the existence of intelligent life, and our apparent free will are some possible candidates for things which we observe which we can, at least arguably, say are not the result of the mechanical operation of natural laws. Then there are the cases of historical events which observers claim to have experienced things which contravene the mechanical operation of natural laws.
Since we cannot with certainty rule out the existence of something outside of nature, we can't start with the position that everything happens as the result of the mechanical operation of natural laws, and then use this position to discard any evidence to the contrary simply because we hold that position. We can certainly have the debate--we can, for example, argue that life evolved by chance or that it must have been created by a force outside nature, or that it makes more sense to believe a certain naturalistic explanation of what observers saw (or that observers were wrong or lied) or that it makes more sense to believe a "super natural" explanation. But one side of the debate can't claim victory simply because it holds to pure materialism to begin with--we've already seen that there is no a priori reason to hold to pure materialism.
Considering a few more of Matthew Heaney's points:
(from Will)
“That is, if something plays a role in our best explanation of some phenomenon, you should believe it exists. Otherwise, not.”
I agree. But, as I've pointed out, you can't discard the "extra natural" as playing a role in our best explanation. If you being with the assumption that all there is is the material world, the extra natural can never play a role in the best explanation, no matter how outlandish the best explanation is without the extra natural. But, as I've tried to argue, you can't discard the possibility of something outside the material world a priori, so you have to consider whether something "extra natural" plays a role in the best explanation.
"Also, there is the matter of burden of proof. The naturalist has no obligation to prove that nature is all there is. It’s up to the non-naturalist to adduce evidence for the claim that nature is not all there is."
I think I simply disagree with this point. Philosophically, I think, the naturalist has no superior claim to the truth. Since we have nature at all, it seems to me just as valid to say that the naturalist has the burden of proof to show how nature came into being without something outside of nature. But even without that kind of "first mover" argument, I don't see any special status for a naturalism from a purely philosophic point of view. If it has a special status, it derives from the fact that everyone can see and feel and hear things for themselves--but then we're back to our previous discussion about how the extra natural would intrude on the natural world and how we'd experience that with our senses.
2 years ago
The Appearance Is
Matter
Consciousness
Movement.
The consciousness is
Feeling,
growth,
Perception,displacement,
Appearance,communication.
Conscious is.
11 months ago
8 months ago
8 months ago
Qualia: Yes! They play a computational function.
Don't say that out loud. Daniel Dennett will appear and destroy you.
8 months ago
This is correct, except for the third sentence, which should read "We have it, as long as you redefine it as consisting of properties we have." Preserving a folk concept like 'free will' and recasting it as "reasons responsiveness" (or whatever) in order to confirm that actually, we do have free will seems like the epitome of a pointless equivocation. (Cf. "We have free markets; it's just that they're centrally planned.")
"To be is to be the value of a bound variable."
No. To be a justified existential postulate is to be the value of a bound variable. (Cf. your subsequent musings about epistemology.)
"Modal statements about fundamental kinds (”gold might have had a different atomic weight”) may be grammatical but are not meaningful."
Only if we insist on reading it in terms of the Kripkean construction that gold necessarily has the atomic weight that it does. (Again, cf. your remarks on epistemology.)
5 months ago