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...

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.