Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Considering the Place of Intuitions in Philosophical Reasoning

A key issue that comes up repeatedly on this blog also strikes me as crucial for understanding the philosophical method—and so seems a fitting topic both for students of mine who are about to dig into my philosophy of religion course and for regular readers of this blog. The issue is this: When it is reasonable to trust our intuitions? Put another way, when is it appropriate to make use of an intuitive judgment as a premise in an argument, thereby treating it as a reason to believe a conclusion?


Of course, all of us agree that our intuitions can be mistaken. But does it follow that we are never warranted in making use of them? Is it even possible to refuse to make use of our intuitions—or is it, rather, the case that all of us inevitably appeal to intuitive judgments (but, perhaps, are mostly unaware that we are doing so, because the judgments seem so obvious to us that we don’t even notice we’re assuming them?)

I suspect the latter is true, especially when we are wrestling with philosophical questions—questions which, typically, cannot be answered based on sensory observation alone. In my own experience, everyone who engages in philosophical discussions and debates has intuitions that they are making use of—but not everyone recognizes their own intuitive presuppositions. In a sense, our intuitive starting points operate as the lenses through which we look at our world. Since we’re looking through them, they often become invisible to us. Part of what philosophers strive to do (with greater or lesser degrees of success) is to explicate what these starting points are. And in many cases the most valuable outcome of philosophical debate is that participants come away from them more fully aware of their own intuitive starting points than they were before—as well as more aware of how looking through those “lenses” colors their experience.

Of course, many of the premises that philosophers make use of in their arguments are drawn from observation. Sometimes they are observations of the most general kind (for example, the first of Aquinas’ “Five Ways”—his initial arguments for the existence of something with God-like properties—begins with the premise that there are things that undergo change). And philosophers will also make use of principles that are matters of logic (for example, the principle that something cannot be both the case and not the case at the same time in the same way, or the principle that if A and B are the identical thing, then everything that is true of A is also true of B).

But often enough, a premise in a philosophical argument will be neither of these things. Instead, it will be something that, while neither a matter of logic nor based on observation, just seems right (at least to the philosopher advancing the argument). In some cases the premise is thought to be self-evident. For example, Leibniz appeals at several points in his philosophical arguments to what he calls “The Principle of Sufficient Reason”—roughly, the principle that for everything that is the case, there is a reason why it, rather than something else, is the case. He treats this as a “first principle”—a self-evident starting point for reasoning about things.

And Leibniz isn’t alone. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, offers an argument against the existence of God that depends on a principle Dawkins is only partly explicit about. The principle runs roughly as follows: “In order for an instance of organized complexity to be adequately explained by an intelligent designer, the intelligent designer—whether material or immaterial—must be at least as complex as that which is being explained.”

This principle isn’t a matter of logical necessity, and it certainly isn’t a matter of empirical observation (how many immaterial intelligent designers have we observed so as to ascertain that they consistently display the property of being at least as complex as what they have designed?). So why does Dawkins accept this principle? Because it just seems right to him. In other words, he has a strong intuition that it is true.

Often, philosophers rely on thought experiments whose most important function is to serve as “intuition pumps”—that is, their purpose is to help us get clear on what our intuitions are. In other words, the purpose of these thought experiments is to help us pinpoint what “just seems right” to us, to make these assumptions explicit--in part so that we can make deliberate use of them in our subsequent reasoning as opposed to relying on them implicitly without noticing that that’s what we’re doing; in part because only once we are conscious of our intuitive starting-points will we make them available for critical scrutiny.

And this leads to my next point. If reliance on intuitions is inevitable—but iour ntuitions are fallible—we are faced with an important question: When should we trust our intuitions and make use of them, and when shouldn’t we? Put another way, when is an intuition a good reason for me to believe something, and when isn’t it?

At this point I think it’s important to distinguish between two kinds of intuitions. First, your mind may leap ahead of your plodding intellect to a conclusion that, in a sense, you believe “intuitively.” But in such cases, the intuition presents itself as a kind of research project: You have a sense (an “intuition”) that the body of evidence (or the rules of logic, or the basic doctrines of a belief system) supports this conclusion—but you still need to do the work of showing that it does. And once you take the time and effort to pursue that work, your intuition might be vindicated or undermined. In either case, you no longer believe it intuitively.

That’s not the kind of intuition I want to focus on here. Rather, I want to focus on the kind of intuition that serves as a foundation for thinking and critical reflection. I have in mind beliefs that just seem right to us in themselves, that we have a strong confidence in, but which we don’t believe on the basis of other things. The point is that we all have such intuitive starting points. But having them is no guarantee of their truth…and yet it would be impossible, I contend, to operate in the world without trusting these intuitions at least some of the time. So when do we, and when don’t we, trust them?

Now I don’t think I can, in a blog post, provide a fully satisfying answer to this question and then show that it’s the right one. But I do want to sketch out an answer that I find compelling (based on my intuitions?)—in part so that others can better understand my perspective, and in part to stimulate discussion.

So, when is an intuition of mine a “good reason”—that is, when is it appropriate for me to make use of that intuition in my reasoning, reaching conclusions based on it, making decisions in the light of those conclusions, etc.?

Let me begin the sketch of my answer by making two suggestions. First, I want to suggest that the worth of a reason can be specific to a particular reasoner in a particular context such that what is a good reason for me to reach a certain conclusion, given my circumstances, may not be a good reason for you in your circumstances. This I think is going to be a characteristic feature of intuitions: That an intuition of mine is a good reason for me here and now does not imply that it must be a good reason for you—and so, if you don’t share this intuition, I am not warranted in regarding you as unreasonable.

In this respect, rock-bottom intuitions are different from, say, logical principles. If you deny the principle of noncontradiction, it may be entirely appropriate to call you irrational. If you consistently refuse to accept the clear implications of the most meticulous empirical observations consistently corroborated by the most highly trained researchers, I might be justified in calling you irrational. But if you don’t accept Dawkins’ intuitive principle about complexity or Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason, I’m not convinced that a judgment of irrationality is going to be appropriate. Put another way, there are some things about which reasonable people can disagree—and intuitions are among them.

My second suggestion is this: While an  intuition can be a good reason for me even if it is something I could be wrong about, it needn't be. The fallibility of my basic intuitions imposes important constraints on when I can legitimately make use of them in my reasoning and when I cannot.

Because intuitions are fallible, I don’t think one should hold to them fanatically. One should, in other words, be open to evidence and arguments that might refute them (or that might shake your intuitive judgment enough that they no longer seem so intuitively right to you). But in the absence of such evidence or arguments, if I have a strong intuition that something is the case, then I may treat it as a premise in my thinking when the implications of doing so should my intuition prove mistaken are benign (or are no more pernicious than the implications of setting the intuition aside). However, when the implications of trusting my intuition are not benign (or are less benign than the implications of setting the intuition aside), I am not warranted in making use of the intuition as if it were a reliable premise.

To put this more succinctly, intuitions can face evidential “defeaters” (evidence that counts against the truth of the intuition) and pragmatic ones (practical circumstances which make it too risky to trust the intuition).

Let me focus a bit more on the latter. Whether acting on a mistaken intuition has benign or malignant implications may vary according to context—in one situation it may be entirely harmless to trust an intuition even should it prove to be wrong, while in another context the costs of trusting the very same intuition (should the intuition prove mistaken) are grave. But we also need to consider opportunity costs: what benefits are lost if one refrains from trusting an intuition and the intuition proves to be sound? In some cases, there are costs or benefits that emerge regardless of the intuition’s truth—that is, there may be benefits to trusting the intuition even if the intuition proves false (or costs to trusting it even if it should happen to be true).

But hovering over all such pragmatic assessment of intuitions is the difficult fact that it relies on an evaluative framework of some kind. When you say that the costs of trusting an intuition should it prove to be mistaken are high, you are making a value judgment about the consequences of believing an intuition in error. How do we determine what is the right evaluative framework to use? Moral intuitions? You see the problem, I hope.

But instead of pursuing this problem here, let me explore more deeply how pragmatic assessment of intuitions might work by considering an example—a case in which mistakenly trusting one’s intuitions is (at least within my evaluative framework) not benign. Having recently finished reading Bernard Beckett’s short novel, Genesis, a particular scenario from that book comes immediately to mind—and it seems a particularly fitting one because it potentially poses pragmatic challenges to some of my own intuitions, ones that we’ve been talking about in connection with my recent series of posts on materialist conceptions of mind.

(It’s also fitting because it might serve as free advertising for Bernard’s novel, which in addition to being thought-provoking on a philosophical level also earns the high praise of having kept me up significantly past my bedtime).

At the heart of the story is the relationship between two characters—one human, one android. The human, Adam Forde, has violated the laws of the Republic in which he lives in a way that makes him a focal figure in the Republic’s internal turmoil. Neither executing him nor letting him go are safe options from the standpoint of the authorities, and so they pursue a compromise: he is locked away with an experimental android prototype, Art, for the purposes of exposing it to stimulation that will facilitate its cognitive development.

Let’s suppose Adam knows a fair bit about Art’s internal circuitry (I don’t think this is true of Adam in the novel, but let’s assume it). Suppose, furthermore, that based on this knowledge he has a strong intuitive sense that nothing in that circuitry could account for the presence of consciousness.

He might, of course, have the same intuition about the human brain: nothing about the physical system of the brain can, by itself, account for the existence of this thing called consciousness. But, like me, he'd also know that he is conscious, and that his conscious states are demonstrably correlated with brain states. Perhaps he reconciles these facts with his intuition about the inability of a physical system alone to explain consciousness by positing that there is something about the brain which attunes it to some non-physical reality. Although he has no idea what this non-physical reality is like, his strong intuitive sense that a physical system alone cannot account for the consciousness he's so intimately acquainted with leads him to believe there must be some mysterious additional component at work—but that there's also something about the brain’s unique properties that makes the connection with this non-material element possible. (We would have to suppose, furthermore, that he lacks a different intuition that some people do seem to have—namely, that if there is some essentially “spiritual” or non-physical reality, it couldn’t interact with a physical one, at least not in the way necessary to generate consciousness as we know it).

Of course, if all of this is true of Adam, then he might also think the same things about Art’s circuitry—that is, he might believe that any appropriately structured physical system could do the same work that the brain does, such that there is no reason in principle why an artificial intelligence could not be created. But let’s suppose he knows a fair bit about Art’s circuitry—and not only is it unlike the biological circuitry of the brain, but its design is of a sort that (perhaps based on a thought experiment similar, perhaps, to Searle’s “Chinese Room”) Adam has a strong intuitive sense cannot do the sort of consciousness-generating work a brain can do. And so, Adam's intuitions lead to the conclusion that, at best, all that Art's circuitry can do is mimic the behavior of a conscious being.

Now it may be that after prolonged interaction with Art, Adam accumulates a body of data that really challenges these underlying intuitions. Perhaps his interaction with Art has a flow to it that just doesn’t fit with the hypothesis that Art is merely mimicking consciousness. The nuances of their exchanges just seem too hard to “fake.” And so, eventually, he reaches a point at which his intuitions have been defeated by a body of experiential evidence. If so, it would no longer be reasonable for him to invoke his original intuitions as premises—he'll be forced to conclude that one of another of them must be set aside, since taken together they imply a conclusion that he has strong evidential grounds for disbelieving. His intuitions have suffered evidential defeat.

(This, by the way, seems to be what actually happens to Adam in the story.)

But in the first days of his imprisonment with Art, his intuitions will not yet have been defeated in this way. At that point, it may be reasonable for him to trust them—but that depends on the pragmatic assessment of the associated costs. And those costs are a matter of context. My circumstances are quite unlike those that Adam faces. Among other things, I'm not sharing living quarters with an artificial intellegence that behaves as if it is conscious. And that difference might matter a great deal for whether Adam is warranted in trusting his intutions.

In fact, in this case I think it would be unreasonable for him to accept his intuitions, even though they haven’t been evidentially defeated—because operating as if they are true (and hence as if Art is not a conscious being) is more costly, should the intuitions prove mistaken, than operating as if they are false.

Here’s my thinking. If Adam operates as if Art is not conscious and he's mistaken, there is a real cost of considerable moral significance—as I understand it, the cost would be a failure to treat a conscious being with the dignity that such a being deserves. To treat a conscious being as if it were an unconscious one is to objectify it. In a sense, this is what distressed me about Adam’s early treatment of Art in the novel: in their first days together, Adam is happy to act on the assumption that Art is no more conscious than a toaster (although there is some evidence that, even at this early stage, Adam isn’t entirely confident in this assumption--he's drawn into conversation with the android, but almost as if to repudiate himself for acting as if this were a conscious being he strikes out against it in an act of physical violence).

One wonders whether this early treatment by Adam may have played an important role in Art’s subsequent development—if you’re conscious, the experience of being objectified, treated like a thing, creates both wounds and needs that can have long-term negative repercussions, ones that often propagate outwards onto others. (If you want to know more about Art’s development, read the book.)

On the other hand, were Adam to operate as if Art is a conscious being and is mistaken, the costs don’t seem to be comparable. And so, in this case, there is a pragmatic reason for Adam to set aside his intuitions, even if they have not been evidentially defeated--because they have been pragmatically defeated instead.

It is, by the way, this sort of thinking that I believe underlies a comment that philosopher Peter Singer once made to me. (Peter Singer is a renowned moral philosopher who is most famous for having written Animal Liberation, a book that helped to launch the animal rights movement). Back in the '90’s Singer visited the university where I was teaching, and the philosophy department had a dinner for him at the home of one of our department members—a vegetarian dinner, of course. During the meal I asked him what he thought about eating snails.

Now, Singer’s argument for vegetarianism hinges on his case for saying that if a non-human animal has interests, its interests should weigh as heavily in our moral deliberations as the comparable interests of a human. Since pigs and cows and chickens all have interests—as evinced by their capacity to suffer—their interests need to be given the same moral weight as ours. My question to Singer was therefore really a question about whether he thought snails (and other animals with neurological systems far simpler than those of pigs and chickens, etc.) met this criterion of being interest-bearers, a condition that Singer (unlike certain environmental philosophers) doesn’t think can be met in the absence of consciousness--leading him to conclude that plants do not have interests.

Singer’s answer? “I don’t know if snails have interests, but I give them the benefit of the doubt.”

77 comments:

  1. Hi Eric,

    Very interesting post on a very important topic. Just a few thoughts for now.

    It would be interesting to know where intuitions come from - why is it we believe them? Certainly many of them are based on past experience (in a somewhat unconscious manner) and should be trusted to the extent that the situation at hand is similar to what we have seen in the past. As a rule I would think we should be very skeptical of all such intuitions when applied to unfamiliar situations. Of course, this also is an intuition of sort, based on the observation that, in the past, the unfamiliar has often proved very different (quantum mechanics, etc.). But why trust experience? Again an intuition I suppose. And so on, and on. As you say, it seems necessary to appeal to “fundamental” intuitions at some point to prevent an infinite regress.

    I wonder if there really are intuitions that are not based somehow on knowledge or past experience (or some built-in feature of the brain). When you say something just seems right might it be that it is simply more difficult to relate the belief to these factors? Why is it that the Principle of Sufficient Reason, for example, seemed right to Leibniz? Can it be explained by reference to experience? A generalization based on some built-in belief useful to our ancestors in the wild? I am not sure at all that it is different in kind from our more mundane intuitions. I would be very interested in reading a detailed analysis of this. By the way, what is meant, precisely, by a “reason”?

    You consider logical principles as distinct from intuitions and indeed they seem to be. But I wonder if it's not simply a question of degree. Denying the principe of noncontradiction may appear foolish and is certainly an extreme case – but the exercise may not be entirely futile. I suppose there was a time when the idea that time was the same for all appeared absolutely self-evident (even questioning this probably made no sense) but we know now that the absolute opposite is true.

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  2. Hi Eric

    Very kind of you to profile Genesis in this way, thank you.

    I agree very strongly with your promotion of a type of pragmatism with regards to intuitions. Amongst other things, pragmatism is something of a blessed peacemaker, as it challenges our instinct for either/or solutions. When friends tell me all religious belief is unreasonable, the pragmatic argument is the one I always use, and although they almost always respond with 'yes, but nobody really sees religion in that way' it does start interesting discussions.

    Some thoughts on intuitions. I'm not sure finding the grounds for pragmatic judgements need in itself rely on further intuitions. Might it not be the case that one's own life is a sort of exercise in empiricism? Finding out what it is that brings us a sense of peace and fulfillment is a lifetime's work, and our tentative conclusions can inform our pragmatic judgements maybe. This is where belief in absolutes can get us in trouble. Believing there just must be, or can't be, a God, can constrain us in our own pragmatic search for meaning. Faced with dissatisfaction we might just refuse to budge on the one thing that could help most.

    I wonder too where science fits into all of this. I would suggest, cautiously, that there are some intuitions that we all find it hard, if not impossible, to escape, something along the lines of Kant's idea about imposing order on nature. Inductive reasoning might fit here, as might preferring models that provide accurate predictions over those that don't. Under this scenario, science might not be best seen as providing truth, but rather as providing models that are widely seen to be helpful.

    As we move further and further away from the easily quantified and controlled, what counts as useful becomes less and less clear. My training is in economics, a subject in which it is notoriously difficult to reach agreement, even amongst those committed to careful empirical methodology. The trap that an overly enthusiastic promotor of science like Dawkins may fall into then, could be to believe this muddy knowledge is somehow less useful, whereas anybody searching for a way out of recession would have cause to disagree.

    I know some evolutionists have tried to find biological groundings for our intuitions, but I remain a little sceptical of this approach, just because of the flexibility of our imaginations and the powerful influence of culture.

    Bernard

    Bernard

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  3. Hi Eric

    Very kind of you to profile Genesis in this way, thank you.

    I agree very strongly with your promotion of a type of pragmatism with regards to intuitions. Amongst other things, pragmatism is something of a blessed peacemaker, as it challenges our instinct for either/or solutions. When friends tell me all religious belief is unreasonable, the pragmatic argument is the one I always use, and although they almost always respond with 'yes, but nobody really sees religion in that way' it does start interesting discussions.

    Some thoughts on intuitions. I'm not sure finding the grounds for pragmatic judgements need in itself rely on further intuitions. Might it not be the case that one's own life is a sort of exercise in empiricism? Finding out what it is that brings us a sense of peace and fulfillment is a lifetime's work, and our tentative conclusions can inform our pragmatic judgements maybe. This is where belief in absolutes can get us in trouble. Believing there just must be, or can't be, a God, can constrain us in our own pragmatic search for meaning. Faced with dissatisfaction we might just refuse to budge on the one thing that could help most.

    I wonder too where science fits into all of this. I would suggest, cautiously, that there are some intuitions that we all find it hard, if not impossible, to escape, something along the lines of Kant's idea about imposing order on nature. Inductive reasoning might fit here, as might preferring models that provide accurate predictions over those that don't. Under this scenario, science might not be best seen as providing truth, but rather as providing models that are widely seen to be helpful.

    As we move further and further away from the easily quantified and controlled, what counts as useful becomes less and less clear. My training is in economics, a subject in which it is notoriously difficult to reach agreement, even amongst those committed to careful empirical methodology. The trap that an overly enthusiastic promotor of science like Dawkins may fall into then, could be to believe this muddy knowledge is somehow less useful, whereas anybody searching for a way out of recession would have cause to disagree.

    I know some evolutionists have tried to find biological groundings for our intuitions, but I remain a little sceptical of this approach, just because of the flexibility of our imaginations and the powerful influence of culture.

    Bernard

    Bernard

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  4. But then, is philosophy about our intuitions? In some fields, (ethics, aesthetics), one can make a solid case that this is true and proper. Philosophy here consists in making explicit and hopefully consistent (and perhaps critiquing) what the mass of people hold as intuitions. Very well.

    But in other fields, like religion, what are we to say? Is it OK to hold philosophy to the low standard of describing what people want in their fantasy lives and existential comforts? Or should philosophy hew to its deeper claim of seeking truth, and determine whether gods exist or not? And if all one has to show in an argument for such gods is one's intuition about it, when by rights there should be abundant objective evidence, then it seems a weak case indeed. Hardly philosophy at all, really.

    Also, on the topic of Adam's intutions, if they turn out to be wrong, it never was "reasonable" to trust them. They may have been reasonable hypotheses in the absence of evidence, but one never trusts one's hypotheses- one tests them. This is a classic example of religious-style thinking- giving one's self license to trust one's intuitions, not to say one's indoctrination, perhaps due to a lack of imagination to think of how the world could be otherwise, but more surely from a lack of philosophical rigor. This is perhaps the proper place to bring up agnosticism and epistemic humility!

    Incidentally, plants certainly do have interests. To see them striving in all climes against the elements and each other is deeply moving. They also experience pain, repair themselves after injury (the secret life of plants and all that...), etc. No brains though. Are we going to be brain-ist? That needs more reflection!

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  5. Hi Burk

    Most of the time I agree with your points, so it's fun to find something on which we differ. Isn't your argument against Eric here just a case of two different sets of definitions being used? Although we all use a word like exist easily, with an intuitive sense of what we mean, my suspicion is that all that's happening here is people have different things in mind when they pose a question like, does God exist?

    When I talk of something existing, I mean that there is a reliable relationship between my model of that thing and the the verifiable evidence available. So, I believe the car outside my window does indeed exist, and this morning will behave accordingly. Science, I would argue, is an extension of this basic system of belief forming, and I suspect this is what you mean by existence too.

    But, where I think you and I differ, is I don't think this is the only sense in which we can speak of something existing. It may well be that there is a higher order reality which gives rise to all we interact with, but which we have no inkling of. So, a garden snail has no sense of atoms, I wouldn't think, yet the atomic model describes well an aspect of reality which underpins the physical reality of the snail's world.

    Given we can imagine such an order of reality, but have no evidential/predictive access to it; isn't a valid question for theology, 'what attitudes and beliefs can we reasonable develop towards this potential, but by no means certain, realm?' Eric seems to me to be arguing for a pragmatic approach to this sort type of existence, suggesting the first question is, how will my stance towards this realm inform and affect my life? At this point ethics, aesthetics and all get brought front and centre, and this seems to me to be a valid topic for philosophical enquiry.

    Bernard

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  6. Hi , Bernard-

    Thanks for the comment. Your book sounds great, incidentally. I am just getting through Lem's Cyberiad, which takes a rather light-hearted approach to these issues, positively Monty-Python.

    Your point is a fascinating one. Susan Nieman makes a similar point that even given atheism, we have a duty to render reverence to existence at large, both in terms of its known and rather awesome properties, and as you say, for aspects that escape our conception. Humility is a reasonable position.

    But the basic point (how will my stance towards this realm inform and affect my life) seems like a non-sequitur. We don't know anything about it, so how could it affect my life? If it were an asteroid hurtling towards us, that would be one thing. But failing to know anything about it makes it highly unlikely to affect us in any detectable way, even if we are situated in its matrix, etc. It would only be through scientific analysis that such a reality would reach us, much as atomic reality has now reached us in the forms of nuclear power, bombs, an appreciation of the sun's fusion, lasers, etc.

    So this just seems like a round-about way to undergird the very temporal powers of theisms which trade on our humble ignorance to propose a model (i.e. tell a story) of this "other" reality which happens to comport with churchly hierarchy, collection plates, gay-bashing, and what-have-you, depending on the flavor of the day. As a philosophical exercise, these thoughts would lead to a wonderous quietism, perhaps deism at the outside. But in the hands of us as social beings, they have led routinely and without fail to philosophical absurdities and to likewise absurd social structures, whether of an uplifting or an abominable nature.

    So it seems to me that you are giving away too much here, supposing that we can "imagine such an order of reality" in any useful way, or that once imagined, it would have any connection with our lives. It just does not connect, other than through our deep yearnings for better answers to the brokenness of existence and the difficulties of life, perhaps best left unrequited. Perhaps the real problem is once again consciousness, which by its equisitely clever engineering offers us a false self-image of omniscience and immateriality which is so painfully at odds with our true nature. I swear- so many problems will be solved once this one is solved!

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  7. Bernard and Burk:

    Bernard, you do a good job here of articulating my position, and you nicely capture a core feature of my philosophical position when you say, "Eric seems to me to be arguing for a pragmatic approach to this sort of existence, suggesting the first question is, how will my stance towards this realm inform and affect my life?"

    Burk, you then raise the question of HOW existence in this transcendent or noumenal sense--conceived as the "I-know-not-what" which underlies the world of ordinary experience--can possibly inform or affect one's life. You note that "even if we are situated in its matrix" such a transcendent order of being won't affect us if it is undetectable IN the matrix--not like an asteroid hurtling towards us.

    But the point is that our BELIEFS ABOUT the transcendent (or our lack thereof) affect us in important ways. More precisely, they effect how we engage with the tangible world. They effect what we do with our mortal lives. And how we cleave to these beliefs (or don't) also affects what we do with our mortal lives.

    That is, whether we cleave to these beliefs with fanatical zeal, or with a fallibilistic openness to having them falsified, makes a difference for how we live our lives. Whether our belief is purely pragmatic (we operate AS IF such-and-such is the case while confessing to having no idea whether it's true in fact) or a matter of conviction (we are convinced that it is true) matters.

    William James's point, in "The Will to Believe" and elsewhere, is that you cannot escape these pragmatic implications. If you decide that the noumenal realm is utterly inaccessible and on that basis refuse to form any beliefs (even purely pragmatic ones) about it, THAT will have implications for how you live your life.

    What this means is that what we believe (or don't), and how we believe it (or don't), can be assessed pragmatically whether or not the object of belief is something whose existence would make a difference with respect to how the empirical world looks.

    The questions then become (a) what standards we should use for making such pragmatic assessments, and (b) what role these pragmatic assessments should play in the overall process of belief-formation. Both questions raise a range of difficult but interesting issues.

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  8. Hi, Eric-

    Yes, you are quite right. Our beliefs do have strong effects, even if they are baseless. I shouldn't have run on as I did. But this makes it rather important to found beliefs on a firmer basis than hopes and stories. What you and Bernard seem to be talking about is art, pure and simple. The art of living in doubt and ignorance and humility, but then provisioning one's self with some narrative sustenance, whether it comes out of Alice in Wonderland or the Upanishads.

    You'd have to agree that in humanity's long project of making sense of our position in the world, (or meta-world, or whatever one might hypothesize), we have come up with zero facts in the theism department. Lots and lots of art and imagination, but precious little basis for that art, other than our feelings about it all. And to stake your ontology of what is on our feelings about it .. well, that just seems to put things a bit backwards, to say the least, succumbing to the oldest narcissism in the book.

    So one of my fonder hopes is to treat religion as art and not to dress it up as philosophy, let alone truth. I think that would be a sound approach to the matter, recognizing our need to express our feelings in this mode, and not getting wrapped up in defending those expressions as "true" or better/worse, accurate, etc.

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  9. Hi JP,

    You write: “You consider logical principles as distinct from intuitions and indeed they seem to be. But I wonder if it's not simply a question of degree.

    I agree. I think all that appears intuitively self-evident to us is only so because we have found empirically that beliefs build on such intuitions work in our experience of life. Probably absolute certainty is never justified, not even in the context of mathematics, or of logic.

    I suppose there was a time when the idea that time was the same for all appeared absolutely self-evident (even questioning this probably made no sense) but we know now that the absolute opposite is true.

    I am not sure that’s precise. General relativity says nothing about our sense of time, indeed nobody is suggesting that our sense of time changes if we move fast, or anything like that. So our sense of time is still “the same for all” no matter what.

    What is implied by general relativity, and is now experimentally proven, has to do with our observation of phenomena related with the measurement of time. Specifically, two clocks (or anything by which one can measure time) will not display the same time if the one is moving fast in relation to the other; rather the moving one will display a lesser time. Similarly, if a person should travel at a speed close to the speed of light and then come back to earth, her body will have aged less than the body of her twin that remained on earth. Nobody imagined that such phenomena would obtain before the discovery of general relativity, but I don’t think that if one had suggested such phenomena scientists would have opined that it is “absolutely self-evident” that they could not possibly obtain. After all such phenomena are easy enough to imagine.

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  10. Hi Bernard,

    You write: “But, where I think you and I differ, is I don't think this is the only sense in which we can speak of something existing.

    What “exists” means is indeed not clear at all, and is, I would say, the subject matter of ontology. Indeed I think there is a great confusion about what “God exists” actually means. That proposition should not be understood as the proposition “God belongs to the set of all existents”. Theism is definitely not the idea that apart from existents such as apples, planets, electrons, spacetime, physical laws, logical laws, numbers, beliefs, experience, and so on, there is also another existent, namely God. Rather “God exists” should be understood as “existence is God-willed”, or, perhaps, as “reality is God-structured”. In other words, the proposition “God exists” is not a claim about God but about existence. Theologian Paul Tillich put it well when he said that “God is the ground of being”, but I think it would be more informative to say that according to theism “The ground of being is a perfect person we call God”. Theism is a really radical idea, and not how many naturalists (and perhaps many theists too) understand it, namely as the idea that apart from everything else God too exists.

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  11. Hi Burk,

    You write: “We don't know anything about [God], so how could it affect my life?

    Strictly speaking we don’t know anything about anything, except, arguably, the subjective experience we are having right now. We don’t even know that the universe has not spontaneously sprang into existence 5 seconds ago, we don’t know whether we live in a computer simulation or not, we don’t know that electrons can move on their own accord, we don’t know that other conscious minds exist, and so on. It seems rather obvious to me that naturalists simply start from a set of assumptions they don’t really know but hold to be true nonetheless, and then accuse theists for basing their beliefs on assumptions that clash with theirs.

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  12. Eric,

    You write: “Whether our belief is purely pragmatic (we operate AS IF such-and-such is the case while confessing to having no idea whether it's true in fact) or a matter of conviction (we are convinced that it is true) matters.

    Is that what “pragmatic” means? I thought that “pragmatic” is an epistemic stance according to which truth is ultimately justified by one’s experience. Or, more specifically, truth is the property of those beliefs that are found to be useful in one’s experience. Or, more specifically still, truth is the property of those beliefs which constitute a belief system which is found to be useful in one’s experience. So, for example, if I say that “2+2=4” is true, I really mean that I have found useful to believe that if I put two beans and two beans together they will come up four should I count them. That “plants need water to grow” is true because I have found useful to water the plants in my garden. That “Neil Armstrong has walked on the moon” is true because I have found useful to believe in most things that cohere with my other beliefs and which I read in serious sources. And, finally, that “God exists” is true, because I have found useful to build a belief system around this fundamental understanding about reality: useful in the intellectual sense (it makes great sense while avoiding the plethora of conceptual problems that plague naturalism), useful in the moral sense (it fits my moral sense and is morally empowering), useful in how it affects the quality of my experience of life (everything strikes me as more beautiful, and several undesired feelings such as vanity and fear subside), and so on.

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  13. Dianelos,

    In the passage you quote I was using "pragmatic" in a colloquial sense. What you provide here is a more technical sense in which "pragmatism" names a distinctive philosophical perspective that makes claims about the nature of truth, knowledge, and meaning.

    I actually would locate my philosophical position in this broadly pragmatic camp, with a distinctly Hegelian flavor--which is why I'm skeptical of the sharp line that Burk wants to draw between beliefs that have evidentiary support and beliefs that facilitate the art of living. As I see it, if a way of seeing our lives and the world facilitates the art of living--if ascribing to it bears pragmatically valuable fruits in this kind of holistic way--then that suggests that it is in some way succeeding in aligning us with a deeper reality (bringing us into harmony with it, if you will, as opposed to setting us at odds with it). And so this pragmatic mode of evaluation is not epistemically empty--although it would be a mistake to therefore assume that it supports the truth of the relevant propositions in the same way that empirical observations can support a scientific hypothesis.

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  14. Hi Burk and Eric

    The difference a pragmatic belief and a conviction is where my instincts lead me away from theist positions. Faced with the unknowable, and I agree with you Burk, I don't see how we can discover anything that would count as collective knowledge about this realm, we nevertheless must develop an attitude towards this mystery. My attitude is agnostic. I behave as if I believe many things to be true, but underlying this I concede I'm making this up in order to live the kind of life that feels fulfilling to me. Lean too heavily upon this awareness, and life becomes sort of hollow, ignore it completely, and a sort of insanity is just around the corner.

    I don't yet know how the balance is best managed, it seems to me to be a most difficult question, particularly when it comes to developing an ethical framework. The trick is something like that which occurs when watching a truly effective piece of theatre. Belief is suspended in order to experience the scene as if it were real and this suspension gives the drama its power. Yet, it is only ever a partial suspension, which in turn allows the pleasure of analysis and contemplation.

    And then there is the question of language. I agree Burk that art might be a better word. Words like religion and God seem to me to carry such cultural baggage that to use them in a pragmatic sense runs the risk of almost deliberately courting misinterpretation. I'd be interested in your response to this language issue Eric, and the benefits you see in utilising explicitly religious language.

    Bernard

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  15. Hi Dianelos,

    I agree

    This makes me think of something Eric has said about disagreements sometimes seeming larger than they are due to misunderstandings about language and so on, not forgetting the fact that discussions almost by necessity focus on disagreements - we may agree on more than we think. In any case I enjoy reading your comments. They are always interesting and thoughtful.

    I am not sure that’s precise

    You are right. I meant to say that, under relativity, time is a property of the observer (instead of being an absolute). Our sense of time is definitely not affected, I agree. Whether people from bygone ages would have found this believable or not, I don't know. I was supposing that this would be difficult but I admit that was pure speculation.

    The case of the two clocks (or of the so-called twin paradox) is more puzzling than your comment seems to imply. The situation is symmetrical: if the two clocks A and B are moving relative to each other then each one can be seen to run faster than the other. So, from A point of view, B runs slower but, also, from B points of view, A runs slower. If they eventually meet (as in the space travel example) what determines which one has aged the most?

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  16. "As I see it, if a way of seeing our lives and the world facilitates the art of living ... then that suggests that it is in some way succeeding in aligning us with a deeper reality (bringing us into harmony with it, if you will, as opposed to setting us at odds with it). And so this pragmatic mode of evaluation is not epistemically empty .."

    I agree- not epistemically empty. But what is the epistemic referent? It couldn't be clearer that the referent is us. Our inner needs, hopes, fears, deficiencies, dreams, loves, and fixations. Our social needs. Our existential needs. The deeper reality is our own inner psyche/cosmos. It has nothing to do with the larger cosmos, which has been a surprise at each step of our astronomical and cosmological study, let alone having anything to do with meta-reality, of which we know nothing whatsoever.

    Here in particular our intuitions have led us grievously astray, not in letting us express what we feel about all these mysteries, but in giving us a false sense of epistemic connection, even mastery, over the outer cosmos of which we know so little. It is a form of magical thinking, confusing one's inner feelings with outer agency (philosophical or divinatory in this case).

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  17. Burk,

    “Yes, you are quite right. Our beliefs do have strong effects, even if they are baseless. I shouldn't have run on as I did. But this makes it rather important to found beliefs on a firmer basis than hopes and stories. What you and Bernard seem to be talking about is art, pure and simple. The art of living in doubt and ignorance and humility, but then provisioning one's self with some narrative sustenance, whether it comes out of Alice in Wonderland or the Upanishads.”

    But your philosophical naturalism is also a “hope” and a “story.” It is an “art” or a philosophy as well. It is your “narrative sustenance.” So your point?

    Bernard,

    “And then there is the question of language. I agree Burk that art might be a better word. Words like religion and God seem to me to carry such cultural baggage that to use them in a pragmatic sense runs the risk of almost deliberately courting misinterpretation.”

    But this goes to my question to you as to whether you would consider your materialism/philosophical naturalism as something personally meaningful, an “art” as it were, but not necessarily true in any sort of objective way as fitting with the physical world. Can your philosophical naturalism also be considered an “art?”

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  18. Hi Bernard,

    Your comments on what it means for something to exist got me thinking. You write of a “reliable relationship between my model of that thing and the the verifiable evidence available”. I would put it differently but I think it boils down to the same idea: our brain creates and continuously maintains a model of reality populated with “ideas” or “concepts” and this is this model that conscious thought manipulates (there are similarities between this and what we do when we model some subset of reality on a computer). In this sense, some our ideas are approximations or simplifications of “something out there”. So, when I say that the tree outside my window exists, it means that some complex set of sensory input is mapped by the brain to the idea of a tree – in some form of pattern matching.

    So, in this view, existence would mean something like this. First, it is expressed in term of an idea – some abstract and complex brain pattern. There is no other way – language must use words and words are already one step away from reality. Second, to say that such an abstract construct exists means that there is a clear match between the construct (idea) and some stuff out there.

    I don't know how much sense this makes but I can hardly think of our ideas as anything else than “objects” in a model inside our brain (this is probably influenced significantly by my experience as a software developer). Hopefully, you will get my meaning.

    What got me thinking is this remark you made: “I don't think this is the only sense in which we can speak of something existing”. Let's consider an alternate reality with which we can have no interaction at all. We often mention this idea here but, try as I may, I cannot make sense of the notion of existence for such a reality. What can that mean? Is there any sense to say that it exists?

    By the way, I don't think the theistic “ultimate reality” is of this kind because theism assumes some kind of interaction between it and us (at least our consciousness).

    On a personal note, I am glad to say that Genesis is in the mail – I should get it early next week (I couldn't find it in a bookstore). I am also expecting A certain ambiguity. While Eric's post on the book made it tempting, the comments by Dianelos (thanks!) made it irresistible!

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  19. Hi Darrell

    I'm possibly trying to maintain a false distinction here, but I like to think of my knowledge in terms of models and stories. By this I mean that I carry in my head ideas about physical relationships in the world upon which my day to day behaviour relies heavily (if I go out in the rain I will get wet, if I step off this ledge I will fall downwards and so forth). I call these my models of reality, something I suspect similar to what JP is getting at when he speaks of the relationship between concepts and reality.

    But, as you have often pointed out, such a set of knowledge is incomplete when measured against human needs. To function fully, I need motivations, attitudes, values and so forth. These do not exist, I don't think, as models, in the sense that their impact is not predictive. (This is only loosely true, if I do something I believe to be good, I may predict I will feel all the better for it). My guess is that this aspect of my knowledge is built up over my life through my interaction with stories, by which I mean all manner of cultural mechanisms. So to answer your question, this aspect of my knowledge I would call art, and creating such art, be it through contemplation or just getting out there in and living, is the thing that makes life worthwhile.

    My take on this is naturalist in the sense that I think the things that underpin such art are our evolved nature, the cultural ideas we have been exposed to, and our own unique set of experiences. I don't think any of the ideas about love, truth, beauty etc have their grounding in an extra-physical dimension, and I'm guessing this will be the point at which we begin to differ.

    Bernard

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  20. Hi JP

    I'm probably playing a little loose with my terms here. Can we imagine a reality with which we don't interact? In a sense I think I can. I used the example of a snail having no concept of an atom.

    This might play out on two levels. We might say that most of humanity through most of history did not have the modern model of the atom available to it. So, they lacked the perspective such a model brings. Does the model itself constitute a new level of reality? Can we reasonably say that beneath an item's apparent solidity we have the reality of mostly gaps and what we take to be solidity is actually quite different forces at work? This comes down to the definition of reality I suppose. We might reasonably guess there are many models we are yet to discover, that will transform our understandings in ways we can't imagine. And that some potentially valuable models we will never reach.

    On the second level, going back to the snail, one reason it doesn't have a conception of atoms is it probably doesn't have any sort of conscious conceptions, certainly not of the type it can discuss on the internet. We evolved a higher level thinking capacity that brought us into contact not just with the physical world but, as you say, with concepts about the physical world. So, what might a sufficiently advanced brain be able to reach that we can't? Why shouldn't there be another level, as foreign to us as abstract concepts are foreign to a snail?

    There is another bigger question looming, and that is whether the concept of reality has any independent existence beyond our own human construction of it. I'm not sure it does, which rather undermines my whole argument!

    Bernard

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  21. Bernard,

    “My take on this is naturalist in the sense that I think the things that underpin such art are our evolved nature, the cultural ideas we have been exposed to, and our own unique set of experiences. I don't think any of the ideas about love, truth, beauty etc have their grounding in an extra-physical dimension, and I'm guessing this will be the point at which we begin to differ.”

    First, thank you for the elaboration and I think much of what you note is entirely correct. But, you are missing, somewhat, my point as is evident with the quote above. What I’m trying to point out is that your very thinking of what it is that underpins such art, that you think it is our evolved natures and so on, IS the art itself—it IS the story, the narrative, the philosophy, the way for you of construing what life means. Does that make sense?

    Further, if it does, are you willing to accept your naturalism as an art, a story, a philosophy, or to put it simply: a faith?

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  24. Eric,

    I have been trying to post a comment and it always get deleted after a minute or so. I have tried to split it and the first part got deleted (I have deleted the useless second part above). Any idea about what the problem is?

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  25. Hi Darell

    To answer your question, no, I wouldn't want to extend the word art to cover the thinking behind our predictive models. Let me try to explain why.

    Art, for me, implies a process of imagination. An imaginative response is available to us when the move is not a forced one.

    So, yes, the scientific world view, by which I mean only the building of our models, not their interpretation, does require some starting assumptions which can not be independently established. Most famously, we assume a certain regularity in the world. So, when I say going out in the rain will make me wet, implicit in this statement is a piece of story telling, that the rules that held yesterday will hold today. However, I would not want to call the inductive assumption art. This is because I can't think of any way of approaching the world without making the inductive assumption. It appears to be a forced move.

    So, the naturalistic programme, it seems to me, is an extension of what we might call common sense. It takes the assumptions we all make and see how far we can push them. As a result we have electricity in our homes, cell phones for communication, radiotherapy etc. And because nobody, when fully informed, would deny the mechanisms behind these technologies, we can think of these models as different in their nature from what I call art. This is not to say scientific models are accurate representations of reality, but we can all agree they are most accurate representations we currently have.

    When it comes to questions of ethics (should we have an estate tax, what level is best?) or aesthetics (does Tom Waits make beautiful music?) then the moves are not forced, and our personal responses to them, and the stories we build about them, I would call art.

    The tricky bit is our response to the grey areas. As you've pointed out, for scientific models to become meaningful we must wrap them in stories. So finding the dividing line between model and art is tremendously difficult, and is a process we must be awfully careful about I think. The implications evolutionary models have for our understanding of consciousness is an excellent example of such a challenging area.

    So if you take the overall naturalistic project, there are certainly many artistic leaps in there, no question.

    Bernard

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  26. Hi Bernard,

    Why shouldn't there be another level, as foreign to us as abstract concepts are foreign to a snail?

    This is a fascinating possibility, don't you think? We can put cognitive abilities of various animals in some sort of scale: amoebas, snails, dogs, great apes, humans. Here, we're not talking of an access to some hypothetical alternate (or noumenal) reality. Animals higher in this scale can comprehend more than others, but more of the same physical reality. I cannot make up my mind as to the likelihood that there are higher levels. But, as you imply, there does not seem to be any strong reason to doubt it. Obviously, by definition, we cannot even imagine what we're missing and this implies limits to what we can imagine or conceive. On the other hand maybe humans have crossed some cognitive threshold and that mathematics, for example, provides the means to extend indefinitely our limits.

    To go back to the existence of a completely unreachable reality: what does it mean to say that it exists? I cannot make sense of this.

    [...]

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  27. [...]

    You have to elaborate on your last point: certainly you are not saying that there may not be a reality independent of us? What I can understand, and maybe this is what you mean, is that when we say “X exists”, X refers to a concept or construct inside our mind – it is only indirectly and approximately related to “stuff” out there. Strictly speaking, “X” exists only in our mind, but the corresponding “stuff” is independent of it.

    There is something of a paradox here. In order to think about reality, we have to use ideas (the model). But then, we are not thinking about reality anymore, but only about its representation. There is an interesting Zen story told by Alan Watts that you may know about. I don't have the text with me but I will try to tell it from memory:

    It was time to select a new master for a Zen monastery. The head monk calls all those eligible to the position to a large room and places a pitcher of water on the floor in the centre of the room. He then asks the candidates to “describe” it (maybe without using the word “pitcher”, I am not sure of the formulation). Each monk tries in turn, the way Zen monks go at these things: “This is not a bed” or what have you. Finally the monastery cook happens to come into the room and is told of the challenge. He then walks to the pitcher and kicks it over with his foot. The cook gets the job.

    I won't tell the point of the story now because some who don't know it may enjoy thinking about it. But, considering what I was saying, it should be obvious.

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  28. Hi, Bernard, Darrell-

    Let me add a slightly different angle on art. Art can sometimes feel like a forced move ("I can't not do art!", and similar sentiments). Only it isn't logically forced, it is internally forced, as a way of expressing feelings and intuitive worldviews. If it is deeply expressive enough of the common condition of humanity, it may strike a similar chord in others and be popular, like Beethoven or Barry Manilow. We seem to love communing with others on the deepest possible level of appreciation of the human condition- true social bonding.

    This is an entirely different project from that of all the logically forced moves of making models of external reality, though in the end, our psychic life is part of that reality as well, and thus the claim of psychology as a science loops back and threatens to join the two realms, making art seem forced in entirely different (and unwelcome) ways. The idea that theism does the science part is long-discarded by any serious scholar, while the idea that it does the art part doesn't seem to be taken seriously. Yet what else is there?

    The problem is that religion (traditional theism, and other totalizing ideologies like communism in its heyday, etc.) expresses feelings, intuitions and worldviews that make all sorts of claims that occupy the science part of the spectrum. It has always been intrinsic to religion to tell a story of human nature through human origins, often with tribal history and fables thrown in for good measure, along with cosmic origins and persons that lead to rationales for superstitions and the like. All a very exciting and satisfying package of artistic production, even explicit (if primitive) philosophy if one wants to take Eric's defense of intutive philosophy seriously.

    Our existence necessarily relates the inner with the outer world, making it easy to confuse the two into an art-science mishmash. It was the critical advance of the enlightenment which gradually separated them out, making of art the recreational and private pursuit it is today, and of science the rigorous and passive-voiced cumulative pursuit it is today. That seems to be why religion occupies such a tortured position in the aftermath, trying to have it both ways, unwilling to retreat fully from age old science-y claims and attempting to keep its flag flying on the ramparts of a supernatural outpost which keeps receding into cosmic and philosophic oblivion.

    At the same time, its artistic functions are as live as ever, giving comfort and a story to people in need of them as ever. But it can't foist its old methods (story telling about our place in the world) on to us as it could previously, due to the intercession of science with its better, if unartistic, stories. So, which story does one choose? The one forced logically, or the one forced psychically?

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  29. Hi JP

    I'm very hazy on this stuff myself, so someone else with philosophical training may step in and rescue me. I remember reading Karl Popper's three worlds theory at some stage and trying to get my head around what he was getting at, and if I have it right, there are similarities. He spoke, if you're not familiar, of the physical world being distinct form the world of ideas, with the third world, the world of the mind, being the means by which these other two worlds interacted.

    This assumes, I think, that ideas or concepts have some reality above and beyond the simple physical correlates when they are written down, thought about or discussed. So, there is no such thing as a perfect circle in nature, but we have a notion of a perfect circle. Does this notion in itself exist then, above and beyond let us say the neural correlates of contemplating a circle? This harks back to Plato I guess.

    Popper was inclined to give such concepts an existential status of their own, and used this to defend his own version of dualism. I think he said something along the lines of, dualism is out of fashion but I am more than a dualist, I believe in three worlds.

    I don't know where I stand on the existential status of the perfect circle, I am inclined to want to dismiss it as simply a description we give to a particular neurological state, but I'm not sure I can justify this stance. But to the extent that a perfect circle exists, then its relationship to the life of a snail would appear to meet the definition of an unreachable reality (for snails at least) that nevertheless exists.

    So, is it impossible to imagine that some other form of reality stands to us as the perfect circle and other concepts stand to the snail? Or does this line of thought see me disappearing down the rabbit hole?

    In a way this isn't the interesting question for me though. I am more interested in the theistic idea that not only might such a world exist, but we might be able, through some form of contemplation, to get an inkling of it. This is where I run up against a brick wall. I don't see how this could be, or rather how we would ever know we weren't simply accessing our own imaginations instead. Eric's take on Hegel might help me see what he's getting at here. I have tried to get my head around Hegel in the past and failed miserably.

    Bernard

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  30. Bernard,

    “To answer your question, no, I wouldn't want to extend the word art to cover the thinking behind our predictive models.”

    It sounds, to me anyway, as if you are again confusing philosophical naturalism with “science” or the scientific method. They are not the same thing. Both theistic and atheistic scientists use predictive models and the scientific method. You are correct though that I am talking about, as you say, “the thinking behind” the very process of what we think of as doing “science.” The thinking is indeed philosophic, or “art.” I’m not sure how you can deny that.

    We are doing something different when we discuss the results of those predictive models and what it means that we can even predict such things. When we begin to sum up the data and connect it to greater webs of knowledge, when we begin to talk about what it means, we are now into philosophy or “art” as it were. And, as you correctly note, we also approach the very process of building conceptual models and implementing a scientific method wrapped within a philosophy or “art.”

    So, I must disagree. And, it would be interesting to see how you justify your position here...without using and coming from a philosophical viewpoint or "art"!

    “So if you take the overall naturalistic project, there are certainly many artistic leaps in there, no question.”

    Well, right, but it is not that there are “many” artistic leaps; rather, the entire project is such a leap.

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  31. Burk,

    "The problem is that religion (traditional theism, and other totalizing ideologies like communism in its heyday, etc.) expresses feelings, intuitions and worldviews that make all sorts of claims that occupy the science part of the spectrum."

    But so does your philosophical naturalism. It is a totalizing worldview or faith. Your entire response bears this out; you are simply retelling the story once told by the “Enlightenment.” So again, your point?

    Further, the “science” part of the spectrum doesn’t speak. Philosophies speak when we begin to discuss what the “science” means, which is exactly what you are doing in your response. It is not “science,” it is art.

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  32. Darrell

    As always, I'm not convinced we're disagreeing at all. I'm not confusing naturalistic philosophy with science, I'm simply saying the science part (that as you note, both atheists and theists are free to participate in), which is to say the model building, I wouldn't want to call art. We then wrap our scientific discoveries, and our attitude towards scientific study, in stories. Don't we both hold these things to be true? So where is the disagreement? I think perhaps you would like me to side with some version of naturalism that I don't hold.

    The thing that interests me most is this. It is unreasonable for two people standing at the edge of a cliff to disagree on the likely effect of stepping off the edge. The one who claims to be immune from gravity in this situation is just plain wrong, and we can all see this.

    It is not however unreasonable for the same two people to disagree on whether euthanasia is wrong. We are unable to say which of them is plain wrong if they take opposing stances on issues like this (although we personally may sympathise with one more than the other).

    So, no matter how we wish to use language to frame the difference, a difference there is. These two kinds of knowledge have distinguishing characteristics, the dispute in the first instance is resolvable, albeit it messily. So, I choose to use the word art to describe this second type of knowledge, our moral and aesthetic knowledge, to make clear the difference. Now, I don't think anything you have said suggests you disagree with this, although you might reserve the right to use different language to describe the difference, and fair enough too.

    Bernard

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  33. Hi Bernard,

    The mathematician in me is particularly interested in the question you raise about the existence of a perfect circle. It may be the case that many mathematicians believe that mathematical objects have an existence independent of our minds. Martin Gardner believed that most thought so and he was himself something of a Platonist in this regard. In my own experience mathematicians don't think (or worry) very much about this although, as a practical matter, they act as if they were dealing with real objects. If, as you say, Popper was also a mathematical Platonist, I am up against much when I say that no such thing as a perfect circle exists in any real sense. Why? Let me suggest that we cannot even conceive of a perfect circle.

    I am not talking of circle as defined by mathematicians. This is done within a formal axiomatic system and presents no difficulty. The problem arises when we consider the “idea” or “concept” of a circle.

    This is not a frivolous question and think it has some relevance to the interpretation of intuitions. Moreover, many philosophical arguments use the fact that some particular thing can be conceived: Chalmer's zombies, for example, or a maximally perfect being in a version of the ontological argument. I am very sceptical of all such statements. There are no doubt constructs in our mind that correspond to these things but they may be just that: objects in a model, shells without much substance.

    In fact, I am puzzled by what “conceive” really means. Can we conceive of a human increased in size 10-fold and walking on the surface of the earth? We know that such a being would collapse under its own weight, so can we really conceive of it? We can certainly imagine this (or a walking tree) but the word conceive seems to imply that the thing in question can be effectively realized. It seems also to imply that we can conceive the thing completely (at least in principle). That is, to really say we conceive of a walking giant, we need to conceive of a way to overcome the mechanical problems caused by the change in scale – and so forth. Otherwise, we don't conceive of the giant at all but only of a shadow, an illusion.

    Now, can we conceive of a perfect circle? If we cannot, there is no sense in saying it exists at all (except in the formal mathematical sense). But if we can it means we can conceived of a realized circle, not just an approximation in a model. This is where the “concept” of a perfect circle breaks down: there is a mathematical argument showing that, starting with what looks like a complete description of a circle (or a line segment for that matter) we find that some properties of the resulting line remain undetermined – and, thus, that the circle cannot be “realized” (because a realized object must be completely determined).

    I have no room here for the argument but it's a fascinating one involving one of the most mystifying mathematical result I know. If you are interested, I can try to sketch it into a comment.

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  34. JP

    I wonder if this is one of those issues that can quickly dissolve into differences of definition.

    I'm not sure Popper was a Platonist as such, and the perfect circle might therefore have been a misleading example. This takes us back to the issues canvassed during the discussion on consciousness. I think the idea is that concepts themselves have some sort of status that loses something crucial if we reduce them to their physical representations. Indeed, just as concepts can be reduced to the physical, so the physical can be reduced to being just a concept. So love, fear, circles, democracy, abstract ideas in general need to be given some sort of status separate to their physical correlates if we are to deal with them, irrespective of whether some iconic Platonic version of them can be conceived of.

    I suspect that when we talk of such things existing we are broadening the definition of existence past that the naturalist would instinctively use, and this may be the equivalent of what Eric is talking about when the definition of religion becomes contested.

    The point I am fumbling towards is why can there not be some category of thing that stands to us as these abstract concepts stand to, say, a snail? This question is just for me an intuition pump, to get a feel of what I might mean when I say there may well be levels of reality beyond our imagination.

    And yes, if it can be done simply, the demonstration of the problem of perfect circles would fascinate me. Thanks.

    Bernard

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  35. Bernard,

    “The thing that interests me most is this. It is unreasonable for two people standing at the edge of a cliff to disagree on the likely effect of stepping off the edge. The one who claims to be immune from gravity in this situation is just plain wrong, and we can all see this.”

    Yes, of course. And this conversation really has nothing to do, per se, with this area—what we might call the “facts” and “evidence” of, life if you will. We all understand the "facts" and "evidence" so, yes, let’s move on.

    Okay, just so I have this right: You agree that philosophical naturalism is an “art” so to speak, a way of making sense of the world, in the same way as Christianity, or philosophy in general, right?

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  36. Hi Bernard,

    I think we agree on the snail business. As much as a dog has concepts that a snail cannot possible have (dog?) and that we have concepts that are inaccessible to a dog (relativity?) there might be concepts (or something else) completely inaccessible to us. What is to us what relativity is to a dog? But I find that thinking about this almost impossible: how can we imagine what these things could be? By definition, they are inaccessible to us. When I try to do so I feel like one of these robots in Star Trek that Kirk or Spock has led into some logical self-destructive loop – I can almost feel the smoke coming out of my ears. It is almost painful.

    I don't think however that these other levels of reality are anything like theism seems to assume. The latter ends up being much too humanlike to make sense to me. What do you think?

    I will try to explain my point about the impossibility of conceiving of a circle (or a line) – probably tomorrow morning. But you may already know much of what I will say.

    jp

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  37. Darrell

    Yes, philosophical naturalism, if I understand the term, is certainly a way of making sense of the world. I wouldn't instinctively use the word art to describe it, but have no objection to doing so. We must, as some point, make a type of imaginative leap in order to bring a system together in our heads.

    Different systems however approach their 'art' in very different ways, and it is valid to consider them all and wonder if some might lead us into inconsistencies, absurdities, nihilism or whatever. This consideration is I think contestable, and we can attempt to find flaws in our own and each other's approaches.

    So, naturalism it seems to me, takes your statement that we can all agree on the facts and the evidence as its starting point, and I find this approach very appealing. It asks, by what means do we extend the range of our acknowledged facts? The answer appears to be, by carefully following the established procedures of the scientific project; observing, hypothesising, testing and critiquing.

    For me three questions naturally follow. The first is, how far can this method take us? So, for example, if we accept evolution as a well established fact of the world, what does it lead us to believe about the human mind? Much of my thoughts on materialism and supernaturalism stem from following this path of enquiry.

    The second question is, what does the success of the scientific method tell us about the underlying reality of the world? One possible response is that it tells us that the world itself is something like the models we use to deal with it. So, as we refine our models we get closer to reality, no matter how strange that might appear (and quantum physics becomes everybody's favourite example at this point).

    The third question is, what to do with the inevitable mysteries and unfilled gaps? For me, when possible believe nothing, adopt no attitude, remain agnostic, is the answer I enjoy. And when a gap filler is required (as in the case of ethical decisions) I turn to art, which is to say my imagination, and the imaginations of all those whose ideas I can access. At this point, I acknowledge that what I am doing is cobbling together a story, making something up for my own small purposes.

    Other approaches, e.g the various forms of Christianity, answer these three questions, and many others besides, very differently. I am interested in exploring these differences further.

    Bernard

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  38. Hi Bernard,

    My argument about intuition is this: (1) we have a intuitively idea of a straight line, totally convincing and apparently complete; (2) we can show that a significant property of the line is still undetermined; (3) therefore the belief that we can conceive of a straight line is an illusion.

    Whether this is convincing or not to others, I can't tell. But, in my view, this has considerable import on the value of intuition in general: if we cannot intuitively conceive of something as simple as a line, we should be very sceptical of any argument based on the conceivability of some thing or another.

    I am talking of the intuition of a line (mathematics define defines its concepts within a formal axiomatic system and these issues don't arise). To fix ideas, let's suppose the line is composed of all numbers between 0 and 1. This, I think, is an intuitively complete description of our line.

    So, what's missing? It has to do with infinite subsets and the continuum hypothesis.

    Consider first the set of all points corresponding to fractions (0, 5/163, 7777/7778, etc.) This set is infinite and has the same “size” (or cardinality) as the set of all integers. (We say that two infinite sets have the same size if there exists a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of the two sets. As is to be expected with infinite sets, this can lead to counterintuitive results: there are just as many integers as fractions or even numbers, and so on.) Sets of this size are called countable. This is the smallest possible infinite “number”.

    Now, consider the segment in its entirety. It is also an infinite set but of a different order of infinity (the cardinality of the continuum). There is no one-to-one correspondence between the whole segment and the integers. It is not countable.

    The question is this: is there a subset of our line segment with an intermediate size? If the line is completely determined, if our intuition is correct, this question should have a definite answer. If we can conceive of the line, we can conceive of its subsets. Does one of them have an intermediate size?

    It so happens that this question is undecidable. Not that this is too complex to find out: there is simply no truth of the matter. We can assume there is or that there isn't such a set without creating any contradiction. But the description of our set (all numbers between 0 and 1) seems complete enough. Nothing at all is missing.

    There is no way I can intuitively make sense of this result – it is absolutely mind-boggling. But true.

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  39. Hi, Darrell-

    "Okay, just so I have this right: You agree that philosophical naturalism is an “art” so to speak, a way of making sense of the world, in the same way as Christianity, or philosophy in general, right? "

    No, I wouldn't say that is how it works. Naturalism goes only as far as reasonably attested facts and processes of reality go. To that extent it isn't art at all. If one goes on from that corpus to make of it a life-affirming narrative, (the ancestor's tale and so forth), then that is art, because it makes of the neutral materials something that speaks to our need for a human-centered, and human-relevant story.

    If Jesus really was god/son of god and flew up to heaven when done with his work here, that wouldn't be art but fact. But the attestation lacks some rigor not to mention plausability, while the story grips many people with inordinate psychological power, so art it is. That is perhaps the briefest way to make this distinction.

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  40. Bernard,

    “Yes, philosophical naturalism, if I understand the term, is certainly a way of making sense of the world. I wouldn't instinctively use the word art to describe it, but have no objection to doing so.”

    Glad to hear it.

    “Different systems however approach their 'art' in very different ways, and it is valid to consider them all and wonder if some might lead us into inconsistencies, absurdities, nihilism or whatever. This consideration is I think contestable, and we can attempt to find flaws in our own and each other's approaches.”

    I think we need to be careful here. Remember, our “approach” and how we determine what is “inconsistent” “absurd” and so on is done by way of this “art” we are speaking of. Frankly, rather than “art” I think we should call it our philosophy or world-view, or “faith,” but “art” will do as long as we understand it to mean our story-telling, narration, philosophizing, of what we think all the “facts” and “evidence” and science mean. My point is that as we talk about “different systems” we are always, already doing so from within our “artistic” framework so to speak.

    “So, naturalism it seems to me, takes your statement that we can all agree on the facts and the evidence as its starting point, and I find this approach very appealing. It asks, by what means do we extend the range of our acknowledged facts? The answer appears to be, by carefully following the established procedures of the scientific project; observing, hypothesising, testing and critiquing.”

    Well, to a point. We follow the scientific method for certain types of answers and results. The problem comes in summing up, in connecting it all together holistically, and then trying to state what it means. At that point, we are doing philosophy. So, to answer your question below, I believe it can only take us so far. This is normally where I think the philosophical naturalist steps over the line and begins to equate his philosophy with “science” or as just noting the “facts.”

    “For me three questions naturally follow. The first is, how far can this method take us? So, for example, if we accept evolution as a well established fact of the world, what does it lead us to believe about the human mind? Much of my thoughts on materialism and supernaturalism stem from following this path of enquiry.”

    But we can accept evolution as a fact, without it impinging at all upon the question of God’s existence or the origins of life and the universe. Therefore, we need not assume that our thinking about the human mind need only be informed by evolution per se. It is only one factor and, I would suggest, not the most important one.

    “The third question is, what to do with the inevitable mysteries and unfilled gaps? For me, when possible believe nothing, adopt no attitude, remain agnostic, is the answer I enjoy.”

    Here again though is where I think many philosophical naturalists step over the line. I would suggest maybe you are not so agnostic as you might think. This is why I commended you recently for your great faith that “science” will one day unravel the mystery of consciousness. I would suggest, rather, that you are a BELIEVER in the naturalist story or narrative (“art”), and you have adopted an attitude (doubt toward theism) and you do have beliefs about the future, for which you hope. Is this reasonable on my part to look at it this way? Why or why not?

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  41. Burk,

    “No, I wouldn't say that is how it works. Naturalism goes only as far as reasonably attested facts and processes of reality go. To that extent it isn't art at all.”

    Well, I disagree and would have to say you clearly are confusing “science” with your philosophical naturalism. Again, the attested “facts” and processes of reality are known and acknowledged by theist and atheist alike. Or, do you mean to say that Eric, myself, and the other theists in this conversation are unaware of do not acknowledge the “facts” and such? Seriously.

    “If one goes on from that corpus to make of it a life-affirming narrative, (the ancestor's tale and so forth), then that is art…”

    But that is indeed what it does, even if, it turns out it is not so “life-affirming” and nihilistic, it still acts as a story or narrative that, as even Bernard agrees, tries to make sense of the world.

    As the readers of this blog might know or not, you and I have had this conversation many times over in other arenas and again, I think you are trying to privilege your private philosophy as something that “just” takes in the “facts” and the “evidence” while the rest of us hang onto stories and that will simply not do.

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  42. Thanks Darrell

    With a little patience we have edged close to a shared understanding of what I am trying to say, and on this front there is very little disagreement between us that I can see.

    I will pursue two points a little further because I am interested in your response to them. I can see you are keen to highlight where leaps of faith exist in any world view, and that is quite reasonable. However, I am going to insist upon my agnosticism at least with regard to the mind. There is to my thinking an important difference between the statements: science will one day explain how the mind works and: science may one day be able to explain how the mind works. While both urge continued research, the second is agnostic, while the first is, as you note, a position of faith. I hold to the second.

    Second, if we return to evolution, I am interested when you say evolution is only one factor to consider when exploring how far an evidence based approach can take us in the examination of the mind. The point I was getting at is that naturalism seems to say, let's just take the evidence based stuff and see where it goes. So, while you are quite right, evolution and theism can accommodate one another, we get evolutionary theory via the fact/evidence approach whereas the theist aspect comes to us via a different method of reflection. The naturalist would, I think, wish for us to bear this distinction in mind.

    Rather than jump too quickly to the 'yes but that's a world view too' defence it may be worth spending a little more time teasing out at exactly which point in the mind exploration the naturalist moves from an exploration of evidence to a world view. I would be reluctant to accept the argument that the whole naturalist structure is based on a world view, simply because you have already made the point that we all accept the facts and evidence, which implies this aspect at least is independent of our world views.

    My guess is an established and possibly defended haziness with regard to this boundary is behind your dispute with Burk and me on this issue (not wishing to speak on your behalf Burk, just to be explicit that I tend towards your point of view on this one).

    Bernard

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  43. Thanks JP

    Yes, I remember a maths lecturer once beginning what must have been a second year maths lecture introducing us to the different categories of infinity. My intuition wants to insist that there are twice as many numbers between 0 and 2 as there are between 0 and 1, but apparently not. A couple of issues back the New Scientist's cover story was on the problems infinity continues to cause for mathematics.

    You asked whether the type of unknowable reality I speculated on shares anything in common with theistic concepts of a higher realm. I don't think so, insomuch as my speculation relates to the unimaginable, whereas theistic approaches seem to me to speak of something we can be in touch with, and gain useful guidance from. It's not my area though so someone may jump in and correct me on this.

    The struggle I would have in moving towards a theistic world view is simply that I don't know how one would go about making such a leap. At the point where you move away from commonly regarded standards of evidence and reasoning, as it appears one would have to, what becomes the guide? I have the problem of then thinking, well if I allow myself to believe in this way, I can believe in absolutely anything, so how to choose?

    Some I guess would suggest meditation and contemplation, but my intuition certainly isn't attuned to such an approach. When I look inward I find, well nothing really but memories, experiences, personality, the machinary stuff. One could look to what others have discovered, but they appear to have discovered such a wide range of things I get lost here too.

    I like the idea of the pragmatic belief, choose the sort of God that best serves you. The paradox I would fall into would be that the most helpful God would be one I didn't believe in pragmatically, but rather believed in wholeheartedly, not because I found it useful but because I found it true. And this God appears to be off limits to the pragmatic believer.

    My question then becomes is there a credible mechanism by which we can evaluate the truthfulness of a set of religious beliefs? If the answer is no, the only test is pragmatism, well I have no trouble with that sort of belief at all, beyond the fact that I wouldn't find it very helpful I don't think.

    Bernard

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  44. Bernard,

    “However, I am going to insist upon my agnosticism at least with regard to the mind.”

    Point well taken. I was probably referring to a certain confidence that comes across in your writing rather than any actual statement, but I accept your own take on it and I certainly believe you.

    “Second, if we return to evolution, I am interested when you say evolution is only one factor to consider when exploring how far an evidence based approach can take us in the examination of the mind.”

    But again, here is the problem. It appears you are separating views out as to (1) evidence based, and, (2) faith based or perhaps based in religion. What I’m trying to point out is that all the views presented, at least in this discussion, are, to start, evidenced based. The question is why do we interpret the “evidence” and the “facts” differently?

    “The point I was getting at is that naturalism seems to say, let's just take the evidence based stuff and see where it goes.”

    Right, and I would look at it differently. I think what Philosophical Naturalism says is, “Now that I have considered as much of, and the best evidence I can, and now that I have reflected, consulted, and connected it to other areas of knowledge, this is what I think it means…” But, such is exactly what Christianity does or any other faith, world-view, or philosophy. Do you see my point?

    “So, while you are quite right, evolution and theism can accommodate one another, we get evolutionary theory via the fact/evidence approach whereas the theist aspect comes to us via a different method of reflection. The naturalist would, I think, wish for us to bear this distinction in mind.”

    Well, I disagree that such a distinction exists. Evolutionary theory, just the basic idea of organisms adapting and changing over time, is not arrived at or accepted by theists by a “different” method of reflection but is also based upon an examination of facts and evidence, just as in every other area of knowledge. Now, once we move on to what it might mean that the world “works” in this way, that life changes and adapts, then both the theist and naturalist have moved from a fact/evidence approach to a philosophic articulation.

    Plus, we also need to bear in mind that even the articulation of the theory of evolution, including the abstract idea or notion of this invisible thing we call “natural selection,” already begins to move us from simply observing facts and evidence to philosophic reflection.

    “I would be reluctant to accept the argument that the whole naturalist structure is based on a world view, simply because you have already made the point that we all accept the facts and evidence, which implies this aspect at least is independent of our world views.”

    Yes, but that also works the other way. It means that Christianity is also based upon an interpretation or assessment of the physical world. One other quick point, which may make this easier: A quick search or some research into what is called, “Philosophical Naturalism” will reveal that it is indeed a “world-view,” a philosophy, so it is separate and different from “science” or just the noting of facts and evidence. This is pretty well established in the literature and in most philosophy departments.

    We are always, already observing facts and evidence within conceptual frameworks or philosophical presuppositions and the very way we “see” or perceive such is always a dialectical process and, in my view, there is no way to separate this out in any neat or tidy way. It is of one piece.

    I do agree with you that we are probably closer in our views here than we might think and much of our disagreement is probably due to semantics, definitions, and so on.

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  45. Hi Darrell

    Thanks for this. I agree with you, we take our evidence and then build on it according to our world views. Sometimes we are guilty of ignoring the evidence, and other times do not scrutinise our world views as closely as we should, and such sloppiness can be found across the belief spectrum.

    In a way this agreement is the easy part though, the hard work intellectually speaking starts when we move past this acceptance and begin to try to get our head around the nature of the evidence before us and its implications.

    Although I agree that even our evidence is coloured by the way we frame and relate concepts etc, it is interesting I think to try to distinguish between those aspects of world views that are universal (forced moves) and those where more flexibility exists. Like all distinctions, it's somewhat arbitrary, but I think it can yield some important insights if we follow up on it. So, when I say the world is round, I accept roundness is a concept that itself is culturally derived, but I claim that this concept is available to us all irrespective of our value system.

    If we then take that upon which we all agree as the starting point, and leave to one side what we will choose to do when the evidence runs out, there is a huge amount of intellectual work to be done just getting our head around this culturally neutral evidence.

    You point out evolution seems to have cultural concepts embedded within it whereas I would claim this is true only if for those who willfully misunderstand the theory (and there have been plenty of these on both sides, the history of evolution is fascinating in this respect). If we for example translate natural selection into survival of the fittest, and if within our concepts of survival or fitness we sneak in ideas of competition, motivation and so forth then we are on a slippery slope. Many of the evolutionary discussions on this blog have wandered down this path.

    Natural Selection can however be re-expressed within the framework of population genetics, a culturally neutral mathematical model. It is a complex model, and I know from first hand professional experience that much of the mathematics is beyond me, but before we start making statements about what evolutionary theory does or does not support we are obliged to try to get our heads around this as best we can.

    Follow through with this theory and its implications and our faith positions, be they Christian, atheistic or whatever, are forced I think to accommodate the new discoveries. As it is with evolution, so it is with neuroscience. There is enough evidence now for us to all accept that the thinking we do is dependent upon the activity of the brain. Working out the methods by which the brain achieves this correlation is to my mind a prior requirement before we can make our faith conclusions, like for example the claim that looking for a physical explanation of consciousness is a category error.

    Bernard

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  46. Hi Bernard,

    The counterintuitive nature of mathematical infinity starts with its definition: a set is said to be infinite if it has the same cardinality (size) as a proper subset of itself. If you like these things, check out Hilbert's Hotel. You might also enjoy the paradox of the Thompson's Lamp. One could claim that this paradox shows that a universe in which we can execute an infinite number of actions in a finite time would be non-deterministic. In any case, what is certain is that our intuition is severely tested by thinking about infinity.

    I an intrigued by the New Scientist story you mention because I am not aware of any significant problem with infinity within mathematics (unless maybe one is a Platonist and insists these things actually exist in some reality). Unfortunately the article is available online only to subscribers. If I have a chance I will try to look it up in a library.

    You ask whether we can evaluate the truthfulness of religious beliefs. I think we can, to some degree, and that we can go at it in a scientific manner. The usual rebuttal to this is that we should not apply criteria from science (or whatever) to religious questions, that this constitutes some kind of “category error” (a very popular expression). I find this quite strange as this view seems to imply a fragmented view of reality. Reality does not conveniently divide itself according to human categories. There is not a reality for science and a (different) reality for religion, and so forth. Reality is whole and questions we formulate about it do not belong to one discipline only. What is true is that we have separate sets of tools that we can apply (or not) to different aspects of our questions. It is also true that some questions, on the whole, may be better handled by some methods than others. But I don't subscribe to this idea that important questions are either strictly scientific, philosophical, artistic, religious or whatever.

    Now, when we have evidence to work with, when we can experiment, when we have any kind of data, and so on, the scientific approach (in one of its many variations) has proven to be extremely good and reliable at finding out stuff about reality. Theists (at least here) say that much. I suggest that it is appropriate to use a similar approach, if possible (but not exclusively, of course), when considering religious questions.

    [...]

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  47. [...]

    You raise the question of the value of meditation and contemplation as sources of knowledge. Or, for that matter, intuition. Some say that these constitute a gateway to some other reality that we cannot access otherwise. It may not be possible to evaluate the claim directly because it asserts an exclusive access. However we can, and should, ask whether any of these methods has ever provided reliable knowledge about any matter we now know something about. If, as I believe, it hasn't, it should count a evidence against the claim.

    As another example, consider consciousness. If it is not “reducible” to the brain then its interaction with the brain (it is claimed that there is a perfect correlation between brain states and conscious states) should be studied, as far as possible, in a scientific manner.

    Of course, saying all this is not science per se. It may be said, I suppose, that the notion that these questions should be studied scientifically (but again, not exclusively) is part of a world-view. But it seems to me that if theists recognize the value of the scientific approach in general (as they seem to do) they should also recognize that it should not be artificially limited but instead used whenever possible, in combination with other tools. My impression, however, is that they have no interest in doing so which may mean, of course, a deep misunderstanding about what theism actually claims.

    By the way, nothing I have said here assumes a naturalistic world-view. I think that a scientific approach, in the general sense in which I use the term, could accommodate non-material elements – to the extent that there is reliable evidence of it. It so happens that science never had to do this and many have come to see this as a necessary feature of the scientific enterprise. But it could have turned out otherwise.

    What to do, then, when we have no evidence at all? How can we evaluate that sort of claim? My first reaction would be one of extreme caution. An obvious consequence of having no evidence is that the set of tools we have to address the issue is much more limited. Therefore, establishing such a claim should be much more difficult. Second, we could look at the past for guidance and see if any similar claim, established by non-evidential methods, has ever been later confirmed. But, as far as I know, the track record is not very good.

    I like what you say about choosing a useful God or beliefs. I don't know how I could decide to believe something that I didn't think true. But maybe it is possible.

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  48. Hi JP

    You raise two interesting points which I think about often but have reached no good conclusions on.

    Can we decide to believe in something for pragmatic reasons even though we are in some sense confident it is not true? This feels impossible, a contradiction of course, and yet it is exactly how I treat free will. I build my life upon the assumption that I do indeed make meaningful decisions, even though my understanding of the logic involved tells me this is wrong. At this point I simply say, so much the worse for logic. Not in a deliberate way, my nature just takes care of the problem quietly off stage. And if I can do this for free will, then why not other things? I'm not sure where this leads.

    And are there questions that are by their nature not available to scientific investigation? I think there are. What counts as beautiful to me, or funny, or moral, hinges at the very least on my individual nature/history (and theists would say my connection to something greater). It is not clear to me how scientific method could help me take a stance on estate duty, or respond to a joke. This relates I think to the fact that one can't set up a repeatable experiment, because each lifeline is unique. This needn't imply there is anything non-material going on, but I do wonder if it provides a high water mark for useful scientific investigation. At this point we may need to turn to our stories.

    Bernard

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  49. Bernard,

    I could quibble with some of the points in your last response, but for now I am happy to believe that we do understand one another better and have actually laid the ground-work for a more productive conversation in the future.

    In this conversation, and in any conversation of this sort, I am continually on the look-out for hidden or unstated presuppositions that are confused with just noting the “facts” or just being “scientific.” I do this so a more open and honest conversation can hopefully take place and I certainly hope that others point out my own.

    “Working out the methods by which the brain achieves this correlation is to my mind a prior requirement before we can make our faith conclusions, like for example the claim that looking for a physical explanation of consciousness is a category error.”

    Again, I could quibble. I think we are making faith conclusions (as far as meaning) throughout, all the way down so-to-speak. I don’t think we are objective passive observers, who then after all the “scientific” work is done- allow our world-view to kick in and make our faith conclusions. Again, I think such a line or boundary is illusory. But, I think I also understand your point and it is well taken. I certainly agree that with all rigor, every angle, every lead, every drop of scientific research and work should be done in every area of discourse and we as honestly and as objectively as possible should consider and allow this evidence to inform and guide our thinking.

    “And are there questions that are by their nature not available to scientific investigation? I think there are. What counts as beautiful to me, or funny, or moral, hinges at the very least on my individual nature/history (and theists would say my connection to something greater). It is not clear to me how scientific method could help me take a stance on estate duty, or respond to a joke. This relates I think to the fact that one can't set up a repeatable experiment, because each lifeline is unique. This needn't imply there is anything non-material going on, but I do wonder if it provides a high water mark for useful scientific investigation. At this point we may need to turn to our stories.”

    I agree to a great extent and this sensibility is where I was going as far as calling it a category error. I think the problem of consciousness is bound up with the same issue of beauty, humor, irony, free-will, agency, and all the rest. They really involve the same issues.

    Here is my final point for you to consider because it goes to the heart of what I’ve been trying to say. When you say, at that point, we may need to “turn to our stories,” I would suggest that such is what you have already done with your philosophical naturalism. It is a story, like any other faith or philosophy.

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  50. Darrell

    Let us continue to quibble then, because this is where the good stuff will be found.

    Two simple points. If we extend the notion of faith positions to include our most basic observations, at this point not all faith positions are equal. Some, like those behind the statement: the sun is hot, convince us all.

    Secondly, I am uncertain of your use of the term philosophical naturalism to describe my position. I would describe myself as a pragmatic supernaturalist I think, and absolutely accept that is a faith position. The question is, is it a smart faith position? And that question's a work in progress for me quite frankly.

    Bernard

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  51. Your point about free will is interesting. I don't see either how free will could exist, at least in its strong version (I think there are ways to look at some intermediate, pragmatic, version, but that's another question). However, I wouldn't say I choose to believe in it. It's, as you say, an automatic process – we just function “as if” it were true. The same is true for the existence of a self (as a well defined, atomic, me) – I don't really believe there is any such thing. But “I” certainly go on with “my” life as if “I” really existed as “me”. These things are below the radar, if you wish.

    I don't know about other things, like God. However I can imagine, I think, how I could slowly drift towards becoming some kind of pragmatic believer – in some appropriate settings. A few years ago, I visited a small, old fisherman village somewhere on the Atlantic coast. There was a very beautiful old church and, slowly walking in the aisles, alone, looking at the dark wooden beams and ceiling, I felt something of the power that could have emanated from such a place as a centre for the community, a focus point (nothing supernatural however). So, if we imagine a small enough and united community, a religion that served essentially as the cement of the community and as a source or rituals, with only mild and widely shared supernatural beliefs (nothing to do with sin or hell or other nasties), I suppose I could end up, for all practical purposes, sharing these beliefs. That would be very different from the beliefs we usually talk about here. More like adopting a social norm and going on with life without paying too much attention to them. They would simply sit somewhere in the background, off-stage as you say (no radar back then).

    Maybe that's the key to pragmatic beliefs: let them quietly become part of the background, as far away from consciousness as possible.

    To go to your other point, there are of course questions about which science has little to say. Science will not help me decide what music I like or whether to laugh at a joke – it just happens. However, even then, we can ask questions amenable to scientific inquiry: what makes a joke funny? And so on. Maybe another way to look at this: science is not, by far, the only way to interact with reality. It may not even be a very important one. But it remains the best we have to acquire knowledge about it.

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  52. Bernard,

    Sorry, I’m not being very clear. Let me unpack that a bit. When I say I think the process “goes all the way down,” I’m not saying we believe things like the earth is round, or the sun is hot, by faith. I’m saying that we are always interpreting such things, from the start, as to what they might mean and we are bringing to bear upon these observations a world-view which is already and always in play. If the world-view I bring to bear upon an observation is such, that, beforehand I believe the world to be flat, and subsequently I am shown pictures of the earth from space, I would need to then change part (at least) of my world-view to now fit the “fact” that the earth is round. However, this doesn’t change the fact that a world-view was always in play. Does that help?

    As to the second point, forgive me, I should not have assumed. I simply surmised from your writing that such a description (philosophical naturalism) was the best fit. I am curious now though—in what way are you a “supernaturalist”?

    And, I agree, that regardless of what position we hold, there are deeper questions to ask such as how “smart” it might be. Caution though. The very way we think about what is “smart” or not is, again, seen though our faith or world-view. The only way I can know if something is “smart” or not is if I have some standard in mind, some gauge, some criteria I can use to determine what is “smart” or not and that standard or gauge, I believe, is our faith or world-view (I’m talking big-picture now, not, in the sense of whether or not gravity is real or not).

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  53. Hi Darrell

    Yes, exactly as you say. If new facts (the roundness of the earth) become known to us, then our world view must in part change. In this very important sense the world view does not go all the way down. This is in direct contradiction to your claim that the world view is always in play. Facts have priority and we build our world views around them. (And again, there is a world view aspect to the notion of a fact, but it is common or at least accessible to all our world views).

    Now, having established this, we can all join in the collective process of establishing as broad a base of received facts as possible, upon which our various world views may be built. Once the point you make about the roundness of the earth is accepted, it becomes reasonable to ask how far other facts such as the evolutionary process can take us before our world view needs to kick in. And this is, to a very large degree, the project naturalists seek to undertake. So not only are our views closer than might as first be assumed, so too the argument you have sustained with Burk is, it seems to me, to a large part built upon issues of definition.

    With regards to how one judges the smartness of a world view, that is indeed value dependent. So, in pragmatic terms, one asks does this view fit me well, does it suit my own personal ends? For example, I value consistency, and hence seek to follow through the logical implications of any faith position I may adopt, looking for flaws on these terms.

    And that leads me nicely to why I would say I am a supernaturalist, at least by a definition outlined by Eric. My take on an evolved brain is that there is no reason why the limits of its capacity should match the limits of reality. Hence I suspect there may be much that will always be beyond our comprehension. I am an agnostic rather than a theist in the sense that I can see no consistent reason to believe we have access of any sort to information about a theoretically possible extra-physical realm.

    Bernard

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  54. Bernard,

    Well, I thought we understood each other but now I’m not so sure. How is my example a “direct contradiction”? Facts do not have priority because a “fact” is nothing until someone says what it means. Remember, we are talking about big-picture meaning in this conversation. We interpret facts through our world-views or faith. My point was that throughout the entire process of observing, testing, learning, weighing evidence, and connecting it to other areas of knowledge, all this, from start to finish, is being processed through our world-view or faith. A “fact” or discovery may change our world-view, but that doesn’t mean a world-view wasn’t in play throughout. In fact, it means that part of our world-view or faith is that such new discoveries or “facts” SHOULD change our world-views—that in and of itself is a world-view. We need to remember that some world-views hold that physical reality is an illusion and so such discoveries or “facts” make little difference.

    So, frankly, I have no idea what you are talking about. If this conversation was over whether or not the earth was flat, then yes, we could wrap it up pretty quickly by noting some “facts” but such is not the case here and even when we are noting just the “facts” we are always and already doing so through and from in our world-views.

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  55. Darrell

    I'll persevere because this strikes me as such an important point. If this was a conversation about whether the world is flat, you say the conversation could be resolved. But how? Why don't you then claim even this fact is world view dependent and it is hence quite reasonable to claim the world is flat and all the evidence to the contrary has been carefully constructed by a devious demon? You and I both seem to believe that the fact of roundness has priority over this particular world view. If we do, then the case would seem to be that facts have priority over world views in some circumstances.

    Or perhaps you will go with the world view argument and claim the world isn't really round, it just appears that way under some world views. But I would claim that any world view that allows this possibility is for all practical purposes hopeless, prioritising as it does sophistry over pragmatic needs.

    I'm interested which side of this fence you sit on, which is why I'm pushing the point, frustrating though you find it. Bear with me, this turns out to be interesting if we follow it through.

    Bernard

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  56. Bernard,

    I would love to respond, but I am at a loss. What from my previous response do you not understand? Help me out a bit, clearly I have not communicated very well. I'm not sure what you are even after.

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  57. Hi Dianelos,

    Thanks for your comments.

    You ask: “Hence the question arises: Are really the axioms used self-evidently true and thus in no need of justification, or is it rather that the truth of the axioms is justified by the useful formal system that can be built on them?

    The notion of a truth being “self-evident” plays no role at all in modern mathematics. Even the notion of truth has a very technical meaning and is only used with reference to a formal logical system (axioms and inference rules). This modern point of view would have seem very odd just a few centuries ago. This was really a radical move as it gave up any pretence that mathematics was about reality.

    There may still be a few Platonist mathematicians, believing that mathematical objects have some existence independent of us (in the foreword to A Certain Ambiguity Keith Devlin says something about this - I got the book this week and had only time for the foreword). But even these work on their mathematics without in any way invoking self-evident truths.

    It is true, as you mention, that the continuum hypothesis (CH) or its opposite can be added as an axiom. As neither choice makes really more sense than the other the idea would be to find another axiom (or axioms) that seems more natural and from which CH or its opposite can be deduced. I know some options have been considered but I am not following this research closely. In any case, I would suppose this is a game mostly played by logicians unless CH has some significant impacts on other areas of mathematics that I am not aware of.

    Axioms are obviously not chosen at random. It is essentially as you say: their are justified by their usefulness (internally or externally). But mathematicians don't talk of the truth or falsehood of an axiom. They are simply assumed.

    My point about using CH was to demonstrate the inadequacy of our intuition. When I consider numbers between 0 and 1 (defined, say, by their decimal expansion), my intuition tells me that this description is complete, that nothing needs to be asked. But my intuition is wrong.

    You will enjoy the following (if you don't already know). You probably have heard of the axiom of choice. It is now universally accepted by mathematicians and has become a standard tool of the trade. However one consequence of the axiom is the following:

    Take a solid sphere (there is no hole inside) of radius one in a three-dimensional euclidian space. It is possible to partition this sphere in a finite number of pieces (I think we can do it in 5, one of which is a single point but I would have to check) in such a way that, by moving pieces around (translation and rotation only) we can reassemble them to make two solid spheres of radius one! This is as counterintuitive as it gets.

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  58. Hi Darrell

    I'm not sure where to try to clarify, but let me plunge in at a point that seems important.

    If we take the disagreement that often occurs between naturalists and theists, and some of your discussions with Burk would stand as good examples, both sides can end up claiming the other is just missing the essential point.

    Look says the naturalist, you're choosing to believe in things for which we have no evidence. You are walking away from the facts. No, says the theist, I am perfectly aware of the facts, it's just I bring a different world view to bear on them, just like you do. No, replies the naturalist, you're just not getting it, facts are facts, irrespective of the world view applied. I am perfectly aware of the world view I then bring to interpret them, but you seek to deny the facts in advance. No, replies the theist, your very use of the word fact implies a world view already in place, a world view where physical evidence reigns supreme. No, that's not a world view, replies the naturalist. Physical evidence does rule supreme, for all of us. Fire burns no matter what your world view. Yes, but, replies the theist... And so it goes on, ad infinitum, unless we are prepared to clarify exactly what we mean by facts, evidence and world view.

    And so, I would like to do this. My opening pitch is this: we are better off not using the term world view to describe processes of collecting and modelling data sets that we all agree upon. We should call these things (be they the wetness of rain or the second law of thermodynamics) facts.

    Once we have agreed upon the facts of any given matter (let's say for example the facts of neuroscience) then we can go about examining the way our own particular world view interacts with these facts, and subject this world view to open examination. So, for example, my world view, as explicit as I can make it, is this: When the facts run out, apply agnosticism where you can, and tell stories where you can't. Explicitly acknowledge that this is all they are, stories. My belief in free will, or your belief in God, fall into this story category, which makes them no less precious, but does challenge us to be more flexible in our thinking about them than we might wish to be.

    Does this help?

    Bernard

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  59. Bernard,

    “Physical evidence does rule supreme, for all of us. Fire burns no matter what your world view. Yes, but, replies the theist... And so it goes on, ad infinitum…”

    And here your point breaks down. It breaks down because the nature of these types of discussions has nothing do to with a fact such that fire burns no what one’s world-view. Again, no one thinks otherwise. Gravity is the same for the naturalist and the Christian. The problem always becomes when the naturalist tells us over and over that he is basing his conclusions (whether his atheism or his assertion that the material is all there is) only on his observation or recognition of the “facts.” We simply need to allow that everyone knows that fire burns regardless and start talking about what we think the facts mean in holistic ways and in “big picture” ways.

    “And so, I would like to do this. My opening pitch is this: we are better off not using the term world view to describe processes of collecting and modelling data sets that we all agree upon. We should call these things (be they the wetness of rain or the second law of thermodynamics) facts.”

    But no one is using the term that way, or I’m certainly not. What I am saying is that throughout this process of collecting, modeling, and organizing the data sets—we are doing all that from within and through a world-view—from start to finish. It is dialectical and our world-views are in flux in the sense that the physical world (the “facts”) can change my world-view but my world-view is also capable of helping me “see” the physical world in new ways that open up new meanings possibly for the data as well. Remember, in these types of conversations, the “data” is nothing until someone says what the data means. It is simply more complicated than I think you allow for.

    “So, for example, my world view, as explicit as I can make it, is this: When the facts run out, apply agnosticism where you can, and tell stories where you can't. Explicitly acknowledge that this is all they are, stories. My belief in free will, or your belief in God, fall into this story category, which makes them no less precious, but does challenge us to be more flexible in our thinking about them than we might wish to be.”

    Well, forgive me, but I still think you are missing the point. Your assertion would lead us to believe that you “just” follow the facts and then when they tell us no more (run out) we resort to stories. I would suggest that your following of the “facts” was never value-neutral or without a world-view (a story) to begin with. In fact, that we collect, model, categorize, and organize the data the way we do is the result of a world-view or way of looking at the world. I’m simply starting back much further than you are willing to admit. I think your interpretation of what a “fact” must mean (big picture meaning) and the way you "see" a fact is as story dependent (from start to finish) as your belief in free-will or my belief in God—however I would add that they are all still dependant upon our observations and interaction with the physical world including our experience of the physical world.

    So, I will leave it there. I do believe we are often saying the same thing and there are areas of agreement, but I think in emphasis, nuance, and also in some significant areas we are on different pages, which is fine. After all, that is why we have conversations.

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  60. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  61. Hi Darrell

    It may well be I am missing the point, certainly there's a part of your argument I'm not getting. Perhaps it's the nuance I'm missing, or perhaps it's that big picture meaning is poorly defined. You write this:

    'I think your interpretation of what a “fact” must mean (big picture meaning) and the way you "see" a fact is as story dependent (from start to finish) as your belief in free-will or my belief in God.'

    Okay, well let's take some facts I believe in (by which I mean I consider them the current best available explanation) and you can show me how my reading of these is story dependent. That would help me see what you're getting at.

    I think it's a fact the sun is very hot.
    This heat is generated by a process of nuclear fusion.
    The tilt of the earth's rotation as it follows its elipse about the sun gives us seasonal variations in weather and length of day.
    Almost all life on energy derives its energy from the sun, in the first instance through the way plants use the sun's energy to split water and utilise the hydrogen in the building of hydrocarbons. In the second instance herbivores unlock this energy through consuming these plants.

    If you are right, the there is something story dependent about these facts. What is it? This is not a trivial example, in the past our lack of understanding of the sun allowed us to build supernatural stories about its characteristics. So in this case naturalism has replaced supernaturalism. One day the science of the brain may pull a similar trick.

    You will help me see your point if we move from general descriptions, where definitional differences are in play, to examples like this where we can both see what we're saying.

    Thanks for your pateince.

    Bernard

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  62. Hi Bernard,

    You write: “Okay, well let's take some facts I believe in (by which I mean I consider them the current best available explanation)[snip]

    To say “I believe X is a fact, for Y reason” sounds kind of incoherent in my ears. I suppose what you actually mean is “I believe with great confidence that X is true, for Y reason”.

    How would you react if I said: “I believe God’s existence is a fact, because I consider the existence of God the current best available explanation for the whole of my experience of life”? Would you accept that I am then warranted in calling the existence of God a fact?

    In general I’d suggest that “fact” is a vague and superfluous concept used mainly for marketing purposes in the marketplace of ideas. What is really there is: 1) a belief we hold to be true, 2) the reason we believe it is true, 3) our confidence that it is true (i.e. our belief that the reason we have warrants it), and 4) our faith/trust in its truth (in the sense that we live according to its being true).

    You proceed to give some examples of facts you believe in:

    [The sun’s] heat is generated by a process of nuclear fusion.

    We don’t know this, so this is certainly not something one should call a fact. For example, if we live in a computer simulation then it is not true that the sun’s heat is generated by a process of nuclear fusion. Indeed, in order to believe in the claim that the sun’s heat is generated by a process of nuclear fusion one must assume scientific realism, scientific realism is a metaphysical theory that goes beyond the science, and beliefs based on metaphysical assumptions should not be called facts.

    And even if one forgets all that, I am not sure why the *currently* best scientific explanation warrants facts. A century ago the best scientific explanation for gravitational phenomena was Newton’s mechanics which assumed the existence of gravitational force fields. Today’s best explanation is general relativity which does not assume the existence of gravitational force fields. So how do things stand? Was the existence of the gravitational force field a fact then but not a fact now? Does the advance of science have the power to destroy old facts and to create new facts?

    So I agree with Darrell that you seem to have a background “story” in mind (i.e. some metaphysical assumptions you take as given), and then base your beliefs on it, and especially how you interpret scientific knowledge.

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  63. (This Dianelos' comment has been lost in cyberspace. I have recovered it from email follow-ups – jp)

    Hi JP,

    You write: “Even the notion of truth has a very technical meaning and is only used with reference to a formal logical system (axioms and inference rules). This modern point of view would have seem very odd just a few centuries ago. This was really a radical move as it gave up any pretence that mathematics was about reality.

    This does not seem right to me. First of all when we say “theorem X is true” we certainly mean more than just “X can be derived from this set of axioms following this set of inference/production rules”. Chess is a formal system, but nobody is calling legal chess positions “true”. Secondly, mathematics seems to work awfully well in our experience of reality. So, for example, the theorems of arithmetic are used to make predictions that save us a lot of time when counting things. So why shouldn’t we say that X theorem’s truth refers to something we will experience or will not experience when counting, and hence refers to reality (or to phenomenal reality, to be exact)? Similarly, the recent proof that four colors suffice says something about reality, namely that it will be a waste of time to try to design a plane map that requires more than four colors.

    I claim that even the most abstract mathematical theorem refers to empirical reality, because (if true) it predicts what we will experience or will not experience when pushing symbols around on a piece of paper according to some particular order.
    [...]

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  64. [...]
    There may still be a few Platonist mathematicians, believing that mathematical objects have some existence independent of us

    Do the majority of mathematicians today believe that the number 7 came into existence only after humanity has evolved on the Earth?

    It is true, as you mention, that the continuum hypothesis (CH) or its opposite can be added as an axiom. As neither choice makes really more sense than the other the idea would be to find another axiom (or axioms) that seems more natural and from which CH or its opposite can be deduced.

    Yeah, but the truth of the CH cannot really depend on what other axiom strikes us as more “natural”, can it? After all, either there is or there isn’t an infinite set of cardinality between N and R.

    Take a solid sphere (there is no hole inside) of radius one in a three-dimensional euclidian space. It is possible to partition this sphere in a finite number of pieces (I think we can do it in 5, one of which is a single point but I would have to check) in such a way that, by moving pieces around (translation and rotation only) we can reassemble them to make two solid spheres of radius one! This is as counterintuitive as it gets.

    Yes, in fact I don’t believe it! Do you have any references for this? Surely the pieces will not be contiguous ones, otherwise somebody would have made a movie demonstrating this miracle. Never mind it would be impossible to double the original sphere´s "volume".

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  65. Hi Dianelos,

    [Your last comments have been lost, as have many others recently. I took the liberty to try and repost them from email follow-ups so that others might follow this if they are interested.]

    First of all when we say “theorem X is true” we certainly mean more than just “X can be derived from this set of axioms following this set of inference/production rules”.

    Strictly speaking, within mathematics, this is exactly what it means and nothing more. Intuition has no place whatsoever in mathematical language or proofs. This is only half the story of course. Mathematicians use intuition all the time when thinking about mathematics, proposing ideas and so on. They can let their imagination go wild because, down the line, every theorem will have to be formally demonstrated, thus eliminating all errors due to invalid intuition.

    What you may be referring to is this. Many mathematical theories can be mapped to some part of reality. Geometry is a good example. When we think of lines, points and geometric figures we have in mind something like marks on paper that we can draw and look at. And, most of the time, we take that realization as the real thing and we base our intuitions on it. If the axioms of a theory are a good match to real-life properties of objects then we may expect that mathematical theorems will also be verified of the corresponding objects. In a sense, then, the theorem means “more” but this happens outside mathematics proper, when mathematics are applied to a concrete situation.

    The difference is between a mathematical theory and an interpretation of one.

    Do the majority of mathematicians today believe that the number 7 came into existence only after humanity has evolved on the Earth?

    There is, if you wish, a naive version of arithmetic based on, say, counting pebbles. It is certainly a universal fact that if you take 17 pebbles, it is not possible to organize them in a rectangular pattern other than a line of 17 pebbles. Is that because 17 is a prime? I think this is a case in which the formal mathematical theory is such a good match for the naive version that it is easy to confuse the two. But they are still different. The formal definition of numbers is not an easy matter – I remember one of my teacher had posted on his wall the definition of number 1 (or something very similar) in some formal system and it spanned many pages of small print.

    [...]

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  66. [...]

    Yeah, but the truth of the CH cannot really depend on what other axiom strikes us as more “natural”, can it? After all, either there is or there isn’t an infinite set of cardinality between N and R.

    This is what our intuition tells us but what does it mean? What you say would be true if the sets considered were real objects but they are not. This is similar to case of the parallel postulate in geometry. There are models of geometry in which it is true and others in which it is false. That is, we can build different interpretations of geometry (on a cartesian plane, or a sphere or finite geometries, etc.) that satisfy all the other axioms but differ in the truthfulness of the postulate. I don't know if models have actually been constructed for the case of CH.

    [...]

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  67. [...]

    Yes, in fact I don’t believe it! Do you have any references for this? Surely the pieces will not be contiguous ones, otherwise somebody would have made a movie demonstrating this miracle. Never mind it would be impossible to double the original sphere´s "volume".

    It's called the Banach-Tarski paradox, known to be true since 1924. Of course, it cannot be done in real space – it is impossible to divide matter in the manner required by the theorem.

    The theorem is more general. You can take any two bounded objects with a non-empty interior (each object contains a solid sphere of whatever size) in 3-space, partition the first in a finite number of pieces and reassemble them to produce the second one.

    The problem with the preservation of volume (measure) is only apparent. It can be shown that it is impossible to define the notion of volume in 3-space in such way that (1) it satisfies the basic properties we want of volume and (2) it is defined for every set. It is technical, but you if you're interested, you can look here.

    What happens with the Banach-Tarski decompositions is that at least some of the parts are not measurable.

    JP

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  68. The relevance of all the above mathematical examples to the theme of the post is of course that they provide clear cases of very strong intuitions that turn out to be completely wrong.

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  69. Hi Dianelos and Darrell

    You are correct Dianelos, a word like fact needs to be carefully defined if it is to serve any purpose, and it may well be I have not taken due care here. So let me do that now.

    A fact, as I use it, does not relate to its underlying truth, because I don't know what the word truth even means. Facts are our very best models at a given point in time, and so, as you note, they change over time. There are two aspects that seem worth highlighting for these types of facts. The first is that they have predictive value. When I say the sun's heat is a result of nuclear fusion, then that model encompasses a range of very specific predictions, right down to the wavelength profiles of the energy emitted.

    The second point is that a statement like, the sun is hot, is not just a statement I hold to be accurate, but one that all people hold to. Darrell makes this point often. We all, Christians and atheists alike, are dealing with the same facts.

    I don't chose this definition randomly. It fits with the lay person's notion of a fact, a thing that can be demonstrated by evidence. It fits too with that aspect of science that sits behind the remarkable progress of the last four centuries, an openness to testing, demonstration and challenge (my favourite example is Fresnel's model of light). And importantly in this context, it is the definition that naturalists have in mind when they engage in theological debates.

    Now, if we take this definition of a 'fact', we find that your two examples, of the computer simulation, or of your personal belief in God, both fall outside of this category. The computer simulation hypothesis adds no predictive information to the model, and so is superfluous (for now. It is not impossible that in the future some evidence makes this the best model, the most compelling fact).

    And your personal belief in God is not transferable in the way a 'fact' is. if someone claims to me there is no blind spot in human vision, I can, via a simple demonstration, show them that their intuition is wrong. The information can be transferred. The data you use to shore up your belief in God is personal and lacks this communal quality.

    This is not to diminish your belief, nor to claim that we do not all construct meaning via our own personal metaphysical models. The key dispute, it seems to me, is that the naturalist wishes to assert the difference between facts, as outlined above, and other forms of model building.

    I know I get rather fixated on this point. This is because I think that viewed through this lens, the dispute between theists and naturalists is far less spectacular than the rhetoric in which it is so often wrapped. I would claim that theists like yourself or Eric, who are upfront about the importance of pragmatic value to your beliefs, have very little quarrel with naturalism at all.

    Bernard

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  70. [this is my second intent to have this post appear on the blog]

    Hi Bernard,

    You write: “A fact, as I use it, does not relate to its underlying truth, because I don't know what the word truth even means.

    If you are saying that for you there is no correlation between facts and truths, then I think this is very confusing.

    One can do philosophy without using the concept of “fact”, but one can’t do philosophy without using the concept of “truth”. Perhaps some time in the future we may discuss the fundamental issue of what truth is.

    Facts are our very best models at a given point in time, and so, as you note, they change over time.

    But then you’d have to agree with the proposition “In 1910 it was a fact that the fall of an apple is caused by the gravitational force field around the Earth, but in 1920 this was not a fact anymore”.

    When I say the sun's heat is a result of nuclear fusion, then that model encompasses a range of very specific predictions, right down to the wavelength profiles of the energy emitted.

    Yes, but this prediction succeeds whether the model does describe objective reality or not. After all, the model may be only an abstract model which does not describe how reality is, even though it makes successful predictions about the phenomena reality produces and we experience. If the sun’s heat is *not* the result of nuclear fusion but of a computer executing the relevant mathematical equations and generating for us the respective experience we’d *still* observe this particular wavelength profile in the respective measuring device.

    Bellow you raise the issue of what the “best” model is, and bellow I will argue that the computer simulation model is the best one. For now though I’d like to point out that some scientific models are such that nobody actually believes they describe reality. So, for example, according to quantum electrodynamics (QED), a particle which is measured at point A and then at point B has in between traveled through all points in space following all possible trajectories at all possible speeds. That’s what QED’s model says, but nobody (I know of) actually believes that this is what in happens in reality, notwithstanding the fact that QED’s model is extremely successful in predictive power. Which raises a difficult epistemological problem for scientific realism (i.e. the view that scientific models do describe objective reality): On what objective grounds does the scientific realist decide which of science’s successful models do describe reality, and which don’t?

    [continued in the next post]

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  71. [continued from the last post]

    The second point is that a statement like, the sun is hot, is not just a statement I hold to be accurate, but one that all people hold to. Darrell makes this point often. We all, Christians and atheists alike, are dealing with the same facts.

    I agree that all normal people will experience the midday sun in an unclouded day in summer and at lower attitudes on the Earth as being hot – but I am not sure what the special relevance of this is. There are many experiences which are not shared by virtually all people, or even by most people, but these experiences represent data that are absolutely certain for those who have them. (The way I experience my wife is very private and subjective, but still as certain a piece of knowledge as there is, certainly much more certain for me than any of the claimed “facts” about the speed of light.) If you are saying that we should only use in our thinking such data that are available to virtually all people, then, as a practical matter, thinking would become impossible. Nobody really thinks using only such globally agreed upon data (i.e. “objective observations”). Not even scientists when doing science do this; it’s a well attested fact that scientists sometimes use subjective criteria such as their sense of beauty to guide their research.

    Typically, naturalists claim that one can form warranted beliefs about objective/noumenal reality using only objective observations, but I have never heard a justification of why that is a good epistemic principle. What’s more, on the face of it, it looks like a very bad epistemic principle indeed: First because, as is pretty obvious, there are many different objective realities that would produce exactly the same objective observations that science studies, so science alone cannot discriminate among them. This is a very strong and very simple argument, and I wonder sometimes how naturalists seem to suffer from a blind spot to it. Secondly it stands to reason that one should not ignore a huge part of the data available when thinking about how objective reality is. About this latter point, naturalists sometimes respond that data which are not of the scientific kind (i.e. objective observations) are unreliable, but this is obviously false. There are no “unreliable” data, for data are data. Data are always true. What can be mistaken is how one interprets or what one infers from the data one has. It’s true that people can and often do form false beliefs on the subjective (not objectively observable) data they have, but this is also true when people try to only use objectively observable data, as evidenced by the fact that people once believed that the Earth is flat based on their objective observations, never mind by the many dozens of mutually contradictory descriptions of objective reality today’s scientific naturalists have come up and are strenuously defending against each other.

    [continued in the next post]

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  72. Dianelos

    I have an extra moment, so let me address what seems to sit at the heart of your argument. You write the following:

    "First because, as is pretty obvious, there are many different objective realities that would produce exactly the same objective observations that science studies, so science alone cannot discriminate among them. This is a very strong and very simple argument, and I wonder sometimes how naturalists seem to suffer from a blind spot to it. Secondly it stands to reason that one should not ignore a huge part of the data available when thinking about how objective reality is."

    Science is not choosing between realities, it is choosing between models. So let us take the process of natural selection as our example. Here is a model whereby the distribution of genes within a population changes over time, so there is a statistical tendency over time for particular variations, once introduced, to either achieve fixation or disappear from the pool. Now, despite your claim above, I don't think there are a range of alternative models consistent with our observations of evolution. This is, I would contend, the only game in town, and so we accept it (for now). Perhaps you can then offer an alternative model, so firming up your contention that there are obviously a number of objective realities between which science can not choose. Science can not discriminate between alternative speculations as to what lies behind the model (the computer simulation, the flea, the giant tea cup) but neither can any other method, so we are free here to invent any story we like. Hence I would insist on calling this activity story telling, because we have no method by which we can communally choose between explanations.

    As to ignoring the subjective data, we don't ignore it in our personal story telling. This indeed is what we build our stories on, our feelings, intuitions and desires. But we must ignore it in our science because science is in the business of building shared understandings in order to move forward. A biologist working in Tokyo is dealing with the same data set as one working in Wellington. And so they can communicate, test, challenge and ultimately progress. In a little over four hundred years we have transformed our knowledge of the physical world in ways that could not, in the time of Shakespeare, even have been imagined. Meanwhile, in philosophy, we continue to debate Plato. You can see why the naturalists are happy to stick to their objective data.

    PS, I think your last post may have disappeared.

    Bernard

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  73. Dianelos

    I put up a previous response to your thoughtful and provocative comments, but it appears to have disappeared.

    I may get back to it at some stage. I was particularly interested in your approach to quantum physics.

    Bernard

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  74. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  75. Bernard,

    As it seems that we disagree about a lot of things, I’d like to start by writing down the points I trust we do agree. If you don’t agree with some of the points bellow, please identify them to me, so that we may investigate them further and avoid discussing in circles.

    1. How reality seems in our experience of life, including our feeling the sun’s heat on our face, our observing the output of an instrument which measures the wavelength distribution of the sun’s radiation, and so on – is called “phenomenal reality”.

    2. How reality actually is independently of us, is called “objective reality” (or “noumenal reality” for those who prefer Kant’s terminology).

    3. The phenomenal reality we experience is produced by objective reality.

    4. Natural science is based exclusively on data of our experience, and thus on phenomenal reality. Natural science develops models which allow us to make and test predictions about phenomenal reality. To the degree that these models make general and precise predictions, the corresponding science is deemed to be successful.

    5. The philosophical field which concerns itself with how objective reality is, is called “metaphysics”.

    6. As there are many conceivable objective realities which will produce exactly the same phenomenal reality which natural science studies, scientific knowledge alone is not sufficient for deciding which of these conceivable objective realities is true (or is more probably true). That’s why there is the field of metaphysics.

    7. Metaphysical naturalists (or naturalists for short) have proposed many different metaphysical hypotheses about how objective reality is. The various interpretations of quantum mechanics are such metaphysical hypotheses, as are the various responses to naturalism’s problem of consciousness (from panpsychism to identity theory), as are the various hypotheses in response to the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental constants (the various multiverse hypotheses), as are some exotic hypotheses such as the computer simulation hypothesis, the two-dimensional hologram hypothesis, etc. A hundred years ago there was basically one naturalistic metaphysical hypothesis (classical science’s realism); today, when taking into account the various combinations, there are hundreds. All of them are currently scientifically viable, because all of them are compatible with all the phenomenal data at science’s disposal.

    8. It is possible that science will in the future discover phenomena which will falsify some of the currently viable hypotheses about how objective reality is, because objective reality cannot be such as to *not* produce the respective phenomena. So, for example, some particular quantum mechanical phenomena have falsified the hypothesis (believed very strongly by such luminaries as Einstein) that objective reality is local. Conversely, it is also possible that science will in the future discover more naturalistically problematic phenomena which will end up increasing the number of naturalistic metaphysical hypotheses.

    9. Given that various hypotheses about objective reality are compatible with science, in order to decide today which one is the more probably true (or the one more reasonable to believe in), one must use other epistemic criteria, such as explanatory power beyond what science explains, freedom from conceptual problems, simplicity, prima-facie plausibility, etc.

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  76. Hi Dianelos

    I am as always impressed with your ability to organise thoughts and disagreements with such structured clarity. It makes it very easy for me to digest and respond.

    At first glance, I think you have summarised very well the points on which we agree. Two things stand out for me. The use of phenomenal models to conclude what is objectively real is very difficult, and we are often tempted to run before we can walk, so to speak. We are therefore best to be very cautious when concluding what a model tells us about underlying reality, beyond saying that whatever reality looks like, it provides the conditions by which these predictive models work.

    So, even with the reality/locality stuff in quantum physics, there is a danger of over reading the results that show reality condition is the one that gives way, not because these results are wrong, but because in this case the very term reality is very easy to misinterpret or read too much into. We are, to borrow Darrell's point, often smuggling in a good dose of world view when we speculate what this tells us about reality.

    The second thing is where I think you and I disagree, and that is on point number 9. If I can imagine endless versions of objective reality to fit a given physical model, then thinking there will be some method by which we can call one more probable than the other is, to my mind, just hopeless. They will always remain simply speculations or stories, until some aspect of them rubs up against the phenomenal world. The way we choose between non-falsifiable hypotheses will in the end come down to matters of taste, which is to say it will be a personal, pragmatic decision.

    I choose not to believe that we are the embodiment of the dreams of a flea on the back of the giant dog of existence not because it is improbable (I could tweak the definition of the dog to make it every bit as probable as your computer simulation) but because it seems a little silly to me, that is all.

    Bernard

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  77. Hi Eric,

    I hope you'll forgive me if I ask a question that's already been asked. Although I read through a number of the responses, I didn't make it through all of them.

    I wonder what the broader implications are for the sort of pragmatic moral argument you (and Singer) offer. The broad outlines of that argument seem to me to be this:

    (1) If some entity E had the right sort of moral status M, then we would be obligated to refrain from harming E without justification.
    (2) If we would be obligated to refrain from harming E without justification, then if it is epistemically possible that E has M, then (all other things being equal) we should (pragmatically? morally?) refrain from harming E without justification.
    (3) Therefore, if some entity E had the right sort of moral status M, then if it is epistemically possible that E has M, then (all other things being equal) we should (pragmatically? morally?) refrain from harming E without justification.

    Epistemic possibility, as I understand it, is considerably broad. Let's say some proposition is epistemically possible if our evidence could (in the broadly logical sense) justify our belief in it. Now, suppose that Earth was visited by aliens whose collective intelligence radically surpassed our own, and suppose, furthermore, that those aliens attested to the fact that snails have moral status. In such a case, we'd be justified in believing "snails have moral status." What's more, given my characterization of epistemic possibility, it's epistemically possible that snails have moral status. At this point, all that's needed for the reconstruction is to substitute "snails" for "E."

    What I wonder is whether just about anything can be substituted for "E," and whether this leads to an implausible host of moral judgments. It seems equally possible (in the epistemic sense) that trees, dirt, air, electrical currents, bowling balls, and numerous other things have moral status. Should I therefore take pains to avoid 'harming' trees, dirt, air, etc.? Of course, it might be unclear HOW these sorts of things COULD be harmed, but still, does it seem plausible that I should worry myself about it? (An aside: Given Singer's uncertainty about whether snails have moral status, I'm guessing he hasn't identified any property that snails have in virtue of which they can suffer, can be harmed, or whatever. But in that case, I wonder if he's in any better a position here, since neither of us really know how to avoid harming snails, trees, dirt, etc.)

    Maybe I'm wrong in assuming that you have epistemic possibility (or, perhaps, what I am understanding to be epistemic possibility) in mind here. Maybe you have something else in mind, like "we should assume everything has moral status unless we have some reason not to assume it." But even this seems to generate some odd moral judgments, at least for some persons unaware of the reasons we have to (for example) believe that trees and dirt LACK moral status.

    Just some thoughts. I'm interested in hearing back from you on this.

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