Dan Peterson Takes on the "No Evidence At All for The Book of Mormon" Argument

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, ttribe said:

 

First of all, "Atheists will be the first to claim..." is a non-starter in the discussion.  You're making a ham-fisted blanket statement which apparently shortcuts the nuance of the human condition.  There is no unified "body" of atheists; I caution against use of such universal language.

Second, you seem to be restricting your discussion of science to only the so-called "hard" sciences.  I can assure you there is a great deal of empirical research in the social sciences which studies morality, etc. and show the societal benefits to collective agreements (even if it is implicit) on certain baseline moral standards.

Oh well thanks so much for the suggestions on style, but substance would be preferable.

With a second Bachelor's in psych, I think I am aware of psychological evidence and if you actually read my posts you will note that that word pops up often.

And no, I am not talking about hard science, I am talking about logical positivism.   I don't care if one is a physicist, a chemist or football coach- if you demand objective evidence for a statement to be meaningful, you are a positivist.   And that position is dead, as I have brought up several times.  You seem to be avoiding the issues I am bringing up

[OGHoosier]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Before I respond to this, let me just say this was a good post of yours and you said a lot of good things I agree with.

One difference between a "truth-seeking activity" and a knee-jerk defense would be as follows (and please forgive me for making myself the hero of the story). When I picked up Big Picture for the first time, I wasn't looking for a book on atheism, looking for a way to bolster my beliefs, or looking for ammunition to argue against any particular religion. I was looking to learn more about physics from a current source. When I started reading it, I did in fact believe that disproving the existence of "fine and pure" matter that subtly interacts with the brain was beyond the scope of what science could prove or disprove, especially in the era of quantum indeterminacy. In fact, I'm naturally a sucker for pseudoscientific ideas like "What the [bleep] Do We Know?" that "posits a spiritual connection between quantum physics and consciousness." I love the idea of having access to gnostic knowledge. None of this was on my mind when I picked up the book, but that is where I was.

When I got to the section about Effective Quantum Field Theory, how strong the evidence (allegedly) is to support it, how (allegedly) robust the conclusions are, how we can (allegedly) be relatively certain that future scientific advances will not override it, and about how it (allegedly) proves that there is almost certainly no soul, no ESP, and no bending spoons with your mind, I was skeptical and intrigued. I studied the arguments carefully, and read the relevant chapters multiple times. I ultimately became convinced. Of course from my perspective, putting more nails into the coffin of certain beliefs I had already abandoned wasn't that challenging in and of itself. In fact, I was probably especially receptive to these ideas because of my own confirmation bias.  But I certainly didn't and still don't have an emotional or sociological need for Quantum Mechanics to offer strong evidence that revelation isn't real. It just so happens that my endeavors to learn about science provided me with this knowledge.

Of the people who have responded on this thread, you are among the ones who gave these arguments a relatively fair hearing, and for that I thank you. But others approached it in an extremely defensive way, anxiously looking for excuses to dismiss it without even beginning to understand the arguments. From my perspective, my approach to the book was a truth-seeking activity that caused me to learn something I didn't know, while the people who made more rash judgments didn't really engage with the evidence and really didn't learn anything. It's hard to call that a truth-seeking activity.

 

Honestly, all of this is fair. I'd agree that your approach to The Big Picture was a good example of truth-seeking activity, or as close as we get to such anyways. 

I'm generally somewhat wary of commentary on emotional and sociological needs corrupting reasoning because what we believe informs those things that we do which generate our social and emotional contexts as a matter of necessity. I recoil from the charge that the presence of social or emotional needs renders our reasoning or opinions on these things invalid, especially since recent science seems to indicate that emotional networks are tied in with our rationality irrevocably. Furthermore, I've become somewhat intrigued by the work of Gerd Gigerenzer, who is a critic of the widely-accepted "cognitive-biases-and-heuristics" school pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Gigerenzer and those merry few in his school of thought argue that what are commonly identified as rationality-killing biases and heuristics are often better-performing and appear more rational when removed from an artificial laboratory setting and put into a real world of fluctuating probabilities and bounded human cognitive function. I honestly think it's good science and he makes some good points, but I also can't deny that rationality is important to me and the idea that humans are not rational is frankly disastrous (not to mention somewhat self-defeating in my view.) So, what am I to do? I have emotional stakes in it, but I don't think it's fair to immediately come down on the opposite side of whatever I want. Simply withdrawing from the question is not possible, and I already disbelieve the idea that I can delete my priors and come to any figment of a sensible conclusion. So my response is generally just to weigh the evidence as best I can and go with it. I don't think there's more that I can do. 

As for your quotes from Pinker, I do want to respond to that. I recall working with the Euthyphro dilemma in my intro philosophy of religion course, and I recall the general contours of my response to it, but some of the particulars have escaped me. I'm going to follow @ttribe's lead and take some time to recollect before getting into it with you. 

Edited March 19, 2021 by OGHoosier
Added "as a matter of necessity" in order to clarify my second sentence.

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Virtually every atheist you meet gets his ethics from humanism, not from atheism. While humanism is the ultimate axiom for morality, it isn't totally arbitrary, either. As humans, we should all be able to agree that human flourishing (e.g. healthiness, happiness, knowledge, wealth, human connections, peace) is better than the opposite. While an argumentative philosopher could claim that there is no reason to believe those things are really better than the alternative, from a boots-on-the-ground perspective, we should be able to notice that a good life is the kind of life we do in fact want. If we agree that human wellbeing is what we want for our civilization, science does have something to say about what ethical dictums are more likely to maximize human wellbeing.

Ultimately everything in philosophy needs an axiom, and for humanists, the axiom is maximizing human wellbeing.  

Does invoking as an axiom that we should want humans to flourish a license to invoke the existence of God as an axiom? I don't see how. Here is a quote from Harvard professor Steven Pinker on the weakness of theistic morality:

Let’s start with theistic morality. It’s true that many religious codes enjoin people from murdering, assaulting, robbing, or betraying one another. But of course so do codes of secular morality, and for an obvious reason: these are rules that all rational, self-interested, and gregarious agents would want their compatriots to agree upon. Not surprisingly, they are codified in the laws of every state, and indeed seem to be present in every human society.

What does an appeal to a supernatural lawgiver add to a humanistic commitment to make people better off? The most obvious add-on is supernatural enforcement...

But theistic morality has two fatal flaws. The first is that there is no good reason to believe that God exists [he then spends several pages explaining why this is the case. I suppose this would all be relevant to responding to Peterson's original point, if "no reason" were shorthand for "no good reason." Although his arguments are excellent, I'll spare the reader with the following ellipses]...

And that brings us to the second problem with theistic morality. It’s not just that there is almost certainly no God to dictate and enforce moral precepts. It’s that even if there were a God, his divine decrees, as conveyed to us through religion, cannot be the source of morality. The explanation goes back to Plato’s Euthyphro, in which Socrates points out that if the gods have good reasons to deem certain acts moral, we can appeal to those reasons directly, skipping the middlemen. If they don’t, we should not take their dictates seriously. After all, thoughtful people can give reasons why they don’t kill, rape, or torture other than fear of eternal hellfire, and they would not suddenly become rapists and contract killers if they had reason to believe that God’s back was turned or if he told them it was OK.

Theistic moralists reply that the God of scripture, unlike the capricious deities of Greek mythology, is by his very nature incapable of issuing immoral commandments. But anyone who is familiar with scripture knows that this is not so. The God of the Old Testament murdered innocents by the millions...

The Euthyphro argument puts the lie to the common claim that atheism consigns us to a moral relativism in which everyone can do his own thing. The claim gets it backwards. A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests: it’s an inescapable feature of the human condition that we’re all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other. For this reason many contemporary philosophers, including Nagel, Goldstein, Peter Singer, Peter Railton, Richard Boyd, David Brink, and Derek Parfit, are moral realists (the opposite of relativists), arguing that moral statements may be objectively true or false. It’s religion that is inherently relativistic. Given the absence of evidence, any belief in how many deities there are, who are their earthly prophets and messiahs, and what they demand of us can depend only on the parochial dogmas of one’s tribe. Not only does this make theistic morality relativistic; it can make it immoral. Invisible gods can command people to slay heretics, infidels, and apostates. And an immaterial soul is unmoved by the earthly incentives that impel us to get along. 

Contestants over a Oh my,  resource are usually better off if they split it than fight over it, particularly if they value their own lives on earth. But contestants over a sacred value (like holy land or affirmation of a belief) may not compromise, and if they think their souls are immortal, the loss of their body is no big deal—indeed, it may be a small price to pay for an eternal reward in paradise.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now (p. 420-429). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Yes I am VERY aware of these issues because I am a pragmatist and humanism is based in pragmatism - your very argument IS my justification for religion.

And thanks for the explanation about the philosophy, but I have been studying philosophy now for 50 years

Alma 32 is a virtual teachers manual for Humanist morality

I have said that "If God is Human then Humanism is theology" in several posts and elsewhere.  The reason Mormonism appeals to me is that it IS exactly what you are describing- it is a materialist faith which in essence worships a paradigm of the Ideal Supreme Human, and yes, I know Pinker's work as well.

But none of these ideas are compatible with the ideas set forth by your buddy Carrol.   The point that religion is relativistic is precisely what I have been saying by calling a testimony- based religion "subjective"

Quite frankly you are quoting back to me all my beliefs!

It is all quite confusing- it seems like a total 180 on your part.

If you really believe your post above, then we are on the same page!

@OGHoosier- did you check out this post??  Do you find it shocking and contradictory that Analytics would be saying these things??  What am I missing?

[OGHoosier]

20 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Yes I am VERY aware of these issues because I am a pragmatist and humanism is based in pragmatism - your very argument IS my justification for religion.

And thanks for the explanation about the philosophy, but I have been studying philosophy now for 50 years

Alma 32 is a virtual teachers manual for Humanist morality

I have said that "If God is Human then Humanism is theology" in several posts and elsewhere.  The reason Mormonism appeals to me is that it IS exactly what you are describing- it is a materialist faith which in essence worships a paradigm of the Ideal Supreme Human, and yes, I know Pinker's work as well.

But none of these ideas are compatible with the ideas set forth by your buddy Carrol.   The point that religion is relativistic is precisely what I have been saying by calling a testimony- based religion "subjective"

Quite frankly you are quoting back to me all my beliefs!

It is all quite confusing- it seems like a total 180 on your part.

If you really believe your post above, then we are on the same page!

@OGHoosier- did you check out this post??  Do you find it shocking and contradictory that Analytics would be saying these things??  What am I missing?

If I understand you correctly, your point in raising morality was not to issue a moral argument for God's existence but to critique positivism. If so then I think that @Analytics's reference to Pinker did miss the point, unfortunately. 

As for Carroll, I think he endorses humanistic morality a la Pinker (they swim in similar circles). But he would likely disagree with your classification of religious morality as fundamentally relative. Most people would. Your approach is rather unique - though I am a fan of it. 

@Analytics, if I'm not mistaken, Pinker's general argument for humanistic morality is broadly paralleled in Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape. I've interacted with that a bit. The Moral Landscape had some problems in that it assumed a resolution of the "is/ought" distinction and basically boiled down to utilitarianism, which when pulled away from the authority of science has some philosophical flaws. Did Pinker have anything special to say about the "is/ought" dilemma?

Let's just say I've learned a lesson or two about questioning a man with a book based on my experience with blogs.  

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

If I understand you correctly, your point in raising morality was not to issue a moral argument for God's existence but to critique positivism. If so then I think that @Analytics's reference to Pinker did miss the point, unfortunately. 

Right.

Let's talk more tomorrow.

Essentially I believe that morality evolved, and something like that idea was alive and well in the first Century. If you are not aware of it, look up The Didache, which is about as Pragmatist/ Evolutionary as you can get.  Read the portion on "The way of life" vs "The way of death".

Morality has survival value. FIRST CENTURY!

But that is only one paradigm, the one that secular folks may understand the best. Of course I don't pretend to know what is "true", just which arguments are justifiable.

[Physics Guy]

I have not read Carroll's book and I'm not planning to read it. I teach quantum field theory every couple of semesters; if I ever try to write a popular physics book I might check this one for things to imitate or avoid but otherwise I don't like reading popular physics books. There is too narrow an enjoyable space between the painful reactions of,  "Arg, I could have explained that so much better" and, "Arg, I wish I could explain that this well".

So I'm not sure how much in this thread is from Carroll or from Analytics. It's a bit weird to me to see things like "Effective Quantum Field Theory" in caps; it's like reading about Hammers and Nails in a book on carpentry. If that's Carroll, oh well.

If Analytics hasn't misunderstood Carroll, and I haven't misunderstood Analytics, then the basic point is that we can empirically rule out substance dualism. Mind or spirit or whatever is not some kind of alternative substance besides normal matter, comparable to the matter we know, only somehow different, yet interacting with the matter we know, so that the decisions of spiritual beings like us can move our material bodies.

We can rule this out because of what we know about the basic way that matter works, according to quantum field theory. Particles don't have to be found; they can be made. They simply appear out of nothing, given sufficient energy. Their appearance is random; weakly interacting particles may be produced only rarely. After decades of high-energy collisions in accelerators, however, we would have seen anything that interacts strongly enough with normal matter to be able to cause body movements in humans.

If this is what Carroll is saying then I have to agree. I have made the same argument myself in the past, and I didn't think I was having an original insight. There's nothing wrong with Carroll writing a popular book about it but it's not scientific news. I don't want to write an apologia for quantum field theory here, but for what it's worth I can give my view that we might not have proven beyond all possible doubt that there is no such substance as spirit, but we've proven it beyond all reasonable doubt. The only loopholes left are more like conspiracy theories than like scientific theories.

What I absolutely don't get at all, however, is how that says anything at all about the existence of God, or about miracles, or about an afterlife. God is not supposed to be Casper the Ghost. Ruling out God through any possible understanding of physics would be like ruling out J.R.R. Tolkien through understanding the geography of Middle Earth. No can do. We're inside the simulation; nothing we can learn about how the simulation works can say anything at all about whatever is doing the simulation.

Furthermore, substance dualism is an irrelevant and unnecessary organ in the body of religious doctrine. There's no need for it. It doesn't even do anything. Everything that any religious person wants to believe about souls or spirits works just fine if the physical mechanism of spirit or soul is the strong AI concept of mind as pattern. Our souls are not in our bodies in the way that the ink is in a book: our souls are in our bodies in the way that the story is in the book.

Everything anyone ever wanted to believe about souls will still work that way. Spirit is not a substance but it does not have to be.

[Meadowchik]

1 hour ago, Physics Guy said:

We're inside the simulation; nothing we can learn about how the simulation works can say anything at all about whatever is doing the simulation.

Hi Physics Guy!

As an aside: I don't disagree with your conclusion from this about the possibility of God, but I do disagree with this as a general statement. I think we can learn a great deal about the government of the universe from inside the universe. I think we can learn a great deal about any possible Gods from inside the universe.

(For example: "If there is a God then it would seem God allows humans to suffer" is a reasonable conclusion.)

Of course, much of those might be conditional statements, but that's okay. They're still informative. 

Edited March 19, 2021 by Meadowchik

[Analytics]

9 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

If I understand you correctly, your point in raising morality was not to issue a moral argument for God's existence but to critique positivism. If so then I think that @Analytics's reference to Pinker did miss the point, unfortunately. 

As for Carroll, I think he endorses humanistic morality a la Pinker (they swim in similar circles). But he would likely disagree with your classification of religious morality as fundamentally relative. Most people would. Your approach is rather unique - though I am a fan of it. 

@Analytics, if I'm not mistaken, Pinker's general argument for humanistic morality is broadly paralleled in Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape. I've interacted with that a bit. The Moral Landscape had some problems in that it assumed a resolution of the "is/ought" distinction and basically boiled down to utilitarianism, which when pulled away from the authority of science has some philosophical flaws. Did Pinker have anything special to say about the "is/ought" dilemma?

Let's just say I've learned a lesson or two about questioning a man with a book based on my experience with blogs.  

I feel I've been kicked in the teeth on this thread for referring to books to learn about science, and I've been kicked in the teeth for putting things into my own words, trying to rephrase and clarify when I'm misunderstood, and then kicked for being inconsistent. Quoting more eloquent people is easier. If it is any consolation, I am trying to be careful as I curate these quotes.

Pinker is definitely on the same page as Sam Harris regarding Utilitarianism. The only thing he specifically says (in Enlightenment Now!) about the is/ought dilemma is that humanism "provides the ought that supplements the is." Anticipating your objections, he says:

A different philosophical objection to humanism is that it’s “just utilitarianism”—that a morality based on maximizing human flourishing is the same as a morality that seeks the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Anyone who has taken Introduction to Moral Philosophy can rattle off the problems. Should we indulge a Utility Monster who gets more pleasure out of eating people than his victims get out of living? Should we euthanize a few draftees and harvest their organs to save the lives of many more? [...about 10 more examples...]

Humanism indeed has a utilitarian flavor, or at least a consequentialist one, in which acts and policies are morally evaluated by their consequences. The consequences needn’t be restricted to happiness in the narrow sense of having a smile on one’s face, but can embrace a broader sense of flourishing, which includes childrearing, self-expression, education, rich experience, and the creation of works of lasting value (chapter 18). The consequentialist flavor of humanism is actually a point in its favor, for several reasons.

First, any Moral Philosophy student who stayed awake through week 2 of the syllabus can also rattle off the problems with deontological ethics. If lying is intrinsically wrong, must we answer truthfully when the Gestapo demand to know the whereabouts of Anne Frank? [...about 10 more examples...]

Many moral philosophers believe that the dichotomy from the Intro course is drawn too sharply. Deontological principles are often a good way to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Since no mortal can calculate every consequence of his actions into the indefinite future, and since people can always spin-doctor their selfish acts as benefiting others, one of the best ways to promote overall happiness is to draw bright lines that no one may cross. We don’t let governments deceive or murder their citizens, because real politicians, unlike the infallible and benevolent demigods in the thought experiments, could wield that power capriciously or tyrannically....

The other reason that humanism needn’t be embarrassed by its overlap with utilitarianism is that this approach to ethics has an impressive track record of improving human welfare. The classical utilitarians—Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—laid out arguments against slavery, sadistic punishment, cruelty to animals, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the subordination of women which carried the day....[several more examples and details]

There is a good reason why utilitarian arguments have so often succeeded: everyone can appreciate them. Principles like “No harm, no foul,” “If no one is hurt it can’t be wrong,” “What consenting adults do in private is no one else’s concern,” and “If I should take a notion / To jump into the ocean / Ain’t nobody’s business if I do” may not be profound or exceptionless, but once they are stated, people can readily understand them, and anyone who wants to oppose them has a heavy burden of proof. It’s not that utilitarianism is intuitive. Classical liberalism came late in human history, and traditional cultures believe that what consenting adults do in private is very much their concern. The philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Greene has argued that many deontological convictions are rooted in primitive intuitions of tribalism, purity, revulsion, and social norms, whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from rational cogitation.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now (p. 415-417). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

 

 

Edited March 19, 2021 by Analytics

[Analytics]

2 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

So I'm not sure how much in this thread is from Carroll or from Analytics. It's a bit weird to me to see things like "Effective Quantum Field Theory" in caps; it's like reading about Hammers and Nails in a book on carpentry. If that's Carroll, oh well.

Actually, that capitalization is me.

2 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

If Analytics hasn't misunderstood Carroll, and I haven't misunderstood Analytics, then the basic point is that we can empirically rule out substance dualism. Mind or spirit or whatever is not some kind of alternative substance besides normal matter, comparable to the matter we know, only somehow different, yet interacting with the matter we know, so that the decisions of spiritual beings like us can move our material bodies.

We can rule this out because of what we know about the basic way that matter works, according to quantum field theory. Particles don't have to be found; they can be made. They simply appear out of nothing, given sufficient energy. Their appearance is random; weakly interacting particles may be produced only rarely. After decades of high-energy collisions in accelerators, however, we would have seen anything that interacts strongly enough with normal matter to be able to cause body movements in humans.

If this is what Carroll is saying then I have to agree. 

That is what he's saying.

2 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

What I absolutely don't get at all, however, is how that says anything at all about the existence of God, or about miracles, or about an afterlife. God is not supposed to be Casper the Ghost. Ruling out God through any possible understanding of physics would be like ruling out J.R.R. Tolkien through understanding the geography of Middle Earth. No can do. We're inside the simulation; nothing we can learn about how the simulation works can say anything at all about whatever is doing the simulation.

To clarify, smac97 is the one who thinks Carroll's arguments extend to "God." But he hasn't read the book, so I wouldn't put to much weight on his opinion. 

Regarding "miracles", Carroll's claims are specific--he doesn't say that "miracles" are impossible. Rather, he claims that the only way that matter can be manipulated is through the conventional application of the four forces. If a force isn't strong enough or doesn't extend across a large enough distance for something to happen, then it can't happen. And because of Eeffective quantum field theory, crossing symmetry, and experimental results, we are relatively confident that there are no more forces that are strong enough and extend across long distances. So whether or not a phenomenon is plausible is bound by this.

Regarding afterlife, he sees dualism as a necessary condition of afterlife--if the mechanism for being aware of yourself and having thoughts is limited to your brain, then when your brain shuts off, that's it. Apparently you think that is simplistic and have a more esoteric or subtle thoughts on this.

2 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

Furthermore, substance dualism is an irrelevant and unnecessary organ in the body of religious doctrine. There's no need for it. It doesn't even do anything. Everything that any religious person wants to believe about souls or spirits works just fine if the physical mechanism of spirit or soul is the strong AI concept of mind as pattern. Our souls are not in our bodies in the way that the ink is in a book: our souls are in our bodies in the way that the story is in the book.

Everything anyone ever wanted to believe about souls will still work that way. Spirit is not a substance but it does not have to be.

When your brain stops functioning, the pattern it was holding disintegrates, does it not? Is there another medium to hold the pattern? Is there a plausible mechanism to create a backup of that pattern?

Or are you taking a step back and saying time is an illusion? That even if my brain is worm food in 2100, I will always be alive in 2020?

[mfbukowski]

4 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

What I absolutely don't get at all, however, is how that says anything at all about the existence of God, or about miracles, or about an afterlife. God is not supposed to be Casper the Ghost. Ruling out God through any possible understanding of physics would be like ruling out J.R.R. Tolkien through understanding the geography of Middle Earth. No can do. We're inside the simulation; nothing we can learn about how the simulation works can say anything at all about whatever is doing the simulation.

Furthermore, substance dualism is an irrelevant and unnecessary organ in the body of religious doctrine. There's no need for it. It doesn't even do anything. Everything that any religious person wants to believe about souls or spirits works just fine if the physical mechanism of spirit or soul is the strong AI concept of mind as pattern. Our souls are not in our bodies in the way that the ink is in a book: our souls are in our bodies in the way that the story is in the book.

Everything anyone ever wanted to believe about souls will still work that way. Spirit is not a substance but it does not have to be.

Bravo!!

I love the analogy of being "inside the simulation" in the sense that the simulation is created by an intelligence which could "actually"- if that word has any meaning in this context- be the collective knowledge of mankind.   The way we see the world is itself a "simulation" but not "real"- it does not get past the phenoma to "what is out there"--what we see of the world is a creation of our collective brains/mind.

"Blue" does not exist outside our perception of it and physical explanations of the retina etc are cute but never get to the full definition of phenomena of "blue"- something will always be left out of the verbal definition

We cannot define the phenomenon of blue - all we can do is point at it and say "This is blue"

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

I feel I've been kicked in the teeth on this thread for referring to books to learn about science, and I've been kicked in the teeth for putting things into my own words, trying to rephrase and clarify when I'm misunderstood, and then kicked for being inconsistent. Quoting more eloquent people is easier. If it is any consolation, I am trying to be careful as I curate these quotes.

Pinker is definitely on the same page as Sam Harris regarding Utilitarianism. The only thing he specifically says (in Enlightenment Now!) about the is/ought dilemma is that humanism "provides the ought that supplements the is." Anticipating your objections, he says:

A different philosophical objection to humanism is that it’s “just utilitarianism”—that a morality based on maximizing human flourishing is the same as a morality that seeks the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Anyone who has taken Introduction to Moral Philosophy can rattle off the problems. Should we indulge a Utility Monster who gets more pleasure out of eating people than his victims get out of living? Should we euthanize a few draftees and harvest their organs to save the lives of many more? [...about 10 more examples...]

Humanism indeed has a utilitarian flavor, or at least a consequentialist one, in which acts and policies are morally evaluated by their consequences. The consequences needn’t be restricted to happiness in the narrow sense of having a smile on one’s face, but can embrace a broader sense of flourishing, which includes childrearing, self-expression, education, rich experience, and the creation of works of lasting value (chapter 18). The consequentialist flavor of humanism is actually a point in its favor, for several reasons.

First, any Moral Philosophy student who stayed awake through week 2 of the syllabus can also rattle off the problems with deontological ethics. If lying is intrinsically wrong, must we answer truthfully when the Gestapo demand to know the whereabouts of Anne Frank? [...about 10 more examples...]

Many moral philosophers believe that the dichotomy from the Intro course is drawn too sharply. Deontological principles are often a good way to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Since no mortal can calculate every consequence of his actions into the indefinite future, and since people can always spin-doctor their selfish acts as benefiting others, one of the best ways to promote overall happiness is to draw bright lines that no one may cross. We don’t let governments deceive or murder their citizens, because real politicians, unlike the infallible and benevolent demigods in the thought experiments, could wield that power capriciously or tyrannically....

The other reason that humanism needn’t be embarrassed by its overlap with utilitarianism is that this approach to ethics has an impressive track record of improving human welfare. The classical utilitarians—Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—laid out arguments against slavery, sadistic punishment, cruelty to animals, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the subordination of women which carried the day....[several more examples and details]

There is a good reason why utilitarian arguments have so often succeeded: everyone can appreciate them. Principles like “No harm, no foul,” “If no one is hurt it can’t be wrong,” “What consenting adults do in private is no one else’s concern,” and “If I should take a notion / To jump into the ocean / Ain’t nobody’s business if I do” may not be profound or exceptionless, but once they are stated, people can readily understand them, and anyone who wants to oppose them has a heavy burden of proof. It’s not that utilitarianism is intuitive. Classical liberalism came late in human history, and traditional cultures believe that what consenting adults do in private is very much their concern. The philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Greene has argued that many deontological convictions are rooted in primitive intuitions of tribalism, purity, revulsion, and social norms, whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from rational cogitation.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now (p. 415-417). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

 

 

The distinction between pragmatism and utilitarianism exists but it is a thin gossamer veil.

THIS is the source of morality on one paradigm- "truth" is what works to accomplish a specific goal.

AND we can see both paradigms at once- they are two sides of the coin- we can flip back and forth from being a "chapel Mormon" to a secularist instantly.  There are two compatible ways of seeing God- a secularist can see him as a conception of some ideal human OR we can see Him as the LIVING HUMAN being, as the Christ, who exemplified- presumably historically- the ideal behaviors of a theoretically Perfect Human. 

"Christ" can be both a theoretical ideal or a "real person" at the same time.  There IS no practical difference because all we know of Christ are stories.  We can see the stories as allegorical OR historic "truth"- but I have trouble with the latter unless I simply postulate that the Bible IS historically accurate.  But that is an iffy proposition.  Stopping the sun and a 6 day creation are hard to swallow but literally possible, using Bertrand Russel's interpretation of the Omphalos Hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis#:~:text=The five-minute hypothesis is,other signs of history included.

Again I have to bring in Witgenstein's rabbit and the duck.   

Which is the "true paradigm" for describing what this represents?:

Rabbit AND duck both at the same time

It is as easy to "flip" between chapel Mormon and secular Mormon as it is to see this as a rabbit or a duck.  All you have to believe is that treating your neighbor as yourself is teh prime directive of morality - either Christ said it, or it evolved for having "survival value".   If Christ is human, both can be "true" at the same time.

Emulating the hypothesized Ideal Human has evolutionary advantages embodied in the Golden Rule-   You don't kill someone because they cut you off on the freeway.  -> peaceful society because everyone voluntarily follows the rules for a peaceful society -> everyone is relaxed and making more babies in a peaceful world.

THAT is the Kantian Categorical Imperative in a nutshell ie: the Prime Directive in achieving a peaceful world.

So the secular God IS the Ideal Human  as an allegory AND the chapel Mormon's embodied Ideal Human at the same time, and that is exactly why I am here.  

We can't know the "truth" of either but we can know what brings peace to our minds.  Psychologists might call it "self-comforting" and others might call it "a testimony experience" but there is no DEFINABLE difference between the two.

 

[Analytics]

Wondering where smac97 got the idea that Carroll disproves “God”, I re-read the review of Big Picture by Paul Nelson that smac had recommended. Nelson says:

“[Sean Carroll] gives a friendly face to naturalism, which is not science, of course, but rather the ancient philosophical worldview that physical nature (the particles, fields, and the void) constitutes ultimate reality. No gods, no spirits, nothing transcendent.”

If Nelson would have read the book more carefully, he would know that Carroll considers himself an adherent of empiricism, not of naturalism. Carroll isn’t talking about an “ancient philosophical worldview.” He is talking about science. He does not assume a priori on philosophical grounds “no gods, no spirits, nothing transcendent.” Rather, he endeavors to look at the empirical evidence and figure out what is most likely based on it. In Carroll’s words:

Science should be interested in determining the truth, whatever that truth may be—natural, supernatural, or otherwise. The stance known as methodological naturalism, while deployed with the best of intentions by supporters of science, amounts to assuming part of the answer ahead of time. If finding the truth is our goal, that is just about the biggest mistake we can make.

Fortunately, it’s also an inaccurate characterization of what science actually is. Science isn’t characterized by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism—the idea that knowledge is derived from our experience of the world, rather than by thought alone. Science is a technique, not a set of conclusions. The technique consists of imagining as many different ways the world could be (theories, models, ways of talking) as we possibly can, and then observing the world as carefully as possible….

Carroll, Sean. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (pp. 133-134). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.  

Does Carroll claim to have figured out “God, the Universe, and Everything” as smac insinuates he has? What does Carroll say about God?

It turns out there is a short chapter in Big Picture about God that I haven’t paid much attention to. Carroll’s position about God can be summed up thusly. In theory, we should use Bayesian reasoning to form a belief about whether there is a God. Simplistically this includes deciding what the universe would look like if there were a God, and what it would look like if there weren’t a God, and seeing which one fits the reality we live in the best. After explaining this process in theory he says,

It all sounds very tidy, but we are fallible, finite, biased humans. Someone will argue that a universe with a hundred billion galaxies is exactly what God would naturally create, while someone else will roll their eyes and ask whether that expectation was actually put forward before we went out and discovered the galaxies in our telescopes. All we can hope to do is to survey our own planets of belief, recognize our biases, and try to correct for them the best we can…. Whatever biases I may have, I need to keep them in mind while trying to objectively weigh the evidence. It’s all any of us can hope to do from our tiny perch in the cosmos. (p. 150).

And he leaves the question on "God" with that.

Edited March 19, 2021 by Analytics

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

Wondering where smac97 got the idea that Carroll disproves “God”, I re-read the review of Big Picture by Paul Nelson that smac had recommended. Nelson says:

“[Sean Carroll] gives a friendly face to naturalism, which is not science, of course, but rather the ancient philosophical worldview that physical nature (the particles, fields, and the void) constitutes ultimate reality. No gods, no spirits, nothing transcendent.”

If Nelson would have read the book more carefully, he would know that Carroll considers himself an adherent of empiricism, not of naturalism. Carroll isn’t talking about an “ancient philosophical worldview.” He is talking about science. He does not assume a priori on philosophical grounds “no gods, no spirits, nothing transcendent.” Rather, he endeavors to look at the empirical evidence and figure out what is most likely based on it. In Carroll’s words:

Science should be interested in determining the truth, whatever that truth may be—natural, supernatural, or otherwise. The stance known as methodological naturalism, while deployed with the best of intentions by supporters of science, amounts to assuming part of the answer ahead of time. If finding the truth is our goal, that is just about the biggest mistake we can make.

Fortunately, it’s also an inaccurate characterization of what science actually is. Science isn’t characterized by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism—the idea that knowledge is derived from our experience of the world, rather than by thought alone. Science is a technique, not a set of conclusions. The technique consists of imagining as many different ways the world could be (theories, models, ways of talking) as we possibly can, and then observing the world as carefully as possible….

Carroll, Sean. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (pp. 133-134). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.  

Does Carroll claim to have figured out “God, the Universe, and Everything” as smac insinuates he has? What does Carroll say about God?

It turns out there is a short chapter in Big Picture about God that I haven’t paid much attention to. Carroll’s position about God can be summed up thusly. In theory, we should use Bayesian reasoning to form a belief about whether there is a God. Simplistically this includes deciding what the universe would look like if there were a God, and what it would look like if there weren’t a God, and seeing which one fits the reality we live in the best. After explaining this process in theory he says,

It all sounds very tidy, but we are fallible, finite, biased humans. Someone will argue that a universe with a hundred billion galaxies is exactly what God would naturally create, while someone else will roll their eyes and ask whether that expectation was actually put forward before we went out and discovered the galaxies in our telescopes. All we can hope to do is to survey our own planets of belief, recognize our biases, and try to correct for them the best we can…. Whatever biases I may have, I need to keep them in mind while trying to objectively weigh the evidence. It’s all any of us can hope to do from our tiny perch in the cosmos. (p. 150).

And he leaves the question on "God" with that.

Edit: misunderstanding.

Sounds like what Carroll is looking for is Radical Empiricism - William James

 

Edited March 19, 2021 by mfbukowski

[Ahab]

11 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

I have not read Carroll's book and I'm not planning to read it. I teach quantum field theory every couple of semesters; if I ever try to write a popular physics book I might check this one for things to imitate or avoid but otherwise I don't like reading popular physics books. There is too narrow an enjoyable space between the painful reactions of,  "Arg, I could have explained that so much better" and, "Arg, I wish I could explain that this well".

So I'm not sure how much in this thread is from Carroll or from Analytics. It's a bit weird to me to see things like "Effective Quantum Field Theory" in caps; it's like reading about Hammers and Nails in a book on carpentry. If that's Carroll, oh well.

If Analytics hasn't misunderstood Carroll, and I haven't misunderstood Analytics, then the basic point is that we can empirically rule out substance dualism. Mind or spirit or whatever is not some kind of alternative substance besides normal matter, comparable to the matter we know, only somehow different, yet interacting with the matter we know, so that the decisions of spiritual beings like us can move our material bodies.

On this we agree but based on what you said later in your post I'm not sure how much we agree.  Mind or spirit is the same kind of matter that exists everywhere...physical, tangible matter... rather than some kind of alternative matter, whatever that means.

11 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

We can rule this out because of what we know about the basic way that matter works, according to quantum field theory. Particles don't have to be found; they can be made. They simply appear out of nothing, given sufficient energy.  Their appearance is random; weakly interacting particles may be produced only rarely.

When that happens the particles don't come from nothing.  They come from that energy, which is also matter.

11 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

After decades of high-energy collisions in accelerators, however, we would have seen anything that interacts strongly enough with normal matter to be able to cause body movements in humans.

Electrical impulses.  Live matter.  Surely you've witnessed electrical charges of sufficient energy to cause body movements in humans.  And it is that kind of live matter that causes movements in many other kinds of things too.

11 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

If this is what Carroll is saying then I have to agree. I have made the same argument myself in the past, and I didn't think I was having an original insight. There's nothing wrong with Carroll writing a popular book about it but it's not scientific news. I don't want to write an apologia for quantum field theory here, but for what it's worth I can give my view that we might not have proven beyond all possible doubt that there is no such substance as spirit, but we've proven it beyond all reasonable doubt. The only loopholes left are more like conspiracy theories than like scientific theories.

You have done no such thing, unless you're using a different idea or definition of what "spirit" is than we do.  Spirit is matter, very fine particles of matter, actual, physical particles of matter.  Teeny tiny particles we don't usually see without some kind of visual aid like a microscope or just a really good pair of eyeglasses.

11 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

What I absolutely don't get at all, however, is how that says anything at all about the existence of God, or about miracles, or about an afterlife. God is not supposed to be Casper the Ghost. Ruling out God through any possible understanding of physics would be like ruling out J.R.R. Tolkien through understanding the geography of Middle Earth. No can do. We're inside the simulation; nothing we can learn about how the simulation works can say anything at all about whatever is doing the simulation.

We are the real thing and God our Father is just as real as we are.  We have a tangible, physical body and so does he and our Lord Jesus Christ and all of their angels and messengers.  Every single one of them made of actual, physical matter, whether or not they are only in spirit form without a mortal body or a resurrected body.  Their spirit matter just as real and physical as all of the matter in our own bodies.

 

11 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

Furthermore, substance dualism is an irrelevant and unnecessary organ in the body of religious doctrine. There's no need for it. It doesn't even do anything. Everything that any religious person wants to believe about souls or spirits works just fine if the physical mechanism of spirit or soul is the strong AI concept of mind as pattern. Our souls are not in our bodies in the way that the ink is in a book: our souls are in our bodies in the way that the story is in the book.

Everything anyone ever wanted to believe about souls will still work that way. Spirit is not a substance but it does not have to be.

Spirit is substance, though, as I said, unless you have something else in mind when you use the word spirit to refer to what we have within our mortal body.  So as of now I'm not sure if you know what we are talking about when we refer to a spirit.

[ttribe]

19 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Oh well thanks so much for the suggestions on style, but substance would be preferable.

With a second Bachelor's in psych, I think I am aware of psychological evidence and if you actually read my posts you will note that that word pops up often.

And no, I am not talking about hard science, I am talking about logical positivism.   I don't care if one is a physicist, a chemist or football coach- if you demand objective evidence for a statement to be meaningful, you are a positivist.   And that position is dead, as I have brought up several times.  You seem to be avoiding the issues I am bringing up

I saw your post last night, but I wanted to think about why I haven't really engaged you seriously on this topic in this thread, rather than just react. The more I thought about it, I settled on the following reasons:

• I feel like our past interactions, especially when you bring up your philosophy insights, end up being frustrating and fruitless.  That is probably creating a certain amount of bias in how I am reading your comments.
• My perception over the years is that you are far more concerned with instructing than in understanding my thoughts.  I don't find that particularly helpful to reaching any kind of understanding on the issue at hand.
• I am embarrassed to admit, but I am simply not well-read on any of the philosophies you bring up, so I don't feel like I can respond intelligently to your comments.  If I simply reacted, I would be engaging in the same kind of activity that I have been criticizing in this thread; namely, arguing from ignorance.

So, there you have it.  I wasn't consciously avoiding your argument, but I wasn't taking it very seriously, either.  For that, I apologize.

[mfbukowski]

28 minutes ago, ttribe said:

I saw your post last night, but I wanted to think about why I haven't really engaged you seriously on this topic in this thread, rather than just react. The more I thought about it, I settled on the following reasons:

• I feel like our past interactions, especially when you bring up your philosophy insights, end up being frustrating and fruitless.  That is probably creating a certain amount of bias in how I am reading your comments.
• My perception over the years is that you are far more concerned with instructing than in understanding my thoughts.  I don't find that particularly helpful to reaching any kind of understanding on the issue at hand.
• I am embarrassed to admit, but I am simply not well-read on any of the philosophies you bring up, so I don't feel like I can respond intelligently to your comments.  If I simply reacted, I would be engaging in the same kind of activity that I have been criticizing in this thread; namely, arguing from ignorance.

So, there you have it.  I wasn't consciously avoiding your argument, but I wasn't taking it very seriously, either.  For that, I apologize.

Well thanks very much, that means a lot to me.

I often enjoy your posts on other subjects.  😉

Only a few here actually understand me right "off the bat", but I have had a few "converts" back to the church as well, and many kind compliments from LDS students of philosophy. 

Maybe that's why I have that "instructive" tone, but I am here to learn.

It is my personal belief that through the study of both Pragmatism and Phenomenology everyone could see the benefits there for Latter Day Saints.

Once you "see" it, it is EVERYWHERE throughout our scriptures. Alma 32 is the clincher.

I know the BYU philo. department is full of phenomenologists like Faulconer, which is why probably he is the chairman.  Phenomenology is essentially the European version of Pragmatism.  If you are interested in understanding us weirdos, I would read up on those areas.  Thanks again!

Edited March 19, 2021 by mfbukowski

[Physics Guy]

21 hours ago, Meadowchik said:

I think we can learn a great deal about the government of the universe from inside the universe. I think we can learn a great deal about any possible Gods from inside the universe.

(For example: "If there is a God then it would seem God allows humans to suffer" is a reasonable conclusion.)

Yeah, my statement was too strong, and in fact I had these second thoughts about it shortly after posting it. I'd even advocate trying to infer as much as we can about God from observing nature. What I should have said is just that there are tight limits on what we can infer about God in this way, including the basic issue of whether or not God exists. And even things that we can try to infer are unavoidably iffy because we can't know any context that might be outside the universe. What we see from inside might be misleading.

20 hours ago, Analytics said:

Regarding "miracles", Carroll's claims are specific--he doesn't say that "miracles" are impossible. Rather, he claims that the only way that matter can be manipulated is through the conventional application of the four forces. If a force isn't strong enough or doesn't extend across a large enough distance for something to happen, then it can't happen. And because of Eeffective quantum field theory, crossing symmetry, and experimental results, we are relatively confident that there are no more forces that are strong enough and extend across long distances. So whether or not a phenomenon is plausible is bound by this.

You can dream up scenarios to get around this. Maybe tiny wormhole mouths open and gulp something away to a distant part of the universe where the laws of nature are different because the energy density is much higher or something, do some stuff there that could not happen here, then spit the transformed thing back out into our part of spacetime. If such appearances by wormholes were a rare natural phenomenon that happened occasionally all the time everywhere, then once again we should have seen at least indirect signs of them by now. If they only happened when orchestrated deliberately by a deity under religiously relevant circumstances, though, then they might never have shown up in our labs. For that matter, a divine being like that could simply break the laws of nature under religiously motivated circumstances, and never in a lab, and we'd have miracles without scientific evidence.

And on the other hand the laws of nature that we know actually allow an awful lot of things we'd count as miracles, given special initial conditions. If all the laws we now assume were true, and you could both control the initial conditions of the universe and compute motions perfectly, then you could make a person walk across a lake. Just figure out how the water molecules would have to move now, to have enough of them bounce hard enough against the bottoms of the person's feet to keep them from falling. Then work out the motions of all the particles in the universe back from that state to the beginning of time, and see how things would have to have been at the beginning, in order to produce the water-walking miracle later. Then start the universe that way. It would be just like stacking the deck in a poker game. One of the implications of dynamical chaos is that such a stacked-deck universe would look just like a typical universe until the very last moment when the person started walking on water, and after the person had again set foot on shore there would be nothing remarkable to notice in the lake then, either.

I don't take scenarios like that seriously myself but I don't see how to rule them out. Miracles by a divine power are an elusive target for science. What I think is more reliably ruled out is supernatural phenomena that occur regularly, even if rarely, in defiance of current physics. There are no ghosts, there is no telekinesis.

Quote

Regarding afterlife, he sees dualism as a necessary condition of afterlife--if the mechanism for being aware of yourself and having thoughts is limited to your brain, then when your brain shuts off, that's it. 

When your brain stops functioning, the pattern it was holding disintegrates, does it not? Is there another medium to hold the pattern? Is there a plausible mechanism to create a backup of that pattern?

The backup I imagine is simply God's memory. If God wants to continue our stories in new adventures, in a whole new setting, God can. If we are merely patterns then new instantiations of the patterns will really be us, living again. Other than that God-dependent mechanism I see no inherent ability in our patterns to sustain themselves without our bodies, no. 

I don't see how substance dualism even helps, though, with an afterlife of the kind that religious believers generally want. If my soul is some additional substance whose attachment to my body becomes severed at death, well then where will that substance go when I die? I can see how it might haunt the place of my demise as a ghost, but life as a ghost isn't much of a heaven. Where is that substantive soul going to go? The ionosphere? Outer space? Neither of those is much fun.

Actually I can sort of imagine a scenario where a material soul gets to go someplace cool. Our four-dimensional universe could be a set of bound states attached to a four-dimensional subspace within a space of larger dimension (a so-called brane world). At death the soul somehow gets released from the 4D subspace and can wander off into other dimensions, where things are awesome. That might be a nice basis for a science fiction story but it is also the kind of thing that is pretty effectively ruled out by experiments. If ordinary matter could even rarely drift off into higher dimensions, or if our souls were composed of a different kind of matter that could, then we should have seen signs of these effects by now.

So failing that it seems that dualism won't bring anyone to heaven, anyway. For that you need a way to get your soul entirely out of the universe after you die. That's no biggy if the soul is a pattern that God can remember but it's tough if the soul is a substance.

10 hours ago, Ahab said:

Spirit is matter, very fine particles of matter, actual, physical particles of matter.  Teeny tiny particles we don't usually see without some kind of visual aid like a microscope or just a really good pair of eyeglasses.

It's nice to confirm that substance dualism isn't simply a straw man, that some people really do believe it. Would you mind if in future I quote the above line to illustrate that? I won't attribute it any more specifically than "a poster on a message board".

[Analytics]

8 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

And on the other hand the laws of nature that we know actually allow an awful lot of things we'd count as miracles, given special initial conditions. If all the laws we now assume were true, and you could both control the initial conditions of the universe and compute motions perfectly, then you could make a person walk across a lake....

But given chaos theory, can we honestly say that there was a set of initial conditions 13 billion years ago that could predictably (i.e. repeatedly) cause the molecules to line up perfectly now? Between reality having a stochastic element and chaos theory, I can’t see this extraordinarily  unlikely alignment of molecules being predictable very far into the past. In other words, is being able to compute motions perfectly possible, even in theory?

Quote

It's nice to confirm that substance dualism isn't simply a straw man, that some people really do believe it. Would you mind if in future I quote the above line to illustrate that? I won't attribute it any more specifically than "a poster on a message board".

Are you familiar with the fact that in May of 1843, Joseph Smith authoritatively taught, “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; we cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.”

See D&C 131:7-8

Edited March 20, 2021 by Analytics

[SeekingUnderstanding]

On 3/18/2021 at 12:01 PM, mfbukowski said:

And so he is begging the question from the beginning by not questioning where that need for scientific certainty comes from

You actually might enjoy his book. He touches on philosophy quite a bit and acknowledges (And I’m going by memory) that there is no self justifying belief system. We are all boot strapping it. 

[mfbukowski]

11 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

Yeah, my statement was too strong, and in fact I had these second thoughts about it shortly after posting it. I'd even advocate trying to infer as much as we can about God from observing nature. What I should have said is just that there are tight limits on what we can infer about God in this way, including the basic issue of whether or not God exists. And even things that we can try to infer are unavoidably iffy because we can't know any context that might be outside the universe. What we see from inside might be misleading.

I see this same question which is often ignored, differently

I think the alleged problem is not about being in or getting out of the universe but simply in getting outside the human mind to see "what is really out there" outside of human perception and paradigms.

This brain of mine seems pretty well attached and I find it hard to live without it.  We ARE stuck in a little box called a "skull" dependent on human eyes and other senses all wired through the black box to construct a universe out of shared comments from other black boxes.

We can never get out of the black box of human perception.

Dualism makes no sense- it is  self defeating.

 They only reality we can know comes through the human psyche.

And so "misleading" cannot be conquered. 

It is what we think it is until a guess that works better comes along

We will never get closer to the truth through the scientific view because it is stuck in the human perception- peer-review- process, which tells us perfectly about human perception not what is "out there"

Edited March 20, 2021 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

24 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

 

Duplicate 

Edited March 20, 2021 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

You actually might enjoy his book. He touches on philosophy quite a bit and acknowledges (And I’m going by memory) that there is no self justifying belief system. We are all boot strapping it. 

Thanks.

It's "on the list".

But how does "no self-justifying belief system" fit in here, when I believe that any belief system that "works" is as close to "justified" as we can define the word "justified"?

I guess I would like to see examples of that- I am not asking you to go back and figure it out- I am just having trouble understanding what that means.  It sounds like saying that "All belief systems must be justified by something outside the belief system itself."

But that sounds like NOT "boot strapping" it.

No biggie - thanks for the comment- I hope I have to time to get to it.

Edited March 20, 2021 by mfbukowski

[SeekingUnderstanding]

1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

Thanks.

It's "on the list".

But how does "no self-justifying belief system" fit in here, when I believe that any belief system that "works" is as close to "justified" as we can define the word "justified"?

Philosophy is a weak point of mine, but I don’t know that he’d disagree with you here. He happens to think his epistemological framework is the best at interpreting the world, but I would assume that you think yours is. He uses the analogy of “planets of belief” briefly described here: “One concept I talk about is that of a “planet of belief” — rather than grounding our beliefs on an unshakeable foundation, we assemble a collection of beliefs that hold together under a mutual epistemological attraction. That’s not a mistake, it’s the best we can do. The secret is not to grow so attached to our planets that we equip them with impregnable defense systems, so that they can never be altered no matter what new things we learn.”

Edited March 20, 2021 by SeekingUnderstanding

[Physics Guy]

5 hours ago, Analytics said:

But given chaos theory, can we honestly say that there was a set of initial conditions 13 billion years ago that could predictably (i.e. repeatedly) cause the molecules to line up perfectly now? Between reality having a stochastic element and chaos theory, I can’t see this extraordinarily  unlikely alignment of molecules being predictable very far into the past. In other words, is being able to compute motions perfectly possible, even in theory?

There are certainly many ways to distribute a lakeful of water molecules in order to support a walker. There's plenty of force to balance gravity with even a small bias in favour of hitting up on those feet. And chaotic dynamical systems are still deterministic. There is a one-to-one mapping between any state now and some particular initial state. So sure, there are many sets of initial conditions that would make it not only possible to walk on water, on a particular special occasion, but inevitable.

Is it possible to compute those extremely special initial conditions? Certainly not for us, and not for any computing power we can foresee ever harnessing. But an omniscient being could presumably do it in a jiffy. So lots of statistical miracles are in principle possible, without violating any natural laws that we know. 

Quote

Are you familiar with the fact that in May of 1843, Joseph Smith authoritatively taught, “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; we cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.”

See D&C 131:7-8

I knew that Smith had taught something like this, but I did not know the reference. So substance dualism is actually in canonised Mormon scripture, explicitly? That seems like a problem.

I wish I could still find out what Clark Goble thought about this.

[Calm]

4 minutes ago, Physics Guy said:

substance dualism

Perhaps I missed this, but if everything is matter/energy, how is this dualism which I understood to suggest two fundamentally different somethings...one matter, one not matter nor a property of matter. 

Edited March 20, 2021 by Calm