| Religion is excellent stuff for keeping the common people quiet. —Napoleon |
Two Types of Knowing June 13, 2006
Posted by Rastaban in : Naturalism, Non-Existence Arguments , 1 comment so farIf the world outside of our thoughts was of the same essence as the world of our thoughts, there would be only one kind of knowing. Yet philosophers have long recognized that knowing comes in two distinct varieties. There is knowing which is innate, Plato’s forms, Kant’s analytical knowledge—and there is knowing which is acquired through the senses, empirical knowledge.
Why should there be two types of knowing? Why should that be a feature of our existence? Yet it is. This is the key, the giveaway clue, perhaps the single most important observation in all of philosophy.
If the world and our thoughts were of the same basic stuff, there would only be one type of knowing. Yet we have a different kind of knowing for the world—one which is approximate, inexact, provisional—than we have for our thoughts themselves, and that means that the world and thoughts are different in essence. The domain of our thoughts is mental in nature, with an innate conceptual/rational/analytic framework. The world outside lacks any such framework. It is non-mental, non-rational, non-knowable in its essence.
The consequences of this are simple and significant.
We expect our thoughts to be rational and meaningful because that is appropriate for thoughts; but outside of our thoughts the world is not rational or meaningful because the outside’s essence is non-mental. Consequently it makes no sense to expect the outside world (the world outside thoughts) to have characteristics that pertain to thoughts, such as meaningfulness or rationality.
It is only common sense that the world outside our thoughts must be irrational and meaningless — otherwise we would never have developed two types of knowing.
To expect or wish otherwise is to be confused.
Mind, Matter & Divine Creation
Posted by Rastaban in : Naturalism, Non-Existence Arguments , 1 comment so farPerhaps the greatest challenge to a naturalistic worldview is explaining consciousness. This difficulty has several aspects. How did experiencing and consciousness evolve? For that matter why would it have evolved? But more troublesome than the evolutionary question is the basic biological one. How can the brain cause sensations and subjective experiences as well as — to put it bluntly - create the mind? Many theists consider this last to be an insurmountable problem for advocates of naturalism.
The Theist’s Own Difficulty
The theist, however, faces an equivalent task. The problem of how mind and matter can interact with each other — much less one cause the other — does not disappear by adopting a supernatural worldview. In fact the difficulty the theist faces may be greater than that faced by the atheist for the simple reason that the theist is committed to a class distinction between spirit & body, mind & matter, to which the advocate of naturalism is not.
The natural scientist adopts the assumption that consciousness is some kind of physical phenomena. If it is a physical phenomena, then it should not be impossible for another physical phenomena to cause it. Understanding how this happens may still be quite difficult, but at least the relationship — between biological brain and physical phenomena of experiencing — is not conceptually impossible. (Of course, understanding how our thoughts can be “merely physical” remains a difficulty, but not an inherently unexplainable one.)
The theist, on the other hand, is committed to a fundamental distinction between matter and mind (or body & soul) that seems to make interaction between the two impossible to conceive. (more…)
