Atheism v Naturalism

Posted on September 5, 2020 by Dwight

A Pew Research Center option (“There is no God or higher power, other than the laws of nature/physics/mathematics”) made me realize that atheists with a natural worldview reject one additional false belief which unthoughtful atheists overlook.

There is a progression from rejecting the God of the Bible, to rejecting a higher power, to rejecting any element (or framework) that elevates human thought to a cosmic status—all are steps in rejecting supernaturalism. The natural human tendency to elevate mind above and before matter—this is what naturalism is all about ferreting out and eliminating.

Yes, you did good in rejecting God, but if you still elevate intelligence to the point of origin of the physical universe (in the form of laws of physics, or the universality of mathematics) then you have not so much rejected God as disguised him in a more palatable form, one which still preserves the ultimate importance of your mind.

The only step which truly eliminates supernatural thinking is the step of naturalism.

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Bill Nye, Ken Ham, and the Bible

Posted on September 5, 2020 by Dwight

[This is an old draft that I never completed. Oh well, here it is. As is.]

There was a recent debate on the scientific merits of Creationism between Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”) and Ken Ham (founder of Answers in Genesis), held at Ken Ham’s Creationist museum. Unlike many Intelligent Design advocates, Ken Ham actually insists on a young earth, approximately 6000 years old. He believes this because he considers the Christian Bible to be an infallible scientific textbook (among other things). He thinks the Bible infallible because he believes it came from God.

Bill Nye stressed that neither the Bible (nor Ken Ham) provide any hypotheses that can be scientifically tested. Indeed, Ham’s primary point seemed to be that scientists can only make inferences about the past based on what they see today—but since none of us were actually there, we cannot claim that the Biblical account is wrong. And since the Bible comes to us from God, creator of the world, it would be presumptuous to doubt its scientific bona fides.

Bill Nye clearly did not want to attack the Bible as God’s word. In this debate, Nye’s goal was to build a bridge to the religious population and to encourage them to embrace the scientific method. Nye only went as far as to point out that Ham was relying on an English translation of the Bible, and that Ham himself did not take everything written in the Bible as scientific text: therefore (according to Nye) Ham was picking and choosing his “scientific” passages based on his (Ham’s) personal biases.

Ham’s response was simply to wave the Bible in the air and say there’s a book that has all the answers. For his followers, that was enough.

But for scientists, it is not.

For scientists to take Ken Ham’s claim about the Bible seriously, they have to study the Bible not as religious but as scientific text. And as soon as anyone attempted to do so, Ham’s claim would begin to fall apart. I’ll quickly point out two reasons for this.

(1) The scientific information in the Bible is not useful. It is not testable, not consistent, and furthermore is simply too vague to be of any scientific use. (Nye’s point)

Or it is simply silly. The Genesis account of creation furnishes a good example. There we are told that God created darkness and light, night and day, prior to creating the sun. Apparently the author of Genesis did not understand where daylight came from.

(2) As soon as we take the Bible seriously, the claim that it comes from God falls apart.

A few random notes on this point. The Bible that is supposedly God’s unadulterated word, yet contains books which say Moses wrote them. Why don’t they say God wrote them? (Moses dies in one of the books he wrote, so perhaps God had to finish it.) Various Church councils were required in order to decided which books to include in the Bible (these were convened by humans, and God’s attendance was not recorded).

If God wrote the Bible, why are there conflicting flood stories—was it two of every beast and bird on the Ark, or were there six of some? Then the conflicting stories regarding the Ten Commandments, including the embarrassment that the only version which specifically uses the phrase “Ten Commandments” (or “ten words”) lists “thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk” as the tenth commandment. Many other inconsistencies and errors are scattered throughout the Bible.

Continue reading →

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When Biology Trumps Physics

Posted on September 5, 2020 by Dwight

[The following is a draft that I wrote a good decade ago, never completed. The title reveals that I had ambitious intentions for where my line of thought would go. But, being human, the 20th century morass of “information theory” and “representationalism” nonsense was too much, and I could never stay interested long enough (or stay focused enough) to cut through the complex silliness and complete the work. Here I present the draft as is, adding a final farewell line.]

“Know thyself” is good advice, even for today. Sometimes what you don’t know about yourself can lead to embarrassing mistakes, and I suspect that is the case for some physicists and philosophers who in the last few years have latched onto “information” as if it were a fundamental property of the universe along side matter and energy.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?colID=1&articleID=000AF072-4891-1F0A-97AE80A84189EEDF

Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told “matter and energy.” Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus. Likewise, a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.

Others have jumped on the information bandwagon, including David Chalmers, whose December 1995 article in Scientific American suggested,

Perhaps information, or at least some information, has two basic aspects: a physical one and an experiential one. This hypothesis has the status of a fundamental principle that might underlie the relation between physical processes and experience. Wherever we find conscious experience, it exists as one aspect of an information state, the other aspect of which is embedded in a physical process in the brain.

Chalmers goes on to enthuse,

The idea is at least compatible with several others, such as physicist John A. Wheeler’s suggestion that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. The laws of physics might ultimately be cast in informational terms…. It may even be that a theory of physics and a theory of consciousness could eventually be consolidated into a single grander theory of information.

Chalmers does admit a few roadblock, for example,

A potential problem is posed by the ubiquity of information. Even a thermostat embodies some information, for example, but is it conscious? There are at least two possible responses. First, we could constrain the fundamental laws so that only some information has an experiential aspect, perhaps depending on how it is physically processed. Second, we might bite the bullet and allow that all information has an experiential aspect—where there is complex information processing, there is complex experience, and where there is simple information processing, there is simple experience. If this is so, then even a thermostat might have experiences, although they would be much simpler than even a basic color experience, and there would certainly be no accompanying emotions or thoughts. This seems odd at first, but if experience is truly fundamental, we might expect it to be widespread.

How did we get here? One clue may be in the definition of information used by Chalmers. It is a definition that comes right out of the 1940s.

The abstract notion of information, as put forward in the 1940s by Claude E. Shannon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is that of a set of separate states with a basic structure of similarities and differences between them. We can think of a 10-bit binary code as an information state, for example. Such information states can be embodied in the physical world. This happens whenever they correspond to physical states (voltages, say) and when differences between them can be transmitted along some pathway, such as a telephone line.

Now, this is clearly not my definition of information, or anything close to it. For one thing, the way I define information precludes it from being “embodied in the physical world”. In the world I live in, thermostats neither contain nor manipulate information, and consequently the possibility of thermostat consciousness is inappropriate: a joke rather than a live possibility. But you see, I am not a philosopher.

Chalmers is careful with his definitions, typical of his profession. Consider, for example, how he defines consciousness:

Consciousness involves the instantiation of phenomenal properties. These properties characterize aspects of what it is like to be a subject (what it is like to be me right now, for example, or what it is like to be a bat), or what it is like to be in a mental state (what it is like to see a certain shade of green, for example, or what it is like to feel a certain sharp pain). Whenever there is something it is like to be a subject, that subject has specific phenomenal properties. Whenever there is something it is like to be in a mental state, that state has specific phenomenal properties.

I understand each of the word Chalmer uses. No problem following the grammar and sentence structure. I even have a very clear idea of exactly what each word ought to refer to. My problem is that I can’t make Chalmers words clearly fit anything in my world. Part of it, of course, is the ambiguity introduced by terms like “involves” and “characterize aspects”. There is evidently some relationship between consciousness and “phenomenal properties” —or at least their instantiation. And what is it that has these phenomenal properties? It is a subject. Or rather “something it is like to be a subject.” Or at least, “whenever there is something it is like to be a subject” then that subject has phenomenal properties.

Why the roundabout phraseology? Evidently Chalmers is trying to avoid some difficulty in his definition (if it is a definition—is it?). But the result is not only do I not know what difficulty he is trying to avoid, I also end up unsure what the words “subject”, “phenomenal” and “properties”—much less “consciousness”—refer to in Chalmers world. He did include a couple of examples, indicating that “subject” includes “me” and a “bat”. Does subject also include tree and rock, or is it limited in his lexicon to species with consciousness? And if the latter, what is the difference between subjects with their phenomenal properties and mental states and their phenomenal properties?

Intentionality, a favorite word of philosophers, is somehow closely related to consciousness, according to Chalmers. In discussing intentionality, he says, “As with phenomenal properties, we can regard representational properties as being instantiated by either subjects or by mental states.”

Oh my! There seem to be a lot of actors in Chalmers world.

Another quote, which helps explain representationalism:

I will take representationalism to be the thesis that phenomenal properties are identical to certain representational properties (or that they are equivalent to certain representational properties; see below). We can say that pure representationalism is the thesis that phenomenal properties are identical to pure representational properties, while impure representationalism is the thesis that phenomenal properties are identical to impure representational properties. In practice, almost all representationalists are impure representationalists, for reasons to be given shortly. Some representationalists, such as Dretske and Tye, occasionally put their view by saying that phenomenal properties are identical to certain represented external properties, such as physical redness. As I am putting things, that would be a category mistake: phenomenal properties are by definition properties of subjects or of mental states, and physical redness is not (or need not be). I think that this is simply a terminological difference, however. For example, Dretske defines phenomenal properties (“qualia”) as the properties we are directly aware of in perception, and concludes these are properties such as colors.

Which Chalmers finds compatible with his version. So there are phenomenal properties and there are representational (both pure and impure) properties, and these are identical to each other (or maybe only equivalent), and both types can be instantiated either by subjects or by mental states. Or at least by something that it is like to be a subject or that it is like to be a mental state.

Goodbye 20th century scientific supernaturalism! You make my head spin.

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Is Evolution a Fact?

Posted on July 1, 2020 by Dwight

It drives me crazy (not really, of course) when atheists (and lately even some scientists) assert that evolution is a “fact”.

Now, the word “fact” can have various (conflicting) meanings. For example there is a sense in which calling something a “scientific fact” simply means “most scientists agree” it’s true. In that sense I’m sure everyone would admit that evolution is a fact. But it’s a weak use of the word “fact”—and not at all the sort of thing most of us mean when we call something a fact.

Of course, if we examine “facts” closely enough we discover that they become less and less “factual” the more we look—but I won’t go into that here. I don’t want sound like what my younger daughter used to call “a crazy philosopher guy” who “gives people headaches” when she was a child. I’ll avoid casting too critical an eye on factuality and stick with the ordinary meaning of the word.

Facts are the evidence upon which inferences and hypotheses and theories are built. So in ordinary usage if you see a red apple on the table, that there is a red apple on the table is a fact. If someone then lays a table cloth over top the apple, so that now you only see an apple-sized lump under the table cloth where previously you saw the apple, it is now an inference rather than a fact that there is an apple on the table.

Is it a sound inference? Probably so—unless you are attending a magic show and the person who placed the cloth over the apple is a magician. Magicians, after all, make their living by tricking audiences into false inferences, or confusing inferences with facts.

Consider a simple magic trick. The magician sets a glass of water on the table, and then asks a member of the audience for a quarter. Magician holds the quarter up for all to see, then takes a handkerchief and drapes it over the quarter. With two fingers he holds the quarter up, hidden by the handkerchief, so that you can make out the circular shape of the quarter underneath. The magician even passes it to an audience member to hold (without peaking underneath the handkerchief, of course.) Finally the magician asks the audience member to hold the handkerchief and quarter over the glass of water and let go, so that the quarter should fall into the water (and the handkerchief drape over the glass). He then asks the volunteer to pull the handkerchief away and reveal the glass of water.

The quarter is gone! Disappeared. The magician even pours the water slowly out of the glass and dramatically holds the glass upside down—no quarter!

Where is the false inference? In this case, when the magician covered the quarter with the handkerchief, he swapped the quarter with a piece of glass the size and shape of a quarter. The glass may not weigh exactly the same as a quarter, but draped under the weight of the handkerchief, who can tell? When the quarter-sized glass is dropped into the water it is for all practical purposes invisible, especially to an audience expecting to see a real quarter. The surface tension of water makes the glass quarter cling to the bottom of the drinking glass even when it is held upside down.

All magic tricks rely on inducing the audience into mistaking inferences for facts. If you want to avoid being tricked, one thing you must do is become acutely aware whether you are inferring something or directly observing it. The apple on the table is a factual observation, but the apple-sized lump under the tablecloth is only an inference.

So, is the origin of species by evolution (whether by natural selection or otherwise) fact or inference? Do we see evolution happening the way one sees an apple on the table, or is species change not observed directly but rather based on a set of inferences? The answer, I think, is obvious.

All scientific theories are built on inferences from facts, and are therefore never factual themselves. They are always—oh, what is the word?—oh yes, now I remember—they are always theoretical rather than factual.

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Scepticism about Scientific Realism

Posted on December 7, 2019 by Dwight

What follows is in reference to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on scientific realism – http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

The article explains what scientific realism is (no easy task, given that the position has been formulated in numerous and diverse ways), and discusses various skeptical positions regarding it (dubbed collectively antirealism). And this brings up my first concern. As the article makes clear, “realism” is a term with two distinct meanings. In its first (and I would say primary) sense, it refers to the belief that there is a “mind-independent world”, and in this regard stands opposed to idealism. Very few philosophers today (including the majority who embrace the “antirealist” positions listed in the article) deny the existence of a mind-independent world. Nevertheless, it used to be a very common position to take – at the end of the 19th century idealism was dominant, both in the West as well as the East. Even today, outside of philosophic circles, forms of idealism are popular.

Furthermore, as we shall soon see, it is my viewpoint that the central problem with scientific realism is that it does not fully embrace the consequences of a mind-independent world. It infuses (one might say confuses) aspects of mind into the physical world in a manner more appropriate to idealism than to realism. All supernatural worldviews, in fact, have this same flaw simply as a consequence of postulating that the physical world is the product of intelligence. If we are truly going to embrace a mind-independent world, we must divorce intelligence and all its accroutrements from that world, and this is precisely what I maintain scientific realism fails sufficiently to do.

Let us then consider the second sense in which the philosophical term “realism” is applied. Here the term refers to the claim that our scientific theories and models provide true knowledge (or approximately true knowledge which science is continuously improving). The key word here is the term “true” and unfortunately (unless I missed it) the Stanford entry fails to define that word (though there is a reference to the correspondence theory of truth). I take it that scientific realism embraces the notion that “true” knowledge is a revelation about the actual nature of the mind-independent world. The term antirealism is applied to all positions which deny this possibility.

Thus antirealism has two contradictory meanings: (1) the denial of a mind-independent world; (2) the affirmation of a mind-independent world but skepticism about our ability to truly know its nature. As mentioned earlier, some of us who embrace this second position go further: our skepticism of acquiring true knowledge about the mind-independent world is a direct consequence of insisting on the mind-independence of that world. Because we think the physical world is fully mind-independent, it follows that knowledge can at best be a simulation (a simulacrum, in fact) tested by usefulness (i.e. the scientific method) and can reveal nothing inherently true about that world. We deny that the mind-independent world has a describable nature, for to assume otherwise would be to infuse mind into what is supposed to be mind-independent.

To call this antirealist simply creates confusion. It is to call antirealist a position which maintains that scientific realism is not adequately realist and aims to correct that.

Realism has become a philosophical term with too many meanings. From the article:

Traditionally, realism more generally is associated with any position that endorses belief in the reality of something. Thus, one might be a realist about one’s perceptions of tables and chairs (sense datum realism), or about tables and chairs themselves (external world realism), or about mathematical entities such as numbers and sets (mathematical realism), and so on. Scientific realism is a realism about whatever is described by our best scientific theories—from this point on, ‘realism’ here denotes scientific realism. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/  (captured June 22, 2014)

 Notice that none of the “realisms” listed include our first sense of realism, the existence of a mind-independent world, and this includes the example of “external world realism.” For to identify objects as tables and chairs is to define their “realism” (or their nature) by their meaning as objects, and that is not mind-independent. This is not clearly stated, but perhaps I can make it so. What makes an object a chair? Is it the fact that someone has sat on it? No, because we recognize chairs as chairs whether they’ve ever been sat on or not. (Beyond that, even large rocks and tree stumps can be chairs). A chair, like a table, is thus a conceptual object rather than merely a physical something or other. It would not exist as a chair if no species capable of sitting had evolved into existence and conceived of it as such an object. Although there are indeed real physical somethings or others which humans and other species can sit on, and we can fashion objects into shape specifically for sitting, these only become chair objects when we imagine them as objects that one can sit upon. This demonstrates the care that must be taken not to infuse concepts (or conceptual objects) into the mind-independent world.

By its nature, knowledge is necessarily infused with concepts and conceptual objects (such as the chairs and tables above). If there is a world that is truly mind-independent then we must take pains not to attribute such knowledge to that world’s nature. Instead, all knowledge must be placed on the “mind” side of the ledger rather than on the “mind-independent” side. Once we make this move, it becomes obvious that knowledge is not something “discovered” in the mind-independent world, but something invented by minds to be “about” the mind-independent world. Why would minds bother to invent knowledge about a world that lacks any inherent knowledge? Because those minds are actually produced by physical organisms that are themselves mind-independent and exist within the surrounding mind-independent world, and because creating a knowledge simulacrum of that surrounding world turned out to be useful for their survival and successful reproduction. Organisms which evolved a useful knowledge simulacrum have become populous (at least on Earth) because of this usefulness.

We are not warranted to say anything more than that knowledge has degrees of usefulness. When we declare a theory or model of the world “true” what we are really doing is declaring that it is more useful than any competing theories or models that we have so far invented. The method of science has been to make usefulness as observer-independent as possible (Victor Stenger calls this “point-of-view invariance”), and this has allowed us to sail far beyond the sensual simulacrum of a world created by our brains (the world we naively think we “observe”). But I don’t think this new-found capacity to generate models of “invisibles” (as the article terms it) through the use of extensive instrumentation and the application of point-of-view invariance fundamentally alters the nature of knowledge. It does not shift concepts to the mind-independent side of the ledger or result in models which are true representations of that mind-independent world.

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Framing Free Will

Posted on June 23, 2018 by Dwight

When interactions occur between theists and atheists, our disparate frames of mind often cause confusion and misunderstanding. Behind these conflicting mindsets lie two incompatible worldviews: supernaturalism and naturalism. Understand these frameworks, and you will have a key to understanding our intellectual disconnects.

At the core lies a fundamental disagreement about the relationship between mind and matter. Someone with a natural worldview places the physical universe primary and posits that consciousness or mind arrived on the scene at a later time, once the first organisms with brains evolved into existence. Not so for someone with a supernatural worldview; for them mind/intelligence/consciousness is primary, and the primal intelligence (God) created the physical universe. For the latter, mental phenomenon can exist independent of matter; for the former, mental phenomenon is produced by and dependent upon organisms in the physical world.

This fundamental disagreement is important to keep in mind when it comes to how we understand ourselves. Are we bodies that evolved to experience consciousness and thought (as someone with a natural worldview sees it), or are we souls temporarily inhabiting those bodies (as someone with a supernatural worldview believes)?

Free Will Is a Myth Because Our Neurons Control Us

For an example of how this difference in overall framework is key to understanding our intellectual disconnects, consider the debate about free will. For convenience, I’ll focus on a 2016 article in The Atlantic, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will – But we’re better off believing in it anyway” by Steve Cave. I will point out confusions which result from not taking worldviews (and their assertions about the relationship between mind and matter) into account.

The title of Cave’s article handily summarizes his argument, but let’s examine a few of his underlying points. He begins by noting the “agreement in the scientific community that the firings of neurons determine not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, dreams,” and concludes that our choices are not free but “determined” by those neurons. The argument appears straightforward and sound. But is it? Let’s step back and ask a framing question: what does the word “our” refer to in the phrase “our choices are not free”? Or to put it another way, why does Cave assume that neurons in our body are not also us?

He makes this assumption because, like most people, he is saddled with a two thousand year old concept of the self—one picked up from the supernatural framework: we are our minds, or more broadly we are “thoughts, hopes, memories, dreams” which make up our conscious experiences. Herein lies the central flaw of Cave’s article. He is trying to cling to a supernatural concept of the self in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that it’s not tenable.

The supernatural “I” must be something that can be split off from the body and exist (at least temporarily) bodilessly. This separability is required for belief in afterlife, since we see bodies rot in the ground. It is also required for the concept of God, who is defined as a kind of bodiless consciousness. Yet the message of modern neuroscience is that this can’t be: consciousness is a product of neurons, and neither the dead nor the divine have neurons. We see this again when Cave discusses Benjamin Libet’s experiments in the 1980’s which demonstrated that “conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.”

The conclusion I draw from Libet’s work is that “we” are not equal to our conscious will or conscious thoughts; rather “we” encompass our brains in addition to the thoughts those brains produce in us. Put another way, we are not souls encapsulated in bodies, we are those bodies. Yet Cave never abandons the supernatural framing of “we.” His framing leads him to the conclusion that “we” (those encapsulated souls) aren’t freely choosing our actions at all. Whereas a common sense framing based on a natural worldview would redefine “we” as “bodies with sensations,” not as “souls separable from bodies.”

If our neurons are controlling our sensations—so what? Our neurons as well as our sensations are part of “us,” and conceptually cannot impinge upon “our” freedom to act. Only when we cling to the supernatural premise that “we” are souls does a problem arise. For with supernatural framing, our bodies and neurons are something outside us, yet something neurobiology claims controls our actions. This leads to cognitive dissonance which can only be resolved by rejecting the claims of neurobiology or else switching to a natural frame.

We Lack Free Will Because We Are Predictable

We saw that adhering to supernatural framing of human identity results in “the problem of free will”; next we’ll see that supernatural framing regarding the relationship between physical existence and conscious knowledge is also problematic. Cave argues that because neuroscience “describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat,” it follows from this that “[i]n principle, we are therefore completely predictable.” This, he argues, shows that our choices are determined—that the physical world around us, including our genetic heritage, our evolutionary past, controls our behavior and makes it scientifically predictable—therefore we are not free. The syllogism here appears to be:

1. Our choices are predictable

2. Therefore they are determined

3. Therefore they are not real choices

It should be noted that this argument is not dependent upon defining ourselves as souls encapsulated in bodies. So long as there is a world outside of us (no matter how expansively we define “us”), if our choices in that world are predictable then they are determined by the world outside us.

But is it true that the predictability of our decisions entails that we are not actually making decisions? Within a supernatural frame, God’s foreknowledge of the world and its future implies that we can never make choices contrary to God’s expectations. If we could “surprise” God, it would throw into question his infallibility as well as his perfect knowledge of the world he created. Cave seems to believe that a similar concern applies to scientific knowledge. Admittedly, our scientific understanding of the world today is imperfect, but since perfect and complete scientific knowledge is possible it must follow that such perfect knowledge underlies existence (even though scientists have not got there yet). Just as God has perfect knowledge of the world he created, Cave’s reasoning is that there must be perfect scientific knowledge of the world, which scientists aspire to obtain, and that perfect knowledge entails an absolute determinism (like God’s foreknowledge) of physical events from which our actions cannot escape.

The parallel implications of determinism, rearing up in the context of God’s foreknowledge and in the context of perfect scientific knowledge, clue us in that we are stuck on a supernatural frame. When we step back and peer underneath the frame, we discover the unstated assumption that scientific descriptions and explanations are discoveries of some underlying intelligent causation that determines everything which happens in the physical world. Causation has to be seen as prescriptive for this to be the case, and in a supernatural world where mind is the ultimate cause, it is de facto prescriptive.

But prescriptive causation belongs to a supernatural worldview, not to a natural one. Within a natural frame, causal explanations are mental—they can only exist in consciousness—and therefore must be the product of brains. Given that naturalism posits the existence of a physical world prior to the existence of brains or minds, in a natural frame causation is necessarily always descriptive. It is part and parcel our scientific understanding of the world around us, which we create so that we may successfully predict events, and control them.

If you adopt a naturalistic worldview, the only things that can be deterministic are our explanations. The term cannot coherently be applied to physical reality—that reality doesn’t contain within itself inherent descriptions, explanations, or causes—not, at least, if we adopt a naturalistic frame. But it follows from this that our explanations of the world can never be perfect and infallible; those explanations are necessarily empirical and therefore falsifiable. In short, it requires a supernatural worldview to raise the scary flag of determinism. Once again, we see Cave tripped up by his framing fallacy.

Now, one might argue that it’s not a fallacy, rather just framing that some of us don’t like. But it is a fallacy in the sense of leading to an incoherent worldview and logical confusion. You can’t successfully fuse concepts which are logical companions of “mind before matter” with concepts that are logical companions of “matter before mind.” To wit, if prescriptive causation is embedded in the very nature of physical existence, how did it get there? Who or what “prescribed” it? What created those mathematical and logical connections at the moment of creating physical reality? Such presumptions are unavoidably supernatural (mind before matter). They do not fit with naturalism. They are not compatible with a “matter before mind” reality.

But We’re Better Off Believing in Free Will Anyway

The final part of Cave’s premise in his Atlantic article, is that even though there is no free will, humans are better off believing in it anyway. Specifically, he argues that there is scientific evidence that humans need to have a false belief in free will, or else will there will be disastrous consequences. “If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we be become morally irresponsible?” he asks. “And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all these institutions based on it?”

Cave refers to two scientific studies by Kathleen D. Vohs which show that when told that free will is a delusion, or that their actions are pre-determined, people are more likely to do dishonest things. But perhaps this only reveals what we already know about how most people frame human agency. As far as I can determine, Vohs’ studies do not attempt to find out the worldview or framing used by participants. This is a crucial point, since with natural framing the neurons which “determine” our behavior are also “us”; therefore agency still belongs with “us.” It is only the mistaken effort to mix supernatural framing with the science of neurobiology that leads to the feeling that we lack agency and therefore responsibility for our actions.

Easy solution: don’t make that mistake. This is because the determinism that Cave refers to is the increasingly strong biological evidence that our “thoughts, hopes, dreams” are produced by our neurons. The only way this denies us agency is if we define our neurons as “not us”. And that is an obvious framing fallacy.

Cave’s conclusion: “Believing in free will as an illusion has been found to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, less grateful toward one another.” If the research behind this is valid, then it would follow that atheists as a group should be less creative, more likely to conform, unwilling to learn from their mistakes, and so on. Based on my interactions with non-believers, I would say this is not the case. And though some atheists may cling to supernatural framing—most do not.

Nevertheless, Cave presses on with this dubious thesis. He quotes Saul Smilanski who “advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend: the idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower.” This is because “[w]e cannot afford for people to internalize the truth,” says Smilansky.

“Promoting determinism,” Cave concludes, “is complacent and dangerous.”

Cave admits that not everyone agrees—and mentions Sam Harris. “From [Harris’] vantagepoint, the moral implications of determinism look very different, and quite a lot better,” Cave admits. “What’s more, Harris suggests as ordinary people come to better understand how their brains work, many of the problems documented by Vohs and others will dissipate. Determinism, he writes in his book, does not mean ‘that conscious awareness and deliberative thinking serve no purpose.’” Cave, goes on to explain that “[t]he big problem, in Harris’ view, is that people often confuse determinism with fatalism…. When people hear there is no free will, they wrongly become fatalistic; they think their efforts will make no difference.”

Although Harris is clearly looking at the subject from a naturalistic perspective, Cave does not seem to pick up on the importance of that perspective. We see this even more clearly when he discusses another scientist who takes a naturalistic frame—Bruce Walker.

“Walker,” Cave writes, “believes his account fits with a scientific understanding of how we evolved: Foraging animals—humans, but also mice, or bears, or crows—need to be able to generate options for themselves and make decisions in a complex and changing environment. Humans, with our massive brains, are much better at thinking up and weighing options than other animals are. Our range of options is much wider, and we are, in a meaningful way, freer as a result.” Cave admits that “Walker’s definition of free will is in keeping with how a lot of ordinary people see it….following their desires, free of coercion…”

But Cave does not recognize that Walker has re-framed the definition of “we”—that in Walker’s reframing we are bodies with consciousness and that it is as those bodies that we are free, even if our consciousness itself is a lapdog to the neurons in our brains. When “we” are framed as consciousness (“will”) , the problem of our freedom becomes acute in the face of what we are learning from modern neuroscience. But expand “we” to include all of what we are—bodies with integrated consciousness, and our neurons will no longer get framed as “outsiders” dictating our thoughts and behaviors, but as another aspect of ourselves.

In the end, Cave can’t break free of supernatural framing. He dismisses Walker’s reframing as “an attempt to retain the best parts of the free-will belief system while ditching the worst.” Cave never recognizes that free will as a concept only fits into a supernatural framework. Walker and Harris, atheists and humanists in general, have switched to a different frame—one based on natural rather than on supernatural definitions and categories. Free will can’t fit into the new framework because it is premised on the concept of a conscious will independent of the body. In the new frame, we are those bodies.

Conclusion

Unfortunately for theists, supernaturalism is a framework chained to a definition of self which is incompatible with modern neuroscience. Its advocates must define “self” as an aspect of consciousness separate from the body, for otherwise the concept of afterlife becomes incoherent. After all, afterlife requires our “soul” or essential self to leave the body at death. Even if this self is reunited with a new or idealized body in afterlife, it must be separable in the first place in order to escape death of the earthly body. This commitment extends to the concept of deity itself—God (even when idealized as mind or intelligence or compassion) is necessarily bodiless.

What neuroscience reveals is that this essential premise of supernaturalism does not fit the evidence. Rather than discovering that the physical world is a product of God or of some disembodied mind or intelligence, scientists have uncovered something quite different: mind, intelligence, consciousness, thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams—these are the products of bodies, produced by neurons within physical organisms. Supernaturalism, the evidence indicates, has got the basic framework of existence backward.

The free will studies by Vohs and others, which so trouble Smilansky and Cave, demonstrate the importance of converting society to a natural worldview. If we don’t abandon the old framing that defines us as a soul trapped in a body, then exposure to the facts of neurobiology could indeed lead to immorality. This is the prospect which alarms Christian apologists, who seem incapable of imagining that something other than a supernatural frame is possible. For them, atheism is little more than a supernatural heresy undermining everything valuable.

Recognize, however, that we are body beings—not soul beings, not consciousness inhabiting bodies and capable of separation at death—and the problems which Cave, Smilansky, Christian apologists and others worry about dissipate into nothing. It only makes sense that attempting to combine supernatural premises with natural reality leads to incoherence.

There is an easy solution: don’t do that.

[Note: since publication this morning, I made minor updates for clarity.]

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The Basics

Posted on April 22, 2016 by Dwight

For thousands of years philosophers have gotten the science of our existence wrong. They have mistakenly assumed that we know or perceive the world around us; we do not, we cannot. They have believed that our sense perceptions are direct (or indirect) perceptions of the existence outside us; they are not, they cannot be.

Instead we are organisms that bump into the world—and the world bumps into us. For many of these bumps our bodies send electro-chemical signals to its brain. These electro-chemical signals are not sensations, they are not experienced. From them the brain selectively (usually but not necessarily) creates sensations which we call sense perceptions, but which in fact are simulacra—experiences created by the brain to stand in for the world around us (and in some cases stand in for our own bodies).

In some vertebrates, and certainly in mammals, the brain creates a visual simulacrum with which all other simulacra are more or less correlated or integrated. This integration creates the experience of a world around us. However, it is not the world around us: it is an assembled, (more or less) integrated simulacrum of the world around us.

We do not perceive and we do not know the world, we experience and know this simulacrum, created by the brain, which stands in for and represents the world.

The ability to create simulacra from bumps with the surrounding world is something that has evolved as organisms have evolved. This includes the evolution of simulacra which do not stand in for the outside world, but rather represent the organism’s aims or state of being in the form of urges, feelings, or emotions. These aid decision-making in a complex world.

In some species, simulacra have evolved which simulate the brain’s other simulacra; these are sensations which we experience as meanings, and which form the basis of language and cognition in humans (and perhaps in other mammals). In humans, the brain attempts to integrate these sensations of meaning into simulacra of knowledge, overall models which we can experience as understandings of the world and of ourselves.

Because we are continually bumping into the world, we are constantly in position to test these understandings of the world for reliability. In general—despite unfortunate exceptions—we strive to develop knowledge-simulacra which provide adequate (if not maximal) reliability regarding our interactions with the world and other organisms. More recently, the human pursuit of science involves using careful observation and deliberate experimentation to create models which have what Victor Stenger called point-of-view invariance. This scientific process has turned out to be extremely useful to human beings.

I have laid out a bit of the basic science of our existence. We need to understand these basics before we can build a coherent philosophical model which fits the world and our existence within it.

 

4-22-2016 > this was edited for clarity since its initial posting

Posted in Atheology, Evolution & ID, Meaning & Value, Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Simulacrum | 3 Comments

Naturalism and Knowledge

Posted on May 20, 2014 by Dwight

We are living at the crossroads between supernaturalism and naturalism: the world is gradually abandoning the first for the second. Conservative Christians like to say there is a culture war going on, and there is. But it has more than one focal point. Religious vs secular, Islam vs the West, even believers vs non-believers are minor conflicts in comparison to the major focus: supernatural vs natural worldview.

We all have a secular side, even the most religious among us. Separation of state and church is about creating public space for this secular side of us. This benefits not just atheists but theists as well. In fact, the need for secular space is the direct result of religious diversity. (The absence of such space corresponds with religious monopoly. No surprise then that the West is better at making public space for the secular aspects of our life than are most Islamic countries.) So long as there are a variety of healthy but diverse religions practiced in a population, there will be a strong need for separation of church and state.

Although separation of religious power from government power is an essential battle, it is not specifically a battle fought between the religious and the non-religious. It is instead about preventing the monopoly of a particular religion’s viewpoint being imposed through the power of government. Although an important issue, this is one that is political (a matter of basic freedom) rather than one that is strictly cultural (a matter of worldview).

It becomes cultural as well as political, however, when the majoritarian religion which attempts to dominate government embraces theocracy. All too common in Islamic nations, theocracy has its adherents in the United States as well. For example,

Cover of "Visions of Reality: What Fundam...

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So let us be blunt: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberties of the enemies of God.
—Gary North, quoted in quoted in Albert J. Menendez, Visions of Reality: What Fundamentalist Schools Teach (Prometheus Books, 1993)

The best method of forestalling theocracy is through the expansion of religious diversity. The goal must be to reduce the dominant sect to minority status. This would not be necessary in the United States if the Supreme Court consistently embraced the principle of separation of church and state. But it does not, and so the doctrines of Christianity necessarily become politicized, and appropriate targets for those who love religious freedom. Christianity will have enemies so long as Christians take advantage of government to impress their religious practices on all.

But the key cultural transformation of the age lies elsewhere: educated people around the world are converting from a supernatural worldview to a natural one. The former is inherently monotheist/polytheist/deist; the latter inherently atheist/adeist. Freethinkers tend to gravitate toward atheism or agnosticism because they see the crevasses in the various supernatural worldviews popular today. But I would assert that atheism doesn’t really work in a vacuum: it requires, or at least belongs to, a naturalistic framework.

Atheists, in other words, should not only be saying that supernaturalism is false; they should also be asserting the logical corollary: naturalism is true. I find modern atheism frustrating sometimes because many atheists seem to back away from this obvious step. They are eager to declare that theism doesn’t work, but strangely afraid to step beyond that.

What does embracing a natural worldview mean? It means more than merely saying there is insufficient evidence of a God. If atheism stops dead in its tracks there, at “insufficient evidence,” then it amounts to nothing more than doubt about some forms of supernaturalism. Like Galileo backtracking out of fear, it is equivalent to admitting “naturalism is where the evidence points, but I’m afraid to go there: let me play safe and just say there is insufficient evidence for God.”

In stopping early, atheists leave the underlying premises of supernaturalism intact and often uncontested. I must admit that doesn’t sit well with me. I became an atheist not because the evidence for theism was insufficient, but rather because I saw that the underlying premises of supernaturalism had to be false and, in complementary fashion, that the underlying premises of naturalism were sustainable and even compelling. “Supernaturalism must be false, naturalism is sustainable, therefore there is no God.”  Compare that to “There is no evidence for God or gods, therefore supernaturalism is unsupported.”

It is time for atheists to move fully to the other side of the divide between the worldviews. Too many atheists and agnostics (so it seems to me) still have a foot on the supernatural side. They hang balanced between irreconcilable worldviews for no reason at all. Except this: their misunderstanding of the underlying incompatibility of the two worldviews. Rejecting one ought to go part and parcel with embracing the other.

Perhaps the fundamental difference between them concerns the place and role of intelligence and its accoutrements. Supernaturalism places intelligence beyond the brain; naturalism places it within. Supernaturalism sees knowledge as something basic which underlays God’s creation like a blueprint: information is out there in the world, waiting to be discovered by us. Naturalism, in contrast, sees knowledge (and information) as something we create on the inside (within human consciousness) and apply to the world around us to our benefit.

For the theist, then, knowledge is something present from the beginning of the world which our minds can pluck like an apple from the tree of existence. For the atheist, knowledge is a faculty which came into existence only after millions of years of natural selection: not an apple to be plucked from the world, but an inborn capability of our species most beneficial to pursue.

Mull that distinction if you want to understand why theists and atheists so often talk past each other.

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Posted in Christianity, Naturalism, State & Church, Supernaturalism | 2 Comments

Secular Solemnizing Statement

Posted on May 10, 2014 by Dwight

Atheists don’t do invocations or prayers. We recite no magic words, beseech no deities, invoke no figments of imagination for public worship. But this doesn’t mean that atheists are incapable of language of the sort appropriate (according to SCOTUS) to solemnize a session of federal, state or local government.

Without such solemnizing language to evoke our most cherished illusions—apparently—government might fall apart. So say the Christians who have controlled such solemnizing for the past 200 years, though one might suspect they are more concerned with creating a public aura of authority for their particular religious practices than abetting democracy.

So in the spirit of providing a secular alternative to religious invocations and prayers, I submit the following for use at government functions.

Life, wrapped on each end by oblivion, is all we have.

Pale Blue Dot

There is nothing else. Let us therefore not drop our heads, but raise them and look at the world bravely and honestly.

As Carl Sagan wrote in his wonderful book, Pale Blue Dot…

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

In the vastness of the universe, earth is small and insignificant and temporary. Sagan continued…

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

So it is. Life is a bright and wonderful season between walls of enveloping darkness. For one transient moment we have our day.

Like sparklers we transit the darkness, flashing into the bright rich colors of this brief day.

We each travel our short distance lit with the quiet insouciance of life, between vast walls of oblivion.

In this brief moment exists all our hopes and dreams, our pleasures and pains, our joys, our sadness, our love for one another.

In this brief and transient sparkle across the darkness, we have our all.

We live, and then we pass the brightness on to others before our own extinction in the dark.

On this fragile blue­-green planet. Alone in the vastness of the universe. Alone with each other amid the ever­stretching darkness.

But what brightness it is, this bit of life on earth! What sparkle and color and brilliance we have for our brief day! To share this with each other, to live it and joy in it together!

So we gather as members of this brief community of life, working together as we must.

Let us endeavor, collectively and cooperatively, to do our very best to preserve and improve the brightness of this transitory bit of existence. By our communal effort, let us enhance life on this small, pale blue dot we call home.

We have each other. There is nothing else.

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An Aura of Ownership

Posted on May 6, 2014 by Dwight

The purpose of solemnizing prayer before a legislative session is to create an aura of ownership over the proceedings which follow. Five Catholics on the Supreme Court find that permissible.

Although bringing church to work feels wholly comfortable to the Catholic conservatives on the court, no large corporation in the US would countenance invocations or prayers before business meetings: the inappropriateness would be more than obvious. It might even be seen as religious harassment, something the justices can’t imagine so long as the prayers occur in a government venue rather than a corporate one.

The court has made it clear that our Constitution is no barrier to the sense of ownership Christians love to assert over government meetings. From the beginning Christians have taken advantage of their majority status to push their particular religious practices (such as prayer or invocations to the Lord) into sessions of government at federal, state, and local levels. James Madison understood how pernicious such infringements can be. After issuing a proclamation for a national day of prayer during the war of 1812 (a war during which the British burned the white house), Madison came to regret it for “seem[ing] to imply and certainly nourish the erroneous idea of a national religion.”

But the Catholic court has decided otherwise, and if we are to dislodge this sense of Christian ownership over our government, we must attack Christianity at it weakest point. What is this weakness? It is the barbaric morality and pagan doctrines that hang round its neck like rotting flesh. This 1900 year old religion is an ancient carcass preventing Americans from moving forward and taking care of human needs in the modern world. We will make that plain. Held back by the rot of their religion, many Christians have embraced torture, prejudice, and ignorance—a fact captured repeatedly in polls.

If we are to turn American government around, we must reduce Christianity to minority status. We must ridicule and attack and expose it. We must force believers to see their religion from the outside, and face its fundamental flaws and absurdities.

The Catholics on the court have left no other way open to us. They have enshrined a political role for their religion, and in doing so have made Christianity fair game.

Posted in Christianity, Christinsanity, Religion, State & Church | Comments Off on An Aura of Ownership