I commend Chris Mooney for being so open-minded that he was willing to guest-author a comic on Jesus & Mo.
Comity and reconciliation
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I commend Chris Mooney for being so open-minded that he was willing to guest-author a comic on Jesus & Mo.
Scott #496 wrote:
Is that an axiom, or a working theory? If it were wrong — could we figure out that it was wrong?
If I were to look for axioms of value in science, I’d go for truth-seeking, and truth-telling — and a commitment to avoid self-deception.
As Jacob Bronowski says: “This is the scientist’s moral: that there is no distinction between ends and means.”
If it can be portrayed and depicted in fiction, then it must be at least a little conceivable — so it can’t be completely incoherent.
This is a trivial, basic, elementary error. “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” …
1. The set of all sets that do not contain themselves (see Russell’s Paradox).
2. The smallest positive integer not definable in under eleven words (see Berry’s Paradox).
3. A planar map that requires more than four colors to avoid two bordering areas of the same color.
4. A set of integers, a, b, c, and n, n > 2, such that an + bn = cn.
5. A polynomial with pi as a root.
6. An entity that is both omniscient and omnipotent.
I could go on and on. That something can be portrayed, depicted, or imagined does make it coherent, nor “conceivable” as properly construed — that it can occur in some possible world.
People have a loose, general understanding of what it means.
Yes, “loose”, as in a vague description that cannot be fully fleshed out without some “miracle happens here” step.
From the perspective of a naturalist, that’s either incoherent, or wrong. But, I think that if you just slide on the surface of the concepts, it’s coherent enough to get the idea across, and imagine the sorts of things which would support it — or count against it.
What counts against it is that it’s word salad that does not and cannot have any actual referent. I would be embarrassed to offer up such woo-filled gibberish in a scientific forum.
Think of it as your immaterial thoughts magically causing your body to move, through sympathy or intent.
But what is an “immaterial thought”, or an “immaterial” anything? That which exists is physical, natural, material — what isn’t physical doesn’t exist. This gets down to what the word “physical” actually means. And when we examine it carefully, we find that the claim that something “immaterial” exists is incoherent.
And what does it mean for something to “magically cause” something? There are no truly magical causes — events magically caused are uncaused — or they are not caused by what purportedly caused them. This gets down to what the word “caused” actually means. And when we examine it carefully, we find that the claim that something was “magically caused” is incoherent (unless it just means that we don’t know what caused it).
truth machine #503 wrote:
You can only see that, though, when you examine it carefully. They don’t. Mental things feel immaterial. You can’t hold a thought like a physical object in the hand. So they slip it into a separate category.
What you apparently find intuitive, is very hard work for most people.
There are some definitions of God, or the supernatural, that are flat-out incoherent. Others, though, may only be wrong.
Such a polynomial can be construced (for example, f(x)=x2-π2). However if you add the condition “with integer coefficients” (or rational coefficients) then it can’t be. I gather this is what you had in mind.
/pedant
For what it’s worth, I know that it’s possible to make an ‘incompatibility’ argument with respect to science and religion without referencing a metaphysical scheme. It’s just that in my experience that subtext is usually manifest in those who make the argument.
No, that’s not your experience — at best it’s your selective perception.
we would despair of making any long-term progress if we seriously considered the alternative, that the Universe is essentially chaotic, rather than lawful.
What we “consider” has nothing to do with it. We would despair if the universe were essentially chaotic (actually, we wouldn’t exist in the first place), but since it isn’t (an observation, not an axiom), science is successful (that’s a fact beyond our “consideration”).
Another axiom is that science values claims which are testable and based on evidence, and does not consider other sorts of claims, including (but not limited to) supernatural claims.
You don’t seem to understand what an axiom is. The scientific method is such that it deals with evidence and testable hypotheses; something that doesn’t do that must go by different name. It would also have different consequences; we arrived at the scientific method because it’s effective in explaining our world; that’s not an axiom, it’s an observable fact.
As for “supernatural claims”, that puts the cart before the horse. There are empirical claims that can be tested, and phenomena that can be explored. Any assertion of a “supernatural” nature is at best premature.
We could avoid a lot of this nonsense if people didn’t have such muddled ontological notions; if they could grasp that “nature” is simply that which exists and “cause” is a relationship among things that exist.
So what, then do we call the non-physical (forgive me, TM) ephemera like thoughts, dreams, emotions? Is there a noun that can be applied to describe them all, or should they be individually identified every time?
You know what, never mind. This conversation is beyond me in my current beer-addled state. Besides, any admission of an “immaterial” side of the world will be snapped up by the woo-mongers like manna.
You can only see that, though, when you examine it carefully. They don’t.
Well sure, but I thought we were talking about what is coherent, not what some people may think is coherent. Honestly, I think you’ve lost it here, and I think the reason lies in the answer to the question you directed to me in #463, as applied to yourself.
There are some definitions of God, or the supernatural, that are flat-out incoherent. Others, though, may only be wrong.
Like I said, you can always redefine the words to avoid being wrong. But your own definition of “supernatural” in #490 is quite incoherent.
if you add the condition “with integer coefficients” (or rational coefficients) then it can’t be. I gather this is what you had in mind.
Yup, thanks.
So what, then do we call the non-physical (forgive me, TM) ephemera like thoughts, dreams, emotions?
How about angular momentum, or centers of gravity? These are all physical phenomena or properties.
I didn’t mean to imply that I thought Nancy was religious. From my reading she just didn’t get the joke and she thought it was because there was something wrong with the analogy and she was bent on telling us exactly what it was.
But most of us got the joke and the analogy right away. There was nothing wrong with it– it’s interpretive and nancy just couldn’t interpret it. I’m guessing Nancy couldn’t “get it” because she’s a faitheist– she needs to see faith as something good or beneficial or not mock-worthy… which means we “new atheists” must be seen as unfair and mean and engaging in “group think” and so forth. That is the only version of events nancy could accept–no matter how carefully people explained the analogy-and they did an excellent job too. She could NOT accept that she just didn’t get the joke (a very simplistic and accurate analogy of Mooney’s argument)– and the closer her brain came to getting it, the angrier she got at everyone trying to explain it to her.
I’ve seen Heddle around before, and I knew he was religious… I just wasn’t sure which brand-meme he was infected with. Now I know… I think.
I don’t post at sites geared towards believers, so I have a hard time figuring out what makes them post here. (I’m glad they do, because I enjoy a rousing round of SIWOTI myself obviously.) I’d really be interested in hearing their version of why they post here. A lot of times they’ll tell us they came here to have a discussion, but to me, they seem like they are trying shore up a belief or opinion that is on shaky ground.
P.S. In a previous thread I likened running and turbulence to thinking — all physical processes.
The ontology can get rather tricky, because we impose interpretations upon the physical world we perceive. Consider the browser window on your screen. There isn’t “really” a window there … or is there? In any case, it’s a physical phenomenon. Dan Dennett offers the examples of laps, smiles, and good health — these can all be observed, but they are odd sorts of “things”.
truth machine OM #508 wrote:
Well, (aside from the grammar blooper) I think it’s coherent with appearances, but the appearances are inconsistent with the actual facts. At that level of analysis, it’s no longer coherent.
I’d like to know whether the theists here (heddle? Scott?) would accept the definition, or at least think it coherent. I’ve gotten agreement from at least some supernaturalists on other forums.
Though I once was a believer in supernatural things, I think my beliefs were at the core incoherent, but I could make sense of them in a fuzzy way and then leave the rest to “mystery” because it “felt” right.
Now, I can’t make any sense of the term supernatural. I can’t distinguish it from “magic”. What does it mean to say that something (or some phenomenon) exists which has to measurable properties– none of the qualities we associate with existence. How does one distinguish such a thing from the imaginary?
I can’t imagine a consciousness without sensory organs for input and a material brain for interpreting. When people give silly analogies like a horse talking (or whatever the example was above)–I’d want to know the physical details– Did it sound like it had human vocal cords? Was it like a parrot? Did others hear it? What was the expression on it’s face? Could it have been a misperception? Can a horse physically make sounds that sound like words? Did the words involve forming phonemes with the tongue and teeth? Etc.
I would want to know how the purported “magic” thing interacted with the non magic natural world.
So I was once as Sastra described… but now I’m much more like a _ray_in_dilbert_space and truthmachine. I cannot make coherent sense of anything supernatural. The more you examine such claims, the less coherent they seem-fairy dust and magic beans. Maybe believers spend so much time finding stuff wrong in the claims of others, so they never have to examine the basic incoherence in their own beliefs.
I think it’s coherent with appearances
I have no idea what you mean by that. It’s incoherent because, as I’ve noted, it deals in oxymorons — nonsense about immaterial “things” that “cause” things to happen via “the power of intentions or values” . It’s woo-laden drivel, and it isn’t any less so because it’s you uttering it than some flake from Ojai (Ojai is the U.S capital of woo).
oxymorons
Or perhaps I should say “category mistakes”. Intentions and values simply aren’t the sort of things that have causal powers, other than as properties of physical brains that are causal through physical interactions.
Or maybe it points up a weakness of just posting the cartoon itself here, without adding the author’s additional hint…For those who aren’t familiar with J & M, it quite often is drawn in response to a particular article/pundit/etc., and the cartoonist helpfully provides a link to explain the contest. See the above cartoon here:
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2010/01/22/deny/
http://tinyurl.com/ya82at2
I realize PZ included a link to the strip, but suspect that many didn’t bother to click through, as the ‘toon was already posted here; and that many who DID click through wouldn’t have noticed the subtext hint…
I’d like to know whether the theists here (heddle? Scott?) would accept the definition, or at least think it coherent.
I thought Heddle rejected this sort of nonsense from the very beginning of your conversation here.
I’ve gotten agreement from at least some supernaturalists on other forums.
Uh, so the eff what? You can get agreement from people on other forums that Obama is the antichrist. What the heck does it show if a bunch of deluded fools who believe in nonsense accept your nonsensical definition of the nonsense they believe in? I think most of my wacky science-illiterate friends in Ojai would accept it too.
I think my beliefs were at the core incoherent, but I could make sense of them in a fuzzy way and then leave the rest to “mystery” because it “felt” right.
Which pretty well sums up Sastra’s nonsense
in #468 about “at least a little conceivable”, “can’t be completely incoherent”, “a loose, general understanding of what it means”, “It can be imagined”. She says there
Well yes, certainly, but that’s no reason to suppose that thought could have been “an immaterial ‘thing’ or a ‘power'” — it couldn’t have been.
Speaking of xkcd screentips (and someone was, back awhile)–I’m really embarrassed to ask this, but…what am I doing wrong? They only appear for a few seconds for me, and so I can only read the very shortest ones in their entirety the first time I mouse over the ‘toon. Worse, they won’t reappear for me until I click to a new page and then back again…
How can I be screwing up something this simple? (I don’t have this problem with other screentips).
Sheepishly,
–Diane
Re: #506
Ah, TM. I hope you enjoyed PZ’s talk. I wish I could’ve attended.
You write:
We would despair if the universe were essentially chaotic (actually, we wouldn’t exist in the first place), but since it isn’t (an observation, not an axiom), science is successful (that’s a fact beyond our “consideration”).
Well, here’s the thing. The observation of regularities and apparent lawfulness is not in itself scientific. In the West, this habit has a checkered history inspired by the notion of a Lawgiver. I’m assuming that we can agree that the latter is not demonstrated via evidence? If so, then historically the notion of lawfulness really predates anything recognizable as modern science. Even if, for the sake of discussion, we grant that today the lawfulness of all reality has been demonstrated beyond any doubt, I would still maintain that such hasn’t always been the case.
Also, I have to point out that even today all we can confidently say is that, generally speaking, the phenomena within our visible horizon appears to be lawful, albeit incompletely understood. There are versions of both string theory and the many-worlds interpretation of QP that not only permit, but demand regions outside our power to observe that are not lawful in any sense that we could recognize.
You don’t seem to understand what an axiom is.
I’m not using it in the sense of something which is self-evidently true. I’m using it in the sense of something accepted as true without proof for the purpose of reasoning about something else. “Let us assume that ‘A’ is true. If so, what would we expect to find about ‘B’?” If you object to this definition, please explain.
I am not a philosopher by trade, but it seems to me that just because the presumption of ‘A’ predicts a certain consequence ‘B’, it does not follow that the confirmation that consequence ‘B’ exists demonstrates the necessary existence of ‘A’. At best, it leverages the weight of evidence in favor of the existence of ‘A’ to the point where it is clearly productive to behave as if ‘A’ is true.
I like what Gould says, that in science a fact can only mean, “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” In that sense, the apparent lawfulness of the universe is certainly a fact. But it is not a brute observation in and of itself, like the spectral lines of hydrogen. It is something that is generally assumed for the purposes of doing science because it has been productive, not because it has been directly observed in all cases.
As for “supernatural claims”, that puts the cart before the horse. There are empirical claims that can be tested, and phenomena that can be explored. Any assertion of a “supernatural” nature is at best premature.
I agree, but I made no such assertion here. I simply noted that science values evidence and testability, and is not well-disposed to consider claims without evidence, or claims that can’t be tested. The consequences of supernatural claims often fall into the former; the actual claim that the supernatural exists falls into the latter.
I might also add that even if an alleged consequence (‘B’) of the supernatural’s existence (‘A’) is observed, that ‘A’ is not in itself demonstrated. The concept of the supernatural itself seems inherently incoherent; it is much more parsimonious, observing a natural consequence ‘B’ to assume a natural cause, which is to say, ‘not-A’.
Let me finish by commending a somewhat different view. Richard Dickerson wrote a nice essay a few years back that appeared in the Journal of Molecular Evolution. You can read it as a PDF file here. I would be interested in your thoughts on it.
Scott
Scott, I submit that the axiom of the regularity of nature is self-evidently necessary for the scientific endeavour, unlike the axiom¹ that the supernatural exists or is a cause of anything.
Deities are conceived as supernatural², and clearly are an unnecessary axiom.
To employ unnecessary axioms is unparsimonious and unscientific; yet another way that science is incompatible with supernatural religious belief.
—
¹ you could speak of a premise, or of a presupposition, or of a postulate, but I get your meaning.
² that is, beyond nature. Certainly the Christian god is held by its believers to have created nature (i.e. “Creation”).
Sastra (#512):
Since you asked, I have to say that I feel that the word ‘supernatural’ is something of a placeholder word for a lot of different things, many of which involve fantasy. It doesn’t seem to be consonant with the business of doing science, which seeks natural causes for natural phenomena. Yet, if we attempt to define the term in some operational way, we end up invoking nature. In this sense it is tautologous.
Over the years, a minority of human beings have thoughtfully considered this state of affairs and concluded, with Laplace, that they have no need of this hypothesis. Considerably more people resist this conclusion, typically on intuitive rather than logical grounds.
So, is ‘the supernatural’ coherent or incoherent? I have for several years held the opinion that the notion can not be squared with any attempt to give an objective account of reality. In that sense it is incoherent.
At the same time, human beings do experience things that they don’t understand or can’t express in words, or both. For many, perceiving these experiences as somehow otherworldly gives them a sense of coherence that is more personally meaningful than the simple acknowledgment that something mysterious occurred.
So, while it may be incoherent, it offers something like coherence to those who believe this or that. Is that what you’ve been getting at?
If so, I sympathize. Tautologies are just like that. They are true by definition, and the fact that something is necessarily true seems to satisfy a certain part of the human mind.
Others (like me) recognize that something is still missing from these accounts, and embrace the mystery as an object for wonder, awe and investigation. I’m cool with everyone who has this attitude, whatever their view of the supernatural. I feel sorry for those who are satisfied with less.
This quote from Einstein (who of course was no theist) seems appropriate:
I have found no better expression than “religious” for confidence in the rational nature of reality, insofar as it is accessible to human reason. Whenever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism.
They are also meaningless as conclusions, and don’t say anything significant about the world.
John Morales (#521):
Scott, I submit that the axiom of the regularity of nature is self-evidently necessary for the scientific endeavour, unlike the axiom¹ that the supernatural exists or is a cause of anything.
Yes to the first part of your claim, but this is like saying that it is self-evidently necessary that baseballs must exist in order to play major-league baseball. It’s not the same thing as saying that baseballs themselves must self-evidently exist. In any case, I wasn’t using the word ‘axiom’ in that sense.
I also agree with the second part of your claim, that it is not self-evidently necessary that ‘the supernatural’ exists. I would argue, however, that the axiom that supernatural claims must be excluded from science is almost certainly necessary for the scientific enterprise.
To employ unnecessary axioms is unparsimonious and unscientific; yet another way that science is incompatible with supernatural religious belief.
I believe that I pointed something like that out in my previous reply to Sastra. But it should also be clear that supernatural beliefs are not axioms. They are neither self-evidently true, nor held simply for the purpose of reasoning about something.
Scott,
I know¹ presuppositionalists disagree with that, and I suspect it’s not just them.
Indeed, and you’ve explained it well: “At the same time, human beings do experience things that they don’t understand or can’t express in words, or both. For many, perceiving these experiences as somehow otherworldly gives them a sense of coherence that is more personally meaningful than the simple acknowledgment that something mysterious occurred.”
In other words, it makes them feel good to believe it. I guess you have no issue with believing arbitrary, incoherent things so long as they make one feel good.
In that previous comment to Sastra, you wrote:
You seem to be tip-toeing around the issue.
Do you or do you not believe in the supernatural?
If you do, what utility does this belief have for you, other than making you feel less angsty or more content?
Anyway, thank you for your pity.
I, in turn, feel sorry for those for whom reality doesn’t suffice, so that they must make up wishful imaginings to console themselves.
—
¹ From interaction with a number of them.
Um, John (#525):
I don’t know why you would thank me for pity. My brief “I feel sorry for those who are satisfied with less” was directed at people (many of them conventional believers) who are threatened by mystery and disinterested in asking the exciting and interesting questions.
Since I don’t think you’re a fan of blind faith (or perhaps faith of any kind), then I don’t see why my comment would apply to you.
Since you ask, as a theist I of course do believe in a personal God. I want to stress, however, that I did not post in this thread with the intent of talking up theism. I wanted to drop my two cents about the cartoon (which was droll) and secondly, the ‘compatibility’ question itself, which is interesting from a philosophy of science standpoint. If you thought I was engaging in some kind of stealth evangelism, my apologies. Not.
As far as what my beliefs give me? Gee. Does taking any claim on faith in and of itself benefit anyone? I doubt that it benefits me objectively, since I’m not a politician or a preacher. And any subjective benefits that I might imagine I receive are not worth discussing in this forum, because feelings, strictly speaking, are not evidence.
But I will say this: you say you feel sorry for those “for whom reality doesn’t suffice.” I understand what you’re saying, but you’re saying that their problem is essentially one of adding to reality. I don’t think that’s correct. I think, rather, that they are substituting their experiences and desires for an open engagement with the world as it really is, in effect subtracting any data from the real world that raises too many hard questions. They aren’t enriching their lives, they’re impoverishing them.
May your reality be rich and stimulating!
Thanks, Scott.
No.
I guess I was being impertinently and combatively inquisitive because of my own dissonance when contrasting your evident rationality and intelligence with my awareness of your admitted theism.
I think I was out of line there, and I therefore apologise. Thanks for your magnanimity.
Sastra:
A wifi signal doesn’t “feel” material either, but I don’t see people doubting its physical existence. I’m not saying that people would put a thought in the same category as a wifi signal, but there are many “folk categories” of things: I’m not sure that equating the mental category with ‘supernatural’ really describes it.
Scott:
Um, to put it bluntly: so what? There are countless fundamental observations about reality that precede modern science. To take another example, the description of species and their classification into nested hierarchies precedes modern evolutionary theory. And it was “inspired by the notion of” a Creator. Does that mean that it is somehow less a part of evolutionary biology because of that?
Diane – I remember some browsers had problems with long alt-texts, and needed to have an add-on called “long extensions” or something like that put on to be able to read the full thing. If you just encounter it as a problem on xckd, though, you can go to the forums -> individual comic threads -> comic of interest, and on each the first post is the comic and the alt-text typed out.
Windy: (#528):
It’s dangerous to join a line of reasoning mid-stream. I should know: I’ve stumbled more than once here.
My brief regarding the origins of the notions of lawfulness was not intended to diminish its stature within science, as your reply suggests. My point is that (contra TM) ‘lawfulness’ was not originally derived on first principles from observation in the manner of science, but rather as a built-in assumption. I also tried to suggest that, properly speaking, that even today ‘lawfulness’ has not been rigorously “proved” for the Universe. It’s held provisionally, like all scientific generalizations.
Science, to my way of thinking, is not a belief system but a system that values things like evidence, testability, tentativeness, etc. I fully embrace those values. The limits imposed by those values on what science can and can not say are often taken by laypeople as a sign of science’s weakness, when in fact it is a great strength of the whole enterprise….and it all starts with values, whose adoption as axioms for the purpose of doing science has proved so fruitful!
Scott #522 wrote:
Okay, fine. Now define it.
You didn’t really answer the specific question I asked. I am trying to get a clear definition of what people who believe in the supernatural, actually mean by the term. A definition of something ought to be allow someone to distinguish it from the things which it is not. How is something “supernatural” different than something which is simply unusual, unknown, or mysterious (dark energy, for example, or other dimensions in superstring theory.)
Iow, how do YOU define “the supernatural?”
Here was my definition:
The Supernatural: Non-material, irreducible mental Being, beings, or forces which exist apart from and above the material realm, outside of regular laws, and which affect the natural world through the power of intentions or values.
This definition is broad and general on purpose, because the category has to include supernatural things you believe do exist, supernatural things you don’t believe exist, and supernatural things you think are just plain silly or fantastic. (Also, if you object to the word “supernatural,” you are welcome to substitute the word “spiritual.” Or any word you like, frankly, as long as it addresses the issue.)
Would you agree that my definition is more or less accurate, and at least tracks with your own?
truth machine OM wrote:
Exactly; I believe theists are making category errors by reifying abstractions, and accepting the superficial intuition from a nonreflective experience that mental activities are really immaterial things which have the power to act on the physical world, the way our desire to move our hand, can move our hand. They’re treating the cosmos as if it all were like a giant Mind, or story in a mind, and stopping themselves from asking any further questions about details or mechanisms.
What if, when the human skull was opened, it had always turned out to be either empty, or filled with a plain, potato-like substance? No brain, nothing like a brain anywhere — just something that helps cool the blood in the head, perhaps. Wouldn’t this have made the hypothesis that thoughts are ‘immaterial things and powers’ more reasonable?
Diane G. (#516)
PZ not only linked to the cartoon, he paraphrased the author’s hint. And Mooney was the subject of a post the day before, too.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Scott (#520)
That would be affirming the consequent. It doesn’t work, period. Pretending that it “kind of” rather than absolutely works is wrong.
So you’re saying if there is a supernatural it is untestable and its consequences leave no evidence? On what grounds can you even give it such properties, then? Further, how do you know of something that’s untestable and leaves no evidence? And if you “believe” rather than “know,” then what do you use to choose one set of beliefs over another?
~*~*~*~*~*~
John Morales (#525)
Not disagreeing with your point, but there are so many things that people believe that makes them feel bad. There’s something peculiar about belief that way.
What if soup dancing in candlewax fish sang melodies of love behind each chance? unless in the evening after all! Pete.
Wouldn’t this have made the hypothesis that thoughts are ‘immaterial things and powers’ more reasonable?
;)
What if God showed up, turned off gravity for a second just to get everybody’s attention, said “I AM THAT I AM” inside everybody’s head and disappeared again, leaving a tattoo with the letters “YHWH” on the forheads of all 6 billions of us.
That would prove a lot of things. But fantasizing about this possibility brings us no truth. It’s just juvenile.
Lars #535 wrote:
Hypotheticals don’t try to prove something is true; they help us explore what kinds of evidence would count for, or against, a particular claim.
Since we don’t have a giant potato in our heads, but instead have highly complex networks of neurons and dendrites and axons, this counts against the idea that the mind is something “out there.” Why would we need something so unnecessarily complicated?
Sastra (#531):
OK, sorry. I thought you wanted me to weigh in on the question of whether ‘the supernatural’ was incoherent, as opposed to defining it. Let me unpack your definition again:
The Supernatural: Non-material, irreducible mental Being, beings, or forces which exist apart from and above the material realm, outside of regular laws, and which affect the natural world through the power of intentions or values.
Hmm. At first glance it seems to be pretty close to what a lot of people mean. I have a few quibbles, though.
#1 I’m not sure that all supernatural phenomena are irreducibly ‘mental’, and I’m not sure what is gained by adding that condition. In focusing on the reification of abstractions, are you trying to relate the concept of the supernatural to something like Plato’s ‘world of forms’?
#2 Your definition doesn’t acknowledge the experience of the numinous except as a consequence of alleged beings or forces, but it is at the core of why so many people believe that ‘the supernatural’ exists
#3 There is a conception of the supernatural as being in accord with natural law, rather than independent of said laws. Some people argue that this is just writing nature a bit larger and more mysterious. I’m sympathetic to that approach.
But let’s say, arbitrarily, that we agree to your working definition. What would you like to do with it?
Scott #537 wrote:
I think it makes the definition more accurate, if you include mental products such as values and goals in the term “mental.” If you can reduce them to the physical, then you’re dealing with materialism again.
Here is a quick list of purported supernatural phenomeonon:
disembodied souls, ghosts, ESP, psychokenesis, magical correspondences, vitalism, karma, prana, God, cosmic consciousness, mind as “energy force,” a universal tendency towards the harmonic balance of Good and Evil, progressive evolution towards Higher States, mind/body substance dualism, holistic nonmaterialistic monism.
What do they have in common? Every single one of them involves minds or values. Can you think of something that would be included in the category — and yet be unconnected to anything mental?
Not really, because Platonism, while it may reify abstractions, doesn’t involve the vital mental component of intentionality or values, and their interaction with the physical world. This may be why we don’t generally consider it a form of supernatural belief. Platonists don’t.
True, but I’m trying to be as generic as possible, and I’m not sure all supernatural beliefs include this. But perhaps I could add a modifier to the effect of “invokes a deep sense of awe and wonder?”
I know; that’s why I tried to avoid making the crux of the distinction “inside nature” or “outside nature,” and was willing to go along with a change in the term. Too many times, people want to include the “supernatural” or “spiritual” inside Nature as a way of emphasizing holism, or goodness, or the way-things-ought-to-be. It’s a byproduct of — or maybe the cause of — the whole “natural is best” movement.
Examine it in the light of modern science.
A. Noyd (#533) is troubled by my description of the status of a working argument in science:
“At best, it leverages the weight of evidence in favor of the existence of ‘A’ to the point where it is clearly productive to behave as if ‘A’ is true.”
He objects, as follows:
That would be affirming the consequent. It doesn’t work, period. Pretending that it “kind of” rather than absolutely works is wrong.
Sorry, but you are misled. If it were really this easy to rule out arguments like this on logical grounds, don’t you think some armchair philosopher would’ve torpedoed Darwin’s Origin 150 years ago? Because this is pretty much the sort of argument he employs throughout!
This is the kind of philosophical observation that routinely annoys working scientists, and causes the latter to (incorrectly, in my view) eschew philosophy altogether. Philosophy is useful, because it provides tools to analyze scientific claims, but it does not dictate how science is practiced. A comparison may be helpful here.
‘Affirming the consequent’ is a logical fallacy with the following form:
1. If A, then B.
2. B.
3. Therefore, A.
Students learn about fallacies so they can appreciate when an argument’s logical structure does or does not guarantee the validity of its conclusion.
But whether or not an argument’s conclusion is warranted can be uncoupled from the question of whether or not the argument’s conclusion is correct. Valid arguments can lead to conclusions that differ from reality if the premises are inadequate; invalid arguments can have conclusions that are confirmed by observation or experiment. In other words, right, but perhaps for the wrong reason.
Here’s how the logic of a working scientist differs from the fallacy of ‘affirming the consequent’:
1. If A exists, then (mountains of shit consistent with ‘A’ should be observed).
2. Mountains of shit consistent with ‘A’ are observed!
3. ‘A’ may not be true, but so far the shit’s in its favor. Let’s treat ‘A’ as it were true, but continue to test the shit out of it.
In other words, the provisional nature of scientific claims means that there is no absolute ‘therefore’ at the end of the chain of reasoning, that some conclusion must be absolutely true, the only possible explanation, etc. Therefore, there is no logical fallacy…other than the conflating of the apples of science with the oranges of philosophy.
Sastra (#538):
Examine it in the light of modern science.
Fair enough. As far as I am concerned the previous were minor quibbles. I accept the definition. Lead on, Macduff!
Scott #540 wrote:
Oh my — at the end of a long thread! Okie doke.
The Supernatural: Non-material, irreducible mental Being, beings, or forces which exist apart from and above the material realm, outside of regular laws, and which affect the natural world through the power of intentions or values.
The hypothesis is that this exists.
What sort of evidence do you think would count directly for it — and what would count against it?
And if you COULD know for certain whether something supernatural exists… would you want to know? Or would you prefer keeping your beliefs as they are?
Heh. That’s an almost supernatural definition of “Nature” there; as something prescriptive, based on intent, rather than something descriptive that results from falsifiable and parsimonious observation and analysis.
From the perspective of metaphysical naturalism, I think it might be best summed up as the perspective that “nature” and “reality” are simply synonymous.
Yet if these could be detected and demonstrated by science, would they not be part of nature?
There would no doubt be science that studies them, perhaps as subbranches of psychology, or as a separate discipline of “spiritology” or something. There would be attempts to discover the limits of these phenomena, and perhaps even develop technologies based on them. Why not?
What would distinguish them from the natural, if they were actually real?
====
Sure. But I would also want to be sure that I was not being fooled — or fooled by someone who was fooling him/her self.
The only really necessary belief is that reality, as it actually is, is not a deliberate attempt to fool us.
Speaking as a Christian, if I heard another Christian made a claim of a supernatural experience, I would be skeptical. I would not automatically admit they had experienced the supernatural just because we both had similar beliefs about the supernatural.
In fact, I have my doubts that a single piece of objective evidence for any subjective claim would be persuasive for me. All evidence would be presumed by science to be natural phenomena, and based on previous work, it would be non-parsimonious to argue for a supernatural origin when the opposite tack has proven so successful. I would tend to assume that the person who made the claim was misinterpreting some natural phenomena.
I have to admit that I am impressed by your brief ‘the vital mental component of intentionality or values.’ This does seem to be essential, not just to distinguish the supernatural, but perhaps to test it. It’s not enough to find evidence for an ‘otherness’.
No, I think the only thing that might count would be a clear, objective signal of purpose in some object that could not possibly be the result of human manipulation. I’m impressed by the 7.656 MeV resonance in carbon, for example. It can be predicted by anthropic reasoning, but the degree to which it is ‘fine-tuned’ can not. But even that is only evidence for a higher level of order, not a purposefulness operating completely outside the natural world we experience.
Suppose at higher resolution than at previously available, that characters (say, the Hebrew tetragrammaton) were found inscribed on the non-functional side of the small ribosomal subunit, and that these characters were universally conserved across all taxa without any apparent function. This would certainly be a sign of the activity of what Fred Hoyle called a ‘superintelligence’ of stupendous power. But would that automatically mean that this purposeful being was ‘supernatural’? I don’t think so.
I’m stumped. I can think of things that demonstrate that there are things outside our understanding, but I don’t seem to be able to imagine a way to rule out a natural explanation for any such phenomena. Even if it carried within it unbelievable amounts of new information demonstrating its power, even if it contained a claim that there was a supernatural realm, I don’t think that rules out a natural explanation.
Do you have any suggestions?
Scott (#539)
All right, on rereading, you were careful to be a bit more provisional than I gave you credit for, but I took you literally where you used “consequence” in the singular in “just because the presumption of ‘A’ predicts a certain consequence ‘B’.” You said “at best” finding B true “leverages the weight of evidence in favor of the existence of ‘A’.” But where does the information come from to let you know whether you’ve got a best case scenario? All you can be confident of with the singular is you don’t have to discard A, nothing more. Yet now you’re condensing a large number of B’s into your “working science” version. I find that assumption just a wee bit disingenuous.
Also, was there a reason you didn’t answer the questions in 533?
Owlmirror #543 wrote:
The word “nature” is not all that important: as you say, we’re really dealing with the concept of “reality.”
If such purely intentional forces are real, we’ve discovered that reality is very different than we thought it was — significantly different. Materialism is false, and has been falsified.
You can divide reality up then into “nature” and “supernature,” or “material” and “spiritual,” or “physical” and “mental” — or whatever category labels you want, I think.
Scott #544 wrote:
Look again at the definition, and list of supernatural claims:
——-
The Supernatural: Non-material, irreducible mental Being, beings, or forces which exist apart from and above the material realm, outside of regular laws, and which affect the natural world through the power of intentions or values.
Examples of supernatural phenomenon: disembodied souls, ghosts, ESP, psychokenesis, magical correspondences, vitalism, karma, prana, God, cosmic consciousness, mind as “energy force,” a universal tendency towards the harmonic balance of Good and Evil, progressive evolution towards Higher States, mind/body substance dualism, holistic nonmaterialistic monism.
————–
This is balanced out against the materialist alternative — specifically, that mind is what the brain does, and all the above, though conceivable, are false.
I think we could go through almost all of these claims and think of a scenario where they were, if not proven (science doesn’t deal in ‘proof’), then strongly supported. Many of them would support each other — or at least make it more plausible. (God, for instance, is often considered to be a disembodied Mega-Mind which manipulates matter and energy through its Willpower (psychokenesis) and communicates through a form of ESP.)
And if there were strong scientific evidence for any of the above phenomenon, then material theories of mind are in very real trouble. Scientific evidence for mind-body dualism would count for the Supernatural, as has been defined.
The lack of scientific evidence for the above phenomenon — coupled with positive evidence for the materialist alternative — would count against the existence of the supernatural.
If the supernatural exists, then (mountains of shit consistent with the supernatural) would be expected to be observed.
(Mountains of shit consistent with the supernatural) are not observed.
The supernatural is unlikely to be true.
One can then consider the fact that (mountains of shit consistent with natural, materialist views of mind) are observed, and take that as the working theory, easily falsified if those mountains move.
A. Noyd (#544:)
Sorry, I didn’t address your earlier questions. Here we go, your original questions in italics.
So you’re saying if there is a supernatural it is untestable and its consequences leave no evidence?
It seems to be inherently non-falsifiable. This is kind of what Sastra and I are playing with right now.
On what grounds can you even give it such properties, then?
Ask Sastra. He’s the one who’s taking out a toy definition. I see the word as a placeholder for a lot of different ideas, as I mentioned earlier.
Further, how do you know of something that’s untestable and leaves no evidence?
Are you, by any chance, not living in a forest where the trees fall soundlessly?
OK, just joshing. Untestable claims often have evidence associated with them, they just aren’t the kinds of things that can be independently corroborated. It’s evidence of a sort, but it doesn’t count for much.
And if you “believe” rather than “know,” then what do you use to choose one set of beliefs over another?
I reserve the word ‘belief’ for propositions taken on faith. There are lot of subjective criteria one could apply to these things, but one of my personal rules is to not to take a claim too seriously when it seems to contradict a large body of observations and experiments. That actually rules out quite a few things!
And yet, is Christianity itself not the result of some very specific claims of supernatural experiences?
===
Every scientific revolution does this — they falsify the previous model.
And, actually, given how much people are given to the egocentric bias, it be more said to work exactly as they do think. “I always knew it was really all about me” (or “about us“, if they’re more species-centric rather than ego-centric).
Hm. Only in the narrowest sense, I think.
Sure; dualism. But is dualism coherent?
If there is some identifiable substance that “spirit” is associated with (quintessence; vital fluid; ectoplasm; an all-pervading aether), why would it not just be added to our existing collection of concepts of basic forces, forms of energy, and states of matter?
[Working somewhat backwards…]
It doesn’t rise to the level of being unfalsifiable. It’s incoherent and has (cannot have, in fact) evidentiary support. It’s garbage, and completely dismissable.
This is so broad as to be utterly meaningless.
Your personal rules should include dismissing those claims that can’t be formulated coherently and don’t/can’t have evidentiary support.
Do tell.
Then how do they demonstrate what you say?
Yes. Stop being a Christian. It’s silly.
Sastra (#547):
Ah. Now I see. The point of your definition is to conflate mind-body dualism with the supernatural?
So, the argument takes the form:
1) If the supernatural exists, it necessarily entails mind-body dualism
2) The expected consequences of mind-body dualism have been, in large, falsified
3) Mind-body dualism can be provisionally rejected: it is unlikely to be a correct theory of mind
4) Therefore, the supernatural is unlikely to exist
I think the logical structure of this argument (or however you want to phrase it) seems valid. Do you feel that something like premise #1 is required to make it go? That may be where the wrinkle lies.
Also, even if #1 is demonstrated, is it really a good idea to reason from what we think we know about our minds to the general properties of reality? Eddington’s injunction that the universe may be queerer than we can possibly suppose is a call to epistemic humility. We actually can’t be certain that our local horizon is typical of every scenario permitted by string theory and the many-worlds interpretation of QP. The rules might permit, or even demand, other realms in which the rules are different, realms that interact with out local ‘bubble’ of space-time in ways that are not presently detectable.
I apologize in advance if that seems like hand-waving, but keep in mind that multiverse or ‘bubble’ universe scenarios are being seriously advanced in theoretical physics, in part to avoid the aesthetic (and philosophical) problems entailed by a transcendent beginning to the present order. It’s not theists who are looking for ways to get around the ‘Big Bang’, it’s non-believers.
Not that any of that troubles me much. As I mentioned, I’m sympathetic to the view that what we call the supernatural is actually a subset of the ‘natural’.
Yes, if you’re dishonest and/or stupid.
(adding a bit to my previous)
And if there isn’t some identifiable substance — why wouldn’t these phenomena fall under the heading of some previously unidentified and/or unisolated behavior of the contents of the real universe?
Owlmirror #549 wrote:
True — it would confirm our intuitions on what the mind “feels like” and how we think reality must be. But it would certainly change the views of the scientists of today. Significantly so. The theists, the woos, the paranormalists, the spiritual — they would all consider themselves rightly vindicated. Mind has real power, and the cosmos is not indifferent to us. Our concerns, are its concerns. Mind cannot be reduced to matter — it’s above matter. It can exist prior to it, or outside of it. And thus was can seriously consider that our death is not the end — from a scientific perspective. Science discovered the supernatural/spiritual/woo.
Even if there was some kind of identifiable substance associated only with spirit — and spirit wasn’t completely irreducible — I still contend that this new understanding of reality would be so radically different than the current working theory of naturalism that just saying “it’s only a new form of naturalism” simply doesn’t do the change justice.
Not as a first step. The first step would be to re-evaluate the computational capacities of potato-like substances. The second step step would be to re-evaluate the computational capacities of other organs and organ systems.
tm said nothing about “lawfulness.” He said it is an observation that the universe is not inherently chaotic. Leave out the word “lawfulness” – nothing you say here is at all relevant.
“Doing science” involves every area of life, every instance of fact claims. Are you suggesting that a person is only doing science if she’s working in her specific subdiscipline or discipline? Working in a professional context? Are scientists in their life outside their discipline or beyond the lab bench exempt from “things like evidence, testability, tentativeness” in forming or evaluating claims? heddle has already stated that he holds political/economic beliefs without evidence. Are you saying the same? Should no one but professional scientists be held to the epistemic standards of science, and they only in their fields and only during the hours in which they’re engaged in their professional activities? Would “The US needs to invade Iran because its government is planning to attack the US tomorrow” be acceptable to you without evidence? What about a supernatural claim – “The US needs to invade Iran because its population is possessed by an evil force bent on destruction”? This contains “untestable” elements. What do you do with it? Is such a claim compatible with science?
Scott, what do you mean when you say you are a Christian? Do you believe in heaven and hell? Do you believe that belief is necessary for “salvation”? Why do you believe whatever it is that makes you call yourself a Christian? Why would you extrapolate “the universe may be queerer than we can possibly suppose” to the notion that the universe is queer in EXACTLY the way you suppose (Christianity)? How is that different than Deepak Chopra using QM to justify his new age beliefs?
How exactly have you reconciled your faith with the facts– or do you just not think very deeply about the subject? I mean, I’m glad that I can point to great skeptics and scientists who are religious to help calm the fears of those who would stop the teaching of evolution otherwise– it seems harmless and maybe even comforting. But I also wonder if you guys are just hanging onto the idea that you believe because you are afraid not to– a bit of Pascal’s wager.
If there were no god, would you want to know? Or would you prefer to believe there was? If an invisible undetectable form of consciousness does and could exist, how do you distinguish them from gremlins, myth, and the other proposed entities that don’t?
Scott #552 wrote:
Not necessarily strict mind-body dualism: remember, my list included forms of idealistic monism (nothing exists but Mind.) I’m trying to be as inclusive as I can be, to identify variations. But I think the belief in pure mind — or the products of mind — as a kind of force or power lies at the heart of what people mean when they talk about supernatural or spiritual truths.
It necessarily entails that mind or its products somehow affect the material world through the power of intentions or values. I say this, because I think it a necessary part of the definition. I define it this way, because this is what I think people mean — what they’re really driving at — when they talk about the supernatural.
I can’t think of a counter-example — a supernatural thing or being or force which has nothing to do with purpose, goals, love, justice, desire, intention, thought, good and evil, joy, personhood, or morality, as a fundamental aspect of its being or existence.
Yes, I think it’s a good idea — it’s the usual assumption to work from what we know, unless there’s good evidence to change it. We assume consistency.
As Dawkins has said, “Mental things, brains, minds, consciousnesses, things that are capable of comprehending anything — these come late in evolution, they are a product of evolution. They don’t come at the beginning. So whatever lies behind the universe will not be an intellect. Intellects are things that come as the result of a long period of evolution.” This is not conclusive — but it’s relevant.
There’s also something else to consider: we can understand and explain why we might have a natural tendency to believe in substance dualism, even though it’s false, and anthropomorphise objects and events. The case against reincarnation is strengthened, for example, by studying the types of cognitive biases which would lead people to think it is true, even if it isn’t. Coupled with the lack of evidence, it helps to weave a unified explanation.
Uh uh. Maybe.
That’s standard to all scientific conclusions — we might have to change them. They might be wrong. But we don’t throw them out or consider them dicey because of the maybe.
So? Nobody cares about a scientist’s motivations unless they’re trying to explain someone holding on to a view beyond reason. The astrophysicists and string theories are pursuing science properly — or getting properly called on it when they don’t. They are not whining about the need to have faith.
I think you’re mistaken about the implications of the Big Bang and God, but if you’re claiming that the Big Bang challenges atheism, then I think you have to agree that science can say something about the existence of God. If it can support God, then it’s legitimate to measure the hypothesis against the evidence, to discredit it.
And this concludes this evening’s episode of Explain Your Beliefs, Damn It!.
Or not…
:)
I’ve also been considering this as a potential alternate universe, one where the discoveries mentioned are made early, and alongside the more traditionally considered scientific physical discoveries.
It might seem so at first. But after the journal articles and and popular science articles and technical applications come out, I suspect that it might start to seem more like “business as usual”. OK, so there’s a new science of spiritology. So? It needs to account for why most people don’t usually have real, non-biased, psychic abilities and powers. It would not be something ubiquitously accessible. Woo-meisters and frauds would latch onto it, but they would no doubt get it as wrong as Deepak Chopra gets quantum mechanics. The technical apps would have associated risks and unintended consequences. Some people would want to use the new tech to spy on people; others would decry such abuse; still others would become horribly paranoid about being spied upon.
And so on and so forth.
It’s always one damn thing after another.
I suspect that we hold different concepts of the potential supernatural.
Posit, for example, an all-pervading aether that reacts to mind, and perhaps becomes part of mind — but is itself utterly neutral; a substrate that permits action at a distance, or resonating vibration to permit psychic communication (to grab some woo-speak). It may interact with people’s minds and affect the qualities you list, but it doesn’t really have any of those qualities inherent to itself, I would think.
Owlmirror #561 wrote:
Yup; like an eternal heaven, a top-down, spirit-infused, morally-attuned, enchanted universe is much better in the abstract, than it is when you try to get specific and concrete. That’s where you run into problems.
Being spiritual means not having any of those kinds of problems.
Scott (#548)
Hm, I suppose I first need to ask if you consider your god is supernatural and if you agree with the “untestable/leaves no evidence” qualities of the supernatural. I’m basically trying to get at how you justify your theism at an epistemic level. Even if you keep it all at the level of belief, why are you preferential in your choice of beliefs?
Yes, some things do, but I wasn’t asking about them. Maybe I should rephrase. How does anyone know of something that’s untestable and leaves no evidence? Though, if you don’t think anyone can know of something like that and you were only entertaining the idea for discussion with Sastra, don’t worry about answering.
Grrr… No Scott, I read the whole thread but I only replied to a small sub-argument that was interesting. Don’t be an ass.
No, I didn’t suggest that. But you seem to think it’s somehow significant if an observation is “not in itself scientific”, or if it precedes science: what’s the significance? I pointed out that many other “self-evident” observations, ideas and traditions were “grandfathered in” to modern science.
The last two sentences seem to undermine the argument you started out with, that lawfulness has a special status within science as a value axiom (whatever that is).
And another thing, I don’t think you have considered how ‘lawfulness’ is necessary to all human activity. It’s not something specific to science: the assumption of lawfulness is essential to writing a cookbook. Like truth machine said, we wouldn’t exist in the first place without it. Think of it as an extension of the weak anthropic principle: science can only exist where beings capable of observation exist. Observers can only exist where the universe has enough regularity for life (and memory) to persist. So it’s a version of Douglas Adams’ puddle fallacy to wonder at the amazing fit of science and ‘lawfulness’. (IMO, it would be better to talk about “regularities” instead of “lawfulness”)
@ 540. Lead on MacDuff? Oh God, it’s that corruption from American scouts on a hike. “Lay on MacDuff” meaning with your sword, says Macbeth. Not ‘Lead on MacDuff.’ You could claim the phrases are not related and that MacDuff is a common enough name and a three word phrase with it could begin with ‘Lead on’ and have nothing to do with Shakespeare’s ‘Lay on MacDuff’. You could claim that. No doubt the phrase is now a juvenile folkway for generations to come. I would just like to get it in proper perspective with its senior ‘Lay on MacDuff.’
@ et. al.
So I couldn’t stand it and entered here and wrote off topic.
So I’ll add on-topic, something not mentioned. Perhaps a what are they thinking?
Oh yes I’ll go with you. You will not be alone. Though you’re crazy as a loon I’ll be crazy too, with you. I saw on the steppes of Russia that a woman, her horses, and people her relatives or servants went with her. And the Indians of the old America went with their household leader, a wad of tobacco for narcotic and a rope twisted around their neck. A few declined. All that was something, loyalty, kindness, sacrifice, what the hell, still something. But us, we won’t leave at exactly the same time, likely. If you go first, I’ll be along later. So Jesus will have to go with you and keep you company till I get there, and when I arrive we can be together again. I will hold your hand now and promise to see you later. That’s our hope. Yes, I know it’s only a hope.
Said the religious scientist.
At the risk of muddying the waters and being misunderstood, I’ll add that even if the universe is chaotic, that doesn’t mean that it’s unpredictable. Both deterministic chaos and stochastic chaos are observable (though some believe that stochastic chaos is only evident because of our limited observational powers).
The entire ‘lawful’ or even ‘non-chaotic’ supposition is unnecessary to the fruitful pursuit of science. It is only necessary that there be some correlation between the present state and future states in order to do science. The better we get at understanding which portions of the present state affect the likely future state, the better the predictions we can make.
If the correlation between past and future is inconstant and arbitrary, chances are not good for the existence of life at all, much less its continuance. We might go so far as to call these correlations ‘natural laws’.
We then assume ‘lawfulness’ not because it’s convenient, but because without it there would be nothing which could be known. ‘Agnostic’ should only extend so far.
llewelly said @367
Math isnt my strong point but I think you mean, n(n – 1)/2
There are some self-incompatible ideas, and you need n(n+1)/2 comparisons to include these. If you assume that any given idea is compatible with itself, you can go to n(n-1)/2.
Way, way, too much to reply to in a single post. Sorry, but the football today was compelling.
Anyway, in no particular order….
Articulett (#558) has a bunch of questions about the sort of things I take on faith. I don’t intend to spend time answering every one of them, there’s too many and that would end up being something like proselytizing. I’ve been down that road before, and it’s just doesn’t seem appropriate here. If you really want to grill me on my beliefs, you can go to my blog and look up posts with the label ‘Behind the Curtain’.
Windy (#565):
I hate to be an ass, so sorry if I was. But I still think you are misreading me. For example, you bring up Adams’s puddle fallacy. Questions about selection bias or why the universe seems to be lawful are interesting, but that’s emphatically NOT what I was addressing with TM. He was arguing that I was ontologically muddled in saying that science assumes the Universe’s lawfulness, like an axiom. I disagreed, on the basis of what I know about the history of science, that the notion of lawfulness wasn’t deduced on first principles from logic, but rather adopted as an assumption for the purpose of figuring things out.
I also don’t understand your comment that acknowledging the provisional nature of scientific claims undermines the status of principles like ‘lawfulness’ within science. All claims in science are held provisionally. But not all claims have the same explanatory and predictive power. Without something like an axiom of ‘lawfulness’, science would mostly consist of descriptions of whatever we are observing at the moment, and precious little could be predicted and even less could be explained.
gould1865 (#566) Guilty as charged. I massacred the Bard of Avon. Thou cream-faced loon!
MikiZ (#567) You make a good point that the word ‘chaotic’ does not necessarily mean an absence of predictability, since regularities (presumably the result of laws) can be observed.
My apologies for muddying the waters, but I have to point out I was just replying to TM’s usage of the word. It seemed better than to quibble and insist upon something like ‘absence of lawfulness.’
You suggest that the imputation of lawfulness may not be necessary for the conduct of science and write, “It is only necessary that there be some correlation between the present state and future states in order to do science.”
Meh. You are describing the sort of ‘science’ that could be done by a machine. As a general rule, people are not interested in correlations themselves. If a correlation presents itself, the wondering mind at the heart of science seems to want to know why this correlation exists. Sagan remarks in Cosmos that if we lived in a universe that was static, or if we lived in a universe that was not lawful, that there would be little impetus to do science. Fortunately, Sagan says, we live in an ‘in-between universe’ where things change, but in regular, predictable ways according to laws of nature and concludes, ‘we can do science, and we can improve our lives.’
I think Sagan’s right. If we discovered correlations, but we didn’t assume that there was some regularity at the base of the correlation, we wouldn’t be that motivated to figure out what the regularity was. We would be curious in the sense that pre-scientific cultures were curious, but continue to embed any observations about the larger universe in some pantheon.
A.Noyd (#564):
How does anyone know of something that’s untestable and leaves no evidence?
Ha! Ask the string theorists if the LHC doesn’t provide them with anything to hang their hat on.
I’m not claiming that I could possibly ‘know’ that untestable things that leave no evidence exist. But it seems likely that there are things that exist, but which can not be detected. We only observe those things in the night sky which are in our event horizon, for example. We could, if we wanted to, pretend that this is all the stuff that exists. But we have good reason to believe that there are entire superclusters of stars that we will never be able to know anything about based on what we know about the general properties of the universe from the WMAP data.
In any case, to me the word ‘belief’ implies taking propositions on faith, which means that ‘belief’ isn’t knowledge in the sense of being justified by independent, verifiable observations.
Sastra (#559):
Your approach really intrigues me, and I’d like to pursue it further. But this thread is getting cumbersome in length and in all the sidebars that are getting raised. I’d rather focus on that definition, and I would also like to review the literature on the mind-body problem before venturing an opinion. I took a philosophy seminar on consciousness about 12 years ago, but I’m rusty. If you want to continue this, how about dropping me a line at:
epigene13@gmail.com
@Miki Z
Bingo. I was assuming that no idea needs to be compared to itself. Thx. :)
I think I could have stated my point far more simply (at the risk of some ambiguity):
Things don’t follow natural laws because they are the ‘law’. They are the ‘law’ because they make accurate predictions. The existence of the law is the effect of the behavior, not the cause of it.
Scott (#570)
Well, that answers some of what I asked but doesn’t come close to what I said I was getting at–your epistemic justification for theism. What do you feel justifies such belief? What lets you choose one belief over another? Note that I don’t care about the precise content of those beliefs, so you shouldn’t worry about proselytizing.
Scott, re:
I’m not thinking of grilling you, but I am curious.
Alas, your link is malformed.
(Carlie–Thanks SO MUCH for the alt-text & xkcd tips!
–Diane)
Where are you getting this “deduced on first principles” stuff? I didn’t see anyone else suggesting it. And an assumption for the purposes for figuring things out may be derived from observation (and usually is).
I think you misunderstood Miki Z, he didn’t say that science should stop at describing correlations.
Either ol’ Carl was using a bit of poetic license here, or he didn’t consider the implications of his thought experiment. Since life at a minimum implies self-replicating patterns, it makes no sense to talk about LIVING in a universe where nothing ever changes (since nothing would grow or replicate) or where everything was random (since no pattern could persist).
How can a correlation exist without regularity? Even if it’s a spurious correlation there are usually some other unseen variables behind it acting regularly. At the very least, the observer jotting down the correlation exhibits regularity!
And not to argue from authority, but the very next paragraph in Cosmos disagrees with you about pre-scientific cultures…
(“Human beings are good at understanding the world. We always have been. We were able to hunt game or build fires only because we had figured something out.”)
I think this touches on the concept of evolutionary epistemology — humans have been good at figuring things out about observable things that directly impinged on their survival. But generalizing and abstracting to basic principles, or understanding things that are outside the immediate range of our senses — that took many thousands of years, and the creation and refinement of specialized tools.
On lawfulness: it’s worth bearing in mind that lawfulness is implied when we assume that we will still exist in a recognisable form in one second’s time. The problem of induction may be a logical issue but the problem of noninduction is much worse; absent the assumption that previous regularities continue into the future, there is no basis for doing anything or making any kind of decision or holding any belief, because there’s no reason to assume your own continued existence, or that of anything else in the universe.
articulett, #558,
Can’t speak for Scott, but as another Christian voice I would say that I think about these things very deeply and often. The present body of scientific knowledge poses no great challenge–in fact typically the more we learn the more secure I feel. However, I do wonder about things like discovering (not just postulating) parallel universes or extraterrestrial intelligent life or a complete and tested OOL model–I haven’t worked out how those would affect my faith.
Again, can’t speak for Scott, but I’d certainly want to know.
Heddle, since the default assumption is that there are no gods- all the gods we know of are fictional characters- surely you should be more interested in finding out whether there is any such thing as a god.
#576:
Read TM’s original post. He’s saying that the ‘lawfulness’ of the universe is an observation, rather than an axiom. Observations are incorporated into an explanatory scheme initially either by induction of deduction.
Induction: “I see this regularity here, and another regularity here. I see a general pattern of regularity. The universe is lawful.”
Deduction: “I observe a thing, and I observe the same thing at a different time. After many such observations, I conclude this thing follows a rule or law, and I can use this rule to guide my behavior.”
Either way, you are reasoning from first principles to a notion of lawfulness. But I don’t think our prescientific ancestors had either of these conversations in a meaningful way with each other. More often than not, they began with the presumption of lawfulness:
“The god(s) exist, and they are mighty. They have ordered the heavens. By looking at the heavens, we shall see the laws of the gods.”
That’s still very clever, as Sagan says, but hardly science. I agree with Owlmirror’s subsequent comment (#577).
A.Noyd (#573): The word ‘justified’ leads to a logical cul-de-sac when people define knowledge as ‘justified true belief.’ Justification, in turn, usually turns on claims which can be objectively verified. Faith isn’t like that.
In a nutshell, I believe because of personal experience with belief. I am a Christian in part because my belief experience is embedded in a largely Christian culture, and in part because I feel there is something distinctive about the teachings of Jesus. But you see this is merely anecdote, history and aesthetics. There is nothing objective about it.
#574:
John, sorry about the bad link. Here’s my blog address:
http://www.monkeytrials.blogspot.com/
Stephen Wells
?? Did I not write, in #579, that I’d want to know? I don’t understand your comment.
Scott, I would contend that the current thinking in science is more pragmatist than either inductive or deductive. Assuming lawfulness of the Universe has led to useful insights in cases A and B, so it is worth trying in case C as well. Now this is in some sense inductive, but rather than making statements about the Universe, one is making statements about utility.
Scott #581 –
I know you don’t say it, exactly, but I can’t help reading that and seeing “I believe because I really, really want to and am not sure I can imagine functioning happily in a world where I didn’t.”
I once used nearly the same exact outward justifications for belief (in my mid- to late- teens, even after I realized that the science I accepted completely contradicted biblical scripture), but inwardly it was really more of a sincere desire for it all to be true coupled with a fear how I would cope if I accepted that it wasn’t.
I don’t mean to insult or oversimplify for you… just recognizing a pattern I’m personally familiar with.
Well, objectively, it is… except for the “history” part…
@heddle: you assented to the suggestion that if there were no god, you’d want to know. I’m just pointing out that it would be only rational to not suppose that any gods exist until there’s definite evidence for them. If there _were_ a god, I’d want to know; until such knowledge is available you shouldn’t assume there are any.
So would you say that currently, you would classify your belief as being distinct from knowledge?
Clearly, you experienced some change within your brain (or mind), and you know that you experienced it — but you don’t know that what you experienced actually was something real caused by a supernatural event and/or a supernatural being?
The real problem with religious presuppostion — in contrast to a more conservative deistic presupposition — is the special pleading made for the belief. That is, not only do you believe in — presuppose the existence of — a God that is a person, but that this person is presupposed as all-powerful despite demonstrating no observable power, is presupposed as all-knowing despite demonstrating no observable knowledge, and (perhaps worst), is presupposed as benevolent despite demonstrating no observable benevolence.
Presupposing a God is “merely” a violation of parsimony, but presupposing the existence of all of those attributes in the absence of the demonstrations of all of those attributes violates the definitions of those attributes; it is logically inconsistent.
I haven’t followed all of the “supernatural” discussion, so forgive me for barging in…
It seems to me that Sastra is basically right and has been doing a bang-up job explaining why the concept of the supernatural is not incoherent in the trivial sense that some people think.
This is important, because the accommodationists want to make it sound like supernatural concepts are simply unfalsifiable, such that religion has its own sphere that science can’t touch.
That is crucially false, because in fact supernatural concepts are not generally unfalsifiable. They are systematically about things that have observable effects, because if they didn’t, humans wouldn’t find them interesting to tell and retell stories about them, or to build religions around. They are also systematically causal and predictable, in at least something like a statistical sense, because religion would not work if they weren’t.
The appeal of supernaturalist (and supernaturalish) religion hinges on the supernatural being relevant to real people—prayers & sacrifices being effective, spiritual experiences actually connecting the mundane and spiritual planes, or the ability of people to introspect/meditate/whatever and realize experience a transcendent Ultimate Reality, or get a spiritual insight that All is One, and Atman is identical to Brahman, or something like that. Importantly at least some of these strange phenomena are supposed to reveal Deep Wisdom to at least some spiritually adept people, and that wisdom is supposed to be useful in guiding how you live your life.
At least for the modern sense of the “supernatural,” the main issue is not whether the idea of the supernatural is incoherent in itself. In its most general form, it apparently isn’t—it’s too vague to say either way.
The idea of the supernatural is not clearly wrong in terms of trivial philosophy, independent of empirical evidence. It’s just not a matter of simple dictionary definitions. (It’s a matter of the basic categories that people instinctively use for understanding the world.)
It is wrong scientifically, in light of modern science, and that’s important, because the accommodationists don’t want to admit that science has anything to do with it. They want to assert or presuppose some NOMA-like distinction, and NOMA could not be more wrong.
The idea that science and religion are about different things is pretty much the opposite of the truth—science has everything to do with religion. There is no place for religion to hide from science, because science doesn’t just tell us that we evolved over millions of years.
That’s the least interesting thing on the table.
Science has a lot to say about the central issues for religion—minds, morals, how to run a society, and religion itself, including religions’ claims to be a “way of knowing” that offer offers knowledge or “wisdom” that secular reasoning cannot.
—
The supernatural is incoherent with the scientific conception of minds and mentation. Our minds evidently just do not work in the ways that would be necessary to survive death, or intuit Deep Truth through religious experiences.
The scientific conception of the mind shows that thoughts, memories, desires, values, and personalities generally are basically very high-level computational phenomena that it doesn’t make sense to talk about outside a computational context.
There’s no traditional soul that animates such a computer, and even in the supernatural realm you’d need something kind of computer made out of supernatural stuff to even be a mind with memories, etc. And if you understand what a computer is, it doesn’t matter what it’s made out of, so long as there are some low-level relationships (between some kinds of things or other) with certain formal properties, that can be used as computational elements. It turns out not to matter much whether a computer is made out of meat, like our brains, or little solid-state analog amplifiers (like current digital computers)—or even spirit-stuff.
In light of cognitive science, presupposing a different set of laws for supernatural stuff turns out not to be incoherent per se.
The fatal problem is that the alternative realm with its own rules turns out to useless for explaining anything the supernatural was invented to explain, and wildly implausible in terms of what we now know about what minds, matter, and the actual relationships between them.
The accommodationists like to say that science can never disprove the existence of God or souls, so religion is compatible with science in some useful sense.
The accommodationists systematically misrepresent science in two fundamental ways.
One is that they are using a standard of proof that’s unrealistic and irrelevant. Science is simply not about proof in that sense. Never has been. Never will be.
By their supposed standard of scientific proof, we never even disproved the idea that the sun goes around the earth. Seriously.
You can always tweak a bad hypothesis to make it unfalsifiable, e.g., positing that the Sun goes around the earth in just such a way that it’s indistiguishable from the Earth going around the Sun.
Such a hypothesis-saving theory doesn’t even have to be complicated, so that a simple application of Occam’s Razor clearly suggests that it’s false. For example, the geocentric theory can be salvaged by adding a couple of trivial relativizing axioms, and retaining the mathematical structure of the heliocentric theory. Not a major change, mathematically. It’s just crazy, and in particular antiscientific.
Another fundamental way that the accommodationists misrepresent science is by misrepresenting the issue unfalsifiability as something that makes science neutral to religion.
In science, we generally do not adopt a stance of agnosticism toward unfalsifiable hypotheses. If a hypothesis appears to be contrived to avoid falsification, we view it with great prejudice, and without very good scientific reasons to accept it, we generally guess that it is wrong. (Or worse, not even wrong.)
That’s the take-home lesson from the Galileo affair. Some Catholic authorities suggested that Galileo could just tweak his geometric model very slightly to put the Earth back at the center of the universe and bring it into conformance with scripture.
Galileo refused, because science just doesn’t work that way.
The Catholic authorities rightly pointed out that the “slightly” revised theory was equivalent to his for “practical” purposes, and a minor tweak would keep science “compatible” with religion.
And indeed it would have, except that in science, we are generally very suspicious of special pleading.
We can’t rule a hypothesis out if it’s observationally equivalent to any other hypothesis we can’t rule out. The fact that we can’t logically disprove it doesn’t mean that we don’t provisionally rule it out—we generally do.
When faced with a hypothesis that’s clearly contrived to avoid falsification, we provisionally rule it out with extreme prejudice, and even ridicule it.
(IMO, that is the central first-order claim of the so-called New Atheism. It’s what it’s all about. There are a couple other practical points that are important, but this is what it’s all about.)
The accommodationists who say that religion can be compatible with science, and we “can’t disprove the supernatural,” are doing exactly what some Catholic authorities did in trying to make the Galileo affair go away.
They are engaged in special pleading for religion, to salvage certain hypotheses (God, souls) in the face of evident falsification.
They are grotesquely misrepresenting the basic nature of science when they imply that their special pleading for contrived hypotheses means science is compatible with religion.
The accommodationists often accuse the “New Atheists” of doing bad philosophy and being unscientific for claiming that science debunks religion. They say that we’re offering philosophical opinions above our scientific pay grade if we say that science proves there’s no God, or no soul. We are even unscientifically going beyond what the evidence can show.
They could not be more wrong. By their standards, Galileo was doing all those things.
In my opinion—and this is a common opinion among the scientists and philosophers in the relevant areas—we are in the midst of a great scientific revolution, comparable in importance to Galileo’s and Einstein’s. (And even more important in terms of implications for how normal people understand themselves, society, and their lives.)
The emerging consensus among the scientific experts is what Francis Crick called “the astonishing hypothesis” that the mind is the operation of a machine made out of matter, and dualism is simply false.
As Crick pointed out, this “astonishing” hypothesis is only astonishing to people who don’t know cognitive science or philosophy of mind. In those fields, it’s already the dominant view.
If this hypothesis is true, almost all religion Eastern and Western inevitably goes out the window, scientifically speaking, and what’s left is not even clearly religion.
—
Accommodationist like to pretend that the important science relevant to religion is evolutionary biology. They systematically avoid the real issue that evolution touches on—how evolution suggests that cognitive science is on the right track as viewing the mind as the operation of a certain kind of evolved machine, and nothing else.
That’s what strikes at the heart of religion’s claims, especially its self-justifying claims about itself.
The modern scientific conception of the mind strongly suggests that religion is systematically based on false presuppositions—not just that we have souls, but that we have an ability to figure things out by some magical or quasi-magical “spiritual” faculty.
Cognitive science indicates that religion is a result of the failure modes of several cognitive biases, which evolved for other purposes:
We are prone to dualistic thinking, seeing patterns where there are none, paranoia specifically about agents causing those patterns, and confirmation bias amplified by social biases.
We are also prone to seeing things in terms of in-groups and out-groups, such that we denigrate the out groups and their beliefs, and use our shared in-groups beliefs to justify cooperation within the group and the exploitation of out-groups.
In addition, we mostly suck at introspection, and understanding the source of our intuitions, the nature of our internal cognitive/emotional states, and how reliable our intuitive feelings are. In the absence of good reality checks, we tend to think that our extremely unreliable “experiences” and “intuitions” reflect access to some mysterious truth.
(Anybody really interested in this, or the subject of what “supernatural” really means, should read Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained. Scott Atran and Bruce Hood are also good. On naturalistic accounts of morality in particular, Mark Hauser’s Moral Minds is good, and Dennett’s Breaking the Spell does a pretty good job of laying out all of these issues. If you need background on cognitive science, a great place to look is the first two thirds of Steve Pinker’s How the Mind Works.)
It’s important to note that these phenomena are well-established, and were not dreamed up to explain religion. We know that people have all these problems understanding themselves and their world.
None of this is specific to religion, or to “evolutionary psychology” per se—although it fits very well with evolutionary science. This is really just established cognitive science, social psychology, and anthropology—but it’s also a recipe for a certain kind of popular delusion, suspiciously similar to religion.
Given that, the informed scientific attitude toward contrived, unfalsifiable religious hypotheses is not agnosticism. It’s extreme skepticism.
It appears, scientifically, that religious beliefs are the kind of thing that we’re prone to believing whether or not they’re true.
That makes the hypothesis that they’re also true superfluous. It would complicate the model, and if you think about it, it would complicate the model a lot, in implausible ways.
We may not have good evidence one way or the other as to whether there’s a creator “God” that created the universe, so long as that “God” is indistinguishable from any old alien intelligence-like-thing that might have done so accidentally, or maliciously, or more likely for reasons we are utterly irrelevant to, and which are irrelevant to us.
The accommodationists are right, up to a point, about that. We can’t disprove such a minimal “God”, and we can’t even provisionally rule it out in quite as strong a sense as Galileo ruled out geocentricism.
But of course such a remote, uninterested alien intelligence-like thing is just not what anybody in our culture really means by “God,” if they want to know whether science is really compatible with religion. Religion isn’t really about mere possibilities that a particularly dry form of Deism might turn out to be sorta right.
Religion is about human interests, and about religions own self-justifications in terms of humanly usable knowledge, morality, and wisdom.
That is, of course, the only reason anybody cares about religion. It’s supposed to be personally meaningful, socially important, and/or good for you—and typically somehow wise, if not strictly true.
The mere possibility of an intelligence-like creator of our universe is just not something you organize a religion around. You need something it feels right to worship, or regard as a source of humanly recognizable and humanly usable wisdom. It has to be Good or Wise or Magical, and has to impart knowledge or morality or wisdom or at least goods or favors, or something else related to basic human interests.
None of that seems likely in light of science.
Modern science casts great doubt on religion’s most basic presuppositions—souls and/or deep spiritual Truth or Wisdom.
It casts even greater doubt on religion’s self-justifying claims to be a source of anything at all, except systematically delusory claims.
Owlmirror,
That’s right–I don’t know.
Scott (#581)
I’m talking about the justification for making exceptions for religious beliefs. How do you justify relying on faith at all, and how do you justify your choice of one faith-based idea over another?
Why wouldn’t you try to reduce bias when examining religious ideas? Why not use the same standards here as for science? For instance, do you not realize you probably feel the teachings of Jesus are distinctive in large part because you were raised in a Christian culture? What have you done, if anything, to go about minimizing that?
Paul W: Wow. Filed away for future use. Hope it wasn’t wasted, coming so late in the thread…
What if, when the human skull was opened, it had always turned out to be either empty, or filled with a plain, potato-like substance? No brain, nothing like a brain anywhere — just something that helps cool the blood in the head, perhaps. Wouldn’t this have made the hypothesis that thoughts are ‘immaterial things and powers’ more reasonable?
Why were you expecting thoughts to come from inside the skull? How would looking somewhere that doesn’t contain an apparatus for creating thoughts and not finding such an apparatus make it more reasonable that thoughts are immaterial things?
Something that is logically incoherent (“immaterial things and powers”) cannot be made more reasonable by any failure to observe something.
Science and logic: you’re doing it wrong — yes, even you, Sastra.
I haven’t followed all of the “supernatural” discussion, so forgive me for barging in…
It seems to me that Sastra is basically right and has been doing a bang-up job explaining why the concept of the supernatural is not incoherent in the trivial sense that some people think.
This is a particularly useless declaration. You not only don’t understand what is being debated, you haven’t bothered to read the discussion.
The concept of the supernatural is incoherent in a technical sense: it entails a contradiction.
That is crucially false, because in fact supernatural concepts are not generally unfalsifiable. They are systematically about things that have observable effects,
You have here confused the concept of the supernatural with claims of the supernatural. Just because the concept of the supernatural is incoherent does not mean that every claim that is labeled “supernatural” is unfalsifiable or even false — people often call real, natural, observed phenomena “supernatural” — they are mistaken/confused/wrongheaded about the nature and cause of the phenomena, and mistaken about ontology and cause generally.
The word ‘justified’ leads to a logical cul-de-sac when people define knowledge as ‘justified true belief.’
How absurd. Philosophers proposed “justified true belief” as a characterization of knowledge in an attempt to get at what we mean by “knowledge”.
Justification, in turn, usually turns on claims which can be objectively verified.
“justified” means “for good and appropriate reason”; it does not entail “objectively verified”. For instance, I believe that I am holding 3 pennies in my hand. Since that belief is based on visual and tactile confirmation, I believe it for good and appropriate reason. If there are in fact three pennies in my hand, then my belief counts as knowledge, despite the fact that it is unverifiable (there were no witnesses, and the pennies are no longer in my hand).
Faith isn’t like that.
Which simply means that faith claims are never knowledge claims — even if they turn out to be right (the “true” part), they weren’t right for good and appropriate reasons (the “justified” part).
Paul W: Wow. Filed away for future use. Hope it wasn’t wasted, coming so late in the thread…
There is a lot that’s valid in Paul’s comment, but it doesn’t pertain to the debate between Sastra and myself et. al. He seems to think that he’s siding with Sastra, but in many ways not. e.g., he correctly says that
The scientific conception of the mind shows that thoughts, memories, desires, values, and personalities generally are basically very high-level computational phenomena that it doesn’t make sense to talk about outside a computational context.
Which is true, whereas Sastra says that, had we found the skull to be empty, it would “have made the hypothesis that thoughts are ‘immaterial things and powers’ more reasonable”. But the scientific conception of a mind does not depend upon a particular part of the human anatomy containing a grey mass — there are far deeper reasons that support the scientific conception than such matters of anatomy.
truth machine #591 wrote:
There would be no brain — or anything like a brain — anywhere in the body. There would be no part that couldn’t be cut out, and leave the person’s mind and sense of awareness completely intact. This would then give us no reason to think that thoughts are the result of any physical process at all.
Question: can you imagine yourself lying down on a bed, drifting out of your body, and looking back down at it? Could you imagine your disembodied conscious-self then drifting through space?
(I’m asking because I have met other noncognitivists who have told me they can’t imagine such a thing — it contains incoherencies.)
There would be no brain — or anything like a brain — anywhere in the body. There would be no part that couldn’t be cut out, and leave the person’s mind and sense of awareness completely intact.
How do you know? Why would you posit something impossible before entertaining the possibility that you missed the mechanism? And if there truly truly were no such thing — well, then you’re in the territory of #534 and #535 — you’re imagining impossible things.
This would then give us no reason to think that thoughts are the result of any physical process at all.
This is grossly ignorant; we have many reasons to think just that, without ever having opened a skull.
Question: can you imagine yourself lying down on a bed, drifting out of your body, and looking back down at it? Could you imagine your disembodied conscious-self then drifting through space?
We’ve already had this discussion — being able to imagine impossible things doesn’t make them possible. What the fuck does this “self” look with? How does seeing work for it? If it’s disembodied, how does it propel through space? Where is a disembodied thing?
You just don’t understand how to think about these things, and you aren’t willing to learn (back to your self-serving question of what it would take me to change my mind). As I said before, this debate is a waste of time.
One more stab at it: in a previous thread I discussed horses and unicorns. Do you think it’s possible that horses are actually unicorns, but their horns are “unembodied” — drifting about above horses’ foreheads like these consciousnesses you imagine? Do you think that’s a meaningful claim? If you do, then you have a muddled ontology, a confusion about what “actual”, “real”, “exists”, etc. mean — the same sort of muddle ridiculed by the notion of millions of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Something is not real, or realizable, just because it can be voiced or imagined, and that goes for disembodied consciousnesses that can look at things and float through space.
Or deeply confused.
P.S.
There would be no brain — or anything like a brain — anywhere in the body. There would be no part that couldn’t be cut out, and leave the person’s mind and sense of awareness completely intact. This would then give us no reason to think that thoughts are the result of any physical process at all.
Not only would this absurd reasoning make “thoughts” not be physical processes, but the same would be true of all the brain’s other functions. Our entire nervous systems and hormonal systems would be controlled by magic, as would the size of our skulls — why did evolution impose such a pointless source of suffering on women? The question here is as foolish and meaningless as “What if magic were real? This would then give us no reason to think that anything is the necessary result of anything.”
truth machine #596 wrote:
I think you’re right — but it seems to me that the underlying problem here isn’t knowing how to think about mind and brain: it may come down to a fundamental difference in how we think and visualize in general. You and I seem to conceptualize things differently. Not one way right, one way wrong — but differently.
Whether mind is the activity of the brain, and therefore disembodied consciousness is physically impossible is a factual question, and on that we can (and do) apparently agree. That’s an empirical matter which is thrashed out through reason, evidence, learning, etc.
But we’re disagreeing on what seems intuitively possible — and I don’t think we can work that one towards consensus. Perhaps it’s wiring. I seem to have the ability to think very sloppy and loose, fuzzy at the edges and skimming on the surface of appearances, and form it into a half-assed working concept — and you can’t go there. That’s okay.
It’s a gift… ;)
It would be interesting to know if there’s a consistent divide between people in general. And if any supernaturalists are noncognitivists. I’d guess not, but I don’t know.
Sastra, I admit I haven’t been following closely every word of your discussion with tm, but I honestly have no idea what you’re on about. Would you mind terribly stating your argument in a few sentences for me?
In this scenario, why would we have bodies at all?
It sounds like you’re positing a disembodied soul-thing that uses a body like a meat robot; a protein cargo-loader, maybe.
Well, why have all that extraneous biology if it isn’t necessary for experiencing and manipulating reality?
Not one way right, one way wrong — but differently.
No, sorry, anyone who thinks so sloppily that they can talk about disembodied consciousnesses looking at things and drifting about without recognizing that they have just described something impossible is conceptualizing incorrectly. Again, you should ask yourself the question you asked me — if you are wrong, what would it take to change your mind?
truth machine #597 wrote:
Ok, one more stab: yes, I think it is a meaningful claim, in that it is logically and conceptually possible. I think it is empirically wrong. It isn’t incoherent.
It is a foolish question, yes. But not meaningless.
I don’t know. Maybe we just mean something different by the term “meaningless.”
SC OM #600 wrote:
tm and I are disagreeing on whether the concept of “disembodied minds” is incoherent nonsense that doesn’t and can’t mean anything — or just wrong.
Owlmirror #601 wrote:
Right. That is a good argument against substance dualism.
It sounds like you’re positing a disembodied soul-thing that uses a body like a meat robot; a protein cargo-loader, maybe.
And without any explanation for how this disembodied soul-thing interacts with the physical. The complete and utter inability of anyone to come up with any explanation of how such an interaction could occur is why Cartesian/substance dualism is dead in analytical philosophy.
Well, why have all that extraneous biology if it isn’t necessary for experiencing and manipulating reality?
Somehow, it doesn’t dawn on Sastra that this is an excellent reason to suppose that the mind is a physical process — that the inability to find a brain in the head would not negate such reasons.
truth machine OM #62 wrote:
I can’t be wrong about whether or not I can conceptualize something, and imagine it. Not all concepts need to be detailed.
I agree with you that such a thing is physically impossible; we learned that. But it’s not incoherent as such. The contradictions and category errors only come in after we have the empirical knowledge that refute it.
I can’t be wrong about whether or not I can conceptualize something, and imagine it.
Now you have descended into the stupidest of strawman; I of course did not say you could be wrong about that.
But it’s not incoherent as such.
You’re wrong, just as wrong as someone who thinks that the set of of all sets that do not contain themselves is not incoherent.
Thanks. In that case, you’re wrong.
truth machine OM #605 wrote:
No, I already agree that this is an excellent reason to suppose that the mind is a physical process.
The supernaturalists claim that the brain and body are just conduits for consciousness — like a radio or tv set. They also vaguely handwave an explanation that the nonphysical-physical interaction relies on the “force” of our thoughts moving our brain and body around. The more detail they get into, however, the more the whole “explanation” falls apart. It’s not a real explanation: it’s an intuition which they’re trying to back up with empirical facts and can’t, because their intuition is wrong. The facts are against them.
But their intuition is broadly conceivable — solid enough for us to make cogent arguments against it by bringing in those pesky facts. If it were totally incoherent, we wouldn’t be able to do that.
Perhaps we’re working from different meanings of the term “incoherent.”
tm and I are disagreeing on whether the concept of “disembodied minds” is incoherent nonsense that doesn’t and can’t mean anything — or just wrong.
Sigh. Are you being willfully dense, or it an inherent condition? I repeatedly have noted that “incoherent” means “logically impossible”, not that it can’t mean anything. Again, from my previous examples, “the largest prime” means something, but it’s incoherent. The same with a planar map that requires more than four colors. We don’t need any empirical knowledge to determine that these things are impossible.
truth machine OM #611 wrote:
And I’ve noted that “disembodied mind” is only logically impossible given the facts of the matter. Without being aware of these facts, it is conceivable, and possibly true.
We argue against it then, by pointing out the facts. It’s an empirical argument: not a philosophical one.
No, I already agree that this is an excellent reason to suppose that the mind is a physical process
You repeatedly say “no” in direct contradiction to what you already wrote. Here you wrote that finding no brain (or similar organ) “would then give us no reason to think that thoughts are the result of any physical process at all”. As I said before, that’s WRONG. Here you admit that it’s WRONG.
Perhaps we’re working from different meanings of the term “incoherent.”
How many times do I save to say that merely being able to imagine something doesn’t make it possible? Logical possiblity is the sense I’m using, and it’s the only sense that matters. No one claims that people talking about the supernatural are incoherent in the sense of “speaking in tongues” — uttering nonsense syllables, meaningless gibberish. “An entity that is both omniscient and omnipotent” is meaningful, but it’s not coherent — it contradicts itself.
Perhaps we’re having this having this debate because someone keeps missing the point, contradicting herself, and generally acting foolishly.
If you slide on the surface of words or concepts (“natural,” “forces,” “affect,” and so on) and leave their meanings open to redefinition, it’s impossible to determine what’s incoherent, since effectively you’re not claiming anything at all. It’s like taking a sharp photograph and intentionally blurring it, then saying it was impossible to determine what was shown in the original. And now you seem to be sliding on the surface of and trying to redefine incoherence, so the conversation can’t really make any progress.
truth machine OM #613 wrote:
Ah, you’re right. There would still be some reasons to think that mind is a physical process. I think it would be a weaker case, but I’ll admit I was wrong there.
If the lack of any sort of brain was coupled with strong evidence for ghosts, OBEs, NDE’s, and other evidence for a mind which does not need a physical body to ‘get around,’ I think the case for mind-body substance dualism would be considerably strengthened.
And I’ve noted that “disembodied mind” is only logically impossible given the facts of the matter.
You seem to have no idea what “logically impossible” means. That which is impossible because of the facts of the matter is contingently or nomically impossible, not logically impossible.
Without being aware of these facts, it is conceivable, and possibly true.
You are wrong. A “disembodied looker” or a “disembodied drifter” is semantically incoherent, a category mistake, a mistaken application of the words “look” and “drift”.
Again, being conceivable in the sense of “imaginable” does not make something possibly true; for something to be “conceivable” in that sense, it must be the case in some logically possible world. But there is no possible world in which there are disembodied lookers and drifters, any more than there is a logically possible world in which there are married bachelors.
Sastra, could you describe one?
If the lack of any sort of brain was coupled with strong evidence for ghosts, OBEs, NDE’s, and other evidence for a mind which does not need a physical body to ‘get around,’ I think the case for mind-body substance dualism would be considerably strengthened.
Sigh. You just acknowledged that the question of why we have “all that extraneous biology if it isn’t necessary for experiencing and manipulating reality” is a good argument against substance dualism. Evidence that a mind doesn’t need a body to get around doesn’t provide an answer to that question. It also doesn’t touch on the fundamental problem with substance dualism — how does the non-material “substance” have physical effects, and how is it affected by the physical (how does a disembodied consciousness “look”)?
One can always strengthen a case by merely imagining a set of evidence that is not in fact coherent — that entails a logical impossibility.
But wouldn’t identifying a category mistake depend on a prior analysis of the facts? We have to point out how and where they are making a category error — and they will argue that it’s not a category error at all, because they’ve got evidence that the phenomenon is in a different category, than we think it is.
Substance dualism is a different sort of mistake than a “married bachelor” or a “square circle.” It’s an error — a confusion — that starts at the level of intuition.
SC OM #617 wrote:
Such a world would be one where “consciousness” is a thing, a “force” that exists prior to its embodiment — and it would be a world of woo and enchantment.
tm wrote:
It would “look” invisible, presumably. As for the questions on the mechanics, one can easily answer them with “I don’t know.” That’s how they have to answer them — though I’ve seen some interesting attempts to explain it all with “science.” They’re better off without the pseudoscience.
(btw, I have to go. Will look back later…)
I see Sastra’s point… she’s saying that from a believer’s perspective, it “seems” coherent… just like the earth “seems” flat. It’s an illusion, but a very persistent one in the human mind. We have to remind ourselves that it’s not true… that there is no real “up”– just tangents off of planet earth. (Which makes the idea of “rapture” particularly funny.)
Religion rides upon the fact that we are prone to this dualism illusion because we feel like we are a “mind”. Anyone who was ever a believer in the supernatural must have experienced this sort of illusion. We don’t have the mind to imagine ourselves without consciousness.
But the more you understand about science, the brain, matter, etc. the more you understand that dualism is just one of those human delusions–consciousness cannot exist without a material mind. To me, now, a disembodied form of consciousness seems as incoherent a concept now as sound without matter. But it took a while to get there. For a while (embarrassingly) new agey sorts of beliefs “felt” true. I guess I wanted to believe they were. They made more sense to me then the religious stuff I could never make sense of.
Most people on this forum understand that dualism MUST be an illusion–that it’s “incoherent” at its core, and we don’t want any part of “accommodationism”– because it feels dishonest–as if we are supporting the lie. To me it feels like I’m enabling people who have come to believe that the emperor is wearing magical robes, and they are wondering why they can’t really see them.
You’re just throwing around words now. How is that possible?
I really hope that was a joke.
That’s what I thought before, and I couldn’t understand why she was bothering with that. But no, she’s suggesting something more – that it isn’t fundamentally incoherent. (But then, sometimes, she seems to be saying it isn’t if you just slide on the surface of it, which is closer to what she seemed to be arguing originally. It’s all very muddled.)
It’s weird to me and, I’m sure, to others, that Scott, Heddle, Ken Miller, Francis Collins, etc. understand science –or seem to… and yet they hold beliefs about invisible forms of consciousness (beings that do that think, feel, remember, have volition, etc.) that have no measurable input or processing devices–in fact, these beings (triune gods, souls, angels, demons, etc.) have NO MEASURABLE PROPERTIES AT ALL; they are indistinguishable from non-existent and/or imaginary versions of themselves.
And yet these people believe in some such beings. And we would like to know how they reconcile their science with these supernatural beliefs. But they just get fuzzy in regards to exactly what they believe and the details are incoherent. They pull out the “Goldilocks universe” explanation, and they avoid the tough questions.
And, as Sastra, intimates, they are probably doing this to maintain a degree of coherence in their head regarding their beliefs– because once they try to give voice to it, the incoherence becomes obvious–to others as well as themselves. They don’t want to think how the supernatural might interact with the natural or what it means to exist but have none of the properties associated with existence. They don’t want to explain how they or others would come to know of such undetectable things.
And I think they do this for the same reasons many of us did this. It takes time to allow oneself to understand the implications of “no supernatural”. And some people would just rather believe in supernatural then accept the fact that the supernatural things they believe in are no more supported by evidence than the supernatural things they dismiss. People are very good at seeing how others are fooled, but it takes them a long time to admit that they may have been similarly fooled.
Accommodationism just drags on the process and keeps people from growing up and understanding the many fascinating things we humans are discovering about ourselves and our universe.
tm,
Just how exactly does the concept of the supernatural lead to a contradiction?
Or different meanings of the term “disembodied”. At least, you haven’t explained yours. I think TM and SC are interpreting it as having no physical existence – that’s what makes it incoherent. If it’s “disembodied” like a Star Trek-type energy being or an ectoplasmic ghost, it could be considered logically possible.
I’ll throw in one suggestion on coherence vs. incoherence, using truth machine’s example of a planar map requiring more than four colors:
I agree that this is incoherent, provided that you have a large enough perception to be sure that it is really a planar map and not just a graph embedding into a smooth manifold. If it is just a smooth manifold, you might discover yourself needing seven colors, as in the case of a torus.
Education is the solution here. If people believe that they live on a donut, you’ll never convince them that they only need four colors without first convincing them that they live on a sphere (topologically speaking). Their misapprehension of reality renders coherent something that is incoherent to empirical observation.
But wouldn’t identifying a category mistake depend on a prior analysis of the facts?
Category mistakes are semantic errors. Ryle’s original example was about seeking among the colleges of Oxford for the University — but the university and the colleges are in different categories. This is about what “university” and “college” mean, not about empirical facts.
Substance dualism is a different sort of mistake than a “married bachelor” or a “square circle.” It’s an error — a confusion — that starts at the level of intuition.
False dichotomy — mistakes can be of more than one sort simultaneously. Those two mistakes, along with “there is a planar map that requires more than four colors” and “there is a largest prime” all entail logical errors, but some are easier to discern than others.
You’re just throwing around words now. How is that possible?
Indeed she is, and that’s the question.
‘It would “look” invisible, presumably.’
I really hope that was a joke.
I fear it’s not — Sastra actually seems not to have understood that I used “look” as a verb.
But no, she’s suggesting something more – that it isn’t fundamentally incoherent.
Indeed, she is claiming that it could have turned out that way had the evidence been different. That not only can one imagine drifting out of one’s body and looking back down on it, of having or being a “disembodied conscious-self”, but that it could have been the case if our skulls had turned out to be empty, among other things. However, this would require a “disembodied conscious-self” to have a location, a means of propulsion, and to do cognitive processing of photons that bounce off one’s body — all while being non-physical. I say that this is a category mistake — these aren’t the sorts of properties that non-physical “mental substance” can have.
It’s all very muddled.
Yes.
Is the word “disembodied” itself necessarily incoherent?
I have a certain sympathy for what I think Sastra might be trying to articulate, because I’ve personally had weird lucid dreams and sleep paralysis, and because of reading about weird neurological effects and brain states.
If someone was sufficiently naïve and/or uneducated; not really even aware that the brain was what processed sensory input and could be fooled, would it not make “sense” to them that dualism might be true; that there was a soul that was distinct from the body?
Thomas Willis, and other early brain anatomists, probably should have figured out, from their analyses of the brain and body, that there was something wrong with dualism. Yet the fact remains that so far as we know, as Sastra mentions above, most remained remained devout believers in some sort of disembodied soul.
The discussion of bodies with empty heads reminded me of this (which did retain a fragment of brainstem, so it’s not quite there):
http://enwp.org/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken
I agree that this is incoherent, provided that you have a large enough perception to be sure that it is really a planar map and not just a graph embedding into a smooth manifold.
Sorry, but I referred explicitly to planar maps — the whole set of them; there is no “it”.
Or, as I understand metaphysical naturalism, if there were some mental substance that could interact with the physical world in a meaningful way (as usually posited by dualists), it would be physical, in some sense.
I think “dualism” may very well be incoherent.
would it not make “sense” to them that dualism might be true
Again, for something to be incoherent does not mean that it is meaningless or makes no sense — “the largest prime” makes sense but is an impossibility; likewise with “omniscient omnipotent entity” (which must have the power to falsify what it knows).
from post 502.
from post 611.
In fact, the first occurrence of “planar maps” appears in post 630.
Planar map does mean that a planar embedding into a sphere is possible, but if someone cannot distinguish between a sphere and a torus, they can find a “planar” map which will require more than four colors. To them, this will be indistinguishable from you being wrong, and appeals to the definition of ‘planar’ will be entirely unconvincing in the face of their more fundamental error.
Or, as I understand metaphysical naturalism, if there were some mental substance that could interact with the physical world in a meaningful way (as usually posited by dualists), it would be physical, in some sense.
Yes. Which gets to the answer to Feynmaniac’s question, that I’ve answered previously — “Just how exactly does the concept of the supernatural lead to a contradiction?” When you carefully examine the concepts of “natural”, “physical”, “causal”, “real”, “exists” (in the real world, not just set inclusion as in “there exists a least prime”), they are all coextensive. If anything labeled “supernatural” turns out to exist, then it is natural, physical, causal, and real.
In fact, the first occurrence of “planar maps” appears in post 630.
The “a” in “a planar map” is an indefinite article; as I said, it refers to the whole set, as in “for any m, where m is a planar map, …”.
if someone cannot distinguish between a sphere and a torus, they can find a “planar” map which will require more than four colors.
Whatever “planar” map they find, they will not find a planar map that requires more than four colors. We know this because there’s a deductive proof.
Sometimes, in order to address the above paradox, I make the effort to qualify “omniscient and omnipotent” as being shorthand for “the maximum levels of knowledge and power that are not logically contradictory”.
I am not sure that that works either, but I think it at least tries to acknowledge that “all” or “omni-” can be used very sloppily in natural language, which may in turn spill over into problems with overly-simplified logical propositions.
Sometimes, in order to address the above paradox, I make the effort to qualify “omniscient and omnipotent” as being shorthand for “the maximum levels of knowledge and power that are not logically contradictory”.
That would be satisfied by a God that can do just about anything but doesn’t know squat, or who knows everything but can’t do squat. You can’t maximize both variables simultaneously.
truth machine,
Are Lychrel numbers coherent or incoherent? What about even integers larger than 2 which are not the sum of two primes?
Can an increase in knowledge move things from the realm of the coherent to the incoherent (or vice versa), or are there things which are neither coherent nor incoherent? Can anything be probabilistically coherent in your system?
If someone cannot distinguish between a sphere and a torus, then they have bigger problems than allocating the budget for the number of crayons they need to color their maps.
Clearly, they have a hole in their mind.
Or a blind spot in their “intelligently designed” eye.
Are Lychrel numbers coherent or incoherent? What about even integers larger than 2 which are not the sum of two primes?
Since the sense of “coherent” I am using — and that is relevant to this discussion — is “logically possible”, we don’t know yet. Whether something is coherent or incoherent is something that must be discerned — like with the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, which at first blush seems coherent.
Can an increase in knowledge move things from the realm of the coherent to the incoherent (or vice versa)
“things” don’t move, our judgments about them do, and those judgments of course depend on knowledge.
or are there things which are neither coherent nor incoherent?
“coherent” and “incoherent” as I’m using them applies to propositions or descriptions — there are certainly things that aren’t either of those.
Can anything be probabilistically coherent in your system?
I suppose that one could make a Bayesian assessment of whether, for instance, there are any Lychrel numbers, if that’s what you mean. Otherwise, I don’t know what you mean.
They can’t both equal infinity simultaneously, but why can’t there be a curve of non-infinite but arbitrarily large values for both, where each tends towards zero while the other tends towards infinity?
Basically some sort of rectangular hyperbola, I think.
why can’t there be a curve of non-infinite but arbitrarily large values for both, where each tends towards zero while the other tends towards infinity?
There can, but that leaves us not knowing wtf the religionists are claiming.
Sastra & TM,
I think “logically impossible” is a trickier idea than you’re acknowledging, in light of mid/late 20th century philosophy of language. (Especially Saul Kripke & Hilary Putnam.)
Consider the Morning Star and the Evening Star, which turn out to both be the same object, the planet Venus. That’s just what they are, so any correct definition would say that.
We can say that it is logically impossible that something is true of the Morning Star but false of the Evening Star, because if you actually know what those things are, you know they’re the same object, and any claim like that is incoherent.
But what if you don’t know that they’re the same object? What if nobody knows that they’re the same object, yet? (Imagine some time in the distant past where they didn’t.)
You could say—and it sounds like this is what TM would say—that even then, it was logically impossible that something be true of the Morning Star but false of the Evening Star, because they are by definition the same object, even if nobody knows the definition yet.
Confusingly enough, I think that’s quite right in an important and deep sense. The problem is exactly that people did not have proper definitions of the morning & evening stars. What they had was incomplete descriptions, but not real unambiguous definitions, with necessary and sufficient conditions. They literally didn’t know what they were talking about, so they didn’t notice that what they were saying was logically impossible.
(Does that sound about right, TM?)
Even if we use “logically impossible” in that harsh way, holding people responsible for definitions that they don’t and maybe can’t know yet, we can’t necessarily say that their beliefs are incoherent.
So, for example, suppose one of those Venus-ignorant people thinks that the Morning Star spins but the Evening Star doesn’t.
That’s “logically impossible,” given the (unknown) definitions of things, but it is not incoherent. It’s just empirically wrong.
That is, there are imaginable, consistent states of affairs under which the claim could be true—where the two “stars” are different objects, and one spins but the other doesn’t.
To most people, it seems natural to equate that logical coherency with logical possibility, and say that it is (or was) “logically possible” that one spins but the other doesn’t, but it turned out not to be true.
If I recall my Phil. of Lang. terminology correctly (and I may not)…
what we have here is a case of “a posteriori analytic” knowledge.
It is analytic because the truth or falsity can be determined by logical analysis of the definitions of the terms. (Like a bachelor being unmarried, by definition.)
On the other hand, it’s “a posteriori” because the proper definitions of the terms depend on empirical knowledge.
(E.g., what the Morning and Evening Star actually are. The Morning Star and Evening Star are necessarily Venus, because that’s what the word always referred to, even if people didn’t understand what they were looking at. Nothing could be either of those things without being the other. You could imagine a different world in which there were Morning and Evening stars that were distinct objects, but then they would be THE Morning and Evening stars that our words have always referred to, whether we knew it or not. Weird, huh?)
I think some of the confusion about whether something is “logically possible,” like Sastra’s potato head example, hinges on that subtlety.
If we use the term “logically possible” as above, (such that it’s not logically possible that one star spins and the other doesn’t), then it is also not logically possible that a potatohead could think, unless it’s somehow connected to something computer-like that does thinking.
However, if you don’t know what thinking is, and do think there’s some mysterious soul thing that does the thinking, that’s not necessarily incoherent, even if it is in fact “logically impossible” given what minds and thinking actually are. (Sastra, is that part of what you’ve been getting at?)
Again we’d have a case where the proper definitions of terms (like “think”) is not known, so that while we might say it’s actually logically impossible, it’s not necessarily incoherent to believe it. It’s just empirically false.
I think it’s pretty understandable if people get confused about this. Philosophers were confused about it for thousands of years, even Kant, and it’s still kinda confusing when you don’t make clear which empirical facts are to be considered necessary parts of a definition, and which are considered contingent.
Unfortunately that happens a lot when discussing science, because most of our terms refer to things in the world, which we often don’t understand well enough to accurately describe in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in a category.
Consider the term “photon.” The best scientific “definitions” of “photon” in the 19th century the century turned out to be wrong in the early 20th.
However, we didn’t stick to definitions. We didn’t say that those things we’d been calling photons turned out not to be photons, because photons were by definition simply particles. Instead we changed the “definition.” That’s because we generally don’t use real definitions with necessary and sufficient conditions. We just use partial descriptions (which may even be partly wrong) to refer to real things in the world, and assume that we’ll find out what they a really are later.
Paul W #644 wrote:
I would agree: without the knowledge that mind is an activity, and not a thing, conceiving of mind as some kind of special mental ‘substance’ would seem reasonable. It’s a reified abstraction and a logical contradiction, but not an apparent one.
Yes; this is part of the point I was trying to get across.
Yes.
I’ve also been trying to describe the clash between the top-down approach of sloppy intuitions, and the bottom-up approach of analytical science, in understanding and describing the relationship between mind and brain — the “soul thing,” or ghost in the machine. Supernaturalists are reifying abstractions, and treating them as if they were concrete objects. Because this approach involves top-down thinking, they don’t think it needs any reductive analysis.
This is the whole “we get love from a Love force, we get reason from a Reason source, we get life from a Life force, we get morals from a moral source, and we get Mind from Mind” level of explanation you get with religious thought. There’s no real analysis; things just are, what they are, as irreducible essences. The ideas weren’t built by cranes, so asking how a ‘disembodied mind’ works, or how it interacts, or what it’s made of, or any reasonable question you’d ask of a phenomenon you’re trying to understand just isn’t supposed to be relevant. You understand it through experience — not reason.
And then they bring in all the analogies. Spirit? It’s like light. It’s like air. It’s a kind of energy. But it’s non-physical. Conceptual mess, but only when you examine it clearly. They don’t. It feels like your thoughts are things that make your body move by their intentions. Full stop. You don’t look for the foundations of a sky-hook.
This is why science is so devastating for religion. It’s not just what we’ve found out about how complicated things like minds and morals and emotions and brains and bodies grew up from things that were not complicated, and not “mind-like.” You can’t get away with “essences.” It’s the entire cranes-on-cranes approach to understanding, and the rejection of egocentrism.
As for whether there could have been — or be — good evidence for mind-body substance dualism, I still think there could be, in the sense that we could have found out that the Morning Star and the Evening Star were different stars, if they really were. If things were different, then they would have been different.
TM,
No, it isn’t. You can make sense of the concept of the supernatural, even if it doesn’t exist.
You seem to be assuming that the “supernatural” is by definition not “natural” in the sense of being the kind thing science can study.
That’s just not true. The popular conception of the supernatural was around for thousands of years before the scientific definition of “natural” was thought up.
Even now, the somewhat different popular conception of the supernatural does not respect the same natural/nonnatural distinction as we commonly talk about when discussing the scope of science.
You seem to be arguing a fallacy of four terms, dependent on running together two quite different sense of the word “natural.”
That’s a very bad move, IMHO. It’s a move that the accommodationists want us to make, to claim that the supernatural intrinsically unfalsifiable and is therefore beyond the reach of science, so that religion can be about the supernatural and science has nothing to say about it. Of course that actually makes no sense anyway, but it’s a handy trope for them.
More importantly, it’s just not true. The natural/supernatural distinction has always been about a very different concept of “natural” than any modern concept of what science can study empirically. (Except in certain kinds of apologetics and simplistic philosophy.)
There are several related senses of the word “natural” even in modern scientific parlance.
For example, if I’m running a genetic algorithm and letting it run without interference, I can talk about how a certain phenomenon emerges “naturally” from the regular operation of the algorithm. If I interfere with the simulation, by hand-tweaking a genome and seeing what happens, I’m intervening, and the results aren’t a natural consequence of the basic setup.
(I have sometimes used the term “natural” in exactly that way in refereed scientific papers, and nobody has ever batted an eye. It’s just obvious what it means, and that it’s a valid distinction, in context.)
That illustrates an important thing about the word natural—it’s really not making a particular distinction, but a kind of distinction.
In general “natural” implies some normal situation with normal things and normal processes going on, which is not interfered with by something from outside or “above.” (Or just a qualitatively different category of thing that we can usually ignore in that context, either because it doesn’t interfere, or because it does it in such a regular and consistent way in that kind of context that it’s qualitative weirdness that matters in other contexts isn’t an issue.)
Consider the distinction between natural and artificial. It’s the same kind of distinction. We can study artificial compounds that are not “natural”—they don’t occur in “nature”—using the methods of natural science, because the for the latter purpose, substances that are “not natural” are natural in the relevant sense.
The concept of the supernatural is similar. It’s assumed that there is a normal category of “natural” stuff, plus a special category of “supernatural” stuff that works by qualitatively different rules.
There is no assumption that the supernatural isn’t more or less lawful, or that it doesn’t interact with the natural—in fact, it generally is assumed to be fairly lawful and is assumed to have observable effects in the normal “natural” world, which is what makes it interesting to people who believe in it. (Or even to people who don’t, in fiction.)
Supernatural entities and events are generally qualitatively distinct from “natural” ones in that they do generally involve certain kinds of fundamental category mistakes, but those category mistakes are not generally due to simple conflicting definitions that we know about without doing science.
Science-ignorant people have always been (and still are) dualists. Dualism is not intrinsically incoherent, at least not in any obvious way, as long as you don’t conflate different senses of “natural”.
(Actually, the ancients were often not just dualists, but triplists or quadruplists, believing in several qualitatively different but fairly internally coherent sets of phenomena—e.g., brute matter common to living and nonliving things, a life force common to living things, a kind of animal spirit common to to all animals including humans, and an additional distinctively human spirit. Typically those things were arranged in a a more or less hierarchical way, with the vital essence being able to override the properties of dumb matter to some extent, the animal spirit being able to override that in basic volitional ways, and the human spirit being able to override that with distinctively human control over an underlying animal nature. I’ll mostly ignore that complexity.)
There’s nothing trivially contradictory here; it’s just empirically wrong. Living things turn out to be made out of the same stuff as nonliving things, animals turn out to be made out of that, too, with no extra soul-thing, and humans are just animals organized a bit differently.
If we get all harsh about what’s “logically possible,” we can say that it’s logically impossible for these supposed spirits or essences to do their jobs.
For example, it turns out that being “alive” just isn’t a matter of being infused with special stuff—it’s a matter of functional organization of brute matter, and there’s nothing left for a “vital essence” to do. In light of what life really is—any true definition rather than an inaccurate description, it’s logically impossible. It’s a category mistake, but we only know that empirically, now that we have a much clearer idea of what life actually is.
Likewise, I think that in your sense (if I understand it) it’s logically impossible for there to be a human soul that’s distinct from the functioning of the brain (and is the thing that does the thinking and/or feeling and the being-you thing). The brain does all that, and now that we know that’s what it means to think and feel and be you, a dualistic soul would be useless; it wouldn’t have a job to do, and it wouldn’t matter if you had one. Since that’s clearly not what a soul was supposed to be, souls evidently do not exist.
But again that’s not a matter of simple a priori definitions and incoherence between them. The big conflict a matter of incoherence between prescientific a priori assumptions and a posteriori scientific facts.
It’s science that tells us we don’t have souls, not simple philosophy.
That doesn’t mean that dualism and supernaturalism weren’t philosophically problematic before modern science told us they were wrong. Certainly specific ideas were often pretty clearly bogus because they didn’t really explain anything, and just put issues off a step. Also, various specific dualist/supernaturalist concepts contradicted each other, or with empirical facts. (E.g., basic confusions about free will.)
I don’t think that means that dualism or supernaturalism generally was demonstrably wrong due to a conflict between basic a priori definitions, at least not in any simple way. (Hard to do, because it’s a vague general framework.) It’s at least much simpler to show that they’re wrong in light of more complete and correct a posteriori definitions.
(Sastra, is this pretty much what you were getting at?)
Snore. You two continue to attack strawmen and to ignore what I previously wrote. Enjoy.
It’s science that tells us we don’t have souls, not simple philosophy.
That doesn’t mean that dualism and supernaturalism weren’t philosophically problematic before modern science told us they were wrong. Certainly specific ideas were often pretty clearly bogus because they didn’t really explain anything, and just put issues off a step. Also, various specific dualist/supernaturalist concepts contradicted each other, or with empirical facts. (E.g., basic confusions about free will.)
This is so confused. Science does not and cannot tell us that we don’t have souls. What science can do is to get us thinking in ways that allow us to realize the fundamental mistakes in certain notions — philosophical mistakes. But science isn’t necessary for that; contradictory concepts are contradictory regardless of empirical discovery. When Descartes proposed that mind and matter where different substances, some philosophers pointed out that this was incoherent because it demanded that non-physical stuff directs physical stuff and receives information from physical stuff but a boundary between the two where such an exchange can occur is inconceivable — the notion can only be entertained by ignoring the problem of interaction. Descartes responded, but his response was such nonsensical gobbledegook that he is rarely credited with it.
It’s science that tells us we don’t have souls, not simple philosophy.
That doesn’t mean that dualism and supernaturalism weren’t philosophically problematic before modern science told us they were wrong. Certainly specific ideas were often pretty clearly bogus because they didn’t really explain anything, and just put issues off a step. Also, various specific dualist/supernaturalist concepts contradicted each other, or with empirical facts. (E.g., basic confusions about free will.)
This is so confused. Science does not and cannot tell us that we don’t have souls. What science can do is to get us thinking in ways that allow us to realize the fundamental mistakes in certain notions — philosophical mistakes. But science isn’t necessary for that; contradictory concepts are contradictory regardless of empirical discovery. When Descartes proposed that mind and matter where different substances, some philosophers pointed out that this was incoherent because it demanded that non-physical stuff directs physical stuff and receives information from physical stuff but a boundary between the two where such an exchange can occur is inconceivable — the notion can only be entertained by ignoring the problem of interaction. Descartes responded, but his response was such nonsensical gobbledegook that he is rarely credited with it.
Paul W. #646 wrote:
Yes, but it doesn’t appear to be what poor truth machine was addressing.
I’ll try to go back some time and see if I can figure out what I’m missing, or not getting. TM has been very patient.
You could say—and it sounds like this is what TM would say—that even then, it was logically impossible that something be true of the Morning Star but false of the Evening Star, because they are by definition the same object, even if nobody knows the definition yet.
Sigh. Definitions are conventions, not intrinsic properties — it’s meanigly gobbledegook to say that two things are the same “by definition” but “nobody knows the definition yet”.
It would only be logically impossible for something to be true of “the Morning Star” while false of “the Evening Star” if those two terms are designated as having the same referent, not merely because they have the same referent contingently.
Kripke and Putnam aren’t isn’t the final word on these matters, but you don’t even have them right; you certainly have no clue what I would say about various things.
It’s at least much simpler to show that they’re wrong in light of more complete and correct a posteriori definitions.
But this is all that matters. When we say that nice people aren’t necessarily stupid, we are using those words according to what they mean today, not according to what they meant back when “nice” meant “stupid”. When I wrote #433, I wrote it in the modern day, in response to someone writing in the modern day. When I said that Sastra’s #438 is ontologically muddled, I was referring to a post made in the modern day, using language and concepts of the modern day. (Not that I think that going back to previous ages with more vagueness and less knowledge would make it any less muddled, but it’s silly to use this a posteriori notion as a dodge.)
truth machine #649 wrote:
The “problem of interaction” is only a problem from the bottom-up perspective of science (and philosophy), which try to reduce, analyze, and explain.
Top-down systems of thought, which rely on folk physics and folk psychology, simply take note. They observe, and record, and accept. It’s all very intuitive.
Instead of proposing the pineal gland as part of the solution, Descartes could have resorted to either “I don’t know” — or the less honest and more vacuuous “It just does — non-physical stuff can exercise force on physical stuff because it’s ‘A Force.'” Or maybe, THE Force. Done.
Not just wrong, but sloppy wrong — and in a system which considers sloppiness a kind of virtue.
You seem to be assuming that the “supernatural” is by definition not “natural” in the sense of being the kind thing science can study.
You make a lot of wrong and foolish claims about what I “seem” to be doing. As I have said before, “natural” is what is real, causal, existent, physical … what science can study is a different issue.
That’s just not true. The popular conception of the supernatural was around for thousands of years before the scientific definition of “natural” was thought up.
Sigh. From http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=supernatural
supernatural (adj.) Look up supernatural at Dictionary.com
mid-15c. (implied in supernaturally), “above nature, transcending nature, belonging to a higher realm,” from M.L. supernaturalis “above or beyond nature,” from L. super “above” (see super-) + natura “nature” (see nature). Originally with more of a religious sense; association with ghosts, etc., has predominated since c.1799. The noun is attested from 1580s.
“above nature, transcending nature, belonging to a higher realm” — this is an incoherent concept from its inception … “Originally with more of a religious sense” — rooted in religous notions of ontology.
The “problem of interaction” is only a problem from the bottom-up perspective of science (and philosophy), which try to reduce, analyze, and explain.
Top-down systems of thought, which rely on folk physics and folk psychology, simply take note. They observe, and record, and accept. It’s all very intuitive.
Yes, if you’re just willing to blather stupidly, then anything can be accepted. It’s only a problem if you try to be accurate.
Sigh.
Instead of proposing the pineal gland as part of the solution,
That’s not the response I was referring to.
Descartes could have resorted to either “I don’t know” — or the less honest and more vacuuous “It just does — non-physical stuff can exercise force on physical stuff because it’s ‘A Force.'” Or maybe, THE Force. Done.
Less honest and more vacuous just like your posts throughout this thread.
Feh.
What about this:
There is only Nature. Nature is what is real, causal, existent, and physical. It is composed of two parts:
1.) Lower Nature — the material, inanimate objects
2.) Higher (Super) Nature — minds, values, and their forces (souls and spirit)
The essences in the spirit-world of Higher Nature are real, causal, existent, and of a very fine, rarified, different type of ‘physical’ stuff.
Higher Nature is, of course, a category error based on combining an intuitive folk psychology with ignorance of how “Lower Nature” works.
Is this less incoherent — and more wrong?
Finally, I will go back the the original statement that I said was incoherent, Heddle’s “God supernaturally made the donkey talk”. What does “supernaturally” mean in that sentence? If it means “non-causally”, then there’s a simple contradiction with “made”. If it means “non-physically”, then there’s a less simple contradiction — “the physical” is causally closed. Just because it sounds like it says something, and just because people think that they “understand” what is being said, does not mean that there’s anything coherent being said.
Saying that people who talk like this “observe, and record” is stupid and wrong. Saying that “it’s all very intuitive” suggests the worthlessness and wrongheadeness of their intuitions. Saying that it’s “sloppy wrong” is correct, but that’s been my point all along.
Higher Nature is, of course, a category error based on combining an intuitive folk psychology with ignorance of how “Lower Nature” works.
Again, category errors are semantic errors.
The problem with your division is that it’s completely arbitrary and baseless — a mere language game; “very fine, rarified” — what’s that, less dense?
Descartes made a division based on properties; e.g., physical things like bodies have extension through space whereas mental things like the will do not. The problem with that is that it cannot be made to logically cohere — no workable description of the interaction between the two sorts of things can be given; it’s inconceivable.
“God supernaturally made the donkey talk”.
God made the donkey talk through hitting the donkey with his Intention-Energy. It changes not only the shape, but the nature of objects, as easily as your thoughts can change the ideas in your imagination.
It’s not just physical — it’s SUPER physical!!!
God made the donkey talk through hitting the donkey with his Intention-Energy.
And what makes “Intention-Energy” — whatever that is — supernatural? If it’s supernatural, how does it “hit” something?
Also, what makes this “Intention-Energy” “his”? What is the relationship between the two? Why isn’t there just “Intention-Energy” — what need is there of the “God” hypothesis?
It changes not only the shape, but the nature of objects, as easily as your thoughts can change the ideas in your imagination.
This is a different subject, but you’re confused about the causal effects of thoughts and the contents of consciousness. You might as well say “as easily as your thoughts can change the thoughts among your thoughts”.
You say “it changes …” … why can’t we just say that the nature of objects changes spontaneously; couldn’t the donkey have just started talking as a raw fact? What’s the distinction between that and this imagined “Intention-Energy” “hitting” the donkey with the result that the donkey starts talking?
It’s not just physical — it’s SUPER physical!!!
In what way is it not physical? What distinguishes the two, other than ad hoc labeling?
Do you suppose that dark matter, dark energy, the Everett’s multiple worlds other than this one, Lisa Randall’s rolled up universes are supernatural or super physical or should be referred to in that way? Can you discern the difference between those things and what people do in fact label “supernatural”? Can you discern the difference between the sorts of causal models that scientists develop and “God supernaturally made the donkey talk”?
We could go on about this for several more days, but I really don’t have the time.
A comment about why this thread is so frustrating and why SC called Sastra’s position a muddle:
The question has never been whether the contradiction is apparent, but whether there is one. My position is that there is.
There has never been any question of whether people employ sloppy intuitions, reify abstractions and treat them as if they were concrete objects, or don’t think it needs reductive analysis — these simply aren’t points of dispute; they are strawmen, and they are a deflection from the error that you — not supernaturalists — make — the claim that the supernaturalists could have been right if only the evidence had been different. My objection is to the nonsense in #438, where you say that
and
That’s stupid. Scientists never label anything a “supernatural force” in the first place, so they aren’t “re-labeling” anything or saving face. You’re an equivocator — you say “what was once thought to be a supernatural force” — but it wasn’t thought that by scientists, certainly not the ones who, upon verifying it, call it a natural force. Science has come upon all sorts of bizarreness, like quantum entanglement and dark matter and dark energy, but they never call any of these things “supernatural”, and not because they are trying to save face.
More about #438:
No competent scientist would conclude, from this evidence, that “willpower” is “a kind of force”, natural or not. The correct response is “we don’t know how to account for this evidence”. Science constructs causal models, and there simply isn’t enough information here to formulate or validate such a model.
truth machine (#593)
Thanks for unraveling that far better than I managed.
(#643)
As if they do themselves? Isn’t that a huge part of the problem already? Hehe.
~*~*~*~*~*~
articulette (#623)
Hmm, is there a word for this superficial, fake sense of coherence? Anyone?
truth machine OM #661 wrote:
No, they don’t call them that because they don’t resemble anything supernatural. So far, none of the bizarreness has had anything mind-like about it, relating to humans and their desires, and giving us and our ‘consciousness’ a special place.
If a scientist were to claim that his discoveries show that quantum entanglement means that “material existence is something that is solidified, if you will, by being observed by consciousness,” (actual quote from quantum woo-ist), then he’d likely be told by his peers that that’s a supernatural claim — or that’s woo — or that’s spiritual nonsense, etc.
If he manages to make his case, they’d say they were mistaken two times over; change their views, and change the term. I am suggesting that they would only need to do the first.
Paul W,
Interesting point, but bad example.
There was no term (or concept of the) photon prior to the 20th Century.
As per Wikipedia:
“[…] Later, in 1905 Albert Einstein went further by suggesting that EM waves could only exist in these discrete wave-packets. He called such a wave-packet the light quantum (German: das Lichtquant). The name photon derives from the Greek word for light, φως (transliterated phôs), and was coined in 1926 by the physical chemist Gilbert Lewis.”
A. Noyd #663 wrote:
Sure. “Holism.”
:PPPPP
John,
Crap. How about “electron,” before and after discovery that they too are not “really” particles, deep down, but wavicle things with particle-like manifestations. (I’m no physicist, so that might be wrong too.)
I actually wrote about “electrons” first, changed it to photons because I thought it would be clearer. (More people know about wave/particle duality for photons.) I’d forgotten the history of the name “photon.” oops. My bad.
Thanks for the correction.
A. Noyd,
Rationalisation, in one of its senses, comes close.
No, they don’t call them that because they don’t resemble anything supernatural. So far, none of the bizarreness has had anything mind-like about it, relating to humans and their desires, and giving us and our ‘consciousness’ a special place.
You’re such a bullshitter. There’s nothing inherently “mind-like” in the meaning of supernatural — “not existing in nature or subject to explanation according to natural laws; not physical or material”. From you we have
“values”? What sort of crap is that? How are vitalism, prana, or “a universal tendency towards the harmonic balance of Good and Evil” “mind-like”?
Turn #463 back upon yourself.
truth machine OM #669 wrote:
The “in nature” and “out of nature” distinction isn’t really useful, and doesn’t track with use; I think the real crux of the distinction has to do with giving a special realm and powers to the mind.
Vitalism (or prana) have to do with the idea of an “animating force” which is special to life, giving it intention and purpose. Good and Evil are values. If the universe really did work so that doing an evil deed always resulted in a punishment, then the cosmos would be fundamentally moral.
Can you give an example of something that people have called “supernatural” that wouldn’t fit the definition? I’d reconsider.
Paul, electron has a similar problem, you probably should use ‘electricity’, which at one time was thought to be a fluid, but then was discovered to be quantised.
[I note all matter exhibits particle-wave duality (cf. de Broglie).]
How about “electron,” before and after discovery that they too are not “really” particles, deep down, but wavicle things with particle-like manifestations. (I’m no physicist, so that might be wrong too.)
It’s irrelevant. That our physical models were or are incomplete has no bearing on the logical possibility of souls. And that the terms “Morning Star” and “Evening Star” turned out to both refer to Venus was not a necessary truth; there are possible worlds in which all the same observation-statements involving “Morning Star” and “Evening Star” were made but it turned out that they did not refer to the same object. Another classic example is “the thief jumping over the fence is not my uncle” — this is not logically impossible just because it turns out that the thief jumping over the fence is my uncle.
Sastra,
Easy. The magical law of contagion.
The “in nature” and “out of nature” distinction isn’t really useful, and doesn’t track with use
That’s absurd bullshit.
Vitalism (or prana) have to do with the idea of an “animating force” which is special to life, giving it intention and purpose.
That’s ad hoc bullshit; an “animating force” does not entail intention or purpose.
If the universe really did work so that doing an evil deed always resulted in a punishment, then the cosmos would be fundamentally moral.
So what? The conception of karma is that the universe is “just”, but not that it is “mind-like”.
I’d reconsider.
No, you would just find a way to interpret it as “mind-like”. For instance, your “magical correspondences” include numerology and astrology, which are not “mind-like” but you would find some way to invoke it anyway.
TM may think I’m a moron, but I’m going to go n explaining for anybody who does care, like maybe Sastra…
No. You really need to read up on the causal theory of reference and natural kind terms. You appear not to understand how meaning and reference work, and need to read some important post-1950 philosophy, like Kripke’s Naming and Necessity and Putnam’s “The Meaning of ‘Meaning'”.
(I realize that Kripke and Putnam aren’t the last word, BTW. I just think they got some things basically right, even if they were simplistic about it.)
Proper names (like “The Morning Star”) are typically not just disguised definite descriptions, as Russell thought. They are basically referential and heuristic—they’re partial descriptions assumed to pick out an actual thing, or (an actual kind of thing) in the real world.
Meaning isn’t all in the head. Sometimes words mean things that the speaker does not or even cannot know, or even things that nobody yet knows.
For example, suppose that I hand somebody who doesn’t know about atomic numbers a lump of gold, and I tell them it’s real gold. What does that mean to them? It doesn’t mean, in their heads, that I handed them a lump of an element with an atomic number of 79, which we now realize is what being gold is. (It turns out that something is gold if and only if it has an atomic number 79.)
The person I’m speaking to doesn’t know what it really means for something to be gold, as I do. Most people don’t, and yet the word still refers to the same stuff, which they don’t know the definition of. They rightly assume that my statement has a definite meaning—that the stuff I handed them is real gold, whatever that really is, and whether or not either of us knows what the definition of gold is.
For thousands of years, everybody was more or less unclear on the concept of gold, with ambiguous and incomplete “definitions” like “a rare heavy yellow metal.” (How heavy? Is it always yellow? What’s a metal, really, anyway, and is it always that? Is it an element, or can we make out of the right mix of Earth and Fire? Can we extract it from gypsum or wood if we find out how?)
We were nowhere near having a real definition of gold, because we didn’t really know about elements, or whether gold was one, or if so, which one. (We didn’t even know if it was actually rare, or all around us in some hidden form.)
And yet, for thousands of years, people correctly assumed that whatever gold really unambiguously is, there are some things that are really gold, and others that are really not.
And they were right. It was a good guess.
The meaning of the word “gold” hinged on the assumption of there being an empirical truth that that various samples of heavy yellow metals that people had encountered were the same stuff in some as-yet-unknown and perhaps never-to-known sense. (And not really all the samples, just most of them.)
So the closest thing to a “definition” of gold was something bizarre like
1. An apparently rare, usually heavy, usually yellow, usually “metallic” substance…
2. that many people have encountered and agreed is the same stuff…
3. assuming that they’re right and there is something we’d recognize as making it the same stuff, and agree on that criterion…
4. if we knew enough about it…
5. and which we have frequently referred to before as “gold”, assuming that’s mostly one kind of thing in some way that we could, in principle figure out…
6. although we may not ever actually do so.
This “definition” isn’t an logical definition at all, a priori. Not even close. There are no known necessary or sufficient conditions except that purported gold be the same stuff in some unknown sense as actual gold that people have actually encountered, and have several heuristics for identifying, none of which they entirely trust.
What you have is not a definition, but a loose description of what would count as a real definition. (And that turned out to be element number 79.)
Given that, there are were a lot of statements about gold that you couldn’t say were analytically true or false, or even coherent, without waiting for confirmed theory of what gold really is, that we could agree on.
However, many of those statements were in fact meaningful, and we can now see not just what they mean, but whether they’re true.
For example, if somebody said 600 years ago that “gold is a unique element,” that statement was meaningful, and it turns out to be true.
In fact it’s an analytic statement, but nobody had an actual logical definition of gold, so they couldn’t do the logical analysis; they couldn’t even tell whether it was an analytic statement, because they not only didn’t know if gold was one element, and one element only, they didn’t yet know if that was exactly what it meant to be gold—they didn’t know that that was what most alleged gold would turn out to have in common, that actually made it seem like a particular kind of stuff.
The statement that “gold is a compound of Earth and Fire,” on the other hand, was meaningful and turns out to be analytic—any true definition of gold will tell you it’s not a compound—and it’s false.
Note that none of this is simply a matter of convention, like the a priori definition of ‘triangle.’ It all hinges on empirical facts about actual stuff in the real world.
Some definitions are a priori, like triangle. They’re matters of convention. Others are not, like “gold.” It’s a natural kind, i.e., a category of real thing we’ve encountered in the real world, and have to learn the necessary and sufficient conditions of a posteriori, i.e., empirically.
—
Sometimes this sort of thing doesn’t work right. The assumption that a term makes sense and denotes a particular thing (or kind of thing) doesn’t pan out.
For example, for a very long time, people assumed that arthritis was a particular kind of disease, or at least, that most things people called arthritis were the same basic thing in some vague sense we would agree on, if we better understood what was really going on.
Then they realized that some cases of “arthritis” seemed distinctively different from most cases of arthritis, so they guessed that they were something else, and they came up with different names for those things, like “bursitis,” without ever really understanding either in a deep enough way to make clear sense of the distinction.
Later some of those distinctions panned out, but others didn’t.
And then people realized that “arthritis” still referred to two basically different kinds of thing, both common, and both traditionally called arthritis. (Ostearthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.) It wasn’t clear what we should consider real arthritis vs. something different that only looks like real arthritis.
Once we understood arthritis well enough, we realized that there was no clear winner—there was no one set of criteria that would keep both kinds and still rule out other things we’d decided were not arthritis. So we still call them both arthritis, but we distinguish them with adjectives to denote two different “natural kinds.”
—
The assumption that there’s a real kind of thing in the world that we’re talking about sometimes just turns out to be wrong—once we understand the real facts, we realize that our assumptions were so wrong that our rough-and-ready categories were not even approximately right.
So, for example, phlogiston was hypothesized to be some substance, produced by animals breathing and fires burning, that smothered both fires and living animals in sufficient concentrations. That was a vague description of a presumed natural kind, not an analytic definition. If we’d found not one thing like that, but two, both produced by animals and fires, but one only killing animals and the other only smothering fires, we’d have had to seriously re-think the name(s) and description(s) of our categories, to avoid an arthritis-like situation.
But it was even worse than that. It turns out that what suffocates animals and smothers fires, which phlogiston was hypothesized to explain, isn’t a substance at all—it’s an absence of a substance, namely oxygen.
Before we realized that, our “definition” of phlogiston would have been something like
0. a substance
1. that is a unique substance (one kind of thing)
2. that’s emitted by breathing animals and burning fires, and
3. somehow suffocates/smothers both animals and fires when too much of it accumulates
This is so far removed from anything that we actually found that we didn’t just regard it as a somewhat incorrectly-defined category.
In this case, we say that the term “phlogison” turned out not to refer to anything real. Phlogiston was supposed to be a natural kind of a certain general sort, a substance to be defined more precisely later, but the real phenomenon turned out not to involve a novel substance at all. Back to the drawing board.
—
IMHO, that’s the basic thing that happened with the supernatural.
Like “gold,” it was never a category with mostly necessary and sufficient (or strictly logical) conditions—there’s some wiggle room in several dimensions. It was always pretty vague in certain respects, but with a central intuition. (I basically agree with Sastra that irreducibly mind-like properties are typically important, but it’s a little more complicated than that.)
But like “phlogiston,” “the supernatural” turns out to have no referent in reality. Nothing in the real world turns out to be close enough to our preconceptions that we can say we found it.
What those preconceptions are is interesting, and that’s why Pascal Boyer’s cognitive anthropology of religion and supernaturalist beliefs is important.
In an earlier comment, I mentioned that the ancients were often not just dualists, but triplists or quadruplists. That complicates things, and Boyer’s general cross-cultural concept of “the supernatural” takes that into account.
I wasn’t planning on going there, but I think it may help refine what Sastra’s saying so that it makes clearer sense.
More on that later if there’s interest.
John Morales #673 wrote:
Magic assumes that things are connected through networks of meaning and intention, with symbols and values having the ‘power’ to impress themselves on objects.
In the Golden Bough Frazer wrote
The world is assumed to work like a mind works, putting similar things together without any need for physical connection. Real contagion is not like magical contagion.
TM may think I’m a moron
No, I just think you’re wrong, and mired in essentialism, as “Sometimes words mean things that the speaker does not or even cannot know, or even things that nobody yet knows” — this is absurd, and your treatment of it is riddled with mistakes.
You appear not to understand how meaning and reference work, and need to read some important post-1950 philosophy, like Kripke’s Naming and Necessity and Putnam’s “The Meaning of ‘Meaning'”.
I have read them, jackass. You need to read some Quine.
truth machine OM #674 wrote:
The concept of “justice” makes no sense without sentient beings with goals, who interact. In a universe with no life, what would “justice” even mean?
As with numerology and astrology, ‘karma’ assumes a cosmos which cares, and is very sensitive to what happens to human beings in their social and personal lives. The ‘forces’ are not dead and indifferent, but involved. They’re mind-dependent.
Paul W #675 wrote:
Yes, please — I’m enjoying your explanations (and tm’s also). Though I am cutting out for now … bbl
The world is assumed to work like a mind works, putting similar things together without any need for physical connection.
Predictably, Sastra simply equates the supernatural (“without any need for physical connection”) with “mind-like”.
At http://www.thesupernaturalworld.com one can find a lot of examples of things that people consider “supernatural” but are clearly not “mind-like”. The first one I noticed was bad luck from having a black cat cross your path.
Sastra, re magical contagion, the effect is supernatural, and it is the magician’s will that makes use of it; however, in itself it’s quite independent of mind or purpose. Hence, it’s outside your definition, because it’s neither a force (it is a linkage) nor is it mindful.
I must agree with tm here, No, you would just find a way to interpret it as “mind-like”.
For mine, I think you need to either add an additional clause to your definition of the supernatural to account for all its interpretations, or just generalise and remove the ‘mind’ component.
PS As an extemporaneous ad-hoc definition, I’d give something like “The supernatural is that part of reality which consists of causes, effects and relationships that cannot even in principle be explained by science”.
Meaning isn’t all in the head. Sometimes words mean things that the speaker does not or even cannot know, or even things that nobody yet knows.
Just a note on this, because Paul W. seems to have wrongly ascribed to me a belief that “meaning is [] all in the head”. That’s false, but even more false — downright absurd — is that meaning is in words. Words are tokens which are exchanged by language users. Meanings are intended by speakers, but words can only imperfectly communicate them — “getting” someone’s meaning requires inference. When we say that a word “means something”, it’s a mistake to separate this from the person to whom it means something. A word cannot “mean things [to the speaker] that the speaker does not or even cannot know”, although it might mean something to the recipient of the speech. Under no circumstances can a word mean “things that nobody yet knows” — mean them to whom? That the word “gold” refers to a certain sort of stuff does not entail that it means all of the attributes of that sort of stuff, any more than that the phrase “the thief jumping over the fence” means “my uncle” just because the thief jumping over the fence happens to be my uncle.
Unfortunately, the world of philosophy tends to truck heavily in this sort of essentialism, treating words as having inherent meanings; it’s a major hurdle to overcome.
“The supernatural is that part of reality which consists of causes, effects and relationships that cannot even in principle be explained by science”.
I think that gets at an important element of people’s conception of it.
No, it isn’t. What’s bullshit is conflating senses of “natural,” and assuming that the supernatural is the complement of the natural in a broader and irrelevant sense.
No. It’s not precise, but definitely there’s something to it. The life force does the kinds of things that we now know are done by complex regulatory mechanisms.
Prescientific people weren’t entirely stupid, and they did recognize that living things generally had some mind-like properties. Even plants “know” how to grow toward the light and around obstacles, when to change colors, when to blossom, how to reproduce, how to heal after an injury, etc. They “know” things in some vague, poorly defined and rudimentary sense. They are somehow teleological.
That’s not terribly stupid. Even today we people like you and me express similar thoughts when we talk about a “smart” printer or a “smart bomb” or whatever. We know that theres something special going on that distinguishes a smart (seemingly goal-oriented) printer or bomb from a dumb one, even though we know it’s just information processing, by brute matter arranged in particular ways, of a low enough order that you wouldn’t call it a mind. Such things really do have certain mind-like properties.
In prescientific (and unscientific) belief systems, there is a chronic tendency to attribute at least rudimentary mind-like properties to things, with no clear understanding of what that would actually entail. (E.g., the kind of information processing that goes on in genetic regulatory networks to control growth and development.) Many things have mind-like properties while overtly having no minds, without a recognition of the contradictions there, because people don’t understand what minds are, or what properties like teleology or just luck entail.
In particular, they often don’t realize that the information processing required is complicated, and generally have no clue that it could be done by brute matter. So that’s what the life force, the animal soul, and the human soul are for—they are basically unanalyzed black-box entities hypothesized to explain “teleological” things that are clearly getting done by something.
I think you’re missing the point. The point is not that people necessarily think that supernatural entities have minds. (Some do, some don’t.)
The point is that when you look at things that people consider supernatural, they generally have properties that would in fact entail having something like a mind—sometimes just a rudimentary goal-seeking mechanism that’s not, but sometimes quite a high order of intelligence plus a whole shitload of knowledge.
Take Karma, for example. What karma allegedly is isn’t a mind. It’s just a mechanism, or a regularity, or an inexorable law, or something, and explicitly isn’t a person or anything with a mind; it’s impersonal.
But look at what Karma does. Karma is functionally equivalent to something like a superintelligent superniscient being, which can see everything you do and can tell if you’ve been bad or good, and figure out what you deserve, and give it to you.
Somehow, mysteriously, it does things that would actually require a mind capable of recognizing high-level concepts like harm and benefit, selfishness and benevelonce, justice and injustice, and what would count as reward or punishment.
In Pascal Boyer’s framework, there’s a common characteristic of supernatural concepts, cross culturally, that they are generally based on basic categories we use to understand the real world, but combining (mostly) features of one category with extraordinary features of another.
That’s what makes the supernatural comprehensible and interesting.
We can understand karma as an exaggeration of something we understand intuitively using our usual categories we apply to people—it’s basically a wise justice-enforcing person, to the nth degree—with one extraordinary feature: it’s not a person, but an impersonal phenomenon!
The concept is incoherent, if you have any idea what justice and deserts really are—they’re extraordinarily high-level phenomena that can’t be accomplished by any mindless low-level thing. It takes a mind. (Or possibly some non-mind thing designed to be equivalent to one in very sophisticated ways.)
The addition of something from one category to someting in another category is part of what makes supernatural entities tick. They are understandable, because you basically understand them as one kind of thing, but they’re interesting because there are one or a few exceptions, which you can quickly enumerate. Those exceptions may be features that are exaggerated or left out, or things grafted in, typically from another category.
Supernatural concepts basically have to be that way, or they’d be too hard to understand. If they took equally and randomly from two categories, for example, it’d be hard to remember which categories they inherited which features from, and way too hard to reason about the feature interactions. You couldn’t apply your off-the-shelf reasoning patterns that you’ve developed for thinking about basic categories of things like brute matter, tools, living things, animals, and people.
Often those category mixings do embody category mistakes, but it’s typically not obvious if you don’t actually understand the categories at a deep level anyway.
For example, if you don’t know what life, animation, or minds really are, it’s hard to see why you can’t graft an isolated life- or animal- or mind-like feature onto something with with a lower order of “intelligence.”
Likewise, if you think that life and animation and mentation are done by distinct things from normal matter and bodies, it’s not obvious why you can’t put a human-like mind in an animal body, or vice versa, or graft a particular ability onto a completely inappropriate object. (Like a tree that can remember and repeat stuff said near it.)
The basic idea is that what makes something a “supernatural” concept is mainly how it’s constructed from other concepts, not not some picky distinction about what’s “material” vs. “immaterial” or anything like that. Those are secondary issues that result from the characteristic mangling of concepts.
Paul,
Remember Matthew Segal? :)
He went further, as I suspect prescientific people did, and surely it’s not just “living things” that they considered had “some mind-like properties” — the whole conceit being summed up in the concept of telos.
Water “knows” to flow downhill no less than plants “know” to grow toward the light.
It’s not precise, but definitely there’s something to it. The life force does the kinds of things that we now know are done by complex regulatory mechanisms.
What the heck does that have to do with Sastra’s contention that vitalism, or the elan vitale, is “mind like”? It only is by ad hoc assertion.
I think you’re missing the point. The point is not that people necessarily think that supernatural entities have minds. (Some do, some don’t.)
No, you are missing the point, addressing strawmen left and right.
What Karma allegedly is isn’t a mind. It’s just a mechanism, or a regularity, or an inexorable law, or something, and explicitly isn’t a person or anything with a mind; it’s impersonal.
Quite, and this flatly contradicts the assertion that it is “mind-like”.
But look at what Karma does. Karma is functionally equivalent to something like a superintelligent superniscient being, which can see everything you do and can tell if you’ve been bad or good, and figure out what you deserve, and give it to you.
Fallacy of affirmation of the consequent. That “a superintelligent superniscient being” could do what karma supposedly does, does not make them “functionally equivalent” — there are clearly many attributes of minds that are not attributes of karma, or of a universe in which karma holds.
When people start claiming that numerology and astrology and “magic correspondences”
in general are “mind like”, they have left the arena of intellectual honesty.
Um, I don’t think I made my point very clear above. I meant to say that, in pre-scientific terms, things act “in accordance to their nature”, and this doesn’t imply mindfulness.
the whole conceit being summed up in the concept of telos.
Right, but this ascription of intent is not fundamental or necessary in prescientific conceptions. For instance, the bad luck that supposedly follows from walking under a ladder is not due to having angered the ladder gods — it’s just a raw causal relation. The assertion that this, or astrology, “assumes a cosmos which cares, and is very sensitive to what happens to human beings in their social and personal lives” is utter horseshit and the sort of sophistic thinking that characterizes apologetics; It’s we who care, and thus we tell these causal tales about people — but we could just as well imagine that a car or a piano that passes under a ladder will soon meet destruction.
I meant to say that, in pre-scientific terms, things act “in accordance to their nature”, and this doesn’t imply mindfulness.
I received an email today from the Sierra Club, a review of Avatar, that included this statement: “The final battle scene reminds us that if we don’t respect the power of nature, it retaliates with destructive force.”
Despite the anthropomorphic “retaliates”, it does not necessarily imply mindfulness, and I suspect that the author does not think of it that way. I do have to wonder if the folks who sent this out stopped to think about what it implies about Haiti (see (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24wood.html).
I love Pharyngula.
Let’s see:
It seems to me that there are a lot of good points here. Sastra clearly wants to make ‘the supernatural’ as rooted in some sort of theory of mind, typically (but not exclusively) dualist.
The payoff, one supposes, is that you can end up with a less flabby target, a ‘supernatural’ that is potentially subject to falsification. This certainly gets the attention of this naive theist, and I applaud her for making an argument I haven’t heard before.
However, I thought TM’s observation that she would predictably go to great lengths to preserve that strategy to be pretty telling: it’s clearly a pet toy. I remain unpersuaded that everything ascribed to ‘the supernatural’ necessarily implies a theory of mind, but I am certainly willing to play along and see where this definition leads.
Paul, you get the prize for length and ambition in this thread. I don’t think I can unlatch your philosophical sandals. I think you are right that many ‘accomodationists’ use a naive version of falsification to shield their pet belief system from scientific scrutiny. Claims have predicted consequences, and we can argue from their falsification that is parsimonious to reject claims which can not be directly tested.
I also think Paul is right when you say that terms like ‘the supernatural’ “are basically unanalyzed black-box entities hypothesized to explain “teleological” things that are clearly getting done by something.”
Why wouldn’t I agree with that? As previously stated, I think the word ‘supernatural’ is a placeholder for a lot of things, certainly including the ascription of “mind-like” behavior to poorly-understood phenomena.
That includes, in my view, the sort of folk psychology that I think inspired the notion of a lawful Universe. The idea that ‘lawfulness’ is merely an observed ‘fact’, or else a generic property of human activity, seems naive, given what we know about pre-scientific cultures. Our ancestors, more often than not, looked at nature and saw gods.
Curiously, many of these ancestors felt closer to nature than a lot of folk (believers and skeptics alike) feel today. Can you imagine the consternation of ancient man, that so many of their descendants would come to see themselves as not personally connected to the Cosmos? What an irony, that scientists today seem to be the ones who take the greatest joy in exploring the Universe as it is, without any metaphysics, while the faithful in the pews seem increasingly blinkered and impoverished.
It’s a depressing situation. Maybe Steven Weinberg was right when he said that science if one of the few things that lifts our lives above the level of farce, to receive some of the grace of tragedy.
Sastra (#666)
Umm, no. But holism sure can be used to support it. Reminds me how, earlier today, I stopped by Mike Adams’
sitehoard of weapons-grade stupidity to double check something I planned to quote and caught a glimpse of the gushing responses to his “water is magical” article. Holy shit, do I really share a planet with those people?~*~*~*~*~*~
John Morales (#668)
Yeah, that does come close. Though, rationalization stresses avoiding the real explanation and what I’m thinking of can happen out of mere ignorance and lack of curiosity as well. I suppose “common sense” comes close, too.
No, it doesn’t. You’re misinterpreting “mind-like.” That something is mind-like doesn’t imply that it actually is a mind, and rather suggests that it’s not. If I’d meant that karma was or had a mind, I would simply have said so.
What I said was that it is mind-like. The fact that you jumped to to the wrong conclusions about how I meant it was like a mind doesn’t mean I was wrong. Unclear perhaps, but not wrong.
As for functionally equivalent, I meant what I said. Something that serves the same function, and in particular, the function I already described—enforcing justice in a way equivalent to a superintelligent superniscient being. (Yeah, I know supernisicent isn’t a word.)
I had already explained what such a thing could do—see everything that you do and enforce justice, giving everyone their just desserts. That is the function I was referring to when I said they were functionally equivalent.
Sure, karma and such an actually intelligent being would differ in a variety of ways, but that’s irrelevant to the function I was talking about and therefore irrelevant to the sense in which I was saying they were functionally equivalent.
In general, two things that are functionally equivalent are only functionally equivalent for particular functions, and not for other functions. (My laptop computer may be equivalent to my desktop computer for the purpose of running a useful range of programs, but not equivalent at all for the purpose of acting as a paperweight.)
Two things that are equivalent for a function are generally not the same in other ways—if they were, they’d be identical, not just functionally equivalent.
When I chose the phrase functionally equivalent, I was intending to suggest black box equivalence—intuitively, you put good and/or bad deeds in one end, turn the crank, and you get appropriate rewards and/or punishments out the other. The output is a function of the input, and it’s a mystery what happens in between, e.g., whether there’s anything like thinking going on, as there would be in an actual mind actually figuring things out.
(I didn’t put it in, but while I was writing I was thinking about the difference between, say, an expression interpreter that works by parsing and analyzing and executing statements, vs. one that’s basically just a vast lookup table from all possible input strings to the appropriate output strings. In the former case, some internal analysis is going on—the interpreter is figuring things out. In the latter case, there’s not—it’s just mapping concrete strings to concrete strings. But that raises the question of how such a thing could come into existence…)
To recap, you’ve told me that
1. Karma’s not a mind
2. even if it accomplishes what a justice-enforcing superbeing could do, and
3. that wouldn’t make Karma the same as a superintelligent being in other ways.
Well, yeah—that’s what I said, and you missed it.
You’re misinterpreting “mind-like.”
Fuck off.
Sure, but maybe it’s anachronistic to say that these ‘spirit’ phenomena map to the modern philosophical concept of the supernatural? (considering the etymology #654). If a pre-scientific people believe that ‘everything has a spirit’, does that mean that the supernatural is everywhere?
And, not just mental phenomena, but also the material gets traditionally divided in qualitatively different categories (like classical elements) or categories that have both physical and mental properties (yin and yang, four humors). How does this square with the supernatural-is-mental theory?
Eh, we were talking about Sastra’s definition of “mind-like”, and some people here have been trying to make sense of it for …quite a while now. You just inserted a different definition of “mind-like” into the discussion, so I wouldn’t immediately start complaining how others are misinterpreting it…
I think you presented a much milder argument for ‘mind-like’ than we previously discussed- many things considered ‘supernatural’ are analogous to minds in many ways. That seems all right enough, but OTOH, analogies are cheap. (How about “in a way the supernatural is like mashed potatoes”?)
windy #695 wrote:
No, Paul W.’s description of “mind-like” as involving functional equivalencies to a mind would be part of my definition — as would your phrase above on “categories that have both physical and mental properties.” Concepts such as love, justice, good, evil, anger, benevolence, and so forth are all necessarily associated with consciousness and/or relationships between conscious beings. They require a mind.
In what way is a law of ‘karma’ different than a law of thermodynamics? In karma, the physical universe moves around in reaction to human thought and emotion, in order to bring itself in line with concepts that have meaning only to minds. In astrology, being born under a red planet will effect your character, because red means “angry” and the “angryness” of the planet’s energy will impress itself on the human soul. Such “emotional energy” is different from thermal energy in a significant way. Only living things with brains have emotions, and care whether things are “fair” or not. Structure these concerns, abilities, and properties into presumably ‘mindless’ nature or laws of nature or types of “energy” and you’ve got a mind-like hybrid. Supernaturalism has been constructed from our folk theories of mind. The ghost in the machine, becomes the ghost in the universe, or even the universe itself.
One advantage of formulating “supernatural” this way is that, in addition to being more accurate, it makes the concept capable of falsification or confirmation. It gives supernaturalists a way to make their case by giving them a theory that’s testable, and giving naturalists a way to change our minds. Waving hands vaguely over what’s in nature and what’s not, or what’s material and what’s not, is just a pointless exercize in eternal obfuscation — and gives the advantage to fuzzy-minded theism.
“The supernatural is that part of reality which consists of causes, effects and relationships that cannot even in principle be explained by science”.
I would agree with that, to the extent that the mental aspects are supposed to be purely mental, and can’t be reduced to anything mindless. Science could discover and confirm something like a “mind force,” but it couldn’t explain it through reduction to something else. Mind is caused by mind, which comes from mind, and works by the force of its mind power, which is made up of mind force. That’s a science-stopper explanation.
My definition is a minimal one, focused on a particular aspect of the supernatural which I think is critical to distinguishing it, from what it is not. Feel free to identify other characteristics, and stick them in, to make the definition better. I’m sure it needs some.
Is this approach to the supernatural my ‘toy?’ Maybe, but I’m far from alone. There are of course problems with it — such as stuff that seems to fall on the borderlines — but these seem less important to me than the problems with other definitions. It’s always something.
For a more detailed (and better) explanation than I can give, here’s an essay by Richard Carrier:
http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/search/label/supernatural
Yes, but there are underlying commonalities, and Boyer claims to have a fairly general cross-cultural theory of them, which I like a lot, in which modern dualism is a special case.
Yes. But something analogous that is common in modern supernaturalist views, too. Even now, in western culture, most people think that everybody they know has a supernatural soul, and that supernatural soul matters a lot to what they do in the material world.
However, most people do not refer to day-to-day “normal” events purportedly involving souls as supernatural, and they don’t think about it most of the time. They don’t say things like “my supernatural soul asked her supernatural soul whether I should cook dinner for her.” It’s just taken for granted, not consciously thought about in those terms, and not marked off as special.
What we typically explicitly call “supernatural” is when things violate the normal order, drawing attention to themselves and the issue of supernatural entities and their relation to the mundane world.
When the supernatural entities (purportedly) interact with each other directly, or affect material reality in unusual ways, that’s what we explicitly call “supernatural” and make a big deal about.
That’s largely what Boyer’s theory is about:
1. the underlying mental schemas by which people understand common and important kinds of things (especially brute matter, tools, living things, animals, persons),
2. and how they are explained with supernaturalist concepts (e.g., one or more kinds of souls), and
3. how that’s taken for granted, and doesn’t really matter much for the most part—e.g., reasoning about other minds is mostly just reasoning about other minds, whether you think they’re souls or computatational processes, or just have no idea what they really are
4. how basic concepts are transformed in simple ways to yield distinctively “supernatural” concepts.
5. why those supernatural concepts systematically have certain characteristics, e.g., being mostly one normal basic kind of thing, with something added or removed or amplified, and/or mixed with just a little bit of another kind of thing. (Because if they weren’t, they’d just be baffling, and hence uninteresting. Nobody could understand and repeat stories about them, so the ideas would die.)
The generalization to more-than-dualism is actually one of the basic features of Boyer’s theory. Modern dualism is just a reduced case of something more general.
Boyer regards the kind of dualism we see in Western culture as an unusual thing, anthropologically, and largely a response to modern science. Most people accept that many things are explainable naturalistically that previously were assumed to have some rudimentary soulish teological thing animating them, but the distinctive human soul is off limits to science.
(And actually, it’s not that simple. I suspect that even now, in the U.S., many if not most dualists are actually at least triplists—they still believe in a vitalist “life force,” as well as souls.)
Boyer says that against this backdrop of supernaturalist assumptions—one or more kinds of souls interacting indirectly through the material world—the remarkably “supernatural” events involve manglings of any of the usual schemas, not just things involving obviously person-like souls.
For example, you might have a plain material object like a boulder, that magically can locomote, like an animal. (Despite being otherwise brute matter.) It’s not really smart like a cunning animal, and can’t even do most of the distinctive things that plants can do. But it can roll into your way and block your path, or something like that.
This is immediately recognizable as a magical object, but not because it can do something that no normal kind of thing can do—even plants can do a lot of more sophisticated things, and animals are way better at moving around and interacting with agents in the world.
It’s recognized as magical because it can do things that are surprising for the basic type of thing that it is, i.e., brute matter.
That’s what makes it interesting, narratively. You can quickly grasp the idea of a rock with one animal-like ability, even if it makes no sense, because it’s a fairly simple mangling of a pre-existing schema with a feature of another pre-existing schema. You can quickly grasp how it’s weird, too, so that it’s memorable, and you can retell the story.
Notice that in terms of ultimate mysteries, from a prescientific point of view, a rock that can locomote isn’t any more mysterious than perfectly normal a plant or animal—you have no real idea how they actually do what they do, either, but you do have a fairly high-level schema that tells you what to expect from them.
(Plants grow and stay rooted, animals are agents that can recognize you as an agent and either run away or maybe attack you, etc.)
One of Boyer’s major points is that this sort of thing is very common in religion—it’s generally about reasoning at a certain “normal” level of abstraction, using abstractions appropriate to everyday reasoning about basic categories of everyday objects.
Religion is not generally about ultimate explanations. It usually doesn’t even try to explain things in any real depth—e.g., how an animal soul or human soul can do what it does, or why there is anything rather than nothing at all.
In prescientific cultures, ultimate issues are rarely “problematized”—they’re just not on people’s minds. Nobody but maybe a few theology weiners is sitting around worrying about ultimate origins, or how souls actually could possibly work, or why there is water, or anything like that. By and large, people take a certain ontology for granted—the basic categories I mentioned, plus a whole slew of auxiliary distinctions (like two sexes) and useful concepts (like deal-making and fairness).
Religion does not generally even try to explain those things. Instead it assumes them, like people in general do, and leverages them. So, for example, we can (mis-)understand things like fairness and sacrifice because we rely on schemas developed for dealing with other people—dealing fairly with in-group members, appeasing bullies, etc.
The bottom line is that religion is remarkably easy to explain, if you ignore theological propaganda about how religion is about “ultimate issues.” Rather than looking at how people attempt to justify it, you should look at how it really works, in terms of how people think about the normal world—and in only slightly different ways, about the supposed supernatural.
To me—and this addresses a couple of questions by other people earlier—the most interesting thing about theories like Boyers is that if we can explain religion naturalistically in a fair bit of detail, and it turns out that religious patterns of belief fixation are systematically bogus, that has huge implications.
A lot of people think that religion itself is impossible to explain scientifically, both because religion is about things that science can’t say are false, and because religion itself is the kind of mysterious thing that science can’t deal with.
Even a lot of atheists and especially “agnostics” believe that NOMA-esque nonsense.
It’s bullshit, and the way to vividly demonstrate that clearly is to go ahead and explain religion in general, naturalistically, doing two things:
1. Explaining that it’s not just particular religious beliefs that are bullshit, but there’s a few general kinds of mistakes that underly large categories of religious bullshit, so that we don’t have enumerate them and refute them case-by-case.
2. Explaining how the phenomenon of religion fairly generally is systematically a bullshit generator, rather analogous to paranoid schizophrenia in an individual.
The 2nd point is particularly important for some people. Rightly or not, in practice the burden of proof is on us, the minority, to show why religion in general is the kind of thing that you should systematically disbelieve unless you find extraordinary evidence for it.
If we explain religion itself naturalistically, and have good evidence that the explanation is even very approximately right, religion is in deep doo-doo.
That’s why Freud was so threatening to religion; he basically diagnosed it as something like a mental illness, and gave an etiology of the disease, which undermined religion’s claims to anything like truth about anything.
Many people took Freud seriously—too seriously, because he was unfortunately pseudoscientific in a lot of ways, and Freudianism itself became largely a religion-like cult of personality with its own unfalsifiable dogmas.
Freud’s analysis of religion was one of the things that made atheism more respectable among educated people, for a time. (And then less, when Freud rightly fell from favor. Oops.)
What we need is a way of accurate diagnosing the basic problems with religion, and giving a convincing etiology of the “disease,” which isn’t wrong like Freud’s.
Short of that, even a plausible materialistic etiology has a lot of value. We may not convince a lot of people that the particular theory is true, but if enough think that it’s even plausible, that itself will concretely demonstrate that NOMA is false, or at least not clearly true, in a way nothing else would. Many people will be skeptical that science could explain religion, even in principle, until you actually give them a concrete explanation. That’s when it sinks in.
This is the kind of thing that should be on the cover of NEWSWEEK, with headlines like “Has Science Explained Religion?”
More narrowly, having this stuff be well-known among atheists and agnostics would help a lot, at our end of the Overton Window. It would make it clearer why NOMA is just false—handy in the endless accommodationism war—and why nonbelieving “agnosticism” isn’t superior to disbelieving atheism.
(Dear Dog am I sick of smug accommodationist agnostics and even atheists who think that science is agnostic toward religion, such that the “New Atheists” are out of line for pushing their “personal, philosophical” views “as though they were scientific.” I’ve spent way too much time over at the Intersection lately, dealing with the epidemic of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome among the accommodationists. Wow.)
One of the great things about a theory like Boyer’s is that it explains a whole lot about religion fairly economically, and basically quite plausibly. Even if it’s not actually true in various details, it vividly demonstrates that a bunch of things most people consider inexplicable are naturalistically explicable, even if we don’t know quite the right explanation yet.
That is, it can serve as what Dennett calls a “don’t-care theory,” showing that you can plausibly explain a phenomenon by one mechanism (e.g., individual selection) say individual selection, without invoking another mechanism (e.g., group selection).
We may not have the right theory of religion that that doesn’t assume the reality of the supernatural, but as with detailed evolutionary theories, our problem is not a shortage of particular credible theories; it may be having too many credible theories to pick from. We’re not stumped by things people often assume we’re stumped by.
Windy,
I think that Sastra’s view is actually fairly close to mine, but she’s said some confusing things that I wouldn’t have said without immediately qualifying and explaining them to avoid misunderstanding. (She seems to agree.)
In any event, I was only defending my own views, rather than entirely agreeing with Sastra, or what it may have seemed like Sastra was saying.
Sorry, I should have made that clearer, given the context.
Has it gotten any clearer with my latest post or three? (And BTW, I intend to deal with TM’s example of mindless Luck; that may help too.)
I’m defending a framework basically like Pascal Boyer’s, where there are only a few important, common schemas for basic kinds of things that we commonly reason about in characteristic and distinctive category-specific ways, and that supernatural concepts are generated by only a few fairly simple transformations of those schemas.
(Boyer gives a fair number of disparate examples from a bunch of religions and free-floating superstitions.)
I don’t know. Can you think of any examples of supernatural concepts that are better explained as being like mashed potatoes than as simply-mangled basic schemas?
Paul, I for one am finding your posts quite interesting.
Can’t comment on Boyer’s work, as I’ve only read reviews of it, but may I say I find your heartfelt parenthetical expostulation regarding religion in agreement with my own position.
—
Sastra, thanks for the link to Carrier’s blog; it really does help me understand your position.
I do think that the overwhelming bulk of people have but an inchoate conception of the supernatural, and don’t distinguish between it and the paranormal, or effects and entities or the like — it’s akin to a conceptual version of the Gordian knot, but not amenable to Alexander’s solution… :(
Which puts us more skeptical people, when confronting such believers, in the unenviable position of having to categorise and clarify what it is they purport to believe in order to be able to meaningfully argue about it!
Am I the only person who’s been following this thread and hearing, as background music, Zero Mostel singing, “Comity, comity, comity comity comity—toNIIIIIIIGHT!”
Ron Sullivan
http://toad.faultline.org
Ron, I venture to say: “Yes!” :)
Ron,
I’ve been guessing that a lot of people missed the comity/comedy pun, or how good a pun it is, because they don’t realize they’re actually homonyms.
(The t phoneme is actually pronounced as a d in that phonic context, but if you know the word, you still automatically hear it as a t phoneme, without being conscious of any of it. Out of context, you’d hear “comity” as “comedy”.)
It’s easier to hear the pun if you move your lips when you read, mentally pronouncing the word without actually voicing it.
That’d explain why some of us did get it.
Getting back to the supernatural/natural distinction, now that I’ve blathered a picture of a cognitive theory of supernaturalism… I’ll recap a bit and then get to a few issues I left hanging hundreds of posts back…
I think it should be clear now that the falsifiability issue is a red herring and that it’s a very different distinction from what anybody really means by “supernatural” outside of a certain kind of bizarre theological/apologetic/accommodationist kind of discussion.
Cross-culturally, people make a qualitative distinction between brute matter and things with teleological properties. Things with teleological properties are regarded as qualitatively different.
People generally have more than one sense of the word “supernatural.” (Or in other languages, a near-equivalent word or pair of related words.)
1. Being something beyond brute (non-teleological) matter, and having teleological properties. (Or more generally, properties somehow consistent with teleology.) So souls, even vegetable or animal souls, would count.
2. Manifesting supernaturalism in sense #1 in an unusual way, violating the normal order of how the supernatural interacts with brute matter.
So, for example, in most cultures there’s some kind of concept of ghosts that’s remarkably similar to the concept in our culture.
(Even if their theology says this concept is simplistic and deeply wrong, they intuitively get the concept, because it’s constructed so easily from basic intuitive categories. Atheists, Mormons, and henotheistic monistic Hindus have no trouble grasping the concept.)
It’s usually assumed that ghosts are basically spirits like living people have, that have somehow shed the brute, non-teleological matter of their bodies.
That spirit is recognizably “supernatural” in sense 1, even when it’s in a living body in the usual way interacting with other spirits indirectly, through brute non-teleological matter.
So it’s natural (in a sense close to normal) that the supernatural interacts with the natural in certain ways, e.g., people’s souls communicating with each indirectly through the brute matter of their bodies.
An entity or event is regarded as supernatural in sense 2 when the usual day-to-day order is violated, e.g.,
* a soul leaving its body and being visible to living people, or
* living people’s souls going out for a stroll and coming back to their bodies,
* two living people communicating directly mind-to-mind, without the need for the mundane non-teleological matter of their bodies to be involved
* an embodied or disembodied soul directly influencing brute matter, e.g., moving objects by the force of thought.
—
If we conflate these absolutely normal concepts of the supernatural with the ufalsifiability issue, we’re not only wrong, we end up sounding stupid for insisting on shoehorning a big round concept into a small square hole.
Most people intuitively get these sorts of distinctions, though very few can articulate them, and sooner or later they’ll rightly sense that we are (1) being very simplistic, and (2) not really talking about what they’re talking about.
We’ll sound like ideologically blinded atheists who do not understand the most basic concepts of most religions, and that’s not entirely wrong. If we can’t get the apparently universal concept of ghosts basically right, like everybody else in the world does intuitively, we look stupid.
more coming…
Paul, I don’t actually move my lips when I read but I do listen to what I’m reading, or writing. It’s useful when I edit, too—sometimes for so basic a thing as the need for more or fewer commas.
I confess to a penchant for puns and other low comedy.
Ron Sullivan
http://toad.faultline.org
I want to address the issue of why people didn’t decide that electricity or radio waves or X-rays were “supernatural,” despite their being unlike normally-observable brute matter, and superficially similar to a lot of concepts of supernatural entities. (Sastra has addressed this already to some extent, but I can’t help chiming in.) I’ll also address why quantum mechanics seemed supernaturalish to some physicists for a while.
It’s interesting to note that when people first started understanding electricity, it did strike many people as like a supernatural phenomenon, in that it
(1) was mysterious and invisible,
(2) could interpentrate with normal brute matter,
(3) seemed sorta lifelike and/or maybe directly life-related.
(For example, it “knows” where to go in some weak sense, you can route it invisibly through solid steel… and apply it to a live animal, and invisibly make the animal convulse and even die; you can make a dead frog’s leg twitch with it, as though it was alive.)
A lot of people guessed that electricity was the life force that could turn nonliving matter into living matter, if you just knew how to combine them. A lot of other people didn’t buy that, but intuitively got the concept. People still intuitively get that concept, which is why Dr. Frankenstein animating the monster with lightning still makes an obvious kind of sense, even to people who clearly know better, and know it’s complete bullshit.
What quickly made electricity clearly not supernatural is that even though it’s invisible, it still fits pretty neatly into the category of brute, nonteleological matter.
We had experienced other invisible entities all along—sound, gravitation, heat, light beams, refraction, etc. Something being invisible in itself, and only observable indirectly, is entirely consistent with it being a brute physical phenomenon, nothing like life or mentation.
A related issue that’s been raised is the alleged stumper for dualism about how “immaterial” supernatural phenomena interact with “material” phenomena.
Science has dealt with that kind of weirdness before, and still does. If things clearly interact sometimes and not others, and you don’t know how or why, you just accept that fact, keep going, and worry about it later.
Think about early conceptions of matter, energy, and motion. Energy was a distinct thing from matter.
To a lot of people it was an appealing idea that all there was was matter in motion, and no other kind of energy on the loose, with spooky “action at a distance” even in a weak, non-instantaneous sense.
Light supposedly consisted of a stream of material particles, interacting with something like atoms by mechanically contacting them. (Maybe even gravity did.)
Even when light refraction as waves was recognized, it was commonly guessed that the waves had to be propagated through some kind of “material” medium with elastic mechanical properties, so they invented the luminiferous aether, which filled the vacuum, to keep it matter in motion.
When it was realized that light didn’t behave like it was traveling through an elastic medium, and the aether wasn’t real, that was a stumper. When light turned out to be waves sometimes, and particles sometimes, that was even weirder. WTF?
Still, few scientists thought to connect any of that “mysterious” stuff up with the supernatural, even though invisible and seemingly paradoxical stuff was going on.
Why not?
I think it was because none of it seemed teleological, or regular in any way that suggested a correlation with teleology, at that point. It was just weird and that’s not enough to suggest the supernatural strongly to most people, or even modestly to most scientists. It’s just a theoretical problem with the behavior of brute matter, so you go and try to solve it.
That changed when quantum physics came along.
(And in the popular imagination, there’s still something that’s plausibly supernatural or quasi-supernatural going on there, even though physicist mostly dropped the idea decades ago. Hence quantum woo.)
With quantum physics, it seemed that human observers had a bizarre effect on very low-level physics, with the very high-level act of observing having a bizarre and bizarrely random effect on the collapse of the wave function.
According to fairly basic reductionist paradigms of modern science, that just shouldn’t happen. High-level phenomena like minds and their observations shouldn’t be able to directly affect low-level physics. The underlying physics should stay the same, no matter what chemistry, biology, and psychology is built on top of it.
To some people, this immediately suggested a profound connection between seemingly high-level intensely organized phenomena (like minds and consciousness) and the lowest levels of reality, where things had otherwise seemed extremely simple, utterly mindless, and not the slightest bit correlated with anything teleological.
After a while, scientists and philosophers realized that connecting perception and consciousness to low-level physics wasn’t necessary to explain the data—it wasn’t necessary to revolutionize science that profoundly—although any explanation would be very weird, somehow. What mattered to collapsing the wavefunction was not minds per se, but just instruments that magnified quantum events to have macro-scale consequences. While that is weird, it isn’t nearly so weird that that things at very different physical scales would interact oddly than that minds, in particular were what mattered. (There was also skepticism about whether the wavefunction collapsed at all, or something very different was going on, e.g., the many-worlds interpretation and its successors.)
Most physicists concluded that looking for deep connections between mentation and physics was just a mistake, and a mistake of a very old and tempting kind, namely looking for humanly-relevant meaning where there is none, and seeing anthropocentric patterns in stuff that’s random or just counterintuitive.
Unfortunately, the general public never got the memo, and quantum woo lives on.
(BTW, I’m not a physicist or historian of science, so any of the above may be wrong, and anybody who knows better is welcome to correct me.)
Getting back to the mind-body problem, I think it should be clear now that science has repeatedly dealt with mysteries about how qualitatively different kinds of things (e.g., light) do and don’t interact with a very different kinds of things (e.g., matter). In general, we haven’t known those things; at any given point we accept that there are regularities and irregularities in however the do and don’t interact, and we are often very surprised by how things turn out at a lower level. (E.g., wave/particle duality, a zoo of short-lived particles that mediate interactions between other subatomic particles, etc.)
It is certainly not obvious that dualism is an intrinsically incoherent concept, even if the supernatural is irreducibly teleology-related.
If quantum physics teaches us anything, it’s that we should be very careful before we rule things out as incoherent and logically impossible in any simple sense—and deeply mysterious interactions between qualitatively very different things are not necessarily a big problem.
If science can’t study the supernatural, it’s not for some simple, obvious reason.
A lot of things are pretty complicated and weird, and very difficult to study—e.g., human psychology, and quantum weirdness. We study those things anyway.
—
Insofar as I understand the concepts, I don’t think that the supernatural is necessarily any weirder than things we do study. At least some supernatural things should be and are open to scientific investigation—e.g., ghosts, ESP, luck, astrology, effective prayer, and anything soul-like not actually done by the brain. If they exist, we should find them.
Hypothetical supernatural entities are not typically unfalsifiable—in their clear and plain form, they generally are falsifiable.
That’s a bit of an oversimplification, though, because what makes a hypothesis falsifiable or unfalsifiable is not typically a fact about the hypothesis itself. It’s a fact about how much you’re willing to evade falsification, by tweaking auxiliary hypotheses so that the central hypothesis never decisively fails…
…as illustrated by the Galileo affair, and what I said in comment #587. We could have changed the theory that the Earth is in the center of the universe with a couple of relativizing axioms, and that’s a “smaller” change than some we ended up making, e.g. elliptical orbits and especially relativity. But we are rightly prejudiced against theories that seem contrived to avoid falsification of the central hypothesis, especially if that hypothesis is preferred on religous grounds.
When science and religion conflict, you can pretty much bank on religion being wrong; it’s generally and systematically been wrong before, which is the real impetus and justification for “methodological” naturalism. Religion systematically sees teleology or something similar where there isn’t any—as we did yet again when we goofed on interpreting the weirdness of quantum mechanics—so we have plenty of empirical evidence that distinctively religious hypotheses are almost invariably wrong, and therefore should get approximately zero weight.
This has nothing to do with the mythical unfalsifiability of supernaturalist or religious claims, and everything to do with their entirely-too-evident falsifiability.
Ron:
Don’t tell anybody, but me too.
I confess to looking for comedy, high and low, to I can analyze it cognitively and explain the joke until it’s stone cold dead.
I completely agree with that as a practical approach: I simply don’t think that the concept of ‘supernatural’ makes any sense ontologically. I understand it’s useful as a catch-all term for common pseudoscientific ideas, and for this reason we are tempted to try to give it a definition. But even in this thread, I notice that if you define all folk concepts of mindlike things as ‘supernatural’, you then have to alternate between ‘sense 1’ supernatural and ‘sense 2’, the really or remarkably supernatural. Isn’t that a bit confusing? I think it’s a mistake to grant minds and everything ‘mindlike’ an a priori supernatural status, absent a scientific demonstration that they can be derived from ‘brute matter’ on first principles. Even if it’s only for the sake of the argument.
I agree
What are you talking about now? It’s generally not the atheists who conflate ghosts and such with unfalsifiability (the accommodationists do conflate them, but they don’t usually care to argue for ghosts). Isn’t it pretty common for people who think they’ve met their mother’s ghost, or an angel, or whatever, to insist that the experience was somehow “outside science”?
Windy:
I’m not quite sure what either of those sentences actually means.
This seems to me more than a “practical approach,” unless that just means “scientifically tenable.”
Boyer’s theory is supposed to scientifically explain the actual phenomenon of supernaturalism, cross-culturally and throughout history.
One of the things that seems successful about his theory is that most or all of the phenomena that are called “supernatural”—by cultural anthropologists or just plain folks watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Wars—do seem to fit very well.
We need an explicit concept of the supernatural to explain what seemingly very diverse things like gods and vampires and The Force and Karma and Brahman have in common, which normal people immediately recognize as the kind of thing you could make a religion about.
Very few people can articulate the concept of “the supernatural,” but there are widely shared tacit beliefs—unanalyzed presuppositions, and if Boyer hasn’t nailed those, I think he’s come pretty close.
I’m not sure what you mean by “catch-all.” This doesn’t seem like a “catch-all” to me. It seems like a scientific theory, rather like Darwin’s concept of species. (But clearer!) There may be fuzzy cases, as there are with species, but there’s something important and basically right about the idea.
What Darwin did was to explain why there are species—what real “natural kind” our intuitive concept of species more or less corresponds to.
What Boyer is doing is explaining why there are supernaturalist concepts, and what they basically are, in a way that reveals a deep regularity that accounts for the superficial diversity—what the underlying structure is behind the seeming grab-bag of particular phenomena.
Yes, but lots of words work in that sort of schematic way. Natural language is filled with cluster concepts, such that words have several related senses. (That’s why I gave the example of “natural” vs. “artificial,” even in scientific discourse.)
It’s not a fault of the theory that it’s not trivial, with only one sense of a popular word. If the popular word “supernatural” has two common senses, as I think it clearly does, the theory must account for that. If it can do so economically, and I think it clearly does, that’s a big plus for the theory, not a minus at all. Any simpler theory that required a single sense of the word “supernatural” would just be empirically wrong. A theory that shows how one word sense is derived from the other in a simple way is ideal.
I’m not sure what you mean here. Could you clarify?
Boyer’s theory is that people are natural dualists, or really something like quadruplists, and that what distinguishes the basic more-or-less instinctive categories distinguished by levels or aspects of teleology.
On his theory, much of that teleology is functional—you may or may not think that plants have minds that are actually aware, but you know that they behave in certain respects as if they did.
Even within a given culture—even in our modern culture—different people may interpret that recognized teleology differently.
For example, a lot of New Age woosters think that plants do have something like our emotions and consciousness, and even that they’re telepathic. A lot of other people think that’s ridiculous, and that plants are more like brute matter in that sense. Interestingly, most people in both groups don’t know enough about their own minds and what emotions and consciousness really are to have any clear idea what they mean when they say those things.
To me, that’s a big plus for Boyer. He really does seem to be talking about basic intuitions and cultural universals. With a fairly simple theory—it’s hard to imagine a simpler one with anywhere near the explanatory capability—he can explain the similarity of beliefs between ancient Sumerians, golden age Greeks like Aristotle, medieval Catholics, and typical Americans praying to Jesus, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or talking to their plants.
Paul W:
Thanks for pointing me to this thread. Good points all and much as my position has been for many years.
My background is physics and applied computer science so I understand your points and haven’t found anything I disagree with yet. I will have to spend a bit more time reading through more of the comments. I am more than impressed by the enthusiasm of this blog’s supporters. How do you find the time?! But don’t stop.
I think you’re mis-interpreting my comments as if I’m trying to argue against Boyer. I was only talking about the narrower issue of whether it’s wise to give the supernatural an ontological definition as a ‘fundamentally mindlike’ substance, or whatever. I think Boyer would agree that people don’t normally think about ‘the supernatural’ in those terms.
Windy,
OK, cool.
I’m not sure whether you’re objecting to an “ontological” definition, or just to the term “mind-like,” meant broadly to include irreducible or just unanalyzed black boxes that behave functionally like minds.
If it’s the latter, I think you’re right that the term is confusing, as demonstrated in this thread.
What I think Sastra and I both mean is something closer to teleological, but we also mean to point out that in light of science anything teleological would actually require something more or less like a mind—and the higher the level of teleological, the more mind-like the information processing would have to be.
That’s part of the argument that science conflicts with religion—we now know, scientifically, what makes things behave in mind-like ways, and it’s information processing.
You could also make a philosophical argument that it had to turn out that away, I suppose. (And maybe that’d make truth machine happier; I never know.)
The argument would be a kind of “counting argument,” showing that any adaptive system must be at least as complex as a state machine with a distinct possible state for each distinct response to possible combinations of inputs. (It can be a “nondeterministic finite automaton,” for example.) Higher levels of teleology require more complexity, to discriminate between superficially similar input combinations and respond to higher-level properties of things. (Like truth or love or “positive outcomes”.) Appropriate responses to very high-level properties that people care about requires something fairly mind-like in its degree of sophistication. (Basically doing at least fancy pattern recognition and planning, taking a bunch of information into account.)
That argument refutes the common intuition that supernatural entities are in an important sense simple—at least, they’re not complicated “like a machine.”
—
A counterargument would be that no, there’s no fancy mechanistic information processing going on inside supernatural entities; instead it just works out that way due to deep regularities in the structure of the universe.
The response to that counterargument would be that if so, they have to be correspondingly complicated regularities in the structure of the universe, such that anything simpler could twig to the humanly-important high-level issues and respond appropriately without processing a bunch of information; the whole world would have to be profoundly and very complicatedly rigged such that something simple could “just do” a fancy job and have it “just come out right” with a simple thing (or nothing at all) doing the work.
Moving the locus of pattern recognition and planning to the subtle rigging of the universe doesn’t make the theory any simpler, it makes it even more complex and bizarre.
Either way it undercuts the common intuition that supernatural entities provide simple explanations of purported supernatural phenomena.
Religous people rarely put it in those terms, but I think that a major reason for their continued belief in the supernatural is that it seems parsimonious. It’s not; naturalism is simpler.
—
As for the word “ontological,” if you object to that, I’m stymied by an ambiguity.
Boyer proposes a folk ontology (i.e., a theory of folk psychology and its implicit ontology) and a scientific theory about how people reason about the supernatural, given that folk ontology.
That scientific theory has its own scientific ontology, in particular, a claim about how the normal ontology contains elements explained in ways that are “supernatural” in the weak sense, and that remarkably “supernatural” concepts are generated by concepts that cross-classify with the usual pigeonholes.
—
If I understand you, I sorta agree.
People often believe in supernatural things like Luck or Karma without thinking there’s a mind doing the work to make it come out right.
On the other hand, many supernatural entities are presumed to have minds, or the possibility is sometimes entertained. E.g. people sometimes guessing that there’s a mind behind their good or bad luck—an interfering spirit, or a God who set things up in just such a way, somehow, as to systematically reward or punish certain people for certian things. That’s not an accident; the “non-mental” supernatural phenomena are so behaviorally mind-like that it’s a reasonable suspicion that there’s a mind thing going on somehow.
This thread is still going! And Paul W. is pretty much saying what I was trying to say, only better, and fleshing it out with new stuff! Yay!
Paul W. #712 wrote:
The supernatural not only seems simpler, it seems much more familiar to us, than does a mechanistic universe in which like doesn’t just come out of more like. Supernaturalists hate the idea of reduction — reducing morals, meaning, emotion, mind, and life down to things which no longer have the characteristics which make them special. This goes against a folk intuition which makes the genetic fallacy: if molecules can’t think, then a bunch of them moving around together in patterns can’t think, either. This is why we keep seeing Christians come in and accuse atheists of not believing they’re conscious, or not believing in love, or not believing there’s any real meaning in the universe. We only believe in material things, and those aren’t material. We murder, to dissect.
I agree that it’s important to connect the ‘remarkable’ supernatural objects and events to the ‘normal’ supernatural objects and events, in order to understand not just the underlying similarities, but the underlying cause of supernatural beliefs.
Here’s an interesting excerpt from an early attempt to shore up the idea of spirit through a rational, scientific approach:
In other words, we start out knowing, through direct experience, that our thoughts act from another realm to move matter around — and thus we infer that God relates to the universe, the way our soul relates to our body. No engines or machines. It’s all essence.
Most people do not have a teleological concept of bad luck or astrology — that’s a sophistic after-the-fact pet-theory Procrustean ad hoc characterization.
People often believe in supernatural things like Luck or Karma without thinking there’s a mind doing the work to make it come out right.
On the other hand, many supernatural entities are presumed to have minds, or the possibility is sometimes entertained.
Some is not all; as I said earlier, this is a fallacy of affirmation of the consequent. That detached minds are considered supernatural does not imply that the supernatural consists only of “mind-like” phenomena.