Two Types of Atheism

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How I Found Ungod

[Old piece of writing from one of my mid-1990’s websites—yes, it’s a spoof, but one with a philosophical/atheological point to make (see first footnote explaining the origin and concept of “Ungod”).]


Excursions Near the Temple of Gloom

 or

How I Found Ungod

by Eltanin al Rastaban

While romping through the highland jungle near an archaeological dig (yes, years ago I was Indiana Jones, so to speak), I stubbed my toe.

On a rock. A remarkably smooth rock, in fact. As I checked the surface for the remains of my toenail, perhaps thinking it could be reattached with a little scotch tape I had on hand, I observed some oddly invisible, cryptic characters on the edge of the stone. 

Retrieving my slightly rusty trowel, I quickly dug the stone out. Since it was located in the disturbed soil of the surface there was no need to do more than note its coordinates in the forest. Eagerly, I began to study the mysterious markings on the rock.

I said earlier the characters were invisible, and indeed they were, except to the faith of an atheist. When I showed the stone to my archaeological compatriots, not one of them could see any markings or letters at all, since they lacked atheist faith. Indeed, their jealousy of my ability to see characters on the stone quickly led them to dismiss me from the team.

Now I admit their petty jealousy perturbed me. Nonetheless, I retreated to my trailer and began the task of recording and translating the message on what would later become known as the Rock of Ungod.

The result you see before you, referred to variously as the “Word of Ungod,” “Ungod’s Atheist Teachings,” or the “Ungod Commandments.”

I present them together with my own explanations, for I have discovered that by simple, sincere atheist faith, I’ve gained the uncanny ability to comprehend exactly what Ungod was trying to say.

Ungod’s Brevity

It has been asked how so much information could have been found on a single rather small stone. It is simple. The invisible characters on the stone magically grouped themselves in layers over one another, alternately rising and falling as I needed. Reading the holy writ of Ungod was more like unpeeling an onion, albeit a somewhat magical one, and less like making pressings of gravestones or, for that matter, reading pedestals. Thus the Rock of Ungod has a clear edge over the tables of Moses or the tablets of Mormon. After all, their technology was stone age. Ungod’s is information age.

A word about the pre-Mayan language on the tablets. In most languages, ancient and modern, a distinction is made between nouns and verbs—or more accurately, between objects and their actions. Here that is not the case. Remarkably, their word for an object always includes its action or behavior as well. 

In a sense there are no verbs in this language because nouns already include the verb: we might call them noun-verbs. What almost serves the place of the verb, however, are characters that indicate the existential or logic state for each noun-verb in the sentence. These are: 

  • happens
  • moves
  • happens-not
  • moves-not
  • happens-if
  • moves-if

Though there may be other logic-states, they are not found on the Ungod stone. In the deciphered passages, the logic states follow [in brackets] in the same order as the noun-verb to which they apply. 

Any noun-verb that changes or exists (or is provisionally presumed to exist, in some contexts) is assigned the logic-state of moves. If it is non-existent, it is assigned the opposite state of moves-not. On the other hand, when a noun-verb is assigned the logic state of happens, it becomes a reference to the noun-verb’s experience itself—or the experiencing of it by some sentient being.  This will become clearer as we look at the sayings.

The first 8 sayings of Ungod are as follows:

  • 1) Gods Ungod-living [moves-not] [moves]
  • 2) Gods Head-thinking Body-being [happens] [happens-if] [moves]
  • 3) God-giving Ungod-living [happens] [happens-not]
  • 4) Body-being Head-thinking [moves-not] [happens-not]
  • 5) Body-thinking [happens]
  • 6) Body-thinking Pond-changing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]
  • 7) Body-being Ground-dancing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]
  • 8) Body-being Corpse Corpse [moves] [happens-not] [moves]

The Atheist Teachings of Ungod — Explained!

1) Gods Ungod-living [moves-not] [moves]

Translation: “There are no Gods but Ungod” 

Since Ungod is no god, this pretty much sums up atheist worship.

Ok, you’re right. Atheists do worship the pink unicorn and great fisheye, I admit that. But most of all atheists worship Ungod. Or they will as soon as they find out about her, because. . .  ok, because Ungod is naked. 

That’s right, not a stitch on. And can Jehovah and Allah and Buddha say that?

2) Gods Head-thinking Body-being [happens] [happens-if] [moves]

Translation: “If God had a brain, He’d have a body.” 

And if he had a body, he’d have to wear clothes. Or else go stark naked like Ungod. 

What Ungod means here is that she is a much better choice for human worship because she can be naked. Whereas God, poor bodiless entity that He is, hasn’t a thing to hang his clothes on. 

Oh, and the part about a brain? Obviously if God had a brain, He’d give himself a body. Who wouldn’t? It makes things so much easier, starting with what to do with your hat. But God doesn’t have a body, and consequently he doesn’t have one very important thing that comes with bodies: a brain.

And without the brain, he’ll never think to give himself a body.

Talk about a vicious circle!

Ok, there’s one other little problem with not having a body. You can’t exist! 

Why? Because you can’t do anything—because you don’t have any parts to do anything with. No body, no brain, no you.

Which makes what to do with the hat the least of your worries.

3) God-giving Ungod-living [happens] [happens-not]

Translation: “Service to God is disservice to Life” 

How’s that for a bumper sticker. 

If you put it on your car, will you find your windows smashed and tires flat? Probably, says Ungod. If you belong to God, any truth but His makes you angry, since it threatens you with eternal punishment. 

“I am a Jealous God,” says God. “and since I only exist as an idea in your head, I will strike you with all my wrath if you think unGod-like ideas!” Serve God, and you serve an idea-virus. It invades your head, destroying any thoughts incompatible with it, barring the ears, eyes, nose and mouth from anything Ungod. What you believe is more important than how you live. 

Poor Ungod! She thinks ideas should serve you, not you them. 

Instead of getting stuck on your beliefs, she thinks you should be free to abandon them as soon as the wind changes—or a better idea floats by. 

But God, that destructive virus, wants to rout everything out the human mind but Him. Think God ideas, or go to hell. Believe and worship God ideas, and be rewarded with the only existence that really, really matters: afterlife.

Ah, afterlife! The City of Dis. Heaven at God’s right hand. Cloudy, wispy angels braying in your ears! God, God, God, God all day long in your ears. 

Heaven indeed, if you’re the God-idea virus. But hell, sheer hell, if you’re the ears. 

Such is service to God.

You can’t have two masters. Serve life, or serve God. Take your choice. 

But is life a master? Ungod is telling me she didn’t write that. 

“Life is us in our aliveness, that’s all,” she says. Can you be your own master? 

You can, you absolutely can. But only if you are virus-free.

Service to God is disservice to Life. If you are all goo-goo eyes over heaven, over the sweet fantasy that you will have eternal life without pain or effort or bathroom visits—well, the result is that you pay that much less attention to life. You care that much less about things on earth. After all, the real show is in heaven.

So if a few million people starve here, a few million more get tortured there, what does it matter? This is only life. And by dying, they’ll just get to heaven a little quicker—. That wonderful place where they’ll have the angel-braying God-virus in their ears all day, and running out their noses. The real show!

Of course, life on earth isn’t entirely useless. I mean, its a great opportunity to build religious schools and indoctrinate as many billions as possible with the God-virus. 

We need those billions in heaven. God feeds on them. It’s His only source of sustenance.

But wait, Ungod…

Wait.

A few exist who believe in God but also seem to care about those starving and tortured millions. And actively try to help.

They are called liberals.

If they serve God, how can it be that they care so much about life, about helping other people here on earth?

They serve two masters, says Ungod. The God-virus only got half their brain. Or got brain but not heart. Or they have an active immune system.

Whatever. 

The point is that all the others who serve God are engaged full time in a frontal, full-scale attack on liberals. And now you know why.

4) Body-being Head-thinking [moves-not] [happens-not]

Translation: “Thinking is something that bodies do; therefore without a body to do the thinking, thinking can’t exist.” 

Ungod’s construction here is a little inexact (hey, Ungod is anything but perfect!) but what she means is that thinking only happens in certain animal brains, and then only when those brains receive adequate nutrients and caloric energy. Which means, gosh, thinking is a physical process!

Ungod’s point is that since God is not a physical being, lacks a body and therefore lacks a brain (not to mention other appendages), God can’t think. 

Thinking can’t happen, she’s telling us, unless a body does it. And God doesn’t have one of those. He’s not a body-being. (And He’s never gotten over it, either.)

Ungod’s meaning really goes much further than this, though. If you bob your head and try to pick up the faint vibrational hues and radiances of her words, the following revelation leaps upon you:

Information doesn’t exist out in the world. It is only a human—perhaps only a hominid, perhaps only a mammalian—characteristic. Information happens only in our imaginations.

This is made explicit in the very next words on the Rock.

5) Body-thinking [happens]

Translation: “Information happens!”

Information happens! Isn’t that the truth of it? But what the hell. . . !?

Let me explain. Ungod means information is an internal experience we have, not a set of “facts” about the world. Information is not “true” says Ungod, except as a bit of common human experiencing. 

Don’t let this confuse you, says Ungod. She means that information is always a comparative: instead of being True or False, an information-experience is instead more true (or less true) than some other bit of information experience. 

And information is species-specific, and therefore species-limited. If you can grasp this, and its consequences, you’re getting close to the beating heart of the Rock of Ungod.

6) Body-thinking Pond-changing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]

Translation: literally, “Meaning swims in the dark pond of living.” But it’s fuller meaning is roughly as follows: 

“One thing life can never be is meaningful. Only language can be meaningful. Even then, only to the extent that it dips into the dark pond of life.” 

Ah, the meaning of meaning, whatever that means!

Ungod is saying, “Look at that oak tree!”

And she means that the words “oak tree” are meaningful, for they are symbols which point to—reference, in fancy talk—the tall woody object gracing Ungod’s front yard. “Oak tree” is meaningful because it references something, and when you hear the words you know that it is not the words themselves, “oak tree”, which Ungod wants you to embrace.  Rather, she wants you to glide into her front yard and hug the tall woody thing.

Words are meaningful because they point at things—real things. And the value of the phrase “oak tree” (or more accurately, its source of value) is that real thing in the yard. The real thing is in itself valuable, and the words about it are meaningful because they point at the value.

This boring-sounding stuff is very important to Ungod, and she will get very angry at you if you let on that it bores you. So you better snap to and pay attention, or you’ll soon have naked Ungod to pay.

That’s better. 

Now, what if we said the tall woody thing in Ungod’s front yard was meaningful? Before, we said it was valuable, and that the words about it were meaningful. But what if, instead, we said the tall woody thing was itself meaningful? 

This would be the same as asserting that Ungod’s tall woody front yard thing referenced or pointed at something else. And that to hug her tree is really to want to hug the something else that the tree references. In this case, it is not the tree which is the real thing, rather, the something else which it references is the real thing.

This, you may recognize, is the usual viewpoint. Sometimes people will claim that the real tree references some abstract or ideal tree in God’s mind. Sometimes they will say it references God Himself. Either way, the touchable, physical tree in the front yard has been rendered meaningful, its value removed to another realm.

Wrong! wrong! wrong! says Ungod. “Evil! And nothing but evil!” she shouts!

She is here to tell you, for the sake of life and all that is wonderful and all that matters, that the tall woody thing in her front yard is meaningless. 

Meaningless, meaningless, meaningless. 

It has to be so. 

If it is meaningful, then it is not the real thing. It is not what is valuable, something else has been given value instead. 

Real things are always meaningless. Instead of referring to something else, they are themselves IT.

If you are meaningful, you have no value from yourself, but only from what you reference. You are nothing but a symbol, a word. 

Which is the great lie of theism. 

Theism says our whole world, life, laughter, love and all, is nothing but meaningful. It says that all value comes from God. That God is the real thing, and that earth and earth life is but a symbol of that, at best pointing to God.

Theism insists on moving value away from lovely earth to a non-physical so-called “spiritual” world—a place of God and angels and dead souls. In theism, this realm of death after life is believed to be what is ultimately real, and all the things of earth and cosmos are reduced to being merely meaningful, drawing what paltry meaning they can from what is euphemistically referred to as “after-life,” the unholy realm of God and angels and dead human beings.

Oh, the great betrayal of life that is theism!

Stark naked Ungod, let her nakedly come forth and show us how to value life instead of death, let her uncover before us a path to the wonderful laughter and love and livingness of being real things. We are beautiful body beings, all of us, in imperfect body-being ungod life.

Oh come forth, and step into the meaningless world of being valuable, of being value itself. Of being ungod life!

Naked Ungod herself is telling us so.

No wonder atheists worship her.

7) Body-being Ground-dancing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]

Translation: “To realize we are body beings is to realize life takes place here on earth and not elsewhere.” 

Ungod is a body being. You are a body being. I am a body being—at least, last time I checked. A body being is the antipode of a spiritual being. 

Ungod’s language may seem strange at first ear, but it is the strangeness of real things. Listen to Ungod strangeness.

She is telling you that a spiritual being is one whose final and only home is after life. (Ask any Christian, ask any theist, they will all admit it!) What they want, what they yearn for, what they worship is after life. 

And “after life” means, well, come on! It means what follows upon death. The world of after-existence. The world of the dead. Theists say God lives in this realm of death, which is after-life or after-existence—and atheists agree entirely.

The difference, of course, is that theists insist that the realm of death (after-life, after-existence, call it what you will)—theists claim that it really does exist. That it is really some kind of place, spiritual and bodiless and yet somehow we’ll be ourselves and have spiritual bodies, though never having to eat or defecate or spit. 

While atheists—lacking all practical common sense—conclude that death is actually death, and that after life is actually after life, and therefore not life at all.

And they conclude, most non-sensible of all, that having a body and being a body being is what it’s all about, and that without bodies, being feeling and doing anything would be exceedingly difficult, devoid of pleasure and satisfaction.

Oh those atheists! Where is their common sense?

Now, Ungod admits that it seems undesirable not to live forever. To lose our bodies and all their wonderful feelings and thoughts, to lose our loved ones, to see all our bodily pleasures and preferences come to an end—it does not seem desirable.

But Ungod’s point is that theists believe all these bodily things come to an end at death as surely as non-theists do. 

The proof is in the ground. In the dead body itself. 

It’s dead. We put it in the ground and years later, if we dig it up, it’s still there—partially decomposed, claimed by bacteria, molds, and bugs—but still dead.

The news is bad whether you are atheist or theist. Though of course theists try to disguise the bad news as good news. You were never really a body being at all—they chant.** You were a spiritual being, and the spiritual part continues to live—forever—in that realm of death called after life. Sitting smugly at God’s right hand (or was it left?).

The atheist, more accustomed to honesty, says “Yes, we die, and it’s a bummer. Death is final, for the body never recovers from the grave. And body beings that we are, when the body is lost veritably we are lost, our thoughts, our dreams, our hopes, our pleasures, our memories, our loving—all the wonderful aspects of body-being, lost when being a body is lost. Our very selves lost.”

Strangely, Ungod doesn’t cry.

Ungod chortles, and skips, and smiles. 

Why?

Ungod knows a secret.

It’s written in the Rock. 

8) Body-being Corpse Corpse [moves] [happens-not] [moves]

Translation: We never experience our own death, no matter how many come to the funeral.

Not that we don’t die, but that we never know we have died.

How can that be? Of course we know we die

Ungod, however, means “know” in the sense of experience. Body beings never experience their own death.

They experience the death of others, but not of themselves

Which means that, in our experience, we live forever. Not so, of course, in experience of others, but what do we care. That’s their experience, not ours. And we will experience their deaths, but they will not.

Experiencing, in other words, has a strange eternal quality

To the experiencer it never ends, this business of experiencing

And there it is: eternal life, right here on earth, in our bodies; we never needed heaven after all.

—Eltanin


FOOTNOTES:

* The concept of Ungod was born in a comment I made regarding a couple of posts by Kornform in an America Online forum.

Kornform, God & Ungod  POSTED 4/22/94

Kornform: >>>There almost certainly are a lot of things beyond our knowledge actually existing, but we cannot talk about them beyond just speculating. One cannot say “there is X” without experiencing  x with some sense perception. If x is beyond our knowledge then you obviously haven’t experienced it, thus cannot say it exists. This goes for gods.<<<

And:

Kornform: >>>Look, reality is out there and we discover it. We won’t know it unless we experience it by sense perception and analyze it by reason. There might be some realities which we will never be able to detect, in which case there’s little utility in discussing it.<<<

      My comment:

Well said. 

If God is defined as something which is not capable of being experienced, then that god is simply the unknowable. Unknowable whether it has consciousness, unknowable whether it is a being, unknowable whether there even is such a thing as the unknowable. This means that the only rational attitude concerning claims about any God who cannot be experienced is absolute skepticism.

Interestingly, there is a way to avoid this result of absolute skepticism concerning God. Absolute skepticism results because God is defined as not capable of being experienced. However, God can always simply be defined differently. It might be worthwhile to make a thought-experiment along these lines.

Thought-experiment:

Let us define God as the unknown, but not the unknowable. That is to say, let us define God as that which is detectable by sense experience, but which has not yet been detected. There are several important points to this definition of God: (1) God is a physical or empirical entity, thus God is knowable and can be proved to exist, (2) God is everything which we have not yet detected by sense experience, thus God is the unknown but knowable (doesn’t that sound religious or something?), (3) nothing we already experience and know is God, but it used to be God before we came to experience and know of it.

Thus, by this definition, God is physical; the scientist always seeks God; and God dies as soon as It is experienced and known.

An atheist will rightly object that to call this God leads to semantic confusion and amounts to dishonesty in public discussion. I concur, so instead of calling this definition “God”, I suggest we call it “Ungod”.

No one can deny that Ungod exists. Yet Ungod is entirely unknown. Once known, that bit of Ungod dies, or ceases to be Ungod, which is the same thing, I take it. (Thus Ungod dies all the time, so Ungod is that much better than Jesus, who only died once.)

My questions: 

Can a rational religion be built around Ungod?

Is belief in Ungod theism or atheism?

What does it mean for theism if in order to define God in a way that is consistent and can be proved to exist, we must end up with a definition like Ungod?

By the way, we only know the existence of other beings by experiencing their behavior. Sense experiences inform us of that behavior, and thus satisfy for us the question of their existence. Note that thinking is a special case of experiencing. When we think thoughts or feel emotions, our thoughts and emotions are ours, not some other being’s. In this special case, we experience our own behavior firsthand—which proves our own existence, of course, but can never prove God or some other being’s existence. For it is our behavior and not God’s which we are experiencing when we think thoughts or feel emotions.

This seals the door on theism. Unless God is defined as detectable by sense experience in some way or another, the result must be absolute skepticism about claims concerning God, even the claim that God exists. In short, the rational theist must become an atheist. Or redefine God as something empirically detectable: i.e., as a physical entity.

Another way to look at this viewpoint. Every perception involves two elements: the behavior which is perceived, and the experience of perceiving it. Thus when I see Mary walking down the street, her behavior is what is perceived, and I, the perceiver, have an experience of perceiving her. Thus, experiences are always experiences of something, which is always some kind of behavior. Now, in the special cases, the behavior which is experienced lies not outside, but inside. When we think or when we feel, the experience we have is of our own internal behavior.

This is why I draw the very important conclusion above: when we experience things outside of ourselves, what we experience is outside behavior, which in turns proves the existence of something. It is quite valid to have faith in our sense experiences for this reason. But when we feel or think, the behavior which we experience is our own feeling or thinking processes. These in turn prove our own existence (as if that were necessary!) but cannot of course prove the existence of anything outside us. To say that the source of the behavior we witness when we feel or think is God, or something external to us, is simply to mistake our own internal behavior and experiencing for something alien: it is a category mistake.

** Ok, some theists fib and claim those of us who are saved will have our bodies in heaven—but when you read the fine print you discover that almost all the wonderful things we love to do as bodies (eat, sleep, have sex, etc.) are forbidden. Even the ground to stand on is taken away, replaced with insubstantial clouds. No matter how you slice it, you only get to be a “spiritual” being in heaven—not a body being. And that removes all the fun.

 

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Coherence of Naturalism

One of the fundamental “facts” about existence we all experience is that physics trumps sentience. As a consequence, physics trumps goodness, trumps morality. 

A single example should suffice. When a murderer points his gun at a saint and pulls the trigger, physics controls the path of the bullet without regard to the goodness of anyone in its path. Furthermore, the damage that bullet inflicts on the body of the victim is inflicted without regard to the goodness of the victim. 

This is simply how our world works. It is built in that physics trumps sentience, trumps goodness, trumps morality.

Naturalism provides a coherent explanation for this: physical stuff came first. Sentience evolved afterwards within certain species as a method of improving decision-making and thus survivability as a species. But since sentience evolved later on, it is necessarily subservient to physics.

Incoherence of Supernaturalism

However, every supernatural worldview which puts goodness on top faces a coherence problem as a consequence of the reality that physics trumps sentience: They all want to make sentience primary in a universe where it obviously isn’t. 

So the first incoherence is : why didn’t God (the original primary sentience) create a world, instead, in which sentience trumps physics? In which goodness is on top? 

A possible explanation is that goodness is simply not preferred. Okay, but why should we sentient beings choose a worldview in which goodness could have been preferred, but was not? And how could such a worldview be coherent? 

With naturalism, sentience is not on top of physics, for the obvious reason, and we just have to accept it. But with supernaturalism, how do we explain this situation if everything started with almighty goodness? 

And if everything started with almighty evil instead, why should we worship or acquiesce to such an almighty. 

If alternatively there are co-evil/good almighties, or if the almighty is amoral—how does such a worldview cohere better than naturalism?

So really, only a supernaturalism which starts with almighty goodness can appeal to us. But how to make it coherent? That’s the problem.

If we start with goodness, then there must have been a fall from that original goodness to arrive at the universe we have. But this inevitably introduces incoherence.

Did almighty goodness lose its way? Did it create other sentient beings who turned out not to be so good? But why? 

Were they jealous of almighty goodness? But why? 

What did they lack? They wanted power? But why? 

What would it give them that they needed? And why should they have needed whatever it was? 

In a universe where physics trumps sentience, such wants and needs are understandable—that is, in a world already fallen from goodness. But in a world not yet fallen, how to explain such needs and wants? 

In fact, it seems that as soon as almighty goodness creates physics, and allows sentience and goodness to become subservient, the fall occurs. This can only be seen as an unforced blunder by almighty goodness. 

And if it was a necessary rather than unforced blunder, it puts into question the primacy of almighty goodness. That is, it introduces incoherence. 

We are told that almighty goodness is in a cosmic battle with evil, and that—somehow—we are necessary to assist in the battle. But how we can contribute is not explainable. We are told that almighty goodness became one of us to entice us to join its side and help in the battle. But how can we add to the unlimited power of the almighty? Infinity can’t benefit from having a few finite numbers added to it. The story is incoherent.

Or we are told that almighty goodness became one of us in order to show us the way back to goodness and earn a place at its side in heaven. However, the fall happened when a physical world was created in which physics trumped sentience and goodness. So the only way to undo the fall is remove the physical world—created as it was by almighty goodness—from the picture. So why then was the physical world created, why does it exist as it does? 

Furthermore, if sentience is freed from physics at death, and can then experience full goodness in heaven, why not just have heaven—and only heaven? 

If earth was created to test our suitability for heaven, why? Earth is nothing like heaven, so it can’t be a worthwhile test for suitability. Earth would need to be a bodiless realm to become a suitable test for heaven in this case. 

And if we say heaven is like earth and itself not a bodiless realm, other incoherences are raised. If heaven is a bodily world where sentience/goodness trumps physics, why did almighty goodness bother to create earth (where physics trumps sentience/goodness) in addition to heaven? (And again earth can’t serve as a suitable test for heaven in this case.) 

Furthermore, bodies suitable for earth (bodies which evolved to survive and reproduce) don’t make sense for heaven. 

At every step there is incoherence. 

In contrast, naturalism is coherent at every step. It may not be what we want to hear, but it coheres. 

Posted in Afterlife & Immortality, Christianity, Ethics & Morality, Islam, Moral, Naturalism, Non-Existence Arguments | Leave a comment

Skepticism, Pragmatism and Empiricism

Posted in Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Preface to Atheism | Leave a comment

Mind-Stuff

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Are Mountains Real?

[Post at Preface to Atheism, Apr 27, 2024.]

When philosophers ask if something is real, they mean: Does it exist independently of our thoughts?

Whose thoughts, exactly? Well, generally, human thoughts. Our in this context means us as a species.

But what if we aren’t the only creatures who have thoughts? What if cetaceans have thoughts—or great apes—or birds—or aliens living in a galaxy far, far away?

In my last post, we saw that Elon Musk believes that our earth exists independently of our (human) thoughts but almost certainly not (“only one chance in billions”) independently of the thoughts/experiences of some unspecified aliens (presumably with their supercomputers) somewhere far, far away.

For that matter (according to most who hold a supernatural worldview) there is a God out there who also thinks—and who originally thought us and our world into existence.

Idealism

So when we ask whether or not something is real, we have two questions: “Does it exist independently of our thoughts?” and the broader question, “Does it exist independently of all thought, including thoughts of powerful aliens and God?”

The answers might not be the same.

Consider George Berkeley’s idealism.

Is the physical world around us real? Does it exist independently of our thoughts? Berkeley would say yes. But does it exist independently of God’s thoughts? He would say no.

His idealism has to be taken seriously because Berkeley presented a strong case for the conclusion that objects are mental in nature—that objects are not independent of thought.

We’ll get to this in a moment, when we ask if mountains are real (that is, independent of thought). But first I want to point out that idealism is not the standard viewpoint for most people who believe in God.

The standard (Christian & Muslim) viewpoint is this: Yes, the physical world was created by God (e.g. God thought it into existence) but once created, the world exists independently of what anyone thinks about it (whether the thinker is human or alien or even God).

Philosophers call this external world realism (or thought-independent realism or observer-independent realism—you get the idea).

If I see a mountain and start climbing it, there really is a mountain independent of my own mind (and body) which I am climbing. Independent of God’s mind too. As we say, the mountain is real.

Or is it?

You are probably thinking, how can Berkeley (or anyone whose feet are solidly on the ground) sincerely doubt the mind-independent existence of the mountain.

Answer: by thinking carefully about what a mountain is. And, as we will see, what a valley is.

If you read one of my earlier posts, Roundness and what is real, you may have an idea of where we are going.

A mountain is an object. A physical object, right? But what defines the object?

Is it a giant agglomeration of rock and dirt which rises above the valley? Does mountain include trees and bushes growing on it? The birds flying around and landing on branches? As we trudge up the mountain path and raise dust, is the dust raised part of the mountain? Or is it not? Will it become part of the mountain again if it settles back on the ground? How close to settling on the ground (or leaves) must it be?

For that matter, where does the base of the mountain end? Does it end at the bank of the river in the valley below, at the point where the flowing water ceases to make the ground wet? Does the answer depend on how much rain there was last night?

But wait—the bank of the river and its surrounding flood plain is part of the valley, not the mountain, right? Can a spot of land belong both to the mountain and the valley at once?

So where exactly does mountain meet valley? And when I say exactly, I mean exactly: show me the dividing line down to the square millimeter (or molecule or electron or smaller) where one side is mountain and the other side is valley.

Well you can’t. Or if you can it is utterly arbitrary. In fact, the divide is whatever anyone chooses it to be.

This is a problem for the claim that the mountain (or the valley) is independent of thought.

Notice that we can’t avoid the difficulty here by trying to distinguish between mountain as a category (clearly a mental construction) and an individual instance of a mountain (hopefully not a mental construction). We like to give individual mountains names, but does this make them less of a mental construction?

Consider: Cowrock Mountain and Wildcat Mountain in north Georgia overlook a beautiful valley formed by Town Creek. Yet given this specific instance we still have the difficulty of precisely identifying the mountains’ boundaries with the valley. So we see that individual instances require us to either be vague or to adopt utterly ad-hoc boundaries.

Such decisions are necessarily arbitrary, and therefore necessarily mental in nature.

A mountain is a mental object.

Or as soon as we try to define the mountain, it becomes a mental object.

Objects and meanings

In short, a mountain is a meaning. Even specific mountains like Cowrock and Wildcat are meanings.

Indeed, all objects are meanings, with their assigned properties and qualities. And so, as soon as we think about something, about mountains and valleys for instance, they can’t be thought-independent.

This sounds like a truism. But in reality, it’s just an obvious fact of our existence. The moment we try to know the world, we are inextricably dealing with the world of thoughts. Everything in that world is mental. None of the objects and properties and relationships and boundaries that we could ever think about will be or could be thought-independent.

Still, aren’t we thinking about something out there? Something which really is independent of our thoughts?

Yes.

Only, nothing we think about stuff “out there” can ever be thought-independent. Meanings can never be thought-independent: they are the very stuff of thinking.

Any object we imagine can never be “out there” because by their very nature objects are meaningful things formed and existingin here”, in our thoughts.

Still, we want to say that when we look at the mountain (or are climbing it) there is a real, thought-independent thing there in front of us. We can interact with it. We do interact with it.

But our thoughts do not.

Our thoughts are only “about” it. Thoughts, in other words, are of a fundamentally different nature than physical reality.

What would Berkeley say?

Berkeley would disagree. He argued that the mental object, with its meanings and properties et al, is precisely what exists out there.

This “physical” world consisting of numerous objects with properties is—Berkeley acknowledged—independent of our human minds. You know this if you’ve ever lost a sock doing laundry, and then months or years later, discovered the sock behind the dryer. The sock clearly had its own existence, separate from your thoughts, all along.

Objects (and their associated properties) out there in the world persist even when we don’t think about them (or forget they exist). Berkeley wondered how this could be so, if objects are mental stuff—that is, mind-dependent.

And his answer was: God.

God keeps all objects in mind all the time, thus insuring their enduring existence even when our own minds forget about them.

External world realism and object anti-realism

But Berkeley’s solution to the discovery that objects are mental constructions—it’s not the only possibility.

The other possibility is that there is stuff out there in the external world of a fundamentally different nature than the nature of mental objects constructed by minds.

The objects we experience—yes, they are mental constructions—but as such “stand in” for non-mental stuff out there in the external world. That external stuff maintains its existence not because it’s a bunch of mental objects constructed in God’s mind, but rather because it’s non-mental in its very nature.

Under this view, there is no direct connection or correspondence between external world stuff and our mental constructions. The meaningful objects we imagine are substitutes, mappings at best. The mountain object in our mind stands in for the (very real) external reality that we are climbing. It persists, even when we are not climbing it—not because God’s mind has the mountain object in divine view—but because the thing we are climbing is not an object at all, not a mental construct in any sense.

I hope the reader understands that I’m trying to draw an impenetrable divide between objects—which are mental constructs (Berkeley was right on this point)—and real (mind-independent) “physical” stuff.1

Two important points flow from this. The first is that although we are asserting realism (thought-independence) regarding the external world, we are asserting anti-realism regarding objects (including scientific objects), properties, and relationships between objects and properties. This is also anti-realism regarding mathematics, quantities, universals of any sort, and so on. All are mental elements and therefore exist only in our thoughts.2

This is also anti-realism about what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste. We think our senses are sensations coming to us from the world out there. They are not. Our brain constructs them so that we have subjective experiences which appear to us to be the world but in fact are a simulation—a sensory stand-in for the world. The stand-in only exists inside us.

Anti-realism, as far as the mountain goes, means the mountain (as soon as we sense it or conceive of it as a mountain) is a mental construction, and therefore thought-dependent rather than independent.3 The assertion that objects are not thought-independent is called object anti-realism.

Again, this includes scientific objects. Why? Because scientists can’t think about their subject without conceiving of objects, and these objects are necessarily mental constructions—even though they are meant to stand in for real stuff in the external world.

The second point, which helps explain the first, is an assertion about what thoughts and meanings and objects and properties are: sensations produced by the brain.

Thought can’t escape being a sensation—that is, an experience we have. Objects, even scientific objects, are necessarily experiences occurring within the brain and created by its neurons.

In short, meanings are a type of sensation produced by our neurons.4

Furthermore, sensations (including meaning sensations) interact only with the neurons in our brain. There is no interaction outside of this sphere. Our consciousness, our thoughts, our mind, is only a production by the brain done for its benefit.5

This means that there is no interaction between our sensations and the world “out there.”

We don’t perceive the world, in other words.

We don’t see it. We don’t hear it. We don’t smell it. We don’t taste it. We don’t even feel it.

Our bodies interact with the world, certainly. From these interactions, our brains create sensations—including the five senses and sensations of meaning—which our brains then use as a stand-in for the outside world. (Think of the stand-in as the visual, auditory, tactile, aromatic experiences you have, combined with “objectification” which create objects with properties and joined with “meanings” tacked on by (probably) the neocortex.

The stand-in is composed not just of our sensory experiences but also has these tacked on meanings about objects within the stand-in.

All this happens and exists within the brain, and does not constitute an interaction with the world out there. Our bodies (not our sensations) interact with the out there and send signals to the brain, which then produces the stand-in (again, our sensations and thoughts) for the “out there”—which we then use as a guide for our actions.6

So is the stand-in an accurate representation of out there?

It can’t be. There is no direct interaction between the stand-in and the surrounding world.

However, what we can say is that the stand-in is a useful representation of whatever is out there. If it’s not useful enough, we don’t survive.

So the brain is constantly trying to improve the stand-in based on our interactions with the world. Much of the improvement goes beyond the initial sensations of our senses and involves changing our meanings, our mental stuff.

All this is to try to make the stand-in as useful to us as possible.

Summary

So if we pull everything I’ve written together, what we get is this:

The nature of the “physical” world and the nature of thoughts (consciousness) are completely unlike each other. Philosophers call this dualism.

The alternative is to say they are the same, adopt Berkeley’s idealism and bring in God to explain why the external world has independence from our thoughts (though not from God’s).

But dualism wasn’t the original state of things.

Originally—per naturalism—consciousness did not exist. It arrived on the scene after billions of years of evolution, when it finally began to be produced by neurons in the brains of some species of animals on earth.

So dualism only emerged with the development of brains capable of producing subjective sensations.

Because of this evolutionary development, no sensations, thoughts or meanings can match the actual nature of the world around us (evolution has no way to pull that off)—indeed they can only be a stand-in, a simulacrum, a representation created in a different medium.

We can’t know the mind-independent external world as it is.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t matter to us because we modify the stand-in using pragmatic empiricism—that is, our brain creates a sensual stand-in with hooks for meanings which we then constantly try to improve to be as useful a stand-in for the world as possible.

How do we do this? By acting in the world and noticing what works better and adjusting our understanding accordingly.

Hopefully this makes sense. And if it does, then hopefully you’ll understand why I describe this as philosophical naturalism based on philosophical skepticism.

And in fact, maybe you can see why I say this is actually a scientific meta-hypothesis (an hypothesis which ties in and gives context to a large range of other scientific hypotheses).7

Footnotes

1

I put “physical” in quotes here for a reason. Whatever the stuff of the mind-independent reality is composed of, it is not mental in nature. It’s not objects with properties and relationships—those are necessarily mental constructs. “Physical” means meaning-independent, and that is all. (Meaning-independent entails mind-independence and thought-independence.) Thus we employ the term “physical” primarily for historical reasons: it’s the traditional term for the stuff physicists and physical scientists try to study. But whatever it is, it not made up of objects or properties, which are unavoidably mental in nature. Knowledge is a stand-in for the thought-independent whatever-it-is around us. Which highlights the importance of distinguishing the whatever-it-is from our thoughts about it.

2

Admittedly, my object anti-realism becomes softer when we consider organisms.

3

Technically the brain is constructing three distinguishable things here. First, it’s constructing a sensual visual/auditory/felt simulacra which stand in for the world; second, it’s integrating the various simulacra (via synesthesia) and populating them with objects and associated properties; third it’s integrating understandings and knowledge about those objects and properties into the stand-in. Then, as an organism, we act within the world and adjust the stand-in appropriately to make it as useful to us as possible.

4

Even what we call information is really composed of sensations we experience inside us—properly speaking information is not out there. More on this in a future post.

5

As I like to say, mind (consciousness) is a major way the brain goes about improving itself so it can make better decisions in the future. Consciousness serves the brain and the brain serves the body.

6

I plan a future post that will dive into this using vision as an example. If the reader is interested, I recommend Donald Hoffman’s book, Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See.

7

Notice that I am not asserting that science is committed to methodological naturalism—not at all. Instead, scientists are free to entertain alternatives to naturalism. Scientists could—if it worked well—adopt one or another meta-hypothesis of supernaturalism. Nothing prevents this. What I maintain is that naturalism as a meta-hypothesis simply works better, and will be found to be more useful.

Posted in Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Preface to Atheism, Simulacrum | Leave a comment

Elon Musk is bad at math

[Post at Preface to Atheism, Apr 11, 2024]

Is Elon Musk bad at mathematics? The suggestion may not shock readers who remember him foolishly paying $44 billion for Twitter (now X).

For that I give him a pass. He wanted Twitter badly and to him cost was almost an after-thought.1

Instead I want to focus on an egregious example of Elon’s math illiteracy.

He has famously claimed that we almost certainly live inside a simulation (there’s only a one in billion chance that we don’t, he said). To my knowledge, Elon still maintains this.2

At Code Conference 2016, Elon presented the math this way:

The strongest argument for us being in a simulation—probably being in a simulation—I think, is the following. Forty years ago we had Pong—like, two rectangles and a dot. That is what games were. Now forty years later we have photo-realistic 3-D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. And people have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. Indistinguishable. Even if the rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is right now, then you just say, okay, let’s imagine 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing in the evolutionary scale. Given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers and set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what’s wrong with that argument? … Is there a flaw in that argument? … There’s a one in billion chance that this is base reality. … I think it’s one in billions.3

Well, actually, Elon, there’s a massive mathematical flaw in your argument.

No one spoke up because, well, you’re the richest (second richest?) man in the world. Yet you’re the Emperor with no clothes.

Red Herrings

The problem is this: Elon thinks the number of human-built computers running human-created virtual reality games “indistinguishable from reality” is pertinent to calculating the odds that we humans ourselves exist in a similar virtual reality.

That’s a math blunder.

He’s spewing numbers which have nothing to do with the proposition at hand.

If you took high school math, you likely encountered “word problems” with specious information—numbers thrown in which are immaterial to calculating the answer. That’s what Elon does here—obviously without realizing it.

Why is the number of virtual reality games indistinguishable from reality, whether running on set-top boxes, laptops, VR headsets, VR glasses, even AR/VR contact lens in the future—why is it immaterial?

Because the one sure thing we know about all these games—now or in the future—is that human beings created them, human beings are playing them, and although the games create an illusion of us being immersed within the game’s world and interacting with its characters, we nevertheless still exist outside it all.

Necessarily so, since we humans will have built (or at least purchased) the hardware and downloaded the AR or VR program running on it. Some of us will work in the data centers which host the servers necessary for simultaneous play, and so on.

After all, Elon’s claim is not that we will someday magically find ourselves trapped inside our own games because they have reached some critical level of realism—at least I hope no one reading this is so dissociated from reality.

Elon’s claim is that some superior, alien intelligence, unknown to us, has created this reality that we live in, just as we (now or in the future) create virtual realities which seem just like the world around us—and that the fictional characters we create in these future games will have consciousness and be alive just as we are.

And yet—whatever worlds we create will nevertheless exist within our world and its realities. For example, a power outage or battery failure will still bring the game to a crashing end. But the power outage will not end us.

Likewise, food we consume within the virtual reality will not actually end up in our stomachs, unless we concurrently eat in real life. If this is not clear, please see a medical professional (preferably IRL).

So the billion virtual reality games 10,000 years from now are a red herring. Not a single one of them will be an example of a virtual world within which we biologically exist or in which any fictional character in any fictional game biologically exists.

Thus it’s mathematically invalid to use them to estimate odds that our own biologically existence occurs inside a simulation.

To Be Clear…

If this is not clear, let me help you understand it mathematically, step by step.

Take an actual, biologically produced orange (one plucked from a tree or purchased from a grocery store) and put it on a table in front of you. What do you have?

A table with an orange (which you could peel and eat if desired) on it. How likely is it that the orange is not real but a simulation?

If you are unsure, peel it and eat it—was it a simulation or did something actually go into your stomach?

Okay, if you ate the orange, pluck or buy another and put it on the table.

Now let’s add the red herring. Or rather red apples. A billion red apples. More specifically, a billion simulated red apples. (You can use your Google Glasses or Meta Quest or Vision Pro to simulate the apples. And yes, you’ll need to make the table bigger.)

Math quiz: did adding the billion apples make it more likely that the original orange on the table is now not an orange at all but an apple?

Did the orange transform into something it is not because we imagined (or simulated) a billion apples?

No.

Does creating a simulated apple mean that all apples and all oranges and all tables and all people must be simulated?

No.

But what if we create a billion, tens of billions, hundreds of trillions of simulated apples?

No. The orange is still an orange.

All Elon has done is: introduce a billion red herrings and gob-smack himself with the large number of simulated herrings floating around in his head.

In Elon’s Defense

Wait.

Maybe Elon thinks the orange was an apple all along. Maybe he thinks all fruit, by definition, are simulated fruit. Oranges don’t exist unless simulated.

There is almost some truth to this.

When I see an orange on the table, my brain creates my experience—the roundness, the color, the citric smell and so on. These orange properties are produced by my brain to create a virtual reality “orange” which stands in for the physical whatever lying on the table.

Not only that, in similar fashion my brain created the table, the room, everything.

The simulation is inside me.

It’s my creation.

So wait—is there anything outside me, outside the virtual reality created by my brain? Is there a physical orange, a physical table, a physical room out there?

Of course.

But importantly, they are not of the same sort as the simulation. The simulation is a sensory, experienced construction produced by the brain to stand in for whatever real stuff is actually out there.

But maybe, just maybe, Elon doesn’t think there is anything real, that is anything other than simulation, out there. Maybe he doesn’t think physical stuff exists unless it’s created/simulated by a mind. Or a Mind.

In other words, maybe what Elon is guilty of is not bad math, but idealist philosophy.

Except—somewhere among the billions of simulated realities, he thinks there is one “base reality”. So strike that. We’re back to bad math.

The New Design Argument

As a matter of fact, if we step back, we see that the claim that we live inside a simulation created by some outside being is little more than the 21st century version of the Design Argument for God’s existence.

And like the Design Argument, it is not a logical argument at all, but an analogy.

And the analogy is this: like the characters that exist inside the virtual realities of our popular games, perhaps we too live inside a virtual reality created by some intelligent being or beings.

Well, it’s a thought. How do we evaluate its likelihood?4

Not the way Elon tries to do it.

Like the Design argument, its strength lies in misunderstanding what is going on when we know the world. If you buy into the core beliefs of supernaturalism, you might find the Design analogy compelling because it fits your worldview and your understanding of it. If you don’t buy into those beliefs, you will find the whole thing silly.

The original design argument drew its inspiration from the invention of clocks. These newfangled time-telling mechanisms impressed people during the middle ages because clocks operated automatically—at least until the spring needed to be rewound.

And this led to an idea: maybe earth is just one big clock designed by God. After all, every clock we know of is designed by an outside clockmaker: maybe the physical world was designed by an outside maker as well.

In Elon’s version, he would postulate billions and billions of clocks, as if large numbers made the analogy more convincing. Or more probable.

“There is only one chance in a billion that the earth is not a clock.”

Sorry Elon. This is math illiteracy.

Simulations, Simulations

Notice that the observation that humans might eventually create simulations that seem just like the real world is not something that matters much. It is, of course, where the 21st century version of the analogy gets its start, but the analogy doesn’t require that humans ever successfully create a convincing virtual world.5

Now, if we could create virtual worlds that actually contained sentient physical beings like us (rather than just fictional simulations of such), that would be both impressive and miraculous. If we could ever become such gods, well then others might have done so before us, and others before them.

But here’s the thing about simulations: they are simulations. They stand in for real things (even if fictional) and are not actually what they presumably simulate.

And we know this well, because hominids have been creating simulations for tens of thousands of years, starting with cave paintings and carvings.

A drawing of an object is a simulation of that object.

Horses on cave walls were simulations of horses, for all we know convincing enough to early hominids to make them believe the painting could control the living horse.

Perhaps a prehistoric Elon Musk looked at the Lascaux cave paintings and wondered if he and his tribe were themselves painted on the wall of some great cave somewhere, under the watchful eye of a celestial god. (Only one chance in whatever it wasn’t so.)

Paintings, frescoes, sculptures, carvings and masks were for thousands of years our chief form of simulating reality. And our simulations got better and better over the centuries. Painters got good at simulating at creating realistic pictures. Then we invented photography, followed by motion pictures, movies with sound, television, computer games and, today, 3D virtual reality.

But so far, none of our simulations of real things have ever turned into real things themselves, at least not in the same sense of existence.

There is of course a secondary sense in which a cartoon character like Mickey Mouse has real existence, at least culturally. But Mickey Mouse has never become a blood and bones biological being in the sense that we are.6 Nor does anyone expect this to happen—unless they are mentally ill.

Yet advocates of the simulation hypothesis seem to believe that if only we can make cartoon Mickey’s world realistic enough to become indistinguishable from reality, and do the same for Mickey’s virtual body—presto! He will become a real, experiencing physical being, just like us.

Somewhere, somehow, at some point in perfecting the illusion, magic will happen.

That’s right.

This is magical, supernatural thinking. A belief quite literally in picture magic. Call it “simulation” magic.

The Simulation Inside Us

There is also an intellectual confusion going on here about what reality is.

What is being confused with reality is the simulation (vision, sound, touch, taste, smell) of the world which our brain creates to “stand in” for the world. This biologically-created simulation, however, is inside us. We are not inside it.

Now, there is something important to note about the biologically-created simulation happening inside us: it is computational in nature, composed of objects with properties and information that can be sliced and diced. Thus our brains provide us with a simulation of the world which is “knowable”—and indeed we can’t “know” anything which is not simulation for this precise reason.7

But if the simulation—all simulations—are actually inside us, product of our brains, then it follows that we (the biological beings producing the simulation) cannot be inside it (though of course we can put a representation of ourselves into it). We are necessarily on the outside hosting the simulation on the inside, just as we are necessarily outside any art or craft or motion picture or computer game which is triggering a brain simulation of reality within us.

Which presents us with another way to look at how ridiculous Elon’s logic is here:

Human brains have been creating these realistic simulations of reality (which we almost always naively fail to distinguished from reality) for millions of years, and millions of years before us the brains of other species have been doing the same.

Long before motion pictures, long before Pong, these realistic simulations of the physical world have been in existence. Again, I’m referring here to the sensual experiences we each have every day, experiences created by our brains and interpreted to be the world existing around us. Recall what I wrote earlier,

When I see an orange on the table, my brain creates my experience—the roundness, the color, the citric smell and so on. These orange properties are produced by my brain to create a virtual reality “orange” which stands in for the physical whatever lying on the table.

Not only that, in similar fashion my brain created the table, the room, everything.

The simulation is inside me.

It’s my creation.

In what rational sense can this be conceived as evidence that some other species on some other planet has imagined earth and all its species into existence as simulations in their own brains, in their own computer programs?

At best, it is an off the wall brain-fart analogy, a silly “what if?”

What if???

It boils down to this: What if I’m trapped in a story someone else is telling?

After all, millions maybe billions of stories have been told. If there are aliens elsewhere, quintillions of stories have been told.

Wow! The odds that I’m nothing but a character in a story must be immense.

The more stories I can imagine being told or enacted somewhere, somehow the more certain it must be that I don’t have independent existence, I’m just a character in a story not my own.

“…the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what’s wrong with that argument? … Is there a flaw in that argument? … There’s a one in billion chance that this is base reality.”

We tell stores. We tell stories about others. What if they are trapped in our stories?

What if we only exist in someone else’s story?

Now imagine billions of stories—suddenly the off the wall brain-fart analogy magically acquires high probability in the minds of math-illiterates.

But the stories are so detailed!

They have moving pictures, and the pictures look and move just like us! Therefore they are living, breathing biological beings just like us—trapped in the computer story.

Uh-oh, we must be too!

Now, on top of all this silliness, Elon also believes that minds can be downloaded to a hard drive to achieve immortality8 (by “download” he doesn’t mean “writing books” either).

By definition, his is a supernatural worldview.9

Behind all his nonsense is the gullible belief that mind is primary, that mind must come before matter; that the other way around is unthinkable.

And Elon “proves” it with brain-fart math.

Footnotes

2

The idea is not original. Elon apparently got it (directly or indirectly) from the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. I’ll write about him in a separate article.

3

Elon Musk, 2016. My transcription from YouTube video of Musk at Code Conference 2016

4

How do you calculate the likelihood of the Design Argument being true? You can’t. And this is because it’s just an analogy, a metaphor, a What-if? Do you have a supernatural worldview? Then you’ll calculate the probability that God or something like God created the physical world at 100%. Do you have a natural worldview? The probability becomes zero. And this is because the Design Argument is not evidence or argument at all, but rather a necessary corollary of holding a supernatural worldview. If mind came first, then physical stuff must be its design and creation. And if physical stuff came first, it can’t be the creation or design of any mind.

5

After all it’s an analogy, not an empirical observation. This is why Elon can’t construct a legitimate math problem to calculate the odds.

6

The actor in that Mickey Mouse costume at Disney World doesn’t count.

7

Fortunately, empiricism provides a method for getting around this limitation. Scientists falsify what they believe they know by careful doing in the world (and by meticulous noting of results): in this way beliefs get tested in competition against alternates and get judged by usefulness. Scientific knowledge is thus a simulation (standing in for the world) which gets consciously tested and improved to be more and more useful. Thus the relationship between the world and scientific knowledge is forever pragmatic: what works best we say is true (as long as the model is internally coherent). This is a continuation and extension of how earthly organisms deploy consciousness. It evolved into a practical stand-in for the physical world, one constructed by the brain and used to improve its decision-making. This is accomplished by creating and modifying memories, and thus connections between neurons which can impact future actions.

9

This is an infantile supernaturalism which doesn’t invoke God but rather pretends that super-powerful aliens out there in the cosmos (somewhere) created us and our physical reality. It’s not a mindful supernaturalism constructed over centuries of religious thought about the concept of God and ex nihilo creation. Rather, it mindlessly replaces God with powerful aliens living in “base reality” (who created their base reality?) who, Elon speculates, might have created our reality as a way to entertain themselves. Infantile supernaturalism.

Posted in Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Preface to Atheism, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Defining Naturalism the Right Way

[Post at Preface to Atheism, Feb 19, 2024. I should probably have titled it “Defining Naturalism the Best Way.”]

In a previous post, “What is Naturalism?”, I quoted William H Halverson’s A Concise Introduction to Philosophy, Fourth Edition, 1981 (Random House, NY). Today I want to return to Halverson and focus again on his presentation of naturalism as a world view. In doing so, I want to focus on a fundamental mistake in how naturalism has traditionally been presented.

In chapter 57, Halverson (writing “from the point of view of a convinced advocate of the view in question”) describes naturalism as claiming, “In the beginning, matter.” In contrast, he points out, supernaturalism claims, “In the beginning, God.” (I quoted this in “What is Naturalism?”)1

More broadly (though Halverson doesn’t say this) supernaturalism states, “In the beginning, mind, consciousness or intelligence.” The most popular versions of the supernatural world view eagerly call this God, but this move isn’t universal.

The main takeaway: naturalism and supernaturalism are competing factual claims about the history of existence. Naturalism says, originally there was physical stuff and then living organisms evolved (on earth, at least), and then some living organisms evolved to have consciousness. (The publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Speciesin the 19th century reinvigorated naturalism, because it demonstrated that the forms of species could have come about without the application of intelligence from outside.)

It also highlights a central element of naturalism: consciousness (consequently mind and intelligence) is something produced by the brains of organisms. Not produced necessarily by all organisms, but by those with an adequate collection of neurons (details to follow as scientists do their work.) Therefore, if naturalism is correct, consciousness was not around at the beginning but arrived on the scene later.

By default, this entails atheism. It means that God’s sort of existence, which is bodiless mind or consciousness, was not around in the beginning. Such is the heart of naturalism, and it’s why I write so much about it here. Naturalism really is preface to atheism.

In opposition, supernaturalism asserts that, yes, consciousness may have arrived in organisms like us later on, but this was possible only because an originalConsciousness was present all along. Indeed, the original Consciousness created the physical world. In the beginning, God.

I want you to see the important of stating the difference between naturalism and supernaturalism in this way. It makes clear that the debate is over factual & historical claims. It is a debate over what happened when, as well as a debate over where consciousness is. Importantly, it’s a difference of opinion that can be adjudicated by examining evidence.

Bedeviled Naturalism

But Halverson’s presentation of naturalism in A Concise Introduction to Philosophy, in my opinion, has a fatal flaw; a mistake which bedevils advocates of naturalism to this day. And bedevil is the right word here. The flaw sneaks into naturalism a fundamental premise belonging to supernaturalism. It allows a supernatural devil (in the form of consciousness) to slither about in naturalism’s garden.

To see this, let’s look carefully at the relevant passages in his book:

“Naturalism asserts, first, that the primary constituents of reality are material entities. By this I do not mean that only material entities exist; I am not denying the reality—the real existence—of such things as hopes, plans, behavior, language, logical inferences, and so on. What I am asserting, however, is that anything that is real is, in the last analysis, explicable as a material entity or as a form or function or action of a material entity. Theism says, “In the beginning, God;” naturalism says, “In the beginning, matter.” If the theoretical goal of science—an absolutely exhaustive knowledge of the natural world—were to be achieved, there would remain no reality of any other kind about which we might still be ignorant. The “ultimate realities,” according to naturalism, are not the alleged objects of the inquiries of theologians; they are the entities that are the objects of investigation by chemists, physicists, and other scientists. To put the matter very simply: materialism is true.”2

Halverson’s naturalist next goes on to say that naturalism also holds “determinism is true” and that “to be is to be some place, some time.”

“Naturalism asserts, second, that what happens in the world is theoretically explicable without residue in terms of the internal structures and the external relations of these material entities. The world is, to use an inadequate metaphor, like a gigantic machine whose parts are so numerous and whose processes are so complex that we have, thus far, been able to achieve only a partial and fragmentary understanding of how it works. In principle, however, everything at occurs is ultimately explicable in terms of the properties and relations of the particles of which matter is composed. Once again, the point may be stated simply: determinism is true.”

“It follows from what I have said that the categories of space and time are categories of great importance of naturalism—are in fact, ontological categories. If you cannot locate something in space and time, or if you cannot understand it as a form or function of some entity or entities located in space and time, then you simply cannot say anything intelligible about it. To be is to be some place, some time.3

In these passages, I have emphasized the word “explicable” for a reason. This is the devil I mentioned earlier.

Not Halverson’s Fault

The devil is not Halverson’s fault. He merely presents naturalism as 20th century advocates have commonly misunderstood it. For example, Britannica.com says,

“Naturalism presumes that nature is in principle completely knowable. There is in nature a regularity, unity, and wholeness that implies objective laws, without which the pursuit of scientific knowledge would be absurd.”4

There is so much wrong with this that one almost doesn’t know where to begin.

Let start at the end, the assumption that without “objective laws” that “the pursuit of scientific knowledge would be absurd.” Well, it’s a claim. Yet the pursuit of science is unaffected by this question of where scientific laws exist. Whether they exist “out there” in the external world or whether they exist “in here” in human consciousness, science progresses all the same.

The lack of “out there” existence for our scientific conclusions might seem “absurd” to someone committed to a supernatural world view, but in fact it’s quite sensible. Thoughts, conclusions, understandings are all “in here” phenomena. Like all aspect of consciousness, human knowledge exists to “stand in” for the external physical world. But stand in is all knowledge ever does. It does not and cannot become “factual” in the external world.

Let me repeat: our scientific understanding of matter and energy stands in for the external world around us. It is a careless mistake to conflate scientific understanding of the world for the nature of the world. If you commit this error, you’ve inserted an element of human consciousness which exist in here and placed it out there—you’ve conflated subjective reality with objective reality.

If we dig down, we discover that the underlying fault here is the unquestioned assumption that organisms perceive the world through their senses, and that any resulting knowledge is objective (i.e. an aspect of the external natural world) rather than subjective (i.e. an aspect of human consciousness). Since sense sensations and meaning sensations are aspects of consciousness, this inevitably entangles human consciousness with the physical world around us, vitiating naturalism by inserting consciousness where it does not exist.

We need to rescue the world view of naturalism from this bedevilment so that everyone benefits from clearer thinking (whether naturalist or supernaturalist).

Indeed, Britannica.com does the opposite, turning naturalism into nothing more than the meaningless declaration “everything is natural.”

“While naturalism has often been equated with materialism, it is much broader in scope. Materialism is indeed naturalistic, but the converse is not necessarily true. Strictly speaking, naturalism has no ontological preference; i.e., no bias toward any particular set of categories of reality: dualism and monism, atheism and theism, idealism and materialism are all per se compatible with it. So long as all of reality is natural, no other limitations are imposed. Naturalists have in fact expressed a wide variety of views, even to the point of developing a theistic naturalism.”5

This is worthless.6

Explicibility and Perception

Perhaps it’s viable to view the common but confused presentation of naturalism as oneof several possible varieties which fall under the meta philosophy of naturalism—albeit deeply flawed. Fortunately, there are other variations under the meta philosophy, versions which excise explicability, thus restoring coherence, and also eliminating determinism (since determinism results from the desire for explicability “without residue”7).

We have sound biological & evolutionary reasons for excising explicability from being foundational. These include Hume’s observations about the problem of induction and of course, most importantly, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species8 which undoubtedly influenced William James’ ideas about pragmatism. These also include the rejection of scientific realism, which is necessitated by the biological understanding that species (including us, of course) have no actual method of perceiving9 the world. We are left with scientific pragmatism to replace scientific realism. (But these are topics for future Preface articles.)

Instead, let me continue to focus on the logical reason for removing explicability from the definition of naturalism.

Explicability commits naturalism to the proposition that organisms, through sensations and consciousness, can perceive the physical world as it is. This commitment to perception relies on the assumption that consciousness and the “outside” physical world are a two-way street. On one side of the street, neurons in the brain produce consciousness. (A necessary assumption for naturalism, and amply supported by the evidence we have.)

But on the other side of the street, somehow, consciousness interacts with the outside physical world which we are sensing, so that it can be “perceived.”

It would not be a problem if the assertion were that the two-way interaction occurs between consciousness and the brain: brain producing consciousness and consciousness modifying neurons in return. But the claim of explicability alters the nature of the two-way street: it asserts that consciousness, in its sensual form (i.e., the senses) is a perception of the outside world, and therefore an interaction with whatever physical stuff is.

But how can this be? Logically, it implies compatibility between the sensations of consciousness and the physical world. This is just plain mystical: in the end it means that the physical world (exclusive of neurons in the brain) must have a nature which interacts with and is compatible with consciousness.

If we accept this, we are no longer advocating naturalism or physicalism. So advocates of naturalism should reject this mess.

Instead, advocate of naturalism (thinking logically) should limit the interaction between consciousness and the physical world to the realm of the brain’s neurons: there alone is where interaction between matter and mind, stuff and sensation, “objective” and “subjective” occurs. The brain produces consciousness and consciousness in turn modifies the brain. Consciousness never exists outside this limited interaction. It’s a tool the brain uses to improve itself, and that is that.

Let me summarize my argument in a different form. Per Halverson, explicabilityasserts that human thoughts can tap into the actual “properties and relations of the particles of which matter is composed.” But this is based on the unnatural assumption that properties and relations can be found in the physical world.

But wait: properties and relations are the native language of consciousness. So explicability misleads us into asserting that the native language of consciousness is something that we can find in the physical world as we interact with it.

Such a position is not naturalism. It’s pan-psychism or supernaturalism.

Again, if interaction between elements of consciousness and the physical world is constrained to the brain and its neurons, it poses no problem for naturalism. But allow compatibility between consciousness and physical stuff to occur outside of neurons in the brain, and you’ve jumped out of naturalism into it’s negation.

You’ve allowed the devil into your natural garden.

1

William H. Halverson, A Concise Introduction to Philosophy, 4th Edition, New York, 1967-1981, Random House, page 424.

2

Ibid.

3

Ibid.

5

Ibid.

6

Interestingly, if you replace the word “naturalism” with “science” then the quote makes sense. Has Britannica equated science with “methodological naturalism” and forgotten that philosophical naturalism (the meta philosophy of naturalism) even exists?

7

More on this in future posts.

9

In future posts I will outline the biological case against organisms perceiving the world around themselves. The concept of perception has been scientifically debunked, but most philosophers haven’t caught up yet.

Posted in Naturalism, Preface to Atheism, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Roundess & What is Real

[Post at Preface to Atheism, Sept 16, 2023.]

It’s natural to assume that what we see when we open our eyes is what the world looks like, that we see it as is. Sure, there may be more to it than we see, especially on a micro level, but we see the actual world out there. This assumption is what philosophers call perceptual realism (though it has other names, such as naive realism).

Bertrand Russell, in his book, The Problems of Philosophy1, exposed a few of the problems with perceptual realism.

Consider a round dining table. Imagine that we are comfortably sitting in a chair beside the table. Looking at the table from our vantage point, it is likely that we perceive immediately that the tabletop is round. But how? From where we sit, the tabletop does not actually have a round shape.

This is the problem: how can we perceive the table as round if the image of the table coming through our eyes is not round? Sitting at the table, in fact, it appears oval. It would only appear round if our eyes were located at the ceiling directly above the table—a viewpoint we almost never actually have.

Yet we immediately register the table as round.

Presumably, roundness is one of the properties of the table. But how does our brain pick up this property from the table? How does our brain know it is round?

We can even ask, is the physical tabletop really round or is roundness something our brain is (so to speak) bringing to the table?

Or, as philosophers like to put it, is the table’s roundness real?

The Real Question

Whenever philosophers (or anyone for that matter) asks if something is real, what they are actually asking is a different question: where does something exist? The philosopher’s question, Is roundness real? is, in other words, the scientist’s question, Where does roundness exist?

There are basically only a couple of places where something might exist.

First, it might exist in the “physical” mind-independent world we see around (outside/inside of) us. Perhaps it exists in this world in a manner easy to detect, or perhaps it exists undetected or even undetectable. Something might also exist within organisms which are within this mind-independent world, perhaps even within the structure of neurons in the brains of such organisms.

Most philosophers would consider something existing in any of the above locations to be “real”.

Second, something may also exist “in our mind”—that is, in our thoughts, feelings, or imagination. If something “only” exists in our minds philosophers would say it is not “real.” Realism, to the philosopher, means believing that something exists in the firstlocation. If we believe that something only exists in the second location, it is a rejection of realism vis-a-vis that something.

Of course, something might exist in both places. And in fact this is a common position most people (including philosophers) take.

It is my position that something never exists in both places. Either it exists in the mind-independent, observer-independent physical world, or it exists in the mind of an observer. Never both.

With one caveat: Observers are organisms. And organisms exist in the mind-independent world. In this sense, naturally, the minds of organisms (which are produced by neurons in the organism’s body) necessarily also exist in the mind-independent physical world. But there is never double-existence. Something which exists within the neurobiologically-produced consciousness of an organism doesn’t also exist outside that neurbiologically-produced consciousness.

So if we are talking about something like the roundness of a tabletop, it is my contention that that property of roundness either exists out there in the table (the mind-independent world) or it exists in here in the neurobiological consciousness (mind) produced in the brains of organisms like us.

I hope this clarifies why I think the scientific question, Where does something exist? is preferable to the philosophical question, Is something real?

Where is Roundness?

So where does the roundness of our dining table exist?

Let’s recap the issue:

If roundness is out there in the physical world, how do we perceive an object’s roundness if we never see it round? How does an object so quickly convey its roundness to us?

Well, some objects don’t. The earth we stand on is round, but we don’t perceive that (okay, maybe if we are astronauts/cosmonauts out in space). Only when an object is small enough for us to see it from the proper angle, do we actually see it as round.

So roundness is not conveyed to us by the objects we see. Our brains are inferringroundness.2

And this is even more obvious when we consider that round objects are never perfectly round. We perceive oranges as round, but they are not perfectly round. Our dining table is not perfectly round. Our earth is not perfectly round. And neither are coins.

If something is not perfectly round, is it round?

Well, our brain says it is. And then, on further examination, our brain says it is not perfectly round.

So where does roundness exist?

If we approach this question as scientists, then we are going to look for a biological mechanism for collecting information from the world around us.

Let’s imagine we are sitting outside at night looking at the full moon. The information that the disk of the moon is round, how are we to pluck that from the sky?

Our retinas sample photons which have bounced off the moon from the sun. What do those photons know about the roundness of the moon? Do they carry information about the moon’s roundness with them to earth. Certainly not individually.

Collectively, we convince ourselves, at least together with the missing photons where moon is not, we assemble a picture of the moon’s roundness. But it’s a picture wecompose. Specifically, our brains compose it, and our brains create the information of the moon’s roundness in doing so. Photons know nothing about it.

What about Cameras?

Still, we might naively ask, how then can a camera (a brainless, non-digital camera, for instance) create a picture of the moon’s roundness? Where does the roundness information come from if not the photons captured by the camera?

But here, too, our brains create the roundness of the moon. This time it happens when we look at the photo from the camera.

If someone paints a full moon on canvas, it’s the same thing. When we look at the canvas our brains create the roundness of the painted moon, just as would happen if we were looking at the moon itself.

And then our brains note that the roundness is imperfect.

Our brains, of course, don’t just create roundness information about the moon. They create an entire moon object. This moon-object has properties, including hue, saturation, and brightness. It also has an edge forming the property of roundness.

The objectification of the visual field into objects with discernible properties and information seems to be an automatic activity of the human brain. I would go further and declare that all experiences—that is, all sensation created by the brain for the purpose of moving and acting within the world around us—by nature have location and meaning (so that the sensation can bring a call to action to the organism). This is why our sensations, our experiences, present us with information necessarily.3

A natural answer

Skeptical naturalism answers the question Where does roundness exist? by locating it in the simulacrum created by the brain as it produces our senses and knowledge.

This video4 which I linked to in a previous post demonstrates the point. Watch the video (before reading further)!

If you duteously tried to count the basketball throws as directed, your brain saturated your visual experience with objects needed for the task at hand: you see the basketball, you see the basketball players passing the basketball, maybe you see the players on the opposing team as well since passes from them shouldn’t count. These objects are essential to counting the basketball throws.

But you didn’t see the man in a gorilla suit object. Why not?

Your brain created the visual experience you needed for the task at hand; distractions were excluded from your vision because you had something tricky to concentrate on.

Afterwards, once you learned about the gorilla-suited man, your brain took note and “improved itself”—and I bet now your brain won’t allow you to unsee him the next time you watch the video. (Can you even fully concentrate on counting the throws once you know what’s really important about the scene?)

The question, then, is not whether the brain constructs our experiences. It absolutely constructs the objects and properties that we visualize. The question, rather, is this: are those objects and properties (such as roundness) located in one place or two places?

Are they located only in the neurobiological construction we call consciousness, or do they also have duplicates located in the mind-independent physical world?

I submit that the meta philosophy of naturalism5 is not consistent with saying objects and properties exist in both places. This is because the places—one mind-independent and one mind-dependent—are fundamentally different in type. And the meta philosophy of naturalism says that the second type is a neurobiological construction which shows up only after millions or billions of years.

Things produced by neurons in the brains of organisms can’t be equivalent to things predating the evolution of neurons—not at least under naturalism. (If you have a supernatural worldview, you will see it differently.)

I hope this gets at why I don’t think perceptual realism fits naturalism. And I believe the same will apply for scientific realism.

Footnotes

1

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1912.

In the future, I hope to write specifically about ideas Russell presents here—this post is not that. But my point about roundness comes directly from The Problems of Philosophy:

“The shape of the table is no better. We are all in the habit of judging as to the ‘real’ shapes of things, and we do this so unreflectingly that we come to think we actually see the real shapes. But, in fact, as we all have to learn if we try to draw, a given thing looks different in shape from every different point of view. If our table is ‘really’ rectangular, it will look, from almost all points of view, as if it had two acute angles and two obtuse angles. If opposite sides are parallel, they will look as if they converged to a point away from the spectator; if they are of equal length, they will look as if the nearer side were longer. All these things are not commonly noticed in looking at a table, because experience has taught us to construct the ‘real’ shape from the apparent shape, and the ‘real’ shape is what interests us as practical men. But the ‘real’ shape is not what we see; it is something inferred from what we see. And what we see is constantly changing in shape as we, move about the room; so that here again the senses seem not to give us the truth about the table itself, but only about the appearance of the table.” (1959 Edition, page 10)

2

Again, Russell in The Problems of Philosophy:

“Thus it becomes evident that the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what we immediately experience by sight or touch or hearing. The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. Hence, two very difficult questions at once arise; namely, (1) Is there a real table at all? (2) If so, what sort of object can it be?” (1959 Edition, page 11)

3

In The Problems of Philosophy, Russell separates “sensations” from what he terms “sense data.” Whereas, I believe the brain constructs both in the same fashion, often at the same time. Thus sensations come with meaning for the organism (it’s an important aspect of their neurological construction). Here’s Russell’s take:

“Let us give the name of ‘sense-data’ to the things that are immediately known in sensation: such things as colours, sounds, smells, hardnesses, roughnesses, and so on. We shall give the name ‘sensation’ to the experience of being immediately aware of these things. Thus, whenever we see a colour, we have a sensation of the colour, but the colour itself is a sense-datum, not a sensation. The colour is that of which we are immediately aware, and the awareness itself is the sensation. It is plain that if we are to know anything about the table, it must be by means of the sense-data — brown colour, oblong shape, smoothness, etc. — which we associate with the table; but, for the reasons which have been given, we cannot say that the table is the sense-data, or even that the sense-data are directly properties of the table. Thus a problem arises as to the relation of the sense-data to the real table, supposing there is such a thing.” (1959 Edition, page 12)

It has never been clear to me where Russell thinks sense-data exists. I maintain that like all our sensations, sense-data is constructed by the brain using much the same mechanisms which create our other neurobiological experiences.

4

Learn more about this at theinvisiblegorilla.com

5

As stated in a previous post, the “meta philosophy of naturalism” is equivalent to a “meta scientific hypothesis” that the world has a history, and that this history includes, after billions of years, the evolution of living organisms on at least one planet in at least one solar system, and that on that planet at least one species evolved to have brains which produce neurobiological consciousness. Instances of this neurobiological consciousness constitute novel entities (e.g. visual, tactile, auditory sensations but also including information, conceptsand meanings) which never existed prior. (Roundness and other object properties are examples of such.) Because these novel entities never existed prior to the evolution of consciousness, an essential aspect of the hypothesis is that they exist only in consciousness, not in the mind-independent (consciousness-independent) world beyond.

Posted in Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Preface to Atheism, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

John Shook’s analysis of Naturalism

[Third post on Preface to Atheism.]

John Shook is one of the leading philosophers of naturalism. My understanding is that he advocates for pragmatic naturalism (evidence: he edited a book with that title, and has published books about the pragmatists William James and John Dewey). My version of skeptical naturalism also leverages pragmatism (pragmatic empiricism, specifically).

But Shook will tell you that I am wrong, that naturalism simply can’t be combined with skepticism.

Let’s try to understand his point of view, which can be found here: http://www.naturalisms.org/science.htm

Shook explains that “There are six primary options when considering whether science yields knowledge about reality” and he goes through them one by one to evaluate whether or not they can be compatible with naturalism.

First on his list is skepticism (which, remember, I think biology forces on us, since there is no plausible biological method for organisms on earth to perceive the world as it is, and that what we mistake for perception is actually a construction by the brain treated as if it is the world—a stand-in).

Describing skepticism as a worldview, Shook writes

Reality cannot be known at all. All knowledge is impossible because of fatal flaws within any ways of attempted knowing. This option is usually called “Radical” or “Philosophical” Skepticism. This option is NOT the same as the ordinary skepticism of common sense, or the scientific skepticism that demands experimental evidence to have knowledge.”1

This is the essence of skepticism, although I do have a quibble with it. The claim is not that “all knowledge is impossible”—of course knowledge is possible! Organisms like us do tons of knowing! Rather the claim of philosophical (and academic) skepticism is that all knowledge of reality is impossible, where “reality” refers to the “mind-independent, observer-independent” physical world (where, of course, organisms like us who are observers, organisms with consciousness, exist).

By the word “reality”, we thus mean exclusive of the “observer” or “mind” aspect of organisms like us. Because after all consciousness is all about knowing. The point of radical or philosophical skepticism is that all this knowing is not knowing of the mind-independent, observer-independent aspect of reality: it’s knowing of a biologically created (brain-created) stand-in which organisms employ pragmatically to navigate reality.

We will see that the reason Shook rejects skepticism as a basis for naturalism is because skepticism is incompatible with scientific realism, and Shook believes naturalism requires scientific realism to stand on. (This is the obvious point of disagreement—and later on when we talk about how to define naturalism, we’ll see that the disagreement carries on into that discussion, as one would expect.)

Let’s continue with Shooks six primary options.

The second one is

Reality only consists of what science cannot know about. There is another non-scientific way of understanding reality that should be trusted instead of science. Since science’s conclusions do not agree with this non-scientific way of understanding reality, science is completely untrustworthy.”

Not surprisingly, this is where mysticism, spiritualism, idealism, rationalism reside. In fact, here you will find the residences of a great many people today. It is not an option for naturalism.

Third, Shook gives us

Science is rarely able to give reliable knowledge about reality. Science can occasionally provide reliable knowledge, but only about a limited portion or aspect of reality.”

Here he breaks out two varieties. The first (3A) stresses pure reason (or religious intuition?) as a more reliable alternative to science. Here Shook includes “[m]ost types of Platonism, Idealism, Phenomenalism, and Phenomenology

Anti-Realism

More interesting is 3B. This is where Shook places anti-realism (the rejection of scientific realism).

“The scientific anti-realist has decided that none of arguments for Scientific Realism (the view that science does provide some genuine knowledge of reality) are convincing. In the 20th century, scientific anti-realists have preferred types of Empiricism (like Positivism‘s view that science can only describe patterns of phenomena), or Social Constructivism (the view that science’s claims are largely caused by cultural/political forces). Another type of empiricism is Instrumentalism, which holds that science can only give knowledge about directly or instrumentally observable entities.”

What Shook doesn’t list here is my preferred version of anti-realism: biological constructivism. There are other names for it: neurological constructivism, scientific constructivism, model-dependent realism come to mind.

That last (model-dependent realism) is from The Grand Design, a 2010 book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

According to the idea of model-dependent realism …, our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. We form mental concepts of our home, trees, other people, the electricity that flows from wall sockets, atoms, molecules, and other universes. These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no model-independent test of reality.2

The neuroscientist György Buzsáki makes a related point in the June 2022 issue of Scientific American. Buzsáki rejects what he calls the traditional “outside-in framework” because it relies on an outside observer (the objective scientist). He provides an example of someone “seeing” a flower; from the outside-in framework

A stimulus—the image of a flower—reaches the eyes, and the brain responds by causing neurons to fire. This theory is plausible only with the involvement of an “experimenter” to observe and establish a relation between the flower and the neuronal responses it induces. Absent the experimenter, neurons in the sensory cortex do not “see” the flower.3

Instead, Buzsáki proposes an “inside-out framework.”

The alternative, inside-out theory does away with the experimenter. It presumes instead that we come to understand the external world by taking actions—moving a flower, for instance—to learn about an object. To accomplish this task, inputs from action-initiating neurons combine with sensory inputs to provide an understanding of the object’s size shape and other attributes. A meaningful picture arises, allowing the neurons to “see” the flower.4

The outside-in framework relies on the assumption of scientific realism, whereas the inside-out framework does not. In similar fashion, Hawking’s model-dependent realism bypasses the need to assume scientific realism.

Donald Hoffman, who I mentioned in a previous post, is an earlier (and more forceful) proponent of the idea that our brains construct what we see.5 (Seems to me, Hawking and Mlodinow were knowledgable of modern currents in neuroscience and developed their model-dependent realism accordingly.)

Realism vs Realism

The reader might wonder why I include model-dependent realism as an example of anti-realism? How can a type of realism be a type of anti-realism?

Blame philosophers.

In philosophy there are two quite different “primary” meanings of the term realism. The first is the assertion that the physical world exists independent of mind (often referred to as belief in a mind-independent or observer-independent reality). This meaning of realism stands opposed to idealism. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow mean this sort of realism when describing model-dependent realism. They assert that there is indeed a physical reality—it’s just that we can’t actually know it as it is, so we construct models which stand in for it.

The other (and more common) meaning of realism in philosophy is the specific assertion of scientific realism—but beware because there is a grand philosophical tradition of confounding these two realism. Scientific realism necessarily embraces the first sort of (mind-independent) realism. But so do most anti-realists (those who reject scientific realism—I’ve argued, for example, that scientific realism fails to take mind-independent realism seriously enough.)

Scientific realism tacks on two additional claims.

Semantically, [scientific] realism is committed to a literal interpretation of scientific claims about the world. In common parlance, realists take theoretical statements at “face value”. According to realism, claims about scientific objects, events, processes, properties, and relations (I will use the term “scientific entity” as a generic term for these sorts of things henceforth), whether they be observable or unobservable, should be construed literally as having truth values, whether true or false.6

And the second is this:

Epistemologically, [scientific] realism is committed to the idea that theoretical claims (interpreted literally as describing a mind-independent reality) constitute knowledge of the world. This contrasts with skeptical positions which, even if they grant the metaphysical and semantic dimensions of realism, doubt that scientific investigation is epistemologically powerful enough to yield such knowledge, or, as in the case of some antirealist positions, insist that it is only powerful enough to yield knowledge regarding observables. The epistemological dimension of realism, though shared by realists generally, is sometimes described more specifically in contrary ways…. Amidst these differences, however, a general recipe for realism is widely shared: our best scientific theories give true or approximately true descriptions of observable and unobservable aspects of a mind-independent world.7

Model-dependent realism rejects this for a far more pragmatic view of scientific theories, one

which accepts that reality can always be interpreted in a number of different ways, and focuses on how well our models of the world do at describing the observed phenomena. It claims that it is meaningless to talk about the “true reality” of the model. The only meaningful thing is the usefulness of the model.8

Like biological constructivism, model-dependent realism asserts the existence of a mind/observer-independent reality, but denies that we can know it as it is. (In short, this is naturalism based on skepticism.) Hawking and Mlodinow arrived at this conclusion based on their understanding of modern neuroscience, where it is clear that organisms have no way to perceive the world and so must construct a model of it.

And science is a conceptual continuation of that construction.

Back to John Shook

We left off with John Shook placing anti-realism under category 3B, a variant of

Science is rarely able to give reliable knowledge about reality. Science can occasionally provide reliable knowledge, but only about a limited portion or aspect of reality.”

According to Shook, “These empiricisms [the variations of anti-realism] can’t develop into viable naturalisms, and instead collapse into 3A options such as idealism or phenomenalism.”

But I think we can see clearly now that 3B is the wrong place for most versions of anti-realism—certainly this is the case for model-dependent realism and biological constructivism. Both properly fall under Shook’s category of skepticism. This is because, for reasons of neurobiology, both embrace skepticism about our ability to know reality as it actually is.

Both assert that this is not a problem for science.

Both insist on a mind-independent world which is primary and existed before organisms like us evolved into being.

Both therefore embrace the meta-philosophy of naturalism, and do so via skepticism.

Conclusion: John Shooks says naturalism can’t be based on skepticism9, but I think we’ve shown that he is mistaken.

Footnotes

1

This and the following John Shook quotes come from http://www.naturalisms.org/science.htm

2

Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, 2010, as quoted here: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-model-dependent-realism-2699404

3

This and the previous quote are from “Constructing the World from Inside Out” by György Buzsáki, Scientific American, June 2022.

4

ibid

6

Quote from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/ section 1.2, The Three Dimensions of Realist Commitment.

7

ibid

9

As noted at the beginning, Skepticism is primary worldview 1. Shook says “Only three of the 6 primary worldviews can lead to kinds of naturalism. They are:

4. Science is able to give increasingly reliable knowledge about reality. There may be other ways besides science for knowing reality, but those ways are not better than science. One variety can be a kind of naturalism: 4B. Synoptic Monism(one kind of ultimate reality that is knowable in different ways).

5. Science is the only source of knowledge about reality. The only type of knowledge is scientific knowledge. However, some of reality consists of entities that cannot be known by science, simply because science is not designed to provide knowledge about these entities. Two interesting varieties: 5A. Perspectival Realism (experience is a perspective on reality but not itself knowable), and 5B. Transcendent Realism (some natural reality forever escapes science).

6. Reality only consists of what science knows about. Only what can be known by science really exists. Two interesting varieties: 6A. Current Scientific Exclusivism(reality only consists of what current science knows now), and 6B. Scientific Exclusivism(reality only consists of what perfected science would know).”

http://www.naturalisms.org/science.htm

 

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