Definition of God: First cause, prime mover, objective source of human purpose (final cause) and resulting morality, source of free will; omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent inasmuch as principles of logic allow. I am not talking in particular about any specifically defined religious interpretation of god, such as the christian or islamic god.
Definition: Intellectual dishonesty occurs when (1)one deliberately mischaracterizes their position or view in order to avoid having to logically defend their actual views; and/or (2) when someone is arguing, or making statements against a position while remaining willfully ignorant about that position, and/or (3) when someone categorically and/or pejoratively dismisses all existent and/or potential evidence in favor of a conclusion they claim to be neutral about, whether they are familiar with that evidence or not.
The argument against weak atheism:
Weak, or negative atheism is the lack of any belief that a god exists, and the lack of belief that god probably exists, and is not the positive belief that gods do not exist.
The following is a brief summary of the evidence for a general finding that a god of some kind exists, even if variantly interpreted or culturally contextualized (one can generally look up these arguments and evidences using google or bing):
1) Anecdotal evidence for the apparently intelligently ordered anomalous, miraculous (defying expected natural processes and probabilities) events attributed to god, such as signs or answers to prayers to god, or the ability to manifest or positively affirm such events through free will intention;
2) Testimonial evidence (first-hand accounts) of experience of such phenomena
3) The various Cosmological Arguments for the existence of god
4) The Strong Anthropic (or Fine Tuning) argument
5) The empirical, scientific evidence assembled in the strong anthropic argument in #4;
6) The Moral Arguments for the existence of god.
7) Empirical and testimonial evidence of phenomena closely correlated to the existence of a god of some sort, such as the survival of consciousness after death, and the existence of an afterlife realm, and the apparent agreement of afterlife entities that a god and human purpose exist; the evidence for interactions with correlated entities such as angels and demons (which seem to act to influence our free will towards or away from our human purpose), etc.
While the various arguments listed (all of which, to some degree, begin with empirical evidence) have been subject to counter-arguments and rebuttals of varying strengths and weaknesses, one must not lose sight that while there is much evidence (as listed above) in favor of the existence of god; there is zero evidence (to my knowledge) or rational argument (to my knowledge) that no such god (as defined above) exists.
[Note: One may argue that the Christian god doesn’t exist because of certain contradictions contained in the expressed nature and actions of that entity (or of the Islamic god); and there are such arguments – but this thread is not about such gods, so please adhere to the stated premise.]
The rebuttals to these argument are simply attempting to show weaknesses or alternatives to the arguments themselves so that such arguments cannot be taken as convincing (that god exists); such counter-arguments do not make the case that god (as described above) in fact does not exist.
Also, the testimony of religious adherents of various specific gods can be counted as evidence of the god premised in this argument in the manner that various various cultures can vary widely in their description of certain phenomena or experiences, and come up with widely variant “explanations”; what is interesting as evidence here, though, is the widespread crediting of similar kinds of phenomena and experience to a “god” of some sort (which might be the case of blind or ignorant people touching different parts of an elephant and thus describing “what the elephant is” in various ways). Such testimonial evidence can be counted in favor of the premise here, but cannot be held against it where it varies, because it is not testimony that such a god doesn’t exist.
If a “weak atheist” claims to “lack of belief” because there is “no” evidence for god, they are necessarily being intellectually dishonest, because they certainly aren’t privy to all potential or available evidence. They cannot claim to not know of the evidence for god after having perused the above evidence.
If the “weak atheist” is not aware of any compelling evidence, then any categorical claim they make about the available evidence they are not privy to – that it is not credible or convincing – is again intellectually dishonest because they are making a categorical claim about something they have no knowledge of.
If we have a weak atheist who is aware of the existence of the above evidence and agrees that there might be more evidence they are not privy to; and who does not categorically assert problems with the evidence they have not yet seen; and who does not categorically dismiss the available evidence as “non-evidence” (such as: hypocritically accepting testimonial evidence as evidence when it supports what they already believe, but dismissing it when it supports the existence of god) but rather states that the available evidence they have seen is not compelling towards a conclusion that god exists; then one must ask the following:
In the face of such huge amounts of evidence – thousands of years of testimony and anecdotal stories; many sound arguments based on empirical evidence and apparently necessary logical premises and inferences; and the complete lack of any attempt to make a sound argument that god (as described above) in fact does not exist – one must ask: how can any intellectually honest person come to any conclusion other than that god probably exists, even if god is poorly and diversely defined, and even if the experience of god is open to interpretation and misunderstanding?
As an analogy: even if one has never personally experienced “love”; in the face of thousands of years of testimony and anecdotal stories that love exists, and empirical evidence supporting that certain physical states correspond to assertions of experiences of love, would it be intellectually honest to “lack belief” that love exists, or would it be intellectually honest to hold the view that even though one doesn’t experience love (or using the same argument, color, joy, dreams, etc.), that love probably exists – even if people are widely disparate in their explanation, description, or presentation of what love is?
That I am aware of, there is zero evidence, no argument, and no anecdotal or testimonial evidence that god does not exist (because lack of experience of a thing isn’t evidence the thing doesn’t exist), and there is a vast array of logical, anecdotal, testimonial and empirical evidence that god does exist.
Even if one doesn’t find that evidence compelling for for a final conclusion that god exists, it is at least, if one is intellectually honest, compelling to the point that when one weighs the balance of the evidence for and against, that one must admit that it is more probable that god exists that that god does not exist, which cannot be said to be an atheistic point of view at all.
The argument against strong atheism:
Strong atheism is defined as the assertion that no god or gods exist whatsoever.
First, it is obvious that strong atheism cannot be logically supported, simply because it is impossible to prove (not in the absolute sense, but in the “sufficient evidence” sense). There may be evidence that certain gods, or kinds of gods, do not exist; but there is certainly no evidence or argument (that I’m aware of, anyway) that no significant, meaningful god or gods whatsoever exist.
Instead, strong atheists usually attempt to shift the burden onto theist by essentially asking the theists to prove the atheist position wrong. However, that is not the theists’ burden.
Strong atheism is a sweeping, categorical, negative assertion that something does not exist at all, anywhere. However unlikely one fineds it, it might be true that a god of some sort exists, so the strong atheist position would be excluding a potentially true explanation from consideration unnecessarily.
What is the useful point of a metaphysical position that excludes a potentially true explanation from consideration? What does strong atheism bring to the table of debate other than the potential for intractable error and denial of potential truth for the sake of a sweeping, unsupportable, universally negative assertion?
Conclusion: atheism of any sort is an untenable position for any intellectually honest, rational, and informed person. The belief that god does not exist, or that it isn’t more likely that god exists than not, can only be a valid position based on ignorance of the available evidence and argument for god, or a pseudoskeptical, a priori dismissal of all of the evidence for god based on ideological bias.
(Reposted here from a post I previously made under another name, in another forum, with a few minor edits and additions.)
Actually no, you are perhaps attempting to point out something, but you’ve not actually succeeded in pointing out anything at this point. Just sayin’…
Nonsense. Method precedes statements about reality. We would not have statements about reality, without applying some method of producing those statements.
Statements about methods are needed only in a society, where people want to discuss their methods with one another.
Well, yes, there is. And in any case, what point is there of using your method, when we don’t know whether the axioms are true outside the system under investigation? Or even within it?
But to return – yes there is. One of the most useful tools is empiricism. We don’t have axioms, we have models – always provisional, and always subject to incremental, occasionally radical, modification, in the light of data. And we evaluate our models by their predictive power. We don’t know whether they are “true” – how closely they model reality, but we can get a measure of whether they model reality more closely than alternative models.
We have normative models too – things we hold to be true because holding them to be true is useful, and actually makes life better, both for ourselves and for others. You could call these “axioms” if you like, but as they are untestable, they can really only be evaluated, like predictive models, on their usefulness.
God is one such model. There are others.
But you have not demonstrated this. I don’t accept it, and yet I have a good basis for truth-determinations, as I’ve shown above.
Well, biological computers can be truth/discerners. And non-biological computers. I use them regularly to do just that (though I usually call it “data analysis”.)
Why on earth not?
Because we don’t think you are correct?
The physical world doesn’t “conform to logic”. But it is predictable, and logic is one of the tools we use to predict it. It isn’t “real” (in the sense that we think of “reality” as being what underlies the universe we experience).
You are making the grave error of assuming that the properties of the whole must be the same as the properties of the parts. Yes “such individuals are something other than collections of molecules reacting as they must” – we are people, and our people-ness is a property of the whole, not of the molecules of which we are composed. And one property of us is that we can mean things, and choose things, and opine things, and use tools like empiricism and logic.
No, you’ve made an error. You have misunderstood “reductionism” to mean something different from what it does mean. We are not “reduced” to “collections of molecules” under atheism (or any other non-theistic model). You’ve missed the whole by dismissing it in the trivial word “collections”. We are not an unstructured bag of molecules. Each of us is a system of molecules, each consisting of a system of atoms, and those of a system of sub-atomic particles, and each of those systems have properties not possessed by their parts, and the whole, that is us, has amazing properties that arise from the complex systems of systems that we are.
And one of those properties is the capacity to make informed moral choices and to accept moral responsibilities for our actions. You are simply wrong.
No, we include some rather fine philosophers, who have found that we do not need a dualistic formalism, and that monism works just fine.
Actually, oddly, I learned my monism from a theist philosopher 😉
I like that. Logic is a formal way of evaluating formal statements. It cannot be used to evaluate the truth of statements, only the formal consistency of statements.
Somewhat in the way that math can be used to verify the self-consistency of an accounting system, but not whether the accountant is truthful.
That you believe models of any sort are meaningful without axioms (logical axioms, epistemological axioms, ontological axioms, etc.) profoundly and definitively demonstrates why there is no hope of meaningful debate with you. Those that abandon the philosophical underpinnings of right thinking have abandoned all reason.
Similar to:
As if the very concept of a ‘method” doesn’t in itself reference a necessary statement about reality.
I’ve demonstrated it several times. That others deny the obvious is not my fault or responsibility.
If you don’t care that your premises do not support your conclusions, it’s certainly no skin off my nose.
When I point at the car in front of you, your failure to see it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve pointed it out.
No debate can be meaningful with those who will even deny the necessity of the principle of identity.
Otherwise, what do you mean by “model”?
It’s like saying “We don’t need language, we have words!”
The concept of a “model” is deeply nested in a larger conceptual framework that absolutely requires fundamental axioms to mean anything or to have an value, just like words and phrases are meaningless outside of the language structure that provides them with meaning.
Axioms are not statements about what is real. For example, the axioms of plane geometry have no counterparts in reality.
Ideal statements can be evaluated by logic, but they have no bearing on reality.
Reality can be modeled with formal statements, and systems of formal statements can be evaluated for internal consistency, but this has no bearing on what is true or real.
I like that too 🙂
Yes, quite correct.
OK, I guess the axiom here is that empirical observation MEANS something, that testing a model TESTS something, that predictive models PREDICT something, and that any meaningful understanding of our world is impossible without empirical observation, modeling, and test. But I will agree that anyone who dismisses evidence in favor of wishful thinking and circular reasoning isn’t going to be able to communicate. Except for crossing the road, when I suspect even WJM abandons his circular principles and looks both ways. When it MATTERS, he falls back on the very empirical approach he finds so useless when it can’t find his god.
This probably hints at why science broke off from philosophy a few centuries ago. Those who remained in philosophy were probably spewing the same kind of nonsense about philosophical underpinnings of right thinking. And the scientists proved them wrong by demonstrating how well their science works.
Please tell me what “reality” means in this statement, and please explain it in terms that don’t rely on any formal concepts or are drawn from or rely upon any epistemological, ontological, or logical concepts/axioms. Under the same restriction, tell me what the “you” is that is making this assertion, and what the “I” is that is reading it, and how I am supposed to discern the meaning of what you are saying.
“Hey…I”ve shown you that I can fly. That I do it too fast for your eyes to see me is not my fault!” LOL! Sorry William, but you’ll have to do better than that if you wish to be taken seriously.
Heh! See above. Here’s the thing William, a car is an object that behaves according to principles that we, as scientists, can measure and evaluate. ‘Fraid your claims concerning philosophy have no such similar parameters because, it appears, they are merely your imaginations. You keep claiming there are cars and front of us, but then when we ask “where?” and nothing happens, and have no choice but to conclude your perception is just plain faulty.
No, it explains why modern atheists and materialists must believe it did (when in fact, it did not), and why they have so little understanding of their own philosophy.
There were a few atheists/materialists that were able to follow the consequences of their belief through to conclusion, but nobody here is apparently up to the task – because you think you can do science, and talk, and prove points and exchange ideas without any axiomatic base.
Yes, you have words, I’ll grant you that. But you are devoid of language.
William J Murray,
My premises support my “practical” conclusions as I pointed out when I said, “doesn’t self-destruct practically”.
Why, if I clearly made a distinction between the two different “self-destructs” in my comment, didn’t you take that into consideration when you answered?
If my “philosophical conclusions” are not supported in my “practical world”, why would I care?
On the other hand, if my “practical conclusions” are not supported in my “philosophical world”, why would I care?
Then I need do no better. Whether or not I am taken seriously in this forum is of no consequence to me.
William J Murray,
This is something we have been telling you for months.
You have to have “inputs” that are valid if you want an “output” that is valid.
Instead, you have constantly claimed that you can for example, simply “assume” that “humans have a common purpose”, run it through your logic, but then accept the conclusion as if that premise was validated and not simply assumed.
I’m not making an argument about the practical results of beliefs. I’m making one about the logical integrity of those beliefs. People throughout time have believed all sorts of crazy things and have lived enjoyable, productive lives.
My premises support my “practical” conclusions as I pointed out when I said, “doesn’t self-destruct practically”.
So please explain what is wrong with the logical integrity of the models some of us have presented to you.
And, as a follow up, please explain why there is any logical integrity in arbitrarily selecting certain axioms and declaring them to be true.
snark goes to guano 🙂
William J Murray,
But both can have “logical integrity”!
Whether I use logic on a “practical”, “philosophical” or any other type of problem, only the “logic” itself needs to be evaluated in order to conclude that the “logic” is sound.
The premises may be way off, but the logic may be solid.
So again, if my “practical conclusions” are valid for the “practical” world I live in, of what use are “philosophical conclusions”?
I care and I hope you do too.
Your arguments are flawed due to your assumed premises, which are never validated by you.
This is what I find bizarre. Even by William’s own reasoning, why not make a monist assumption and go with that? We still end up with autonomous agents making moral decisions and accepting responsibility for them.
And it does rather cut out the middle man.
We still end up with autonomous agents making moral decisions and accepting responsibility for them.
You can’t be autonomous or free unless god is pulling your strings.
Then why write so many words and start posts? I find that position to be incoherent.
I’m led to wonder – is there an “official” or commonly used name for that philosophy of Making Stuff Up To Justify My Thinking What I want To Think?
WJM,
No matter how you construct your absolutist argument, you will not change any minds here. To make matters worse, you are closed to the constructive feedback you have been receiving. (On both sides, this is a pointless debate.)
I strongly suggest that you present your argument for critique to those whom you would respect (those who are not insane, delusional or incapable of understanding). A fair warning, though — you may hear some of the same criticisms.
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There is no logical integrity in arbitrarily selecting axioms and declaring them to be true. There is logical integrity in accepting axioms that are necessary for any argument to have a foundation that grants it more meaning and value than rhetoric and sophistry.
Perhaps you should begin with a basic understanding that other people have motivations that may not be the equivalent of your motivations.
Monism is fine, as long as the monad is intent (free will, intelligence, etc.). Intelligence and intent can generate faux non-intelligence and non-intent and nothing necessary (to philosophy, argument and logic) has been lost, but non-intelligence and non-intent cannot generate meaningful faux intent and intelligence. Spiritual monism maintains everything that is philosophically (ontologically, epistemologically, logically and ethically) necessary; material monism has none of the essentials.
I already have, several times.
“Perhaps you should begin with a basic understanding that other people have motivations that may not be the equivalent of your motivations”
Please declare them then, William. You’ve got a lot to say on intellectual honesty; I’d be delighted to hear why you’re motived to write and yet don’t care “..Whether or not I am taken seriously in this forum is of no consequence to me.”
There are answers that can of course fulfill both being motivated and not caring, and I’m sure we’re all eager to hear yours, as it will possibly shape our willigness to engage you (seriously).
I write in forums like this because subjecting my views to criticism and challenge in an open venue often leads to my having a better understanding of them, and has often led to my changing my views. Also, in many cases, I learn a great deal about subjects I otherwise do not know much about.
Such exchanges have also helped me in making personality and character changes that have increased my enjoyment of life. For example, when I first started contributing to forums like this, I took everything personally and in a conflict-adversarial manner. Stuff people would say would hurt my feelings and anger me, and I used that to understand why and change the way I reacted to people.
After all, if one doesn’t take it personally, you guys say some pretty funny stuff. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way about your views, I mean when you’re making subtle (or not so subtle!) insults or disparaging remarks, they’re often hilarious, even if they are at my expense or Joe’s, although Joe’s gotten in a few good zingers as well.
For example, I really enjoyed damitall’s comment above:
That was pretty good. I even came up with an official name: “Bill’s (short for William) Solipsism”, or BS for short.
I’m here for my own understanding, education and evolution, not to try and convince others. Of course I realize that many of my views are absolutely ridiculous in the eyes of perhaps most others on either side of the ID camp. You don’t throw a term like psychoplasm out there without knowing pretty much what kind of reaction you’re going to get. But it’s worth doing for many reasons.
Perhaps it would matter more to me what people in forums thought if I didn’t have a large, loving support system from family and friends, all of whom view life pretty much the same way and appreciate and value me and my views. Since I don’t require validation, love or support from forum-dwellers, their opinion of me is entirely inconsequential to my purpose here.
If I believe what I think others here will think is a ridiculous notion, I don’t mind throwing it out there to see how the wolves tear it apart. I might learn something new, or I might have a reaction that is worth some introspective examination.
Where empiricism (which is a philosophy, btw) is useful, I use it. Where science is useful, I use it. Where faith is useful, I use it. Philosophy, empiricism, science, faith, spirituality, creativity – these are all tools I, as a free will individual, have at my disposal to use as I see fit, for whatever purpose I wish.
The fundamental and simple reason primacy of the mind is a necessary premise and conditional view of all reasoning is that it is all you have to work with, through, and from in the first place – even when trying to define mind and organize what it is. All sensory perception is experienced in the mind. It is all interpreted in the mind. The mind organizes it into models and structures. Even the concept that mind is generated by brain is a concept generated and tested and evaluated in the mind.
If one is going to claim that thoughts held in the mind are caused by other things, that thought itself would have to be considered as caused by something else – perhaps a bit of pizza, a sequence of DNA, some happenstance bumping molecules. If such thoughts and statements and claims are caused by such things, and responses to them by the same kinds of cause, arguments are nothing more than the exchange of noises trees make when the wind rustles them. They are just the happenstance thoughts (effects) of various unintentional causes that mean to whomever hears them whatever their particular set of happenstance causes interpret.
That might be excellent advice for you to follow yourself.
As an example, you say (in another comment):
That no doubt reflects your motivations. But the way you wrote that, particularly your use of boldface type for stress, suggests a lack of understanding that other people with different motivations, might have principled disagreements with this and with many other statements that you make.
Fair enough, William, and thanks. I appreciate this.
Perhaps. But suppose we try to imagine a mind isolated from any form of sensory input, not just from an external world but also from any internal sense of body or physical self. What would such a mind think about? Would such mind think, could such a mind think? Isn’t the concept of an immaterial being, that exists as mind only and which is a necessary prerequisite of a material universe, simply incoherent?
I agree that we can only experience what we assume to be an external reality within our minds, although evidence suggests we experience it as an incomplete model based on very limited data. I see visual imagery, sound imagery, verbal languages, logic and mathematics all as modeling ‘languages’ for want of a better word and, of course, the existence of models and modeling languages implies the existence of that which is to be modeled. Where all that came from and what is the solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness I have no idea – whatever I am and whatever an idea is.
I’m sure your disagreements, and that of others, are principled. Unfortunately, when you necessarily have to use your mind to dismiss mind as primary (ultimate) cause, you’ve undermined the validity of your statement that “mind is not primary”, and so your principles contradict how you must behave whether you want to or not
If you wish to make a case about the non-primacy of mind, then please start arguing without using mind as your primary source of sensory interpretation, model-building, categorization, comprehension, and construction of responses. Also, please shape your responses in a way that don’t appeal to the same kinds of mental qualities on my part.
But the problem here is that we have very different concepts of “mind”. In my own, monist, model “mind” is not my “primary source of sensory interpretation, model-building, categorization, comprehension, and construction of responses”; rather “mind” is the word we give to those processes.
Mind, as I model it, is neither source nor output but process.
And “I”, as I model it, is the name I give to the agent of “my” actions – the actions performed by this organism over here. “You” is the name I give to the agent of the actions performed by the organism over there, sitting in front of “your” monitor.
And these models are no more illusory than any model is. None is a complete description of reality, but most are good working approximations – hence the word “model”.
What does that have to do with “mind” coming from/being part of an overarching universal mind? What is the connection between the two? Make it explicit. Of course, it’s only all in your imagination. So you can’t make it explicit.
On the primacy of lug nuts
If you disagree with the primacy of lug nuts, then be sure to remove the lug nuts from your car before driving to wherever you present your argument. And if you instead use a taxi or a bus, be sure that the lug nuts have been removed from those, too.
Honestly, William, your argument is absurd. You are attempting to win your point by declaring that any disagreement with it is out of order. That sure seems like a case of intellectual dishonesty.
WJM’s verbiage can best be understood as a somewhat unorthodox flavor of Presuppositionalism—I’ll be happy to discuss the validity of my premises, just as soon as you agree that my premises are valid. Alas, once you’ve decided that some particular premise is sacrosanct and inviolable, you thereby render yourself unable to determine whether or not whatever-premise-it-is could be valid. I don’t understand how a person who puts such great store on logical consistency can cleave unto a ‘philosophy’ which consists (almost?) entirely of the fallacy of assuming one’s conclusions, but wjm seems to like it, so… [shrug]
I have no idea how any of this relates to a debate about whether or not one must assume primacy of mind as the root of dialogue and thought.
There are some assumptions that are necessary even to disagree with the point that some assumptions are necessary. Primacy of mind is one of those necessary assumptions.
I would like to delurk just to point out that I have been not-making-points in this thread to devastating effect since its inception – to wit:
1.
2.
3.
These points have not-been-made by non-posts not-posted anywhere. This post calling attention to them should itself be instantly disregarded.
Anybody who disagrees with these points should be careful to make no reference to them, anywhere, ever, as use of communication invalidates whatever point you think you are trying to make.
No. Your claim that matter cannot arrange itself into a mind that relates to its environment is unsupported, just as your claim that non-biological intelligent beings can exist is unsupported. The fact that you will find it impossible to support these claims demonstrates that atheism is rationally justifiable.
If you are unable to provide any support for Belief X other than “I have chosen to accept that Belief X is true”, you’re doing it wrong, for values of ‘it’ which include, at minimum, both logic and rationality.
Well, that’s odd, because I’d have thought it was self-evident! So let me be explicit: To “assume primacy of mind as the root of dialogue and thought” you’d have to first assume that mind was something separable from “dialogue and thought”, in order to be able to stand in a causal relation to it.
I don’t make that assumption, so I cannot address the question as to whether it should or should not be considered a “primal root”. It would be like asking me whether or not running should, or should not be, the “primal root” of legs, or, alternatively, legs be the “primal root” of running.
Thinking, remembering, modelling, computing, reasoning, concluding, believing, being aware, attending to, experiencing, imagining, deciding, learning, are all, IMO, words for activities that we collectively call “mind”. Mind is not “the root” of these things, IMO, nor yet “the result”. It is the collective noun we give to those activities.
So yes, I’d say it relates fundamentally to the discussion.
And, I’d say, all those activities have neural substrates.
I agree with this, but it can be said much more simply: conscious experience = mind. The problem lies not in this, but in how one characterizes the intentional aspect of that experience in ontological terms. When you say:
I still have no idea what you mean. A painting has a substrate of a canvas, but the painting cannot be said to have been caused by the canvas, nor does the canvas have anything significant to say about the real nature of the painting. “It’s on canvas” is about the least significant thing you can say about a painting. The statement “mind has a neural substrate” is not much of a statement, unless you are saying that mind is generated by that neural substrate.
Ontologically, we either see conscious experience, or our “I-ness” as primary, or a real thing in and of itself, and our intention as uncaused (free will), or we see conscious experience, including our sense of free will intention, as the happenstance and essentially trivial (in terms of physical things happening) effects of non-sentient matter.
This goes back to when I asked if battleships and computers could be built without purpose; one could perhaps more appropriately ask, if humans had no conscious experience, could they build a computer or a battleship? This goes to the heart of the question of “primacy” and to more fully parse the essential question form the superset of what “mind” entails.
One either considers the free will aspect of mind (what we call intention) as a necessary, causeless cause, or one considers intention to be largely a sensory effect caused by non-sentient other things, such as the happenstance interactions of molecules. If so, then “what I intend” is generated by prior (or contextual), non-intentional agencies, and the sense of intention (purpose) is largely or wholly unnecessary in the creation of computers and battleships.
If beliefs, memories, decisions, concepts, and perceptions are caused by non-sentient interactions of matter, then (obviously) interactions of matter can cause any sort of beliefs, memories, etc. (false beliefs, self-contradictory views, delusions, false memories), and that capacity of error extends to our intent and our judgement.
Unless one has an independent capacity to judge and an independent capacity for causal agency that is not generated by the same factors that produce that which is being judged, arbited, and supervened over, then the idea of judging and arbiting our views, beliefs, memories and supervening over them by willful corrections and changes, is self-deluded nonsense.
You cannot measure a ruler using the same ruler. If you go to someone else and get their input, you are still using the same ruler – your conscious experience – which is entirely manufactured by the same thing you are attempting to judge and supervene over.
Reading books and becoming a scientist and conducting experiments can do nothing to change the fact that you are attempting to arbit your conscious experience by using the same “effects of interacting molecules” you are attempting to arbit. In the materialist paradigm, you are an effect of non-sentient interacting molecules doing, believing, thinking and intending whatever those interacting molecules happen to dictate; if they dictate a result that you feel A is correct, even when it is not, that is what you will believe; if they dictate that you believe you have conducted 1000 tests and asked 1000 experts and they all agreed with you, that is what you will believe and remember has happened, whether that happened or not in the noumenal world.
If “conscious experience” is just whatever a set of local, interacting molecules happen to produce, one can hardly rely upon that to arbit and supervene. That is self-referencing. self-reifying nonsense. The only way to judge and arbit and supervene over what we believe, think, experience, etc. is if we have access to an independent, uncaused agency with which to do so.
Unless one admits the primacy of our mental capacity to judge and intervene – meaning, that we have an independent, uncaused supervening capacity to arbit our views, beliefs, perceptions, etc., and to independently intervene – then one is left with no alternative than that their conscious experience is nothing more than a materially-generated individual delusion that may or may not happen to correspond in any significant way to the noumenal world.
IOW, if we have no independent, supervening, intentional agency, you and I can be nothing more than isolated, matter-generated delusions with no capacity to do anything other than go along with our particular delusions, rendering debate and argument nothing more than matter-scripted continuations of our particular individual delusions.
I know. Not only was it snarky, but I did rather question William’s motives, so I’m good with the move. Plus, Rich essential noted the same thing in a much nicer way anywhoo…:)
Mind *is* that neural substrate. That neural substrate *is* mind.