Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, and why it matters

[webbles]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Thanks for asking.

In the words of Sean Carroll,

 

All I said was that "Speculations of real-world history that goes beyond that are simply fanciful." 

That's simply my best crack at making a historical inference about the origins of the story. If you disagree and can think of a counterexample of a non-fanciful historical inference that does goes beyond what I said, I'd be very interested in hearing it. The fact that you didn't provide that counterexample and instead used this as an opportunity to disparage me is straight out of @smac97's playbook.

Oh, that's what the book says?  That is old news, though there are some particles that are theorized to exist and have interaction with the existing matter, we just haven't been able to reach energy levels high enough to create them ourselves.  But it doesn't really talk about esp, spirits, etc unless you are saying that esp, spirits, etc requires "new matter".  You can have "esp" without needing new matter.  I'm not particularly a believer in esp, but it if it does exist, it probably is just an emergent behavior of the existing fields.  For example, birds are able to "see" the magnetic field.  The way their body has evolved allow them to feel that field.  Humans probably have something similar.  So a person with "esp" would be able to "feel" one of the various fields that exist.  No need for exotic particles or fields.

[The Nehor]

Sentience was a mistake.

[Calm]

58 minutes ago, Analytics said:

But how robust the relevant laws of physics are understood needs to be appreciated.

https://www.livescience.com/34052-unsolved-mysteries-physics.html

 My current favorite unsolved mystery besides the obvious “what is dark energy/dark matter?” and “what the heck is gravity, anyway?” is Fundamental Constants…..
 

Quote

Dimensionless constants are numbers that don't have units attached to them. The speed of light, for example, is a fundamental constant measured in units of meters per second (or 186,282 miles per second). Unlike the speed of light, dimensionless constants have no units and they can be measured, but they can't be derived from theories, whereas constants like the speed of light can be.

 

In his book "Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe" (Basic Books, 2001), astronomer Martin Rees focuses on certain "dimensionless constants" he considers fundamental to physics. In fact, there are many more than six; about 25 exist in the Standard Model. [The 9 Most Massive Numbers in Existence]

 

For example, the fine structure constant, usually written as alpha, governs the strength of magnetic interactions. It is about 0.007297. What makes this number odd is that if it were any different, stable matter wouldn't exist. Another is the ratio of the masses of many fundamental particles, such as electrons and quarks, to the Planck mass (which is 1.22 ´10¹⁹ GeV/c²). Physicists would love to figure out why those particular numbers have the values they do, because if they were very different, the universe's physical laws wouldn't allow for humans to be here. And yet there's still no compelling theoretical explanation for why they have those values. 

We don’t even know how much we don’t know.

[Calm]

8 hours ago, Analytics said:

...as they are currently understood...

Of course. But how robust the relevant laws of physics are understood needs to be appreciated.

Hanging your hat on this reminds of that scene from Dumb and Dumber when Lloyd asks Mary Swanson, "what are the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me ending up together?" Mary replies, "not good." Lloyd: "Not good like one in a hundred?" Mary: "I'd say more like one in a million."

Upon hearing that, Lloyd gets ecstatically optimistic. "So you're telling me there's a chance!"  

So someone takes a stab at defining spirit matter within the boundaries of our current knowledge and allegedly disproves that definition is consistent with reality and pointing out there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge and the study could therefore be premature is treated as stupidity.  Now I would have more confidence in your confidence if you were able to demonstrate we have been able to sufficiently define dark matter so well there is no need to be reluctant about defining spirit matter.

Reminds me of testing for authors of the Book of Mormon, but not including Joseph Smith as one of the candidates…though this time it is because the researchers are not aware of who he is, they just know a name and that he is claimed to have transmitted it from God and nothing else…..and there are how many Joseph Smiths who lived before the Book of Mormon who knew how to write?***

In my opinion we have a very limited knowledge of some of the things spirit matter can do, but only a vague idea of what it might be and how it does whatever it does.

If we assume we get our knowledge of spirit matter from God as believers likely would, then I am thinking we should be looking to him to define what it is before we start testing to see if we can discover or rule out something fitting into the dimensions of that definition.  Otherwise, what we identify/define as spirit matter might not be that at all.

Quote

But if spirit matter were a real thing that could somehow interface with our brain and obeyed the laws of physics as they are currently understood, that is exactly what would happen.

Why?  Gravity interacts obviously with our brains and certainly obeys the laws of physics.  Have they seen/measured a graviton?

Quote

Some physicists, notably Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein, posited that gravity may be operating as a particle in extra dimensions beyond the three of space (length, width, and height) and one of time (duration)we are familiar with, but whether that is true is still unknown. 

What if spirit is operating as a particle in extra dimensions?

***https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/knowhy/what-can-stylometry-tell-us-about-book-of-mormon-authorship

Quote

This study, however, contained at least eight significant errors,28 the most critical being that it used a closed set technique on what is clearly an open set problem.29 This excluded everyone but the study’s selected candidates as potential authors.30 Most notably, the Jockers study did not include Joseph Smith as a candidate author,31 and it made no provision for the text to have possibly been written by its internally claimed authors.32

Moreover, a closed set of NSC values can only measure the sample texts’ relative similarities to the Book of Mormon. This means that NSC analysis will always deliver positive results for one of the candidate authors in the set, even if his or her style happens to be very different from the Book of Mormon.33 In other words, the Jockers study failed to recognize how misleading the results of their analysis could be if the true author of the text was not included in their selected group of candidate authors.

 

Edited December 3, 2021 by Calm

[Robert F. Smith]

4 hours ago, Analytics said:

..........................................

QFT

Yes, but the only satisfactory (parsimonious) explanation of spooky action at a distance is that all is predetermined, and that free will does not exist.  However, there is no way for humans to prove that option.  We are still prisoners of our senses, just as Hume claimed.  Reality is well beyond our grasp, and there is really "No Exit."

[OGHoosier]

58 minutes ago, Analytics said:

The problem with your simplistic evaluation here is that if "spirit matter is restricted to specific localities" in the way you claim, then according to quantum field theory, it is incapable of interfacing with the human brain in any way. Of course effective quantum field theory could be wrong, but literally all of the laboratory evidence indicates it is not.

Not particularly. If spirit matter is constrained to exist in specific locations that do not include the LHC, then it's failure to appear there is trivial. Nevermind the more idealist or panpsychist approaches to the issue (spirit interacting with matter via immaterial means), with which you do not deal. Consciousness studies is taking an interesting turn these days, and it's not in favor of the conventional materialist conflation of mind, brain, and semantics. 

My contention is that Carroll has not, in fact, demonstrated the impossibility of these things, only their unlikelihood if you approach them from within a certain interpretive framework, which I do not. I do not believe you have refuted that, however "simplistic" my arguments may appear to you. 

58 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Whether or not an idea is "fanciful" depends upon whether or not an idea is plausible and whether or not there are good reasons to believe it. I suggest you read the book Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, and why it matters by Steven Pinker to better understand these issues.

There is no objective yardstick of "plausibility" or "good reasons" It just does not exist in any way that is accessible. These things are subjective, depending on a lot of weights and evaluative factors within the individual. Each person must make their own judgements as to plausibility. I have spent my life reading history, political strategy, philosophy, and legal theory, and from that study I have come away with the iron conviction that your conception of objective plausibility cannot exist. There is no objective standard of plausibility. Everybody has to decide for themselves. It all comes back to intuition in one way or another. Intuition is the bedrock on which everything which claims to be reason rests. 

But here, let's try it out in practice. I'm going to assume that you read the article @mfbukowski (who has pretty well convinced me on basically everything) posted. I'd like to highlight the following portion:

Quote

The first Enlightenment figure Pinker cites as a champion of the energetic application of reason was in fact a leading critic of, and critical believer in, the power of reason: Immanuel Kant, author of the three Critiques (Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and Judgment). These were landmark works in the establishment of the method of critique, which is at the heart of philosophical investigation. A central principle of Kant’s method of critique was that we cannot know things in themselves, but only our experiences of things. Regarding science, Kant wrote that we apprehend the natural world in the first instance by an act of aesthetic judgment, a feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Moreover, we must be guided in our understanding of nature by reflective principles that pertain not to nature in itself but to our own ways of apprehending nature. To these central Kantian tenets, Pinker’s continual invocation of “data” as though it were handed down from on high is utterly alien, as is his complacent call to “verify ideas by confronting them against reality.” [7] “Donnerwetter! Why didn’t I think of that?” Kant is surely muttering as he turns over in his Königsberg mausoleum.

Pinker also includes David Hume in his list of devotees to the energetic practice of reason. Hume, having dedicated his career to arguing against philosophical rationalism and in favor of applying skepticism to the process of scientific reasoning, might be surprised to find himself listed as a champion of reason in a book deploring skepticism. Hume’s skepticism led him to doubt that reason allowed people to connect causes with effects, and to conclude that it was not in fact reason that made these connections, but rather custom or habit. Pinker writes that Hume, among others, was “all too aware of our irrational passions and foibles,” and devoted himself to overcoming these “sources of folly.” [8] I suppose Pinker must have a different David Hume in mind; this can hardly be the one who wrote: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” According to the historical Hume, as distinct from Pinker’s version, the passions were the forces that bound people to external objects and other people, serving as the inducement behind all our activity in the world. The passions supplied people with motivations and purposes; reason could never do this but must rely upon the passions to tell it what to do, and thus, Hume concluded, “[w]e speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason.” [9]

Also transformed by Pinker’s magic wand are the Encyclopedists, whose supremely Enlightenment project it was to create an encyclopedia encompassing all of human knowledge. They become monomaniacal proselytizers for rationality, urging that “we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us.” [10] And yet Denis Diderot, the editor and orchestrator of the Encyclopédie, was a great enemy of rational systems, and deeply suspicious of the faculty of reason as tending to “live within itself.” Diderot recommended instinct — continually “looking, tasting, touching, listening” — as a surer source of understanding than reason. [11] In fact, every one of Pinker’s boosters of reason and science was a skeptical analyst of these. It’s not that they were anti-reason or anti-science. Rather, it was the twinning of reason and skepticism that most definitively characterized Enlightenment thought and writing. In particular, Enlightenment authors were keenly aware that knowledge is inseparable from the knower, composed not only of the thing known, but of the knower’s perspective, passions, experience, interpretation, and instinct. Skepticism was the means by which they acknowledged this truth and put it to work. By eliminating skepticism from his rendition of the Enlightenment, Pinker has done the equivalent of removing every second word of a book: what’s left behind is not half the sense of the original, but just nonsense.

My question is: how do Pinker and Riskin end up at such cross purposes? How do they read these same authors so differently? Can your model - proper rational thinking guiding one into truth - provide one "rational" reading of these varied philosophical luminaries? Is there one reading that is more "plausible" than the others? Should we pass Riskin off as irrational because she disagrees with Pinker or vice versa? After all, they are reading the same words. 

I'm assuming that Pinker is operating in good faith here, and I genuinely think he is. The same holds for Riskin. Yet it remains that Pinker and Riskin come to completely different readings. Their definitions of what constitutes the most plausible meaning are different, which means that their assessments of plausibility are different. Who gets to decide which of them is right? Your model is dependent, absolutely dependent, on there being a list of objective tests against which we can compare there arguments to see which stands tallest. But when it comes to assessments of what is "plausible", there is no such thing. There's too many factors at play in plausibility assessments, especially when things cannot be neatly quantified and measured. There's just too much noise and intuition plays too big of a role. Heck, look at Bayesian reasoning - even the most quantified and statistically implicated version of plausibility calculus there is is dependent on the setting of priors which are functionally based on intuition. Even if there were such tests, there would be a regression problem - how do we know that your tests of plausibility are themselves plausible? 

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

There's too many factors at play in plausibility assessments, especially when things cannot be neatly quantified and measured. There's just too much noise and intuition plays too big of a role. Heck, look at Bayesian reasoning - even the most quantified and statistically implicated version of plausibility calculus there is is dependent on the setting of priors which are functionally based on intuition. Even if there were such tests, there would be a regression problem - how do we know that your tests of plausibility are themselves plausible? 

EXACTLY!  It is simply impossible for a human mind to comprehend the world independent of the human mind.

Another "tautology" ! 

The more we perceive ourselves learning about "the world," the more we are actually learning about how humans are wired to see it!

We look out, at "the world" and only see ourselves looking back, as if into a "dark mirror".

To lose the filter of human perception is to lose the human body, so we can see "face to face"!

 

[CV75]

14 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

I believe this is correct. Philosophically speaking, human rationality has lead us to a multitude of divergent conclusions on many matters, many of which were promulgated by individuals of good will and rigorous thinking. I thus find it myself incapable of believing that any one person's rational conclusions can authoritatively be taken to be "the right conclusion" or "the way to think", which thus leaves us in need of some other standard if we are to hold a standard of "rationally derived truth." 

I bristle at the allegation that the disagreement of two rational beings entails that one is being irrational, for I see no reason to believe that "properly-exercised" rationality will lead everyone to the same conclusion on the same body of information. We have no reason to believe that save for the claim that rationality is self-evident, which is cold comfort in a world so full of contingency as ours. Hume's work on the problem of induction follows similar lines. Even granting that proper rationality would lead all to the same inevitable conclusions, if you cannot persuade your interlocuter to your satisfaction, then your arrogation of the honor of being correct is not particularly meaningful. 

RE: "I bristle at the allegation that the disagreement of two rational beings entails that one is being irrational", this is why I prefer to use "non-rational" for the emotional, spiritual and other biased mental states. It allows them to be complementary, useful and perhaps even essential to drawing the most workable rational conclusions, especially as a duo or a group, especially in reconciling seeming contradictions and counterintuitive principles so plentiful in Gospel discipleship.

[Analytics]

8 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Yes, but the only satisfactory (parsimonious) explanation of spooky action at a distance is that all is predetermined, and that free will does not exist.  However, there is no way for humans to prove that option.  We are still prisoners of our senses, just as Hume claimed.  Reality is well beyond our grasp, and there is really "No Exit."

That might be the ultimate reality of things from a reductionist perspective. Who knows.

On the other hand, "free will" might be something that emerges from the underlying physics. Granted, this conception of free will is different than the belief that "free will" is a metaphysical property of things that have it. But it does have the advantage of being a well-defined concept that is compatible with physics. Have you read Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by the preeminent neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga? I think you'd enjoy it.

[MiserereNobis]

I like the idea of "trans-rationality" to describe mystical states. It encompasses rationality but goes beyond it. It is not irrational, like a schizophrenic claiming to see visions. Rationality takes us to rationality's limits, then God moves us beyond those limits into mysticism.

Just because something is not rational (such as mysticism), does not mean it is irrational. There is that beautiful third option: trans-rational.

[Analytics]

1 hour ago, CV75 said:

RE: "I bristle at the allegation that the disagreement of two rational beings entails that one is being irrational", this is why I prefer to use "non-rational" for the emotional, spiritual and other biased mental states. It allows them to be complementary, useful and perhaps even essential to drawing the most workable rational conclusions, especially as a duo or a group, especially in reconciling seeming contradictions and counterintuitive principles so plentiful in Gospel discipleship.

I agree. I'm using a pretty tight definition of the word "rational" in this conversation, and it is unfortunate that saying something isn't rational comes across as pejorative. I'm merely trying to convey the difference between beliefs that are based on the tools of rationality (e.g. scientific inference), and beliefs that are based on anything else. When I say a belief isn't "rational" I'm not trying to be pejorative in any way. A "non-rational" belief could be conductive and even essential for an optimal life. It could be noble. It could be true. It could be honest, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and praiseworthy. Non-rationality simply means based on something other than the tools of rationality.

[Analytics]

9 hours ago, webbles said:

Oh, that's what the book says?  That is old news, though there are some particles that are theorized to exist and have interaction with the existing matter, we just haven't been able to reach energy levels high enough to create them ourselves.  But it doesn't really talk about esp, spirits, etc unless you are saying that esp, spirits, etc requires "new matter".  You can have "esp" without needing new matter.  I'm not particularly a believer in esp, but it if it does exist, it probably is just an emergent behavior of the existing fields.  For example, birds are able to "see" the magnetic field.  The way their body has evolved allow them to feel that field.  Humans probably have something similar.  So a person with "esp" would be able to "feel" one of the various fields that exist.  No need for exotic particles or fields.

I agree.

One thing to add to this is the idea of effective quantum field theory. Carroll goes into some detail that even if quantum field theory isn't the ultimate truth of reality at every level of energy, distance, etc., and that there could be and probably are particles, fields, and phenomena that it doesn't describe, it does have a well-defined domain of applicability, and within that domain of applicability it is rock solid. The modifier "effective" conveys that even if there is something more to actual reality, the theory is effective at describing reality within its limits. Everything that is strong enough and lasts long enough to have even an subtle effect on the brain is well within that domain of applicability. That's why we can say that even though there is more for science to learn (e.g. dark matter, dark energy), we can be confident that if there was a particle or field that could affect the way the brain functions, we would have discovered it by now. 

[Analytics]

9 hours ago, Calm said:

So someone takes a stab at defining spirit matter within the boundaries of our current knowledge and allegedly disproves that definition is consistent with reality and pointing out there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge and the study could therefore be premature is treated as stupidity.  Now I would have more confidence in your confidence if you were able to demonstrate we have been able to sufficiently define dark matter so well there is no need to be reluctant about defining spirit matter.

I know Dr. Carroll comes across as quite arrogant with these claims. But it's worth remembering that he has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard and is among the top physicists in the world. He might be wrong, sure. But it's possible you are being a tad-bit arrogant yourself when you tell the physicist he's wrong before you even bothered to read a handful of chapters in his book where he makes his case to a lay audience.

Dr. Carroll doesn't claim we know everything. He just claims we know some things, and that those things are enough to rule out some other things. It takes him several chapters to lay out how these lines are drawn, how we know what we know, and how we know this is enough to rule out other things. It is a detailed, intricate argument.

Dr. Carroll's research at Caltech focuses on Dark Matter and Dark Energy, so it isn't like your argument here is something that hasn't happened to have crossed his mind. He says:

Quote

If any particle we haven’t yet found lasted long enough and interacted with ordinary matter with sufficient strength that it could possibly affect the physics of everyday goings-on, we would have produced it in experiments by now.

One as-yet-undiscovered particle we believe exists is dark matter. Astronomers, studying the motions of stars and galaxies as well as the large-scale structure of the universe, have become convinced that most matter is “dark”—some kind of new particle that is not part of the Core Theory. The dark-matter particle must be quite long-lived, or it would have decayed away long ago. But it cannot interact strongly with ordinary matter, or it would have already been found in one of the many dark-matter detection experiments that physicists are currently running. Whatever the dark matter is, it certainly plays no role in determining the weather here on Earth, or anything having to do with biology, consciousness, or human life.

Carroll, Sean. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (p. 183). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

 

 

9 hours ago, Calm said:

Why?  Gravity interacts obviously with our brains and certainly obeys the laws of physics.  Have they seen/measured a graviton?

What if spirit is operating as a particle in extra dimensions?

Believe it or not, Dr. Carroll has thought a lot about this. Something rightly called "spirits" could exist in some other dimension in some other corner of the multiverse, and we'd have no way of knowing anything about them. Sure. The problem is that when you claim spirits somehow interact with our physical bodies, you are not only making claims about ill-defined spirits, you are also making claims about ordinary matter--you are claiming that somehow in some undefined way, ordinary matter has the property of being able to be pushed around somehow by spirit matter. Thus, you aren't merely claiming that hypothetical spirit matter is out there somewhere, you are claiming that the laws of physics that govern how ordinary matter behaves is wrong. In the words of Dr. Carroll:

Quote

 

Whether you are a physicalist who believes that there is nothing to us other than the particles of the Core Theory, or someone who thinks that there is some crucial nonphysical component to a human being, everyone admits that the particles are part of who we are. If you want to say there is something else, you have to explain how that something else interacts with the particles. How, in other words, the Core Theory is incomplete, and has to change.

To address this issue seriously, we wouldn’t necessarily need to have a “Soul Theory” that is as rigorous and well developed as the Core Theory of physics. We would, however, need to be specific and quantitative about how the Core Theory could possibly be changed. There needs to be a way that “soul stuff” interacts with the fields of which we are made—with electrons, or photons, or something. Do those interactions satisfy conservation of energy, momentum, and electric charge? Does matter interact back on the soul, or is the principle of action and reaction violated? Is there “virtual soul stuff” as well as “real soul stuff,” and do quantum fluctuations of soul stuff affect the measurable properties of ordinary particles? Or does the soul stuff not interact directly with particles, and merely affect the quantum probabilities associated with measurement outcomes? Is the soul a kind of “hidden variable” playing an important role in quantum ontology?

If you want to be a dualist and believe in an immaterial soul that plays any role whatsoever in who we are as human beings, these questions are not optional. We’re not rigging the game by demanding a full-blown mathematical theory of the soul itself; we’re simply asking how the soul is supposed to affect the mathematical theory of the quantum fields that we already have.

Carroll, Sean. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (pp. 215-216). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

 

 

  

[Analytics]

9 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

Not particularly. If spirit matter is constrained to exist in specific locations that do not include the LHC, then it's failure to appear there is trivial. Nevermind the more idealist or panpsychist approaches to the issue (spirit interacting with matter via immaterial means), with which you do not deal.

Is there anything in the world that is easier to do than to imagine a God with powers that defy all of the laws of physics? Humans have been doing this since religion was invented.

Please see the quotes I made above in response to Calm.  

9 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

Consciousness studies is taking an interesting turn these days, and it's not in favor of the conventional materialist conflation of mind, brain, and semantics. 

Could you provide a book that explains this? Because my understanding is that neuroscience is going in the opposite direction. See Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by the preeminent neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga.

9 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

My contention is that Carroll has not, in fact, demonstrated the impossibility of these things, only their unlikelihood if you approach them from within a certain interpretive framework, which I do not. I do not believe you have refuted that, however "simplistic" my arguments may appear to you. 

This reminds me of a conversation I had in middle school. A kid happened to tell me that Einstein was wrong and that things can travel faster than the speed of light. His argument was simple, and he'd thought about it a lot and even did the math. If a spaceship turns on its thrusters at 1G of acceleration, its speed will increase by 32-feet per second every second. Thus, in one minute it would be traveling at 1,920 feet per second, in one hour it would be traveling at 115,200 feet per second, in one day it would be traveling 2,764,800 feet per second, and in one year it would be traveling 1,009,152,000 feet per second, or 191,127 miles per second. Since the speed of light is a mere 186,282 miles per second, we see that in just one year of accelerating at a comfortable level, a spaceship can travel faster than the speed of light.

Do you think it's possible that the kid in high school who did the above math didn't understand the details of the Special Theory of Relativity, the theory he was attempting to refute?

Likewise, is it possible you don't fully understand Carroll's arguments?

It seems to me that skepticism comes in two flavors, which I'll call "rigorous skepticism" and "lazy skepticism." Rigorous skepticism engages with the details of the arguments, comes up with detailed hypotheses that could refute existing theories, and figures out ways that the theories could be tested. It is an earnest effort to engage in the scientific process. In contrast, lazy skepticism is sitting in your easy chair with your 44-oz Diet Coke at a bag of Doritos and saying, "Science contradicts my religious beliefs, so science must be wrong." 

Maybe you really are right and and Carroll really is wrong. In a sense, anything is possible. My point is that you sound like Carl Sagan claiming  it's impossible to prove there is not a fire breathing dragon in his garage.  

9 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

There is no objective yardstick of "plausibility" or "good reasons" It just does not exist in any way that is accessible. These things are subjective, depending on a lot of weights and evaluative factors within the individual. Each person must make their own judgements as to plausibility. I have spent my life reading history, political strategy, philosophy, and legal theory, and from that study I have come away with the iron conviction that your conception of objective plausibility cannot exist. There is no objective standard of plausibility. Everybody has to decide for themselves. It all comes back to intuition in one way or another. Intuition is the bedrock on which everything which claims to be reason rests. 

I disagree. Rationality and critical thinking trump intuition. 

9 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

But here, let's try it out in practice. I'm going to assume that you read the article @mfbukowski (who has pretty well convinced me on basically everything) posted. I'd like to highlight the following portion:

My question is: how do Pinker and Riskin end up at such cross purposes? How do they read these same authors so differently? Can your model - proper rational thinking guiding one into truth - provide one "rational" reading of these varied philosophical luminaries? Is there one reading that is more "plausible" than the others? Should we pass Riskin off as irrational because she disagrees with Pinker or vice versa? After all, they are reading the same words. 

I'm assuming that Pinker is operating in good faith here, and I genuinely think he is. The same holds for Riskin. Yet it remains that Pinker and Riskin come to completely different readings. Their definitions of what constitutes the most plausible meaning are different, which means that their assessments of plausibility are different. Who gets to decide which of them is right? 

You get to decide which of them is right.

Pinker is a National-Academy-of-Science-level cognitive psychologist who is a champion of enlightenment thinking. He is a modern renaissance man who knows a ton about a ton of stuff outside his area of academic expertise. And for the reasons made in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, he makes his case. It turns out among academics, this is a very unpopular position--on the right it offends everybody who has a religious view of metaphysics and reality, and on the left it offends everybody who has bought into postmodernism and the liberal agendas that are common in the humanities departments on college campuses these days. Add to that the fact that Pinker is stepping outside of his area of expertise to write to lay audiences about big-picture things that cut across disciplines. It's easy to imagine how a historian who has bought into the postmodern view gets a little peeved by a non-historian writing a best-selling book on history that comes across as simplistic and too conservative.

If you'd like to use due diligence in deciding which of them is right, I'd suggest you do the following things:

First, carefully read Pinker's book. Try to understand his actual arguments. Challenge them all you want, but try to understand his actual point so that if you summarized the arguments to Pinker himself, Pinker would agree, "yes, that is my point."

Then reread Jessica Riskin's review and ask yourself he following questions: does this book address Pinker's actual main points? Is this a fair representation of what the book actually says and what its point is?

Then read the book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Try to really understand what rationality is and how you can think more rationality. Read other books on critical thinking too, such as The Art Of Critical Thinking: How To Build The Sharpest Reasoning Possible For Yourself. Study critical thinking as much as you can. Knock yourself out.

Then use the tools of critical thinking to make up your own mind. 

 

[mfbukowski]

4 minutes ago, Analytics said:

I disagree. Rationality and critical thinking trump intuition. 

Oh

My

Gosh

Poof.

All this has gone right over your head, you don't even comprehend what this is about. There is nothing more to discuss.

Pray tell what objective evidence do you have for the above statement?

None.

What "trumps" what depends on the context of the statement.

Does objective evidence trump intuition when falling in love? 

[CV75]

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

I agree. I'm using a pretty tight definition of the word "rational" in this conversation, and it is unfortunate that saying something isn't rational comes across as pejorative. I'm merely trying to convey the difference between beliefs that are based on the tools of rationality (e.g. scientific inference), and beliefs that are based on anything else. When I say a belief isn't "rational" I'm not trying to be pejorative in any way. A "non-rational" belief could be conductive and even essential for an optimal life. It could be noble. It could be true. It could be honest, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and praiseworthy. Non-rationality simply means based on something other than the tools of rationality.

So perhaps in some of these discussions the posters could agree on the tools, both rational and not rational, to apply to the topic at hand. That seems to be a challenge, though, since adopting another's favored tool (for the sake of discussion and experimentation) risks demonstrating the faults in one's own. And then explaining why a particular tool is favored is an exercise in making the irrational appear rational, since preference is subjective and biased anyway. This is where I think @mfbukowski's paradigm is helpful. At least people can understand what works for others and try them out to see. 

[OGHoosier]

17 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Could you provide a book that explains this? Because my understanding is that neuroscience is going in the opposite direction. See Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by the preeminent neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga.

Sure. Probably the best book-length popular exposition of panpsychism is Philip Goff's Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019). Beyond that you can look at article-length defenses by Bernardo Kastrup, Adam Crabtree, and Edward F. Kelly. Prominent philosopher of consciousness Galen Strawson is also a newly minted panpsychist. 

Another point of strong relevance is the rise of Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of consciousness, the most able defender and populizer of which is Christof Koch. He's published two books on the matter, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (2012) and The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed (2019). IIT is not explicitly panpsychist, but even Koch recognizes the implications of IIT, which argues that conscious experience represents the integration of a wide variety of information, and this experience of consciousness is irreducible. 

Quote

 

One line of argument takes the principles of integrated information theory (IIT) to their logical conclusion. Some level of experience can be found in all organisms, it says, including perhaps in Paramecium and other single-cell life forms. Indeed, according to IIT, which aims to precisely define both the quality and the quantity of any one conscious experience, experience may not even be restricted to biological entities but might extend to non-evolved physical systems previously assumed to be mindless — a pleasing and parsimonious conclusion about the makeup of the universe.

- Christof Koch, Is Consciousness Everywhere?, MIT Reader, March 15 2021

I recommend reading Koch's whole article, it's quite good. Koch is clear to state that he does not believe that atoms and particles have cognitive processes or thought, but the thrust of the whole thing is that conventional materialism is rejected. There is a mind, of whatever rudimentary degree, in all things, which means that restrictions of interaction to merely material means is no longer a compelling constraint. 

35 minutes ago, Analytics said:

 

It seems to me that skepticism comes in two flavors, which I'll call "rigorous skepticism" and "lazy skepticism." Rigorous skepticism engages with the details of the arguments, comes up with detailed hypotheses that could refute existing theories, and figures out ways that the theories could be tested. It is an earnest effort to engage in the scientific process. In contrast, lazy skepticism is sitting in your easy chair with your 44-oz Diet Coke at a bag of Doritos and saying, "Science contradicts my religious beliefs, so science must be wrong." 

Thanks for the charitable interpretation. As long as you're going to insult me by implication, you could at least look in my Interests section and find that my favorite soda is Mr. Pibb. 

It seems clear that further dialogue with you on this matter is a waste of time. 

38 minutes ago, Analytics said:

I disagree. Rationality and critical thinking trump intuition. 

Hardly, rationality and critical thinking are nothing if not operationalized intuition. Either the rules of rationality go down forever in an infinite regress ("turtles all the way down") or they come to rest on a bedrock of intuition. 

45 minutes ago, Analytics said:

You get to decide which of them is right.

Pinker is a National-Academy-of-Science-level cognitive psychologist who is a champion of enlightenment thinking. He is a modern renaissance man who knows a ton about a ton of stuff outside his area of academic expertise. And for the reasons made in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, he makes his case. It turns out among academics, this is a very unpopular position--on the right it offends everybody who has a religious view of metaphysics and reality, and on the left it offends everybody who has bought into postmodernism and the liberal agendas that are common in the humanities departments on college campuses these days. Add to that the fact that Pinker is stepping outside of his area of expertise to write to lay audiences about big-picture things that cut across disciplines. It's easy to imagine how a historian who has bought into the postmodern view gets a little peeved by a non-historian writing a best-selling book on history that comes across as simplistic and too conservative.

If you'd like to use due diligence in deciding which of them is right, I'd suggest you do the following things:

First, carefully read Pinker's book. Try to understand his actual arguments. Challenge them all you want, but try to understand his actual point so that if you summarized the arguments to Pinker himself, Pinker would agree, "yes, that is my point."

Then reread Jessica Riskin's review and ask yourself he following questions: does this book address Pinker's actual main points? Is this a fair representation of what the book actually says and what its point is?

Then read the book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Try to really understand what rationality is and how you can think more rationality. Read other books on critical thinking too, such as The Art Of Critical Thinking: How To Build The Sharpest Reasoning Possible For Yourself. Study critical thinking as much as you can. Knock yourself out.

Then use the tools of critical thinking to make up your own mind. 

Putting aside the nigh-hagiographic treatment of Pinker here, what this essentially boils down to is not a rebuttal of my arguments in your own words and understanding but rather an instruction to go read the set of books which presumably will do it on your behalf. If that's your answer, then we have nothing more to discuss. I intend to read Pinker, but by the time I'm done digesting his works and comparing them with others this thread will be quite dead and cold. 

[pogi]

On 12/2/2021 at 10:41 AM, Analytics said:

I am 100% with Pinker in ascribing to modernism and enlightenment thinking

Ah yes, the "enlightenment" - the unfettering of the human mind through reason!  How beautiful.  How liberating!  We should all aspire to such enlightenment and untethering of the mind, right?

Where did that "reason" lead them?  It ironically led them to the tethered mind of determinism where free will is incompatible with a scientific reliance on the laws of cause and effect.  Much like Sam Harris, Pinker suffers from the same Achilles heel.

In Pinker's The Blank Slate, he argues that what we know about genetics is “eroding the concept of free will and personal responsibility” and that our “conscious mind — the self or soul — is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.”

If our conscious minds are tethered to the laws of cause and effect and are by nature determined, where does control of the conscious mind germinate?   How do we escape the illusion of control and take the reins which lead to a liberated mind and a more rational and reasonable approach to life?    Where exactly is the untethered mind in the enlightenment in Pinker's philosophy?  It doesn't exist.  

If personal responsibility is eroded by "what we know about genetics", how then can he fault anyone for being irrational and unreasonable?  How can we fault anyone for not aspiring to a "higher" way of thinking?  How can we even say one way of thinking is "higher" than another?  Without a soul which gives free-will, Pinker's philosophies are no better or worse than every other unavoidable conclusion or philosophy which nature concocted.  Without personal responsibility or free will, irrationality and unreasonable minds can be no better or worse than anything else, because everything, every thought, every philosophy, every filthy and glorious mind is all exactly how it is supposed to be.  All of human consciousness is one indivisible and amoral manifestation of the whole of the causes and effects of an unguided and incontrollable natural world.    It is what is, and there can be nothing wrong with that.  So, maybe he should get off of his high horse of superior philosophy and realize by nature of his own philosophy that his rationality cannot be superior to my supposed irrationality.

The only possible way to the untethering of the mind and personal responsibility is through the existence of a soul/spirit and free-will. 

 

Edited December 3, 2021 by pogi

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, Analytics said:

Pinker is a National-Academy-of-Science-level cognitive psychologist who is a champion of enlightenment thinking.

Do you realize what you just said?

You said he is a champion of retaining the philosophies of the 16 and 17 hundreds, which have been conclusively shown to be... simplistic and naive, and rather quaint, and irrelevant for the most important human concerns, like who we are, what gives us meaning, and morality

As an analogy, a psychologist doing that might be preaching phrenology in our day - the belief that bumps on our heads create our personalities.

But actually phrenology is more advanced - it is primarily at least from the 18 hundreds 

Edited December 3, 2021 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

On 12/2/2021 at 9:41 AM, Analytics said:

I am 100% with Pinker in ascribing to modernism and enlightenment thinking,

This also caught my eye.

I think that because of the words " modern" and "enlightened",  people associate thse words with ideas which MUST be modern and therefore enlightened.

Generally they don't have a clue that they are neither, and quite obsolete, and 300 YEARS ,or more OLD.

[Analytics]

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Oh

My

Gosh

Poof.

All this has gone right over your head, you don't even comprehend what this is about. There is nothing more to discuss.

Pray tell what objective evidence do you have for the above statement?

None.

On the other hand, maybe you've spent too much time in the philosophy quagmire and not enough time in the science department.

Ultimately, science is based on the unproven and unprovable hypothesis that the universe is governed by natural laws that can be inferred through meticulous observation.

The evidence that this unprovable hypothesis really is true is the excellent track record that science has in figuring out the nature of reality. Science is based on methodological empiricism, and its results and success count as evidence that the world is fundamentally a naturalist one and that rational enquiry is the best way to figure things out.    

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

What "trumps" what depends on the context of the statement.

Does objective evidence trump intuition when falling in love? 

It depends upon what your objectives are. If the objective is to have a long and happy marriage, it wouldn't be a bad idea to get the opinion of a third-party expert on whether the two of you are suitable for a long marriage with each other. 

[Calm]

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

 

Believe it or not, Dr. Carroll has thought a lot about this. Something rightly called "spirits" could exist in some other dimension in some other corner of the multiverse, and we'd have no way of knowing anything about them. Sure. The problem is that when you claim spirits somehow interact with our physical bodies, you are not only making claims about ill-defined spirits, you are also making claims about ordinary matter--you are claiming that somehow in some undefined way, ordinary matter has the property of being able to be pushed around somehow by spirit matter. Thus, you aren't merely claiming that hypothetical spirit matter is out there somewhere, you are claiming that the laws of physics that govern how ordinary matter behaves is wrong. In the words of Dr. Carroll:

I appreciate the time taken to explain his ideas.  I need such summaries since brain fog prevents me from studying anything heavier than a down pillow these days (though there may be hope on that score in the near future).  My theory, that there is more to ordinary matter than we are currently aware of because that behaviour of ordinary matter takes place outside our current ability to measure, is nothing that I can see how to demonstrate (one of the many times I unthank my dad for talking me out of studying physics and going into engineering instead), so there is no reason to assume I am the one who is correct.  It still seems way too early to pronounce “we know enough”.  I can imagine a scientist who’s studied Einstein reading someone from Newton’s time saying “we know enough about how ordinary matter behaves”, though I also get how that could support Carroll’s claim with a “Newton works fine since we are talking about ordinary, non relativistic speeds….which we are, are we not?” to which I could say “but how handy is GPS when we are communicating with each other about ordinary speed and location” and it goes on…a part of me wants there to be great wonders in store for us even in how we see every day life, I don’t want the fun stuff to be all ‘out there’ so to speak, so I do have a strong bias to reject some of his assumptions.

Edited December 3, 2021 by Calm

[Analytics]

1 hour ago, OGHoosier said:

Sure. Probably the best book-length popular exposition of panpsychism is Philip Goff's Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019). Beyond that you can look at article-length defenses by Bernardo Kastrup, Adam Crabtree, and Edward F. Kelly. Prominent philosopher of consciousness Galen Strawson is also a newly minted panpsychist. 

Another point of strong relevance is the rise of Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of consciousness, the most able defender and populizer of which is Christof Koch. He's published two books on the matter, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (2012) and The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed (2019). IIT is not explicitly panpsychist, but even Koch recognizes the implications of IIT, which argues that conscious experience represents the integration of a wide variety of information, and this experience of consciousness is irreducible. 

I recommend reading Koch's whole article, it's quite good. Koch is clear to state that he does not believe that atoms and particles have cognitive processes or thought, but the thrust of the whole thing is that conventional materialism is rejected. There is a mind, of whatever rudimentary degree, in all things, which means that restrictions of interaction to merely material means is no longer a compelling constraint. 

Thanks--I just purchased Galileo's Error. It looks fascinating. It seems to me that the phenomenon of consciousness is fundamentally impossible for science to completely figure out, because in the words of Richard Feynman, "What I cannot create, I do not understand." Even if we created a robot that acted like it was conscious, how would we determine that it is?

 Did you happen to read  Fouad Khan's article in Scientific American from April Fool's day of this year? Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation. In that article, he says, "Why do we need consciousness? What purpose does it serve? Well, the purpose is easy to extrapolate once we concede the simulation hypothesis. Consciousness is an integrated (combining five senses) subjective interface between the self and the rest of the universe. The only reasonable explanation for its existence is that it is there to be an “experience.” That’s its primary raison d’être. Parts of it may or may not provide any kind of evolutionary advantage or other utility. But the sum total of it exists as an experience and hence must have the primary function of being an experience. An experience by itself as a whole is too energy-expensive and information-restrictive to have evolved as an evolutionary advantage. The simplest explanation for the existence of an experience or qualia is that it exists for the purpose of being an experience."

1 hour ago, OGHoosier said:

It seems clear that further dialogue with you on this matter is a waste of time. 

I agree.

1 hour ago, OGHoosier said:

Putting aside the nigh-hagiographic treatment of Pinker here, what this essentially boils down to is not a rebuttal of my arguments in your own words and understanding but rather an instruction to go read the set of books which presumably will do it on your behalf. If that's your answer, then we have nothing more to discuss.

You don't need to spend 2,000 hours studying critical thinking to get my point. My point is that when smart people disagree, you can use the tools of rationality to evaluate the strength of their respective positions. We're all subject to cognitive biases and such. Of course. But some models are better representation of reality than others, and in principle it's possible to use the tools of rationality to figure out which ones are better. 

[pogi]

1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

This also caught my eye.

I think that because of the words " modern" and "enlightened",  people associate thse words with ideas which MUST be modern and therefore enlightened.

Generally they don't have a clue that they are neither, and quite obsolete, and 300 YEARS ,or more OLD.

Isn't there some irony in the fact that so many of these early thinkers considered it "enlightened" to believe that every aspect of their consciousness was a slave, captively bound by causes outside of their control?  A terribly unenlightening and uninspiring idea still propagated today by the likes of Pinker and Harris. 

[pogi]

3 hours ago, Analytics said:

Likewise, is it possible you don't fully understand Carroll's arguments?

You do realize that Carroll and Pinker are at odds with each other when it comes to the most fundamental and basic elements of human consciousness?

In terms of free-will, Carroll is a compatibilist.  Pinker, like Sam Harris, is a determinist.  Yet you defend them both as reasonable and logical thinkers.  Hmmm....   Doesn't their entire philosophical paradigm depend upon that foundation they build on?  Both of their paradigms can't be logical and reasonable, based on a solid foundation.  

Doesn't everything really hang on that one question? Until reason and logic can bring reasonable and logical thinkers to an agreement on this point...what is the point?  Every philosophical paradigm you build will stand or fall based on the strength of the foundation.  So, which is it?  Until we can figure out what the correct foundation even is, what is the point of building anything beyond that?   It would be foolish to build a fortress on an unsure and unproven foundation.  Yet everything we build is ultimately based on faith.  We are no different in that regard.  

 

Edited December 3, 2021 by pogi