I take it that most (though not all) non-theists assume that atheism does not entail nihilism. More specifically, most non-theists don’t believe that denying the existence of God or the immortality of the soul entails that truth, love, beauty, goodness, and justice are empty words.
But as we’ve seen in numerous discussions, the anti-materialist holds that this commitment is not one to which we are rationally entitled. Rather, the anti-materialist seems to contend, someone who denies that there is any transcendent reality beyond this life cannot be committed to anything other than affirmation of power (or maximizing individual reproductive success) for its own sake.
The question is, why is the anti-materialist mistaken about what non-theists are rationally entitled to? (Anti-materialists are also welcome to clarify their position if I’ve mischaracterized it.)
How is an anchor faulty other than displeasing you?
If you can freely choose among possible anchors, then your anchors are not anchored in reality.
If they are anchored in reality, then they are object (at least from a utilitarian point of view, and do not require belief. Just knowledge.
Minds are brain functions and processes. The runaway element of sexual selection played a pivotal role in the evolution of the human brain and mind. Your claim about arguing and our love of debate is better explained in evolutionary terms.
Who subscribes to this kind of reductionism? Anyone?
Culture, history, biology etc… they make us just as much as fundamental physics does.
To be clear, William needs to justify his assertion that reductionism is the only option available to the atheist.
As far as I remember, I haven’t said anything at all about me in this argument.
I understand; I was just reassuring you that even if you chose to offer me advice on how I could become a more rationally consistent atheist, I will not under any circumstances commit murder or any other horrific act. And I do agree that atheists are generally not really very different from theists in the same culture, except for brief periods on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.
I can only speak for myself here, but I agree with this at least to some extent. But surely this applies to you, a non-Christian in the majority Protestant US as well? How can there not be aspects of your behavior that were formed by the culture in which you grew up, which you have no rational foundation for?
In fact, who can rationally account for the totality of their behavior and thought process? I really doubt such a person exists. Are there any married people on this forum who can rationally account for why they fell in love with and married their spouse? Of course I am delighted with the outcome in my case (looking forward to our 20th in a couple of years, married to a devout theist by the way) but certainly my behavior during our courtship was not based on any rational foundation!
Umm…no. Once again, William, as a self-described, rationally consistent materialist, I know that what I am condemning is a product of an emergent system that is NOT the product of a billiard ball physics. As such, I know that political/religious motivated behavior is NOT the same thing as skin color. Not even close. That’s what my subjective feelings tell me anyway, and I of course can only act on those feelings.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! That’s funny, William, coming from the guy who admits that such subjects are way above his pay grade! Your claim has the humorous similarity to someone who insists that pools are dangerous because they have the same constituent parts as hurricanes.
But I’m more than willing to give you credit were credit is due. Just demonstrate your characterization of physics via models or math. I’m afraid your assertion that your billiard-ball physics matches reality isn’t convincing in itself.
You keep insisting this and yet you can’t seem to provide any substantiation for such an assertion. I reject it as erroneous given that I know that molecules and atoms do not actually behave like billiard balls and that complex systems quite readily present emergent baselines that are governed by principles the parent parts do not have. As such, the claim that “the behavior of any system, under materialism, is caused by that which precedes and contextualizes it, even if the effect cannot be determined or predicted” is quite false.
I don’t need a ghost in the machine; I just need a system from which options emerge and another system from which memory emerges.
Reductionism? Is materialism not the view that all things are comprised of and, ultimately, caused by matter interacting according to the regularities we call “physics”? Is there such a thing as a belief that was not caused by interacting matter?
Even if the phenomena cannot be reduced to constituent molecules and forces that describe molecular interactions, isn’t materialism the view that even emergent phenomena is caused?
Are there beliefs that are not caused by material interactions? Are there thoughts that are not caused by material interactions?
Well, who can argue with something so substantive as how you personally feel about it?
William rarely (if ever) acknowledges the weaknesses he recognizes in his own position, but you can learn a lot about them by noticing which questions he refuses to answer, even when they are posed repeatedly.
Like this one:
You’re mistaking a philosophical argument for a scientific argument. I haven’t made any claims about billiard-ball physics – that is your straw man.
Answer me a few questions:
1. Are thoughts caused by interactions of matter?
2. If matter interacts differently, can this cause different thoughts?
3. Beliefs are thoughts. Can interacting matter cause false beliefs?
4. If interacting matter can cause false beliefs, how would you know if a belief is false, since “knowing” is a thought/belief and therefore generated by the same error-producing process that caused the putative error in the first place?
5. Does anything other than interactions of matter cause thoughts or beliefs?
So what? Plainly, we have brains that allow us to reason about the world in terms other than those of fundamental physics.
Unless you are going to say that some thoughts are not caused by material interactions, you’re just begging the question here. Regardless of what the physics are (fundamental or not), if thoughts are caused by material interactions, and those material interactions can cause erroneous thoughts, you have nothing to measure the ruler by except the very ruler you are using. You have no means by which to check against errors of thought.
In fact, if thoughts are caused by material interactions, there’s no such thing as an error or a false view any more than there is an true or false shape to a blade of grass.
This is all just assertion. To have the semblance of a point you would need to demonstrate either that sound reasoning is not adaptive, or that intellectual pursuits other than fundamental physics are impossible without the existence of a god.
We don’t expect evolution to provide optimal solutions, only adaptive ones. Thus human cognition is indeed subject to error, but not maladaptively so. Fortunately we have correction mechanisms. Pretty much the methods of science, but often used in less rigorous, everyday settings.
I think it would be a mistake, for a whole bunch of familiar reasons, to assert either
(1) thoughts are caused by neurophysiological processes
or
(2) thoughts are either type-identical or token-identical with neurophysiological processes.
Instead, my view is
(3) properly functioning neurophysiological processes are a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for having thoughts, but nothing about those processes will tell us what it is to have thoughts, because what it is to have thoughts is explicated at the person-level of description (which attains self-explication through philosophy, history, psychology, art, literature, etc.) and neurophysiological processes are at the sub-personal level of description. My thoughts are caused by my thinking, reading, writing, conversing, and so on — whereas the neurophysiological processes at work in my brain (though not only there) are caused by the interactions between neurons, the rest of my body, and the environment. Likewise my feelings, desires, likes and dislikes are caused by my experiences, choices, actions, and so on.
If (3) means that I should not call myself a naturalist, that’s fine by me. (I have fairly grave doubts about the coherence of naturalism as it is!)
I’m much more comfortable with the idea that there is an irreducible plurality of vocabularies — psychological, biological, physical, etc. — and that none of these vocabularies have a privileged ontological status.
The thesis that the vocabulary of particle physics has a privileged ontological status, and that everything that isn’t couched in those terms must be either reduced to particle physics or rejected as nonsense (at best mere facons de parleur, not to be taken literally or at face-value), strikes me as utterly absurd, because it is picture of reality without us in it. A comprehensive ontology that does not contain us cannot be rationally compelling to us.
It seems fairly clear to me that the challenge to any intellectually satisfying philosophical naturalism is to explain “the Four Ms” (meaning, mind, morality, and modality) in terms of “the Four Fs” (feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproduction). The Four Ms are non-optional — they are constitutive of our rational agency (our personhood), and any intellectually satisfactory comprehensive ontology must explain them. The question is whether the Four Fs — which is pretty much all that the naturalist can appeal to — are sufficient to do the trick. (I think that Dewey does a good job with morality and mind, and Sellars does a good job with meaning and modality.)
It simply won’t do — as Alex Rosenberg insists — to say (translating his view into my preferred idiom), “since we can’t explain the Four Ms in terms of the Four Fs, and the Four Fs are all we’ve really got, then so much the worse for the Four Ms!” The Four Ms are non-optional because without them we cannot even make sense of the norm-governed social practice of empirical inquiry through which we come to know what we know of the role of the Four Fs in explaining the events and processes of natural history. Rosenberg’s scientism is incoherent because he eliminates the very possibility of explaining what science is.
No. And the other questions don’t seem to apply if I answer “no” to the first.
Not as far as I understand materialism. To wit:
“The materialist view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, famously by René Descartes. However, by itself materialism says nothing about how material substance should be characterized. In practice, it is frequently assimilated to one variety of physicalism or another.
Materialism is often associated with reductionism, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description — typically, at a more reduced level. Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, however, taking the material constitution of all particulars to be consistent with the existence of real objects, properties, or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically used for the basic material constituents. Jerry Fodor influentially argues this view, according to which empirical laws and explanations in “special sciences” like psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of basic physics. A lot of vigorous literature has grown up around the relation between these views.”
No. Materialism merely establishes that all things are ultimately comprised of matter. It does not establish how material phenomena must exist.
What do you mean by “caused by”. If you are asking whether there are beliefs that are not the emergent products of systems, I would have to say I do not know, but I doubt such could occur. But there are a number of phenomenon in physics that arise out of systems from which a causal relationship is at best indirect and more properly correlational rather than causal.
Neil.
Are you a materialist?
If “materialism” is the claim that the vocabulary of particle physics stands in a privileged ontological position — i.e. particle physics alone represents what is real — then I don’t think anyone at TSZ is a “materialist”.
No, that is precisely the physics you argue for when you say, ” the behavior of any system, under materialism, is caused by that which precedes and contextualizes it, even if the effect cannot be determined or predicted.” Such a statement reflects a billiard-ball misunderstanding of how matter actually behaves and the misunderstanding and/or mischaracterization that material systems all have the same physical properties.
Yes.
I don’t understand what you are asking here.
Thoughts in the brain (at least as far as the studies of human brains that I’ve seen go) are associative. They arise from interaction of neurons processing a variety of stimuli signals. As such, it appears there a number of different “material interactions” that can generate the same thought.
3.Beliefs are thoughts.
Beliefs can be thoughts. They can also be stimuli. They can also be feelings without any thoughts. They can also be somatic phenomenon such as stress. So I’d have to say your assertion above isn’t complete.
I’m at a loss as to what you are getting at with your question. Let me see if I can ask a related question and maybe you can tell me if the question addresses the same type of concept your trying to understand:
Can neurons give the impression of illusionary stimuli? The answer is yes. It is well-established that amputees routinely “feel” a sensation – an itch or even pain – coming from the location of a former limb.
Well, as my example shows, it would be pretty simple – as the amputee has no limb to itch or hurt, such a sensation is clearly a false one.
Not that I am aware of. The better question though is, is all matter in the human body either a thought or belief? The answer is no.
Hear hear!
No, although I am not sure of the relevance.
I’ll comment further on that, since WJM seems puzzled by my response.
Our notion of causation is about objective events causing other objective events. Thoughts are not objective events or objective things, as far as I can tell. So our concept of causation does not have any relevance.
Presumably, a materialist should deny that there are such things as thoughts, instead of saying that motions of material things cause thoughts.
William J. Murray,
Oh, come off it! You mean you are arguing on behalf of an imaginary theist?
As far as I can see, it’s all about you. What you are, what you are not, and what you despise.
For a man who is adamant he doesn’t know / we can’t know, William sure types a lot and gives lots of advise.
So, what is “matter”?
It doesn’t matter what I’m getting at. You said that interacting matter and nothing else causes thoughts. You said some beliefs are thoughts. I would assume you agree that some beliefs that are thoughts are false or erroneous beliefs.
Therefore, we know that interacting matter can produce both true and false beliefs, and that all beliefs are caused by interacting matter. Therefore, if all we have available is a process of interacting matter with which to thoughtfully examine our mental processes for error or false beliefs, then we are reached a self-referential impasse. We have no proposed or assumed resource by which to check our thoughts other than that which we know to be prone to error.
Not that it matters, really, to someone for whom “personal feelings” is the same as “knowledge”.
If you had said “physical” instead of “objective,” I would find it hard to disagree. But I think it’s tricky to say that thoughts aren’t objective, because then it’ll be hard to see how there be a science of the mind — psychology — at all. After all, one might be tempted by the following line of thought:
(1) empirical inquiry is successful only if reality gets a vote in what we say about it,
(2) so, the intersubjective consensus among inquirers must be constrained by taking into account what is objectively true (or false);
(3) but one’s thoughts are only available to the person whose thoughts they are — they are essentially subjective;
(4) so, since thoughts are essentially subjective, there cannot be an objective truths about them, and so psychology is impossible.
Clearly, since (4) is a conclusion worth avoiding, we should go back into the premises and see what’s wrong. The problem here is (3). It contains a correct insight but presents in a confusing way, and that’s where the trouble starts.
The right thing to say is that my access to my own thoughts is fundamentally different from my access to anyone else’s thoughts. But it doesn’t make the thoughts themselves essentially subjective, private, etc. I can tell what you’re thinking by observing your behavior, by asking you, and so on. (Of course one can dissemble, make-believe, etc.) But it can also happen, if one is a keen observer of patterns of human behavior, and if you’re dealing with someone whose self-awareness is somehow deficient or distorted, that one can know someone even better than they know themselves.
So we should replace (3) with
(3*) but one’s thoughts are available to the person whose thoughts they are in a different way than they are also available to other people
and that prevents (1) and (2) — perfectly fine as they are — from licensing the conclusion that psychology (or the ordinary understanding of each other from which psychology as an empirical science evolved) is impossible.
William J. Murray,
OK, let me rephrase the question:
So, William, are you saying that a theist’s concern for a child is (or should be) grounded purely by its status as a ‘child of god’?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter
Allow me to rephrase: I don’t understand your question as you wrote it.
Yes.
No. Here’s what I typed:
“Beliefs can be thoughts. They can also be stimuli. They can also be feelings without any thoughts. They can also be somatic phenomenon such as stress.”
I don’t understand the question. See if you can rephrase it defining what you mean by “beliefs” and “thoughts” by perhaps providing an example.
Here’s the thing, my understanding is that beliefs cannot solely be thoughts AND false. There would have to be some other property involved…say, a belief concerning a some part of the body, in which case said belief would also be a stimuli. Or perhaps a belief about someone else, in which case the belief would be a thought, stimuli, abstract feeling, and probably even a somatic response.
Please be more specific.
Clearly I cannot accept this assertion without a more detailed description as requested above. It seems to me you are equivocating a range of systems and properties as “interacting matter” as though they all reduced to the same properties. I disagree with that premise and conclusion.
I’m not sure from where you’ve arrived at that conclusion as I’ve never equated the two concepts.
I imagine that is as far as you can see.
Those who can’t do, preach. I mean teach. 🙂
In this case it’s far enough.
I am sympathetic to the view that there could not be a science of the psyche. What psychologists do, in practice, is a science of behavior, perhaps accompanied by a philosophy of the psyche.
Verbal reports of thoughts are, of course, objective.
I keep forgetting how sympathetic you are to an instrumentalist philosophy of science. Someone sympathetic to scientific realism would be inclined to say that, if we get better explanations of their behavior by positing the existence of “thoughts” as the private, ineffable causes of their behavior, we have as much right to say that thoughts are real as we have to say that electrons are real, on precisely the same grounds.
I am just as sympathetic to an instrumentalist epistemology (if you can make sense of that).
Sure, but that’s the slippery slope to phenomenalism. Don’t do it, Neil!
Then we must be talking past one another. I’m nowhere near phenomenalism.
William,
The same “self-referential impasse” obtains even if cognition is nonphysical.
Here is your paragraph, rewritten in terms of human cognition:
You are hoist by your own petard.
P.S. For the fourth time, how about answering my question?
Blas,
Since all of your material assets are earthly and therefore meaningless, I am happy to take them off your hands so that you can focus on the hereafter.
Please contact me so that we can arrange the transfer.
I don’t know what a “fundamental basis by which to trust my mind” means. It’s trivially easy to generate pseudo-skepticism by affixing, “how do you know ___?” for any assertion anyone makes. (One could even write a computer program to do that.) Do we have any reason to think that our cognitive capacities are not generally reliable? Do we have any reason to think that we’re not generally able to detect errors in our perception and reasoning, and to correct those errors?
I follow Peirce on this point: “let us not doubt in philosophy when we do not doubt in our hearts”. In other words, we must have reasons for doubting — it can’t be a mere “how do you know?”, like a computer or a well-trained parrot, in mechanistic response to any assertion one makes.
Without rational agency posited as primary, as a methodological priority, sure. But that doesn’t mean that we’re committed thereby to the existence of the mind a la “the ghost in the machine,” the immaterial Cartesian substance, to account for our ability to engage in reasoned inquiry with regard to both conceptual and empirical issues. How we account for our ability to engage in reasoned inquiry depends on the process of reasoned inquiry itself.
William J. Murray,
The people you are talking about should properly be referred to as “a-Abrahamic God-ists”.; aagies for short.
Oh, but please don’t mistake them for auggies. Dont think you have a bone to pick with auggies, right?
Anyway, that should clear the Beijingesque air that is choking the honesty out of the discussion.
William J. Murray,
Yes, ouch, touche and all that.
The point remains: you argue that a hypothetical atheist cares about a hypothetical child only inasmuch as that furthers said atheist’s ‘interests’ – even if such interests are simply a nice warm glow.
The hypothetical theist, meanwhile, cares (I suggest) only because caring furthers his or her interests with God.
I don’t hold either position – I actually argue that we care equally as much and for the same basic reasons of genetic and cultural predisposition. But I raised the case to point out the symmetry. I think if you insist on ‘selfishness’ in the first, you (or rather, the abstract theist) are exposed to the same charge in the second.
On the slightly OT aspect of dualism, an immaterial aspect to thought is not an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card. There is no logical necessity that a non-material essence evades either the “it was always going to be the case that you would do that” or the “every effect has a cause” flavours of determinism. Until we know something about the behaviour of the immaterial realm, we don’t know.
Certaiinly, causality reaches both into and out of the ‘mind’. The ‘acausal’ part of the mind, if it exists at all, is smaller than the entirety of it. And of course, irrespective, everybody acts as if they have free will. Why wouldn’t they?
I agree with your general point that the explanations of one level of science are not, in practice, reducible to a lower level. But there are some aspects of your post that I would quibble with.
The usual reason that physics is given ontological priority is the causal completeness of physics. Causal completeness does not apply to other sciences. For example, biological explanations of DNA structure depend on chemistry and hence quantum physics. Another example from biology (discussed thoroughly in a different thread) would be the role of randomness in biology: there is no explanation solely in biology for the asteroid strike that affected dinosaur and mammal evolution.
In your reply to Neil elsewhere in this thread, I understand you to claim (roughly) that thoughts are real because they are terms of the explanations of the science of psychology. As a scientific realist at heart, that also makes sense to me. But it also seems to me intuitively that there is some privilege to physics in this approach as well: one could argue that everything is “really” quantum fields, or even the mathematical structures at the heart of physics. But very few would attempt this argument with the terms of any other science.
Which brings me to the opening words of your post:
By the usual arguments, did you mean those relating to qualia? In any event, as I read the above you are denying supervenience of thoughts on the physical. Do I understand you correctly? Or did you simply mean that there could be no explanation of thoughts without reference to psychology, which I would agree with.
Someone on another thread asserted (correctly, I think) that reductionism does not imply constructionism. We can say that the brain can be described by chemistry and physics, but we cannot construct a brain from chemistry and physics. it’s a one way process. There’s nothing about physics that implies brains from first principles.
Which is why I keep arguing that invention is always evolutionary. Always incremental, always just a short hop from what currently works.
ETA:
Which is why you can’t deduce the limits of higher level organization from the properties of lower level objects. You can’t deduce brains from physics, and you can’t say what brains can or cannot do using the language of physics.
A hypothetical rationally consistent atheist/materialist (RCA/M) would view his or her personal, subjective feelings as the final arbiter of a child’s worth – meaning that there is nothing presumed beyond those feelings, and they are presumed to be subjective in nature.
Apparently, you think the significant issue is whether or not one operates in self-interest, and that by arguing for an equivalence between the self-interested (ultimately) motivations of the RCA/M and the theist you’ve addressed the salient point of my argument.
Self-interest is not the salient point. The salient point is in how one conceives of self-interest – what “self-interest” is ultimately serving; what “self” is comprehended as, and how one organizes their “interests”. RCA/M’s have no postulated or conceputualized “self” or “interests” to serve than their material, subjective feelings.
Do you think that I, holding that everything and everyone is a manifestation of god, thinks that god isn’t acting in a self-interested manner? Didn’t create in a self-serving manner? What else can God possibly be acting in the interests of? There’s nothing else that exists.
So, while it can be said that both the RCA/M and (let’s say) a rationally consistent theist are self-interested wrt to the interests of the child, that equivalence belies the significant point – that “self-interest” to a RCA/M and a RCT are conceptualized as two entirely different things. Those two different conceptualizations about what self-interest means should – in a rationally consistent world – produce entirely different sorts of behaviors.
This is why (IMO) many theists consider atheistic/materialism so dangerous; as the theistic foundation of a culture is eroded, the entrenched behavioral modifiers loosen and the nihiistic logical conclusion of the A/M view start breaking through. Imagine a culture that actually considers their personal, subjective feelings as the final arbiter of the worth of any human being, where morality is held as nothing more than personal feelings, and that there are no necessary consequences to any behavior. Where do you think the concept of of “human rights” originates from? Or unalienable rights?
If I was an atheist, I’d fight tooth an nail against the secularization of the culture because I’d recognize that the only thing standing between me and brutal statist tyranny and/or anarchy is a pervasive theism founded on a good and rational god – or, at least, the ghostly remnants of that view still embedded in the psyche of the vast majority.
Kantian Naturalist,
Except, KN, I didn’t ask “how can you know“, now did I? No, I asked “how can you claim“, which, as we should both know, is an entirely different question.
Apparently your answer is “assume a can opener”.
I’ve never claimed – to my knowledge – that my personal beliefs are rationally consistent with each other or with my behavior.
Nobody is legally bound to attempt to defend their views/behaviors as being rationally consistent. That’s their choice.
Do you have remains of your grand grand pa?