Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

How to Hypnotize For Free — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 09:36:51 -0000

Who said we know the answers?

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

strangedoctrines — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:52:49 -0000

"The universe is either deterministic or it isn’t. This has nothing to do with free will. We have it."

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.)

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Steve M. — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:17:55 -0000

Cheers to m-jayz for leading me back here!

Qualia: Yes! They play a computational function.

Don't say that out loud. Daniel Dennett will appear and destroy you.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

m-jayz — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 04:08:40 -0000

Quality

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

خرید پستی — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:28:59 -0000

wow! like that pal I’m going to have this printed up on a t-shirt so ! .

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

patrick hubert — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 11:43:12 -0000

To be

The Appearance Is
Matter
Consciousness
Movement.

The consciousness is
Feeling,
growth,
Perception,displacement,
Appearance,communication.

Conscious is.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Jeff Mauldin — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 14:05:43 -0000

Matthew Hearney makes some excellent points:

"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.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Matthew Heaney — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 15:13:03 -0000

Jeff Mauldin said:

"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...)

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Jeff Mauldin — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 13:09:37 -0000

"The universe is either deterministic or it isn’t. This has nothing to do with free will. We have it."

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.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Kevin Nyberg — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:10:37 -0000

"Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers"
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. :)

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 12:59:19 -0000

Dan, You're welcome!

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Dan K — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 11:20:36 -0000

Thanks for settling all those difficult questions once and for all. When I woke up this morning, I had no idea that I was about to finally understand the universe. I guess I can sell all my books now.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Rob Light — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 19:06:38 -0000

As to Jane Galt's statement above (science will contiunue to fill the in the gaps for which we used to posit God as the explanation), consider the following from Stanley Jaki -- from one of his books of essays, the eponymously titled essay "The Limits of a Limitless Science."

(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.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

John Tabin — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 13:04:48 -0000

km: Is there really no problem with saying people think they want things they actually don't, if you're speaking literally (as opposed to metaphorically describing the phenomenom of self-deception)? I'm not so sure. In any case, a belief doesn't need to be "answerable to the world" any more than any other thought does.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Solan — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 04:27:20 -0000

Why is it that Christians call anyone who does not claim to have a deductive disproof of God "agnostic", all the while NOT calling those who cannot furnish deductive proofs of this God's existence by the same label - "agnostic"? I can see no other reason than hypocricy.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Gustavo Lacerda — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 11:43:44 -0000

>

I'm now thinking that what you meant was "atomic number", since that is what defines a gold atom.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Jeff Lilly — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 05:25:48 -0000

Richard, I like what you're saying about "coherence". It seems to fit with Will's commitment to having no contradictions in his belief system (which led him away from Christianity, if I'm remembering some of his earlier blog posts aright). But there are issues with this approach as well. "GOD DID IT" is a perfectly coherent way to explain everything you see, but that doesn't mean it's true. :-) Conversely, the body of scientific knowledge we have is relatively coherent now (setting aside, e.g., the clash between quantum mechanics and relativity), but that certainly hasn't always been the case. Maybe something like *predictive power* is what we want: a proposition is likely to be true if it helps you predict future events. But then we're back to the reproducibility problem again, aren't we? :-)

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Luka — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 03:14:34 -0000

Will,

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.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

beer man — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 21:27:44 -0000

Just so you know God exists. Your premise that God is not the "best explanation" for anything is partly right but mostly wrong as wrong can be. God is the best primary explanation for everything .

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.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

pixnaps — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 06:42:15 -0000

True, I wouldn't recommend blindly deferring to others, either. Coherentism plausibly suggests that justification arises from relations of coherence and mutual support within our whole "web of beliefs". In short, I shouldn't believe in fairies because that doesn't cohere so well with everything else I understand about the natural world. My resulting worldview is more coherent if I instead believe the experience to be merely hallucinated. (But we might imagine someone in very different circumstances for whom the opposite might be true.)

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.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Jeff Lilly — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 04:58:08 -0000

Richard, thanks for your reply! Your argumentation is quite clear. I wonder, though, why our hypothetical fairy-watcher should trust an amorphous concept like "scientific consensus" (or even "background knowledge" or "everybody knows that...") rather than visual experience. Is it simply because the latter is a social construct -- an opinion created by many people with lots of give-and-take? Why is that necessarily a better guide to truth? Certainly people sometimes hallucinate and dream; but equally as certainly, communities of people sometimes believe mad things.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

pixnaps — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 04:15:05 -0000

Matt -- I'm guessing he means a kind of epistemic possibility, i.e. at least no one else can know in advance that you weren't going to do otherwise. It "could" have happened for all anyone could know. (Consider: even in a deterministic universe, one can assign statistical probabilities, and flip a "fair" coin, etc. There's a 50% epistemic chance of tails, even if it is causally determined to land heads.) Of course, it's certainly debatable whether this form of possibility is sufficient for genuine choice, moral responsibility, and all that stuff we care about.

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.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

pixnaps — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 04:02:38 -0000

Will, it seems to me that you've skipped over the most pressing problem in ontology, namely, the question of what is "existence"?. (Most of what you have written under that category seems closer to epistemology, as Jadagul noted. Though I fully agree with you on the atheism point.)

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.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

LP — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 17:45:42 -0000

Super! I'm going to have this printed up on a t-shirt. I will never have to argue metaphysics again, except as a way to pass the time once I'm too old for more robust pleasures.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

km — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 07:38:57 -0000

John Tabin: It's not clear what's especially problematic about thinking there is such a class of people who 'think they believe' things but really don't. If belief is in some sense a propositional attitute that is answerable to the world (i.e. a belief that p should disappear in light of a perception that not p), then those attitudes toward propositions that are insulated from such answerability might not properly deserve to be called beliefs. For example, there is a rational requirement that if one believes p and one believes that p -> q, then one will believe q. However, the argument p -> q, p, therefore q, does not end in 'i believe q' but rather, simply, q. If one does not accept q after having accepted that such an argument is valid, then we cannot allow it to be said that he believes that p.

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.