Material--philosophical Implications

[Log]

That could be your problem. It is certainly a problem if you really want to understand what is wrong with Dembski's arguments. He pulls a fast one using plenty of imprecision to fog up the place.

By the way, are you aware of Dembski's standing as a mathematician? Do you know anything of his academic publication record? Look him up on MathSciNet. This should make you suspicious.

Unless you want to defend the specifics of his (mis)application of Wolpert and Macready's "no free lunch" theorem then all I can say is, there is no proof of anything and no major mathematician or philosopher that I know of thinks there is-- including, if I am not mistaken, Dave Wolpert himself.

I have no time nor patience for ad hominem, appeal to authority, nor any other informal fallacy tonight. Thanks for clarifying your understanding of Dembski's argument. You have met my expectations.

[Tarski]

I have no time nor patience for ad hominem, appeal to authority, nor any other informal fallacy tonight. Thanks for clarifying your understanding of Dembski's argument. You have met my expectations.

Actually there is not one ad hominem in there. To say that someone's academic record should make one merely suspicious is not fallacy of logic or even an application of logic at all.

As for appeal to authority, it is only a fallacy when used to make a logical leap--it is not a fallacy if one uses it as a consideration or as evidence--we do it all the time, that's why we listen to doctors.

I once had a diff. eq. student that thought his answer on a test was correct (it wasn't) despite me marking it wrong. I told him he could take it to any other professor and see what they said. I ask him if that would convince him and he said I was appealing to authority. Whatever!

Also, I have said very little about the specifics of his argument but I think I have said more than you, at least in our conversation. Do you think you have said any thing at all that demonstates an understanding?

[johndoe]

I don't have much to say other then I'm glad you came to this discussion. Even though you and I disagree, this kind of discussion helps me out. One question. In your view, why can't we just stop at "the individuals will was the cause." Sometimes I feel compelled to just end it at that. Everything going on around the individual provides context and an environment, but the ultimate cause of some event initiated by a "causer" could just be...just because...Don't know how else to put it.

Backing away from ID...

Thanks. As to your question, I can't simply stop with the cause for a decision being X's will, because it isn't satisfying to me. This is an example of what I was referring to in my first post as a vague dualistic notion. It strikes me as an appeal to mystery (or magic) rather than a truly coherent way to address the issue.

A way to think about that that might clarify how I view the issue is to look at the reasons underlying any given decision. For most decisions requiring some amount of deliberation, the decider can provide reasons why he chose to X rather than to not X. Answering the question by saying "I chose to X because it was my will to X" seems evasive and doesn't really add value in this situation, considering that reasons do exist and are known. Simply stopping at the will, for me, implies that the will is a mystery and that reasons why the will would lean towards Xing rather than notXing should be unknowable. But such is not the case. For some decisions it is possible that the individual may not be completely aware of the reasons behind them, but I tend to feel that this does not mean that reasons do not exist or are in some way unknowable (to an omniscient being).

It seems to me that people intuitively reject determinism because it feels wrong without thinking too deeply about the subject. Language employed is often something like - 'then we would be mere robots' or 'then we are just automatons'. I think that most people intuitively accept some form of dualism - that consciousness is other than (and cannot completely be explained by) the physical processes in our brains/bodies. Determinism seems to imply that dualism is false (since most associate determinism with a completely materialistic view), and therefore folks tend to reject it (it feels wrong). I'm not certain that LDS doctrine requires us to accept some form of dualism (vs. monism), but even assuming it does, I don't think that the sort of dualism that would fit in an LDS context is necessarily incompatible with determinism, since I do not think that determinism necessarily requires a materialistic monism.