The Human Question

Quite interesting:  In his book Experience of God , David Bentley Hart states that John Henry Newman, "who was among other things a patristics scholar, found nothing objectionable in evolutionary theory." I would love to read JHN's discussion of this topic.

Sean Carroll insists that the question "Why everything?" is in some sense illegitimate.  Elsewhere in this blog I've discussed why his reason for objecting to this question is part of a circular argument. But I am approaching his claim from another angle here. We needn't ask "Why everything?" in order to come up with God as the answer: simply asking "Why this?" will suffice. As a matter of fact, the first two of Aquinas's five ways start with very particular observations rather than global ones, and proceed from there to argue toward God's existence.  Consider how the Second Way, in considering a concrete order of efficient causes that we find in nature, we are confronting a whole that includes not only caused causes, but uncaused as well.  In looking at even a part of reality, with its mixture of activity and passivity, and asking whence it comes, we are open to discovering divine efficacy in this or that part of the world. If Aquinas&

One response to Daniel Dennett's confident statements about the mind being instantiatable by computers is to propose that a Rube Goldberg device could produce the same sort of results as a computer, given enough time and a little luck (i.e., no breakdowns in the components).  Actually, I think something of this sort has been proposed already, and DD himself replied that these devices operate too slowly.  Unfortunately, I didn't read DD himself saying this but heard someone else referring to him.  In any case, DD's reply would be apt, at least initially, for such a device would be so sluggish that it would fail to convince a human observer that it was driven by thought: a slow motion computer will fail the Turing Test. Suppose, however, that we give free reign to thought experiments: the following scenario might problematize DD's reply.  Suppose, that is, that a device with the same structure as the Rube Goldberg device were somehow miniaturized so that it worked as qu

Hume's phenomenalism threatens to reduce my first person awareness of my physical engagement (push and pull) to a collection of atomistic sensations (for example, pushing would be reduced to the sensation of many pressure points).  Perhaps the best way to show the absurdity of this claim is to reflect on the very experience of conveying or receiving via written or spoken words, Hume's phenomenalist account.  The experience of communicating is more than the sum of its parts, atomistically considered: otherwise, it would not involve any communicative activity.  To consider this sort of experience atomistically (as Hume would have us do) would be to reduce it to a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." To apply a Humean analysis to the communication of Humean ideas would be to reduce those words to a kind of silence. On the other hand, just as the communicative activity is greater than the sum of its parts, atomistically conceived, so to

Surely the operation of the brain is not related to cognition/engagement as cause to effect.  There must be a better word for the way animal brains are related to that engagement. Searle likes to say that raising one's hand doesn't cause one to vote (when at a town hall meeting).  Rather it constitutes one's vote.  One votes by way of raising their hand rather than by means of doing so. Couldn't something analogous be the case for neural activity in relation to cognition/intentional engagement? How about "an animal perceives by way of brain activity"?

If the Turning Test is legit, then if we could create a program that seems to respond like a person, then we would have to say that the program directing the responses  is  in some sense a person.  But what then would we say if a computer program were created that gave two different sets of responses that seemed to come from two different individuals: would this computer program be two persons rather than one?

A being who seeks to live with the eternal.

Isn't the Turing machine hypothesis an example of hyper active agency detection?

... is taken from the use of words.  That would include not only the evidence of agency in verbs like "command," "request," "tell," "mean," "promise," etc., but also the absurdity of using words to deny the reality of the self--for the meaningfulness of the words used in making such a denial presupposes one who speaks while promising, telling, commanding, etc.

Clearly, I need to argue against Hume by pointing to how we are aware of our own efficacy (call it first person causality).  I can now see that the best example of this efficacy is our awareness of our own self-movement in the act of communicating.  That is because the one who denies the connection effectively silences his or her self.

The story of the ship of Theseus could be used, I suppose, to argue against identity through time.  That is, just as we can't resolve the question of whether a ship whose parts have been replaced bit by bit is really the same ship, so too we can't tell whether we are the same self we used to be, as our parts are being replaced without our even noticing it.  So the argument would go. Although I would not recommend this sort of argument I'm throwing it out there because I want to pair it with the following counter-argument that could be given via a thought experiment that I would title "The Sentence of Theseus."  It would start by pointing to a sentence, suggesting that we replace one-at-a-time, as many of the words as we can, with a near-synonym.  It would then follow by suggesting that something like that is going on all the time without our intending to change any words at all, so that the sentence expressed by Theseus undergoes significant change with each utt

This is a very rough draft of some ideas I'm kicking around: Scientific reports are either given in the first person or at least presuppose a first person report. That is evidenced by the necessity of using indexicals  to give reports.   Indexicals include "this," "that," "here," "there," "now," "yesterday," "thereupon," etc. The use of indexicals involves a first person perspective because they situate what is being reported in relation to the individual giving the report. The practice of giving scientific reports begins in the first person.  That is, science as social practice begins only after someone says, "I did this, then that happened." Eventually, reports can be given in the third person passive voice.  "This was added to that; such and such was observed."  But this is just a way of giving a first person report while leaving the reporter anonymous.  It is parasitic upon the fir

Atheist to theist: "If materialism is true, then your invisible friend called 'God' is unreal." Theist to atheist: "If materialism is true, then your visible friends are unreal as well." In other words, those who reject theism on the basis of materialism can do so only by relying upon reductionist asssumptions.  They thus end up denying that we have an enduring identity.  For if a whole is nothing but the sum of its parts and the parts are always changing, then amongst those changes can be found nothing that endures.

...seem to suffer from math envy.

Just wondering: some new atheists say that it doesn't make sense to say, "Why everything?"  But I do think they would grant that it would be okay to ask "Why this galaxy?" or "Why this universe?" (where "universe" is understood as a part of a multiverse). The difference between the two statements is that in the first case one asks a question about the whole, whereas in the second case one asks about a part.  If by "the whole" one means the totality of all that there is or can be, it would not make sense to go looking for something outside of that totality to explain it.  Yet that is what "Why everything?" does or seems to do.  In the second case, however, one asks a question about one part with the intention of finding an answer in another part.  Such an inquiry makes sense if any inquiry makes sense, for that is how questions work. But isn't the objection to the question "Why everything?" an example of c

The following two statements:      "It is good that I exist."       "It is better that I exist than not exist." ...are "obvious" to me.  It also seems to me that my reasoning about how I am going to act presupposes  at least one of these or a synonymous statement.  That is, my practical reasoning presupposes that it is objectively true that it is good that I exist. But can a positivist, i.e, someone who thinks all genuine knowledge is to be found only in science, take this claim to objectivity seriously?  Wouldn't the positivist think it more accurate to recast statements like the two above in emotive terms  (i.e., as meaning something like, "Leo feels really good when he thinks about the fact that he's alive")?  Wouldn't the positivist regard the claim to objectivity as non-sensical, for one cannot (speaking here from a positivistic perspective) have genuine knowledge about the goodness of things? And since ethics presupposes

It doesn't seem that there could be a utilitarian argument against murder that would be applicable if there were only two people.  That is because, if only one is left after the murder and the murder is quite happy about it, then, such a murder would be for the greater good of all who are left.  Or maybe the would-be victim's utilitarian argument against being murdered would amount to "Think of how lonely you'd be if you got rid of me!"  An even more compelling point could be made re murder-suicide.

"All speech is metaphor." "Is that literally  true ?"

What if a person claiming to get messages from God was examined and found to have brain activity quite like that of persons who are diagnosed as mentally ill... what if all of this is true, yet it is also the case that the purportedly prophetic messages repeatedly proved true?

Someone should do an fMRI scan of a reductionist and find out if, when affirming his belief in reductionism, the limbic (emotional) part the brain becomes highly active.

It seems remarkable to me that Pierre-Simon Laplace, probably the greatest scientist in the century between Newton and Darwin and the first to propose scientific determinism, is also responsible for developing probability theory.  Scientific determinism is a hypothesis that every state of affairs entirely determines the state of affairs that immediately follows it and is entirely determined by the state of affairs that preceded it, so that LaPlace's demon (a hypothetical intelligent being with complete knowledge of nature at a particular point in time), could both predict and retrodict any state of affairs in the same time continuum.  Probability theory was developed by Laplace in order to overcome indeterminacy in his knowledge of the movement of heavenly bodies.  He relied on different sources of data regarding this movement, and since these sources were inconsistent with each other, he had to find a way of making a most reasonable approximation.  In other words, he developed pro

Isn't human finitude noteworthy only because of how it flies in the face of our desire for more?

Oftentimes he argues ala Turing that because it functions like it is conscious, therefore it is so. Couldn't we describe this as an "If it looks like a duck, then it is a duck" argument? Is that scientific? Shouldn't reductionism, if it's true, start with the lower level of causality/description and infer the higher from the lower? Isn't that how reductive explanations work in other cases? Wouldn't the lack of such a deductive algorithm "reduce" reductive materialism to mere speculation?

How can an operation that is one emerge from that which is many?

Could a group of thoroughly wicked persons play a good game of baseball? Is any set of social rules entirely divorceable from moral principles?

When engaged in the philosophical dialectic, we should be careful to avoid proving our point on the basis thought experiments regarding scenarios that are far-fetched.  I think everyone would grant that no thought experiment that involves two contradictory claims can be allowed.  And pretty much everyone would agree that a thought experiment involving an event that is highly improbable but quite possible should be allowed.  Besides these two alternatives there is a thought experiment of a third type: it asks us to imagine something that may in fact be impossible in the same way that it's impossible that "green ideas" would "sleep furiously": not a contradiction between two statements but an incoherency in one statement.  When we are unsure of what the words mean; when determining what those words mean; and when one of the candidate meanings would mean, if accepted, that the scenario in our thought experiment is incoherent, then making use of such a thought exper

To the degree that determinism is true, apparent contingency in the world is illusory.  And if contingency, which seems so obvious, is illusory, then it would seem that all bets are off regarding the veracity of other beliefs.

In a moment of humility, Daniel Dennett tells us in  Intuition Pumps that he just doesn't get quantum theory, no matter how hard he tries. Perhaps we shouldn't use candid admissions made at such moments against the speaker.  I hope not, because that's what I'm about to do... It seems to me that quantum theory is a bit of an embarrassment to the argument for materialism found in another book by the same author.  In  Freedom Evolves , Dennett makes an analogy between the way in which one playing Conway's Game of Life  can design life-like items and the way we might come to see ourselves as constructed of atoms. Dennett assures us in that book that Conway's Democratean approach to nature is "sophisticated." But what if that approach is now dated, thanks to quantum theory?  In proposing this, I am not relying on any of the mystical-sounding statements relating quantum theory to consciousness.  I am proposing that even the most staid, sober, "jus

Right now I'm listening to Michael Gazzaniga's Who's in Charge , a delightful book on split-brain experiments by neurological pioneer lacking any pretentiousness but is instead, full of wit and cheer  For reasons already discussed in this blog, I wouldn't reach the same reductionist conclusions as he does.  But instead of going into those objections here, I will only point out that in basing his view of human nature, as he does, on an exceptional case he reminds me of the Chinese astronomers who noted only the irregular occurrences in the sky.  That sort of information became useful centuries later to those who were trying to understand the lawfulness of nature.  Split-brain experiments are similarly useful to one who is trying to understand human nature. But to take such experiments as the starting point is to proceed "bassackwards": the way human nature behaves most of the time is the primary source of our understanding of what sort of being we humans are.

Upon listening to SH's talk on Free Will (or rather the lack thereof), it occurred to me that while Richard Dawkins is a bully, Daniel Dennett is a wee bit of a showoff, Sam Harris seems like a mensch--a regular guy. Good for him! But when you compare the his arguments against theism with the arguments proposed by theists themselves, it is obvious that he is a skillful employer of the straw man fallacy. Looking at his website, I appreciate also that he recognizes the irreducibility of consciousness to matter.  He is a non-reductive materialist, because he navigates this issue with the help of his own common sense and careful analysis. But given his arguments against free will, it seems to me that he lets himself be seduced by scientism rather easily.  For the arguments employed by him against free will prove too much:  they render desire epiphenomenal.

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looking for "the" one har

What if, while administering the Turing test, you asked a computer questions about its sensations?

I think the contemporary notion of qualia is helpful insight into the insufficiency of scientism.  But that does not mean that its advocates have conceptualized it very well.  Something to study more. Meanwhile, I note that Daniel Dennett, true blue reductionist that he is, argues that the notion of qualia is incoherent.  The premise in this argument is the list of properties of properties that he kindly offers his reader: ineffable, subjective, intrinsic and private.  By setting his argument this way at the beginning, he may be offering a straw man.  I dunno: I haven't really surveyed what everyone out there thinks qualia are like.  But in any case, later on in the argument on this topic that I listened to in Intuition Pumps , he seems to argue in a very clearly circular manner.  I need to find where he does that and transcribe it here ... maybe later this week.

I think it of central importance to theism to argue that non-reductive materialism is more plausible than reductive materialism.  Or rather, to argue on the basis of what humans and non-humans have in common rather than on the basis of distinctively human characteristics, that the sort of materialism appealed to in order to attack theism is incoherent. I suppose someone could consider that surrender.  To a philosophically ignorant person who is in the habit of thinking that there are only two choices--Cartesian dualism and reductive materialism--it will appear to be a move from dualism toward materialism. But to someone who sees that there are at least four options, it may look quite different.  More like an invasion (and a justified one, at that) than a surrender. Consider a German living in his country near the border with France late in WW II, when the allied forces had just started invading.  It would be delusional for him to imagine that the allies crossing over are doing so

The contemporary tendency to identify thought with the activities on fMRI scans is akin to the readiness of the phrenologist of yesteryear to locate thought centers with bumps on the head, says Malcom Jeeves, in  Neuroscience Psychology and Religion. Interesting comparison!

Because of the non-linear way in which neurons respond to inputs, the computer programmer who would like to simulate the way brain processes information must create a mini-program to imitate the input/ output relation found in each neuron. Perhaps simulating the operation of a neuron with a computer program is akin to generating a CD (with its digitalization of sound) to simulate the sound of a record.  In both cases, the imitation can be conceived of in terms of ones and zeros, while the thing being imitated is approximated but never truly duplicated by the imitation.

If it works against non-reductive materialism, then doesn't it imply that brute perception is unreliable?  In that case, wouldn't our perception fare no better?  And wouldn't our non-materialistic soul have a overcome a substantial obstacle in order to get to the truth, if it's perceptions were no more reliable than those of non-rational (and hence presumably material) animals.

It seems to me to be effective against certain materialist rationalizations for naturalism (the sort that are used to buttress reductive materialism), but not necessarily against every version of anti-theism.  It works, at the end of the day, against reductive materialism only inasmuch as the zombie objection likewise works (and I think it does) against the same . In fact, one could construct a zombie version of Plantinga's argument (sort of a Halloween version). That is because Plantinga's argument hinges upon the question of whether or not the actions of a percipient beings are entirely caused by the neuro-physical states of perceiver.  If those states suffice, then any correlative perceptions are themselves superfluous--we have a case of epiphenomenalism. It follows that the truth or accuracy of those perceptions would likewise be irrelevant if the perceptions themselves are.  But those neuro-physical processes do  suffice according to reductive materialism (inspire of the

At the individual level, we desire to survive because we desire to thrive rather than vice versa.  And that is where the action is.

Emergence (or something more Aristotelian) is not complexification, it's simplification.  It's not taking another force and placing it beside the lower forces, it's taking the lower forces and appropriating them as part of a higher action.

David K. Johnson argues that there is no free will because propositions in some sense already exist and are already true (or are already false); hence, since it is already true that I will do x tomorrow, it follows that I cannot not-do x tomorrow. I'll try to argue with him on his own terms. Isn't the very existence of these propositions contingent? If yes, then it's hard to believe that something contingent could do the sort of necessitating that DKJ has it doing. If no -- if these propositions had to be -- then there is something rather god-like about them.  Too god-like to be plausible for a materialist like DKJ.

The concept of the integral is introduced by asking the student to imagine breaking the area under a curve into smaller and smaller parts (each of which is a column whose width is delta x or change in x) and then figure out how, as delta x (the change in the value of x) approaches zero and then number of columns (each of whose width is delta x) approaches infinity, ... how one better forms an approximation of the area under the curve.  This series of approximations is then superseded by an insight into another a formula that can more simply calculate for the area of that curve. It might be helpful to see this process as illustrative of how we use our imagination to stretch our experience and thereby arrive at new insights that go beyond possible experience.  Also, it illustrates how the notion of the infinite is at work in the formation of new concepts. Let's try to apply it to our concept of truth: we think that claim which is obvious to ourselves and those we know as true.  W

cognition is an example of the appropriation of the form of another thing/part of moi without taking away the form's being the form of something other than the appropriating cognizer. For that reason, the concept of appropriation might be used to help solve the bundling problem. Appropriation, which is what Aristotle says the common sense ( koine aesthesis or somethin' like that) does to the operation of the proper senses, is a kind of bundling.  And it is analogous to what the proper sense does to the many qualities that concomitantly act up the proper/external senses.  In both cases, the higher power takes the operation of the lower power and owns it without taking it away from the other.

This might not ultimately be relevant to questions about God, but it's interesting that a material personal being that could travel faster than the speed of light (already cheating here bc it may be impossible) could predict the future because our future would have been  present to it -- not because the future had been predetermined.

Perhaps semantics always involves appropriation, and appropriation is always organic, so that only organisms can operate semantically, while machines can at most operate syntactically.

Science-talk (at least natural science) takes the behavior of things, taken in the third person and recombines them in paradoxical ways (we might not notice the paradoxes because thinking of them has become second nature to us).  Consider waves, for example.  I experience waves in a pond or pool.  Then my science teacher tells me that sound travels in waves.  Hmm: sounds paradoxical, but not impossible.  Learning about sine waves, I see the analogy between the repeated and regular compression and decompression of air and the waves in the pool. Philosophical talk of the soul, on a good day, isn't about the sort of things that I can point to (what I call third person things, even though they typically aren't persons at all).  But it can talk about things that have a special connection to the first person: ability, disposition, action, striving, fulfillment.  It uses these terms to describe realities that escape the third person perspective: acting, being affected by desire, bei

Asking, as Daniel Dennett does, what an antireductionist would have to say once he or she encountered a robot that behaved in every way in a manner indistinguishable from a human (okay, it wouldn't breathe, eat, excrete or reproduce), is kind of like my asking what he would say if, upon confirmation of the multiverse hypothesis, he also discovered that every single one of the component universeses is finely tuned for life.  Okay, it is much harder to imagine how one might confirm the latter.  But suppose that he did: what would he say to that?

Functionalism, inasmuch as it treats the other as a machine that functions for me, always abstracts from the other's desire.

That might be a good title for a chapter discussing scientific praxis' need for human agency and human agency's need for judgment and judgment's need for the identity of the one making the judgment with the one apprehending the many thing being judged together.

If the notion of appropriation that I stole/borrowed from Aristotle/Aquinas is correct, then perhaps one way to respond to split brain objections to the unity of the soul/psyche is to say that one sub-organ of the brain normally appropriates the operations of the other(s), and, under very unusual circumstances, may be prevented from doing so.  Hence the zombie-like rebellion of the side not associated with my awareness (the awareness of the one -- or the "one-half" reporting to the scientist)

Add to that example the following detail:  two doctors are working on the same patient.  One believes the patient is the president of the United States, the other does not.  They have no disagreement, however, about how to operate.  Or rather, their disagreement about who the patient is does not come into play in their discussion about how to treat that person.  Only afterwards, when they reflect together on the significance of their work, does the question of the identity of the patient come into play.

Natural science involves equations and models. Equations involve an apparent completeness that imitates the completeness of mathematics: 2+2=4 doesn't seem to need any clarification. There doesn't seem to be some new truth that will undermine it either: in fact it really seems necessarily true. Models, however, are analogies with the sort of causal relations that we find in the prescientific lifeworld. And in that life world, human agency is, as it were, the prime instance of causality. Billiard balls are not.  But inasmuch as the models used in science are parasitic of human agency(albeit in a good way), they include some characteristics that look quite different from equations. They don't even seem to have the sort of clarity that equations at least seem to have. And they involve dependence on other, unmentioned factors, a dependence that can be forgotten when staring at equations. And of course, they involve striving, purpose, satisfaction. Such characteristics are indis

Said in his talk at the conference on science and religion at Steubenville, where he stands out from the others: "Recent decades have seen within mainstream academic philosophy, a renewed interest in traditional Aristotelian metaphysical notions, like substance, essence, causal power, act vs. potency (these days referred to as the distinction act  distinction between categorical and dispositional properties) and finality (these days referred to as 'physical intentionality' or the 'directedness of dispositions toward their manifestions')--different jargon, substantively the same.  Moreovers this revival has taken place among secular metaphysicians with no Thomistic axe to grind..." Contemporary analytic metaphysicians use the term "disposition" rather than "power." George Molnar in his book Powers: a Metaphysical Study , calls it "physical intentionality," and John Hyle calls it "natural intentionality" for similar

For a purportedly cognizant machine to be aware of causality, it would seem (given how it happens with us rational animals) that being aware of its own causal interactions is a necessary condition for its being aware of how causal relations exist in nature.  But to be aware of its own causal interactions, the machine would have to have a sense of its acting as a whole, as an individual, and as being acted upon at a whole.  It would not suffice merely to register information from this or that outside source: there would have to be a sense of the whole acting and being acted upon.   It seems that such awareness requires appropriation and that machines can't do that (at least not in the precise sense that I have discussed in this blog).

Dennett sometimes engages in what may be science fiction or may be science fantasy, coming up with scenarios which may or may not be impossible (who knows?).  Without establishing that they are even possible, he talks almost as if they already have happened and asks his interlocutor, triumphantly, "So what do you say to that ?"

Dennett argues contra Searle that the consciousness that we attribute to a computer is identical with the physical process as such rather than with the processing of a system of symbols.  But a computer program, inasmuch as it has multiple instantiations, seems not to be identical with any one of the physical processes that instantiate it.  In fact, these different instantiations may share no specific physical properties.  What these instantiations have in common is that they all function for us as a system of symbols. Searle's argument works only inasmuch as his opponent identifies thought with the operation of a program (with the program being a system of symbols), but that's enough to win the day, ... for Dennett's counterargument has the problem that the same physical process going on in a machine could be the basis for many different functions.  So it doesn't clearly perform this function rather than that until someone using the computer interprets its operatio

A non-reductive physicalist could say that he or she sees no evidence of God's existence, nor does he/she see evidence of any other immaterial being's existence; therefore, it seems that there is no God.  Or he/she might adopt a soft agnosticism (a soft agnostic is open, a hard agnostic says, "I can't know, and neither can you")    To either of these physicalists,  I would reply, "Here's my evidence/argument..." A non-reductive physicalist might say there is no God because of the problem of evil/pain.  To that I would reply, "You misunderstand what is meant by 'God': God is not thought of as an engineer or manager, but as an agent who is the source of our entire world's entire existence." A non-reductive physicalist might say that there can be no God because there can be no immaterial being.  To which I would reply, "Why not?"  The response would (I expect) belie the sort of assumptions that are proper to a reducti

It might be a desire to know that you HAD to exist...at some point in time.  Your contingent existence is grounded upon a necessity.

If our consciousness always includes consciousness of our body in relation to our environment, then how can it be a that a computer program, which, according to functionalism, can run in precisely the same way in different computers, is ever conscious?  The differences in these machines are like the differences in bodies that are situated differently with respect to the same concrete object. The fact that they are not differently aware while their programs run in different machines with different characteristics and in different situations can be explained by the fact that they are not aware of their bodies at all, and that is not far from saying that they are not aware at all: they are just tools we use to understand the world.

What would happen to the problem of divine foreknowledge if the whole universe existed for only one instant? Well, God could be said to foreknow the condition of creation inasmuch as the atemporal eternal is prior to the temporal.  But this foreknowledge is not the sort that we have when we know, at 5pm we know or think we know what will happen at 5:05pm on the same day. The firsts sort of priority (of the eternal over the temporal) is more basic than the second (of one time over another time). A well-directed attempt to deal with the problem of divine foreknowledge must recognize this distinction, direct its efforts at understanding the implications of the first sort of foreknowledge while recognizing that the second sort of foreknowledge is a pseudoproblem in the case of God's knowledge.

These vague meanderings need a lot of polishing, but I'm spitting them out here before I forget them. His criticism of naturalism is, at the end of the day, a criticism of a certain kind of materialism: one that proposes to explain (or is it justify???!) the reliability of the faculties used by scientific theorizers by saying that these faculties are reliable because they have, over the course of time, enhanced the survivability of their possessors. I think that the type of functionalism that has appeared in other discussions (and which I associate with utilitarianism) comes into this picture as well: a functionalist approach to evolution looks at life processes instrumentally (hence the association I have made between it and utilitarianism).  "Enhacing survival" (of a gene), for example, is a functionalist explanation of why certain phenotypes endure in a population. I think functionalism is problematic in a manner analogous to the problems I find with utilitariani

Perhaps a better name than "methodological naturalism" for the relation between natural science and theism might be "methodological silence." The fact that we are silent about something doesn't mean we are ignoring or denying that it is there.  Suppose the president or vice president were seriously injured, and surgeons, nurses and other medical professionals worked feverishly to save his (or her) life.  While engaged in this work, they would not talk about who  their patient is, even if they were quite motivated by this knowledge to do a good job.  At the end of the day, however, when they have taken off their gloves and masks and sat down, they will talk reflectively with their friends and colleagues about the significance of the task they have just performed.  Such reflections will not, strictly speaking, pertain to the practice of medicine; instead, they will pertain to the task we all have of understanding the point of our lives and how each episode fits

If genuine scientific inquiry can be practiced at all, then reductionism is false.  If reductionism is false, then criticisms of cosmological arguments that involve reductionist presuppositions are undermined, and the degrees of goodness in beings, the beauty that we find about us, make the universe ripe with evidence of God.

What is the object of mathematics?  Does it require that we posit a kind of fiction?  Does it direct us toward Platonic objects? The sort of functional analysis of theism that has been employed by some evolutionary psychologists would, if applied to math, treat it as dealing with fictions.  But it doesn't.  Less respect for theism begets less respect for math; more respect for math begets more respect for theism. Once upon a time I learned how Wittgenstein understood math.  Unfortunately that understanding has grown fuzzy.  But I think that for LW (Ludwig Wittgenstein, not Leo White :)), learning math is being initiated into a practicing community: it's learning "how we do things."  That's no problem to my thesis that more respect for math begets more respect for theism (and the contrapositive).  After all, knowing such truths may be a way of entering into a practice that includes other, higher rational beings...

Do they go together? Then what would be the virtue theory alternative to functionalism?

If the study of physics shows that nature is a closed system and it is, strictly speaking, a scientific fact that miracles and freedom are impossible, then it would seem that a theist could not do physics well. But what about the fact that there are and have been successful physicists who believe in God and freedom?  Apparently theism did not  keep George Lemaitre from discovering the big bang!  If, on the other hand, one's ability to do physics is not adversely affected by theism etc., then the exclusion of miracles and freedom is not so much a scientific fact as as a philosophical inference--or perhaps an act of faith.

If the organismoids found in Conway's game of life were plausible examples of what can happen in nature, then simple life forms without DNA or organelles would occasionally be found in nature.  But they aren't...

[I haven't decided whether or not this is a keeper] Daniel Dennett says it's simply impossible that there be a philosophical zombie, i.e., a creature that acts just like humans even at the neuronal level but has no consciousness.  I agree but would add that IF reductive physicalism were true, then such creatures could exist , and in that case consciousness itself would be causally superfluous. In order to show the truth of the hypothetical statement in italics, I propose that you apply one of the properties of reductive physicalism called reversibility to the scenario in which communication is used to direct behavior.  I propose, furthermore, that to make this point we use (a modified version of) the example used by Dennett to show that consciousness is not superfluous.  Suppose there are three individuals, Nestor speaks Navajo and English; Engelbert, who speaks only English, and Seth, who  can understand English and Swedish.  Nestor can see a pair of lights (one green, th

Note to self: prosopagnosia would serve as a good example of what I'm calling 'appropriation," I got the notion from Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle's De sensu , where he points out that the common sense ( koine aesthesis for Ari,  sensus communis for Thomas) takes the act of the proper sense and makes it its own.  It doesn't repeat the act of sensing, say, color: instead, it perceives something about color.  Somewhere (methinks) in the Summa theologiae  (and in the other Summa ) Aquinas talks about the relation of the higher to the lower power in a similar manner (but while making more neo-Platonic sounding points). It seems to me that perhaps  what we know about the brain today largely corroborates all this.  There is an appropriation by one part of the brain of the act done in another part of the brain (all of these acts are acts of the ensouled body and/or the embodied soul, but never mind for now).  But it may be the case that the "higher/lower&quo

What if you program a computer so that it can win in chess and THEN discover that you can also use it to track packages: what was the computer thinking of when you used it for chess?  What if you find differences between the two functions and reprogram the computer to function differently in the two different situations.  But then you discover that there are at least two more quite different situations in which the new program can function: what was the computer thinking of in each of these situations?  Does it recognize its error? Is functionalism vacuous?

http://thomism.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/a-critique-of-aristotles-physics-in-aristotles-terms/

Daniel Dannett talks about design space as the set of possible designs (while deforming the meaning of the word "design" in a manner that would warm David Hume's heart, but that's another matter).  Why not convey the hierarchical nature of anti-reductionism by talking about "goal dimension"?  Perhaps that's too much like playing ball in your opponent's favorite field, with his equipment, etc.

Both Carol and Dennett are determinists and reductive physicalists. Dennett (or rather, at least Dennett) believes that meaning matters.  That is, the "aboutness" of our thoughts and perceptions is important and able to influence the world. He supports this belief with the parable of two black boxes.  One sends a signal via a wire to another black box.  One had two buttons (A and B) and the other had three lights: red, yellow and green.  Whenever you push the A button, the red light will flash.  Whenever you press the B button the green light flashes.  The signal to the wire is different each time.  Opening the black boxes and studying their operation, they found no similarity between the two.  Later they discover that the first box sends a message to the other in English: a message that is true (taken from its data base) if button A was pressed or false if B was pressed.  The second box then translates the English into Swedish Lisp and compares it with its Swedish langua

This from http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/can-married-couples-much-sex When sex is “on the table” on a near-daily basis, a predictable pattern tends to develop. Men have a higher sex drive, and strongly associate sex with closeness and relationship health. Women comparatively place greater weight on other forms of interaction, and on a physiological level, their appetite for sex simply tends to be lower. Thus, when marital intimacy is perpetually possible, women can easily fall into the habit of putting it off, or even coming to see it as a chore. It’s also well known by now that hormonal contraceptives tend to decrease sexual appetite. So by preparing themselves physiologically to have sex at any time, women make it so that they rarely or never want to. Should we be at all startled that this does not add up to a recipe for marital health? Men start to feel that they are perpetually begging, which is hurtful and degrading. Women start to feel that they are forever badgered and

[promising but fuzzy] Suppose there's a planet in a galaxy in which there are rational animals that seek survival on a day by day basis by competing with others in a manner strangely similar to the moves of a chess game on ours. They would employ a computer called Baby Blue to help them manage their struggles successfully. Baby Blue wouldn't know that it's solving this problem any more than the earthbound computer (named Deep Blue) that beat Gasparov on earth knew that it was playing a game called chess.  This would be true even if both computers had the same hard and software.  In fact, there might be a vast number of situations (let's say each is on a different planet) in which the same program might function quite well.  So it doesn't seem that knowing that a computer serves this or that function helps us know what the computer is thinking.  And that might be because the computer is not so much a thinker as an instrument that we use to think. (The weird thing

Suppose you could write a program to represent all of the dispositions of a pencil (so that it would show algorithmically that if you apply force here and there, and thereby push it against a paper, it shall make lines). Suppose you also wrote a program to represent a person trying to write a sentence using an instrument. Suppose you were able to combine the two so that they represented, together, a person writing a sentence with a pencil. If both programs were well-designed, then you wouldn't have to violate the first program in order to apply the second. So it is in nature: writing a sentence with a pencil does not violate the internal dispositions of the pencil. Perhaps this fact is analogous to how the laws of nature are to be applied to individuals.  For in trying to understnd how an individual behaves, we can't just plug in the laws of nature in an abstract way: we have to translate those laws into internal dispositions, dispositions to act a certain way that can be

Okay, there is an element of satire here, but here goes: Supposing you think that you have a PhD in mathematics (actually, an ABD will do).  But as a matter of fact, you are really just a brain in a vat being fed electrochemical signals: could it be that all of the mathematical truths you suppose that you know are merely fleeting impressions?  In other words, could it be that you do not really know that 2+2=4, for it merely seems that you do?  What would be the status of your knowledge of laws of nature if knowledge of mathematical truths were not really knowledge at all? What is the status of our knowledge of math and science if this thought experiment is informative? Seems to me that one who faces these questions must either grant that he can't really know the truths of math and laws of nature, or he must embrace dualism to preserve at least mathematical truth--OR he might look for a reason for rejecting brain-in-a-vat thought experiments altogether. I recommend the third

Somewhere in the first third of Consciousness Explained , DD proposes that neurons or clusters thereof can do the operations proper to other (neurons or clusters).  I need to find out where he seems to say this as well as what he really does say there, because.... it sounds like the Aristotelian concept of appropriation (the last term is my name for what De sensu  has the sensus communis doing vis-à-vis the proper senses, comparing the former to a craftsman using instruments).

What if a biologist thought or pretended to think that an integrated circuit was an organism?  He would look for signs of life.  And what would he find?  No food intake.  No breathing. No chemical excretions.  No reproduction. No aging.  No death.  No life. He would find responses to stimuli, but they might be different than the sort of responses that a computer programmer would expect.  After trying many different levels of electrical inputs, he will note corresponding outputs.  Whereas the computer programmer will think of input and output in binary terms -- either on or off -- the biologist will look for non-linear relationships.  And he might just find some.  Of  course (no surprise to either the biologist/electrician or to the engineer), he will note that certain levels of input will be catastrophic. What if neurons perform their instrumental role in perception etc. precisely in virtue of their CAUSAL interrelations, AND these interrelations correspond to non linear functions

"Umwelt is really an engineering concept," says DD nonchalantly in Intuition Pumps.   What a sly sophist!

Reductionists take talk of the soul as another example of the positing of an entity in order to fill the gap in our knowledge with a purported explanation.  They might as well call their target the "soul of the gaps." On the other hand, David K Johnson (who argues the soul of the gaps) is perfectly capable of taking the question of identity through time seriously.  He calls this the problem of personal identity. What I don't get, however, is why he completely ignores the question of personal identity when discussing the soul, and vice versa.  It doesn't occur to him that the question of the soul and of personal identity are the same question from two different perspectives. What if the soul is not a hidden entity we posit to explain but simply our identity under a different description?

Isn't the very term "consciousness" problematic, as the use of it tends to reduce desire and effort to thoughts about representations? Might it not be better to think of an engaged human being as the concrete whole and "consciously" as an adverb modifying "engaged"?

If for each physical state there is exactly one mental state is true (which is not the same as saying vice versa), then the fact that different people at different times have the same mental state (inasmuch as they are directed toward the same concrete or abstract object) via different material conditions indicates that it's not a two-way street: for every mental object there is a plethora of possible physical states. If one denies the last statement then cooperation for a common good is impossible or illusory.  In which case, science as a public endeavor would be a collective delusion.  But it ain't.   Therefore...

It's worth noting that Neils Bohr was willing to dispense with the law of the conservation of energy (perhaps the steady state theory does as well--I gotta look into that).  And Sean Carroll proposes the same when discussing the inflationary universe (the latter is an especially striking example of special pleading). These points undermine Sean Carroll's appeal to conservation of energy to support his reductive materialism.  It's a case of "any stick will do to beat a dog," even if it's a stick you've denied others permission to use.

Reductive materialists claim that the laws of nature predetermine how every material thing shall move, including human actions.  One objection that might be posed to reductionism is the randomness scientists attribute to the behavior of individual particles  at the quantum level.  The reductionist reply (this time correctly, in spite of the incoherence of their philosophical position) that quantum fluctuations don't save freedom.  If we behave as we do simply because of a lawful relation between our behavior and its material preconditions, then determinism is not avoided by supposing that right before behavior x happens, a (random) quantum fluctuation happens, which ends up causing (think of the butterfly effect) us to act differently than we otherwise would have, had the fluctuation not occurred.  That is because our behavior, although not predictable in virtue of what happened before the random fluctuation, is predictable in virtue of what happened subsequently.  We could get aro