Just take this and you’ll feel better…
by metacognizant
I came across an atheistic blog recently that linked to an article that explained, biologically, how the placebo effect worked. However, while we can show that the placebo effect has biological effects–and it most certainly should, its statistical effect is huge–that does absolutely nothing to show why it works if naturalism is true. I don’t think the blogger grasped this.
I think part of the reason that the placebo effect doesn’t get more publicity from dualists is the variety of misconceptions about it, specifically about how well it works. I want to publicize it here with a short entry. On naturalism, consciousness is usually held to be a semantic epiphenomenon. For those who haven’t head that term before, it basically means consciousness is an experience that arises from our brains that has little actual relation to the structures that give rise to it; it’s somewhat of a hologram. On this view, the mind has no actual control over the body. Any control that we feel we have is due to our left hemisphere, which rationalizes the world in a not-necessarily-true way in order to keep us sane. This is reinforced by the idea that we are entirely matter, and matter is necessarily bound to deterministic physical laws (this doesn’t include quantum mechanics, but as soon as you’re above the subatomic level, everything operates in a deterministic fashion. Since the brain is not a subatomic particle, all of the atoms inside of it operate according to their predetermined laws).
So why, on naturalism, does the placebo effect work? And work so well, at that? There is no chemical in those placebo pills working on specific neurotransmitter systems to promote pain relief, cure depression, and even help something like Parkinson’s disease. If consciousness is based upon matter, by definition, it’s deterministic. So believing something will help won’t change the fact that there is no chemical affecting any physical system in your body. The placebo effect, in my opinion, is one of the strongest confirmations of dualism.
Thoughts?
Some guy who thinks about thinking. 
>So why, on naturalism, does the placebo effect work? And work so well, at that? There is no chemical in those placebo pills working on specific neurotransmitter systems to promote pain relief, cure depression, and even help something like Parkinson’s disease.
There are at least two reasons why it would work. One is that it doesn’t, but that your mood, attention, stress level and so on are affected. What this means is the neurons signaling pain are firing just as fast but your thalamus is focusing on them less because you’re in a comfortable, happier place where you are being looked after etc.., All of the body’s sensory information passes through the thalamus for the apparent purpose of executive attention management. This is why when you walk into a loud room your ears almost hurt but not as much a minute later because the tiny muscles in your ears attenuate the noise by dampening the ossicles. Your brain constantly adjusts what each and every sense you have is focused on or not. Your environment and situation feed that adjustment.
>If consciousness is based upon matter, by definition, it’s deterministic. So believing something will help won’t change the fact that there is no chemical affecting any physical system in your body.
The thing you call “believing” though is in fact a physical process as well, it is also a result of information processing done by neurons not some detached bit of magic. So when you say believing will not affect the physical systems of your body, you are failing to grasp that believing is a physical process. We may not have a complete understanding of how it is done but we do know things without neurons are also things that do not have beliefs.
Now I’m not sure the blog you mention discussed this in detail but the placebo effect involves the activation of the descending pain pathway that inhibits pain nerves at their respective dorsal root. This happens regularly in lots of situations.. when something has scared you and you run away you don’t notice getting a small cut on your hand. The reason is obvious, your brain is designed to ignore non-critical information in favor of critical information. This is just one example. The placebo effect is proof of the exquisite engineering of the brain. Most of the parts of your brain get inputs from more than one source, either serially or in parallel. Oddly enough even your sense of touch takes some cues from visual information which is why mirrors can confuse our tactile senses. In the case of a sugar pill your sensory system is harvesting useful information from the prefrontal cortex. Why should this be a surprise? It’s the abstract *belief* there is a fire in your house that pushes your adrenal gland button not a stimuli itself (a bonfire wouldn’t scare, nor would a convincing special effect if you were on the set of a play). Our abstract beliefs constantly impact the release of hormones & neurotransmitters.
Hey, thanks for the reply. I guess I haven’t been explicit about my knowledge in my past blogs. I’m planning to do doctoral work in neuropsychology, and I’ve been preparing by reading up in the field and its relatives for years. I’m pretty knowledgeable in the brain sciences–and most likely only this field :P–because of this. In the future, then, don’t worry about elaborating on simple anatomical, physiological, or psychological results of neurological processes; it’s irrelevant, and not typing it up will save you some time.
With that said, it seems that you hold to a different view of consciousness’ arising given naturalism than I do. What I’ve come to believe is the most sensible explanation of consciousness, given naturalism, is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon. This conclusion is also the consensus of all naturalistic neuroscientists that I’ve read. For a brief rundown, the most plausible cause of consciousness is that it arises from active neural circuits (most likely, a large base of these circuits exists in the left frontal lobe), rather than individual neurons (see: Kolb & Whishaw, 2003). This means that consciousness is a result of, rather than a contributor to, neural activity. Therefore, any qualia we experience is somewhat of a hologram, and any sense of control we feel is illusory–our left hemisphere creates rational explanations actions actually out of any “control” we feel we possess.
Surprisingly, this view of consciousness is backed up by research on those who have undergone a corpus callosotomy. What researchers have found is that patients who have undergone this procedure exhibit some interesting features regarding free will. In certain careful experiments, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has shown that those who have had a corpus callosotomy make wholly irrational choices based upon the information fed into their conscious hemisphere (their left) and into their subconscious/unconscious hemisphere (their right), and yet they attempt to explain their choices as if it were the most obvious and sensible choices that could be made. For example, patient Joe chose a tower instead of a tuba when he was told to point with his left hand (right hemisphere) to the musical object that he was just shown. When asked why he chose a tower, he said–or rationalized his choice, and keep in mind that all language and consciousness in almost all split-brain patients comes from the left hemisphere–that he chose a tower because he had recently heard bells, and he figured that tower looked like a bell tower. Over and over again, Joe chose the irrational choice, but explained his decision in roundabout ways that did make sense. The conclusion of the researcher was that in all action that we take, our willpower is illusory; our left hemisphere’s creating consciousness creates a feeling of control in order to keep us sane. If you want to watch this study, and see the true force it presents (rather than my horrid summary), watch Brain Story: The Final Mystery, part 9, by BBC. This conclusion is also reached by V. S. Ramachandran in his book, Phantoms in the Brain based upon wholly different evidences.
Now, I don’t have time in this response to explain why these results do not affect free will given dualism. Suffice it to say that on the standard naturalistic view of consciousness, based in part upon what I described above, our thoughts do not have any actual bearing on our physical processes. Again, it seems that you take to a different view of consciousness given naturalism that I do. Would you give an explanation of how you view consciousness arises?
Well, you’re assuming a psychological view of emotion that, to my knowledge, is not the accepted standard in neuroscience. If, as I have described, our beliefs have no impact on our physical processes–instead, we only feel that we impact them–, and what is natural is all that exists, then holding to our a priori assumption that our beliefs do, in fact, influence our neurophysiological mechanisms is unwarranted.
As I have explained, our beliefs–on my view–are somewhat detached from our neurons (our beliefs are in the domain of a semantic relationship to our syntatical neurons; that is, they’re an epiphenomenon), given the current stance of neuroscience. They are not independent of our neurons, given naturalism, but it is sensible to speak of qualia as distinct (if only for ease of language) from the motion of physical entities. If I have confused you, it’s probably because I started with this presupposition, and you have my apologies. If it’s for something I’m not picking up on (I’m exhausted, haha), then please elaborate.
Again, this is a view of emotion with roots in psychology, but to my knowledge it is not well-received in contemporary neuroscience. There are three prominent views of emotion (or abstract beliefs, as you say), and two of these are much more consistent with contemporary neuroscience than the one that you’re advocating. Briefly, there’s the view that a stimulus creates an abstract thought as well as a physiological response simultaneously (and thus, our physical composition reacts in the way it must–given that physical entities must follow physical laws–and our sense of control is, again, illusory), and the view that a stimulus creates a physiological response first, and an abstract thought follows–it follows precisely to create a coherent qualia given your physiological response.
Again, on the view of consciousness that I’ve seen advocated by most neuroscientists, a physical process must take place in order to have any affect on our physical composition–the control of abstract beliefs over the physical simply isn’t real. Thus, on this view, with no matter affecting any receptors, there is no cogent explanation that can be given for the placebo effect. You’ll probably want citations for a few things I’ve said. Feel free to ask. It’s late here and I don’t have my books with me at the moment. Thanks for the reply :).
Ah you’re an expert of sorts. Great! This’ll be fun. I’m just a psych student without deep knowledge of neuropsych but a good working general knowledge of psychology and anat/phys. I do not subscribe to the consciousness as an epiphenomenon as this includes the necessary premise there is something called the “mental” world existing apart from the material one. This strikes me as magical thinking as a plea to ignorance (specifically consciousness is weird and inexplicable, therefore magic). Like you I take it as a given that experiential consciousness arises from active neural circuits. I would even agree that it is the output such activity with no real inputs but I would not then draw the conclusion there is no control or that control is an illusion. The problem is that the word illusion has no ordinary meaning once you are talking about the subsystems of a thing which as a whole might fall prey to an illusion. It is as if you’re assuming there is a unitary homunculous somewhere in there doing “choice” and when you find components each contributing to but not in-and-of-themselves controling behavior then each is fooled by an elaborate illusion. There is no illusion because the part of me that causes limbs to move in response to an environmental condition.. is still part of me. It’s as much me as any other part, thus it is in fact still “me” doing the control.
I’m familiar with the cases of individuals in which the corpos callosum was severed, fascinating stuff. I do not take it as evidence of dualism though. Mostly it is proof of the modularity of the brain. The part that does speech is different from the part that does vision; the parts interact but not directly and are not the same unit. The left brain is clearly captive to illusions but this is not much different from our visual cortex having the same problem and for the same reasons: each system makes assumptions about how the world works. This is necessary and important to being able to see or to think for reasons I will omit here for brevity. A brain unfooled in this situation would be one with no concept of the world around it and thus, totally useless.
“Again, it seems that you take to a different view of consciousness given naturalism that I do. Would you give an explanation of how you view consciousness arises?”
I’ve no idea really. I don’t think there is sufficient evidence to make any claims on the mechanism. I am unwilling, however, to invent quasi-supernatural realms to explain it away. There is just cause to believe consciousness is an output of neural circuits and that it is a feature of our biological organism and perhaps others. For that reason an appeal to the metaphysical seems mideval.
“Briefly, there’s the view that a stimulus creates an abstract thought as well as a physiological response simultaneously (and thus, our physical composition reacts in the way it must–given that physical entities must follow physical laws–and our sense of control is, again, illusory), and the view that a stimulus creates a physiological response first, and an abstract thought follows–it follows precisely to create a coherent qualia given your physiological response.”
I don’t believe this is possible as you have written it. The reason is that people do not respond physiologically to mere stimuli, directly. For example the subjective feeling of danger precedes a physiological response. But “danger” is not a stimulus. There is no pattern of photons or soundwaves that literally means “danger”. Stimuli must first be interpretted for its meaning, for its abstract content before a response can be formulated. I do not know how this can be out of step with neuroscience, since it seems to me the contrary is a logical impossibility. The response could be simultaneous with the parsing of abstract content along with that meaning being fed into our awareness.. but this is pretty standard brain behavior. Lots of systems have multiple simultaneous output.
“Again, on the view of consciousness that I’ve seen advocated by most neuroscientists, a physical process must take place in order to have any affect on our physical composition–the control of abstract beliefs over the physical simply isn’t real.”
Again words like “real” lose their meaning once we’re speaking of subsystems of whatever we’re talking about. I touch a hot surface and my hand reflexively retracts. My experience and memory report the sequence of events as “I felt heat, I retracted away” but you would say this is wrong because in fact my hand removed itself thanks to a spinal reflex and it happened before my cortex knew about any of it. But the problem is the spine IS ME. The spine reacting IS ME reacting. The narrative is correct, from the standpoint of me as a cohesive organism. It is also logically coherent because it observes reality’s rules (nothing can be reacted to before it happens).
BTW can I use html formatting codes here? & thanks for your reply as well.
Well, it seems that on your view, you’re correct in that there is a plausible explanation for the placebo effect–namely, mental states have causative power over physical states (I know, on you’re view they’re inseparable, I’m only separating them for ease of language). However, there are few options for the allowance of subjective perspective; we do have enough evidence to know that, even if we don’t know exactly what causes it. When one tries to account for conscious perception, then, we run up against errors. If subjectivity arises due to physical processes in the brain, yet subjective experience is different than the objective physical processes (even if only in differing perspectives), it’s an epiphenomenon, and it runs up against the problems described with the placebo effect, as well as free will and other things. If subjective experience is identical with the physical processes, that’s a form of panpsychism (I’ll add that panpsychism, IMO, is the most attractive naturalistic explanation of consciousness. Appealing to a quantum theory of mind on panpsychism solves the problem of free will as well. Rita Carter advocates panpsychism as her solution to the hard problem of consciousness in her book, Exploring Consciousness, which is a very good book on the soft problems of consciousness and a decent introduction to the lures of panpsychism). And if subjective experience results from a dualism, you have the homunculus problem; however, a good and coherent dualism avoids this problem.
For quick clarity (I’m typing a reply as I read your post lol), I don’t take the results of a corpus callosotomy to be evidence of dualism; on the contrary, the results seem to strongly suggest that the self is an illusion and free will doesn’t exist. I typed that out to show you why I had argued that on naturalism there’s no mechanism for the placebo effect, as most naturalistic neuroscientists I’ve read claim that beliefs and choice do not stand in causal relations to physical processes.
I wouldn’t say that appealing to metaphysics is medieval at all, though. Positivism has fallen and metaphysical questions have been regarded as pertinent yet again. There is no need to associate metaphysics with the supernatural though; most philosophers are still atheists.
Well, I actually espouse the theory of emotion that you do. I was simply pointing out that it’s rather inconsistent with the most prominent theory of consciousness given naturalism. However, one who holds to either of the other theories of emotion could answer that our neurons that activate our adrenal systems, among other things, are activated upon an unconscious stimuli, and this stimuli only activates these neurons as they have previously registered that a certain environment harbors danger. Thus, by the time that a belief enters our mental domain, unconscious neurons have already activated our adrenal system, which is why we feel fear. Also, I’m sure that I’m not doing these theories justice. They’re prominent theories; if they sound implausible, it’s probably because I’m attempting to summarize them so late at night, haha.
I think I’ve kinda already discussed the stuff in your last paragraph. If there’s something I didn’t address that you’d like me to, please bring it up :). Also, yeah I think you can use HTML coding; the kind that it gives when I hit the tags are weird though, like lessthansignblockquotegreaterthansignwith for quoting, and lessthansignemgreaterthansign for italics. Sorry if that’s hard to understand, it won’t let me use those signs with any words in between them.
re: epiphenomena. I don’t think this word has any meaning pertinent to my understanding of the mind. In other words, for me ultimately the objective mechanical action of collective neurons in fact is not different from subjective experience. They are the same thing, we merely are not able to understand how to get there from here (yet).
I do equate metaphysics with the supernatural. The words seem linguistically and logically interchangeable to me. Both are posited realms beyond the material world, both have no coherent definition, no evidence and lead to no advances in understanding of anything. To say that I’m not concerned with what is now “regarded as pertinent” is an understatement, even if I agreed.. which I don’t. Philosophers like Dan Dennet Michael Tye certainly see things like “mental planes” as obsolete nonsense and so do I and I would even if every person on the face of the earth thought otherwise (until and unless persuaded otherwise by a reasonable argument).
Well one problem here perhaps with your word choice.. the neurons (circuit) capable of parsing abstract “danger” from the visual cortex and then pushing the adrenal buttons has to be part of our “mental domain” not some external device. All CNS neurons are part of the mental domain. All functions whether conscious or not are part of “me”. While walking most of the muscular control and gravitropic balancing is not being consciously done but it would be mad to say that it isn’t really “me” doing the walking. Tasks have to be sublimated to subconscious control or else we’d never be able to learn to do anything or focus on anything but breathing and blinking.
What you’re endorsing here is panpsychism–that there is no difference between matter and subjective experience–and while this view is still somewhat being developed, it’s replete with problems. Do yourself a favor and read the arguments for and against it.
Well, this just trades on a bad misunderstanding of the term metaphysics. Metaphysical questions are in no way supernatural. Questions like, “Does the color red exist independently of human perception?”, “Why does consciousness exist at all?”, “Why does something exist rather than nothing?”, “Has the world been created five minutes ago with an appearance of age?”, “Are there other self-conscious beings besides myself?”, and even “Is the world around me real, or simply an illusion of a Botlzmann brain?” are all metaphysical questions, and they all can be answered on the philosophies of naturalism, theism, deism, and so on.
What I’m seeing, though, is that you’re trying to say that you won’t even consider an immaterial or supernatural hypothesis. That’s fine, so long as you’re not committed to finding the truth. Should a supernatural or immaterial answer be the only answer to a certain question (such as, “What causes subjective perspective?”), you will not even entertain this because of your preexistent philosophical bias to dismiss any of these answers as nonsensical offhand. Thus, a bias as strong as the one you’ve apparently adopted precludes the search for truth in totality.
This is a poor understanding of the neural basis of consciousness. For instance, visual stimuli pass through numerous neurons before it even is coded for color, movement, and the like. But we don’t perceive these stimuli first in shades of gray and in successive frames followed by the stimuli receiving color and obtaining fluid movement; rather, we perceive the stimuli only in full color and in movement. It is like this for every neural function, so to say that all CNS neurons are part of the mental domain is clearly flawed. Some evidently are not included in subjective perspective, and this is a contributing factor to the gravity of the binding problem.
No actually I’m not at all. Panpsychism, if wikipedia is to believed, entails a whole lot more than that including things like ‘all matter is sentient’ or ‘the universe is one big mind’. None of this is what I believe to be the case. My perspective is that what we call “subjective” isn’t really a thing. It doesn’t really exist because it collapses into what is objective. What we call subjective are just things we don’t understand. I take as evidence for this things that used to be 100% purely subjective are now only partially subjective.
I think it’s important to have a strong bias because the search for truth demands it. Here I reject that which is not defined. In fact I really can’t reject it per se.. because it has no substance or characteristic that places it in the realm of philosophical consideration. I also reject the idea “goldfish might drive the bus” for similar reasons.
I think the problem is you refer only to subjective experience where I see the mind, conscious and unconscious as part of the same unit, the same mind. Each part has its job to do and is well designed to do it. The “experiencer” part of the brain is our awareness and it has no use for partially processed sensory input so it doesn’t get it. It would be very easy for the brain to wire itself to do it.. it just makes no engineering sense. You think that the feeling “I made this choice” is wrong because the part of the brain saying it isnt the part that made the choice. I think the feeling is correct because the part that made the choice is part of “I” even if its a different subsystem. The subsystems are all part of “I”, the mind is a unit that does behavior.
Then your view is incoherent. If consciousness emerges from the activity of neural circuits, then per definitionem it is an epiphenomenon; furthermore, emergent properties cannot stand in causal relations to physical properties, lest the closure of physics is sacrificed, which is crucial necessary if naturalism is to be a self-contained and whole philosophy. If consciousness simply is the activity of neurons, then you must endorse panpsychism, as, ultimately, the same atoms, quarks, and the like that are the building blocks of all of matter are not qualitatively different than those that build up your neurons and brain. But you say your view is neither of these, which is incoherent.
So my own sensation of happiness is no different than a chair existing? I find this absurd. Your proof is lacking as well. We fully understand what it means to feel happy. Also, if you’re referring to the fact that we can locate what regions light up in the brain when I feel the emotion of happy, all we have is a correlation there. Keep in mind that the neural state of happiness would be as illusory as ever before had someone not been in an fMRI, actually been happy, and described to other subjective observers that they felt subjectively happy. The truth is that these states are still entirely subjective; we have taken no more subjectivity away from these states than we had in providing a definitive correlation between which facial muscles tensed during a smile and that person’s own subjective reporting of the feeling of happiness.
Per contra, the search for truth demands that we have no bias at all: we are to remain open to new possibilities. Einstein vehemently opposed all non-local hidden variables interpretations of quantum mechanics, and this set research in these theories behind quite a bit. Now we know that if a hidden variables interpretation is correct, it must be non-local. This is just one example. Also, to say that the supernatural is not defined is naive: it is what is not composed of what is natural to the senses. Likewise, what is immaterial is what is not composed of matter. You’re also begging the question against the entire discipline of the philosophy of religion; and there are many atheist as well as theists in that discipline. So, again, you’re on shoddy ground for rejecting these questions at all, and a search for truth demands entertaining all possibilities. As the fictitious Sherlock Holmes remarked, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” If all natural explanations fail, then the explanation must be supernatural.
As I have said, these words have no specific meaning: emerge, epiphenomenon. You invoke it to explain the gap between something understood and something that isn’t. Neurons -> “emergence” -> consciousness. But this term has no specific meaning because you do not know what is happening at that step- no one does. No cellular biologist would explain metabolism with organelles -> emergence -> metabolism because we have a good knowledge of the biochemistry. Metabolism isn’t an “epiphenomenon” whatever that is.. it’s just a phenomenon. So is consciousness, we just don’t know how.
As for panpsychism.. meh. Why get caught up on labels metacog? I flatly dismiss conclusions said to typify “panpsychism” but I might agree with some premises. I do agree neurons are not a special kind of matter and that consciousness is a product of ordinary matter. I also agree that the iron in an internal combustion engine is ordinary iron. That doesn’t mean I somehow agree a solid boulder of iron ore is in some way a combustion engine. An engine or a mind is a specific arrangement of interacting parts. This is also why I’d never agree the universe as a whole is a mind, which is also a purported implication of Panpsychism.
I’m sure you do find it absurd but that is not an argument. I find it absurd to construct a philosophy of mind using the format Atoms/neurons -> something magic happens -> consciousness. Actually by proof I don’t mean fMRI studies although those can be pretty relevant. Emotions were once totally inexplicable but in the last 50-60 years cognitive science showed that things like thinking and believing can be functionally accomplished via information processing and implemented in neurons (or other processors, this is computational theory of mind). EP has shown how and why we have some emotions and not others and why our emotions function as they do. This does not explain away the subjectiveness of experience but it has demystified parts of how the mind works and put it in the realm of science and out of the pure domain of philosophy as so many ideas before it.
The attitude that the truth is valuable or that we should pursue it, is a bias. Einstein had many biases.. he thought evidence mattered, that ideas should be confirmed both mathematically and with observation, that theories should make testable predictions. Those biases were part of what made him a great scientist.
This is a definition only in the sense that Chomsky’s “Colorless ideas sleep furiously” is a comment. Neither refer to anything in the world, they are semantically stranded in logical incoherence.
I agree that theology is strictly speaking, not a discipline. I’m not the only one to say so, Richard Dawkins has said “Theology has no place in a university”. I’m curious who the atheist philosophers of religion you refer to are. Please let me know. As for Sherlock.. the guy who used his reason based on evidence in the form of clues? Pretty sure that’s my perspective in a nutshell. I’ve never dismissed anything just for being unlikely in the ordinary sense of that word.
Epiphenominalism is not my view. Rather, it is the most prominent philosophy of mind espoused by naturalists. I hold to a dualism, though not a strict Cartesian one. Comparing metabolism to an epiphenomenon is just a bad understanding of what an epiphenomenon is, by definition. From Merriam-Webster: an epiphenomenon is a “secondary mental phenomenon that is caused by and accompanies a physical phenomenon but has no causal influence itself” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epiphenomenon). This is not a view I espouse, but rather, an attempt to account for the reality of consciousness and subjectivity, given a philosophy of naturalism. If this misunderstanding is coming from wikipedia’s (terrible) definitions/explanations, then I would ask you don’t use it as a source of information for our discussion. Try Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
What you’re arguing for is, in fact, a form of emerging phenomenon (E2A level of emergence, if I’m not mistaken). The iron combustion engine is emergent from the iron of a solid boulder of iron ore (E1 level of emergence, if I’m not mistaken). Notice also that the engine stands in no causal relations to the iron that makes it up; hence why emergent mental states do not stand in causal relations to the physical ones that make them up.
Well, panpsychism states that all matter is conscious. If you’re saying that consciousness simply is matter in motion (specifically in the brain), this conclusion is hard to avoid, as the atoms in your brain are not qualitatively different from atoms elsewhere. However, it seems that you do vie for emergent properties, as noted above, so I was mistaken in saying that you seemed to espouse this view.
I hope that by reading this last message of mine, you’ll understand that this is not how epiphenominalism works. Yet even on epiphenominalism, subjective experience is still entirely subjective. Also, evolutionary psychology offers explanations that are at best plausible, but that does not make them correct. The explanations of EP are actually analogous to those made by theological anthropology: they are not testable, falsifiable, or repeatable, but they both offer a cohesive explanation for why humanity is the way it is. If you’re going to jettison theology outright, you’ll have to come up with a pretty good argument for why we shouldn’t jettison EP. (A note, I’m not saying that we should jettison the discipline of evolutionary biology in the slightest. What I am saying is that EP is qualitatively no different than theological anthropology. Note that EP is, in fact, qualitatively different than evolutionary biology as a discipline.)
No, these are not biases. A bias is a prejudice (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bias). You have demonstrated that you have a prejudice against the supernatural; but Einstein’s qualities that you’ve listed are what are known as properly basic beliefs, or inferences based off of those properly basic beliefs–not prejudices. If postmodern philosophy has taught us anything, it’s that the search for truth demands a release of all presuppositions and prejudices. Read anything from Jacques Derrida to see this clearly.
But this is entirely begging the question against the more than 80% of Americans that claim they’re religious! Obviously, a large portion of humanity makes sense of these claims; indeed, they are semantically coherent to me. Something is semantically incoherent if and only if it cannot be understood. But a large portion of the population understands supernatural claims. Therefore, claims of the supernatural are not de jure semantically incoherent.
You agree with whom? If you mean me, I never said that it shouldn’t be a discipline. If you mean with Dawkins, then you chose an odd way to start a paragraph. Either way, theology is a worthless discipline only if God does not exist. I’ll grant that if God doesn’t exist, it’s worthless; but if God does exist, it’s the most precious extant academic study. But I’d avoid siding with Dawkins on matters of philosophy. He’s quite ignorant on the subject.
Graham Oppy, John Leslie Mackie, Bertrand Russell, Jordan Howard Sobel, Michael Tooley, and David Hume, to name a few. And note all of these philosophers embrace naturalism. Also note that besides Tooley, all embrace physicalism. Tooley argues for property dualism given the failure of most philosophies of mind and the evidence available today; but he is arguably the most competent atheistic philosopher alive–the only one I’ve seen that can go point for point with William Lane Craig. I could give quite a few more examples. The point that I’m making is that you don’t have to be religious to entertain supernatural questions and debate their authenticity.
But you must see that, at present, the evidence does point to God’s existence. The universe began to exist, it’s extraordinarily fine-tuned for life, consciousness cannot be explained naturally, and without God there is no ontological grounding for morality. Now, true, naturalism provides alternative hypotheses to each of these, but they’re arguably ad hoc, and they lack the explanatory power that positing as an explanation does. Now, does that mean research should stop? No, on the contrary, we should be eager to explore how–should God exist–He has set up His creation; indeed, following in the footsteps of Newton, or contemporary thinkers such as John Polkinghorne, Kenneth R. Miller, and Francis Collins. And should the evidence one day point away from God, so be it, but for now, the least ad hoc explanation is God.
Then there is no reason for us to discuss it, since neither of us subscribe to it. Please confine remarks to views I hold, not ones you imagine I should hold.
I’m not sure how to say it simpler. Silicon can be made into a computer but a pile of sand at the beach is not a computer and there’s no such property as “computerness” or “consciousness” of any sort of matter.
Yes I said subjective experience is still entirely subjective. The concept and understanding of emotions however has gone from subjective to being amenable to scientific study. Again I am NOT talking about subjective experience. It is merely an illustration the seemingly fundamentally inexplicable and subjective can be brought under the objective lens and understood better if not ultimately, completely. Theories in EP are and must be testable. They must make predictions and the legitimate ones do. I also fail to see how the study of the evolution of one organ, like a liver is legitimate biology but the study of another, the brain, is not.
According to your own link a bias can mean a “tendency or inclination”. It’s a perfectly correct statement that Einstein was inclined to require evidence for a claim.
Indeed, it has taught us nothing. Exactly the opposite is true. No understanding was ever gained without perspective that includes plenty of presuppositions and prejudices. What you don’t want are negative prejudices that become obstacle to the consideration of new and different ideas. Darwin couldn’t possibly have thought of natural selection if he didn’t already feel certain of a wide array of beliefs such as that traits are heritable, that magic imps aren’t afoot, that the physical laws apply to organisms and have for a very long time, that the earth is very very old, etc.., all biases all inclinations toward belief.
What percent is required in order that an idea become valid? 80? I had no idea a vote could make nonsense into sense.
The claim they can, but this is the same group of people who can’t name 5 books of a Bible they say is god’s word. I can tell you “I believe in a square circle”. Those are words, the statement is grammatical.. but it refers to nothing. There is no question-begging or thing to deny or reject.. it is simply fantasy corresponding to nothing. Stuff that exists is matter and energy. Stuff that isn’t that.. doesn’t exist.
None of these statements in any way are evidence of any god and some are oppositional evidence. If a universe with a beginning needs a god, then god needs a creator and so on and on. The universe is just as fine-tuned for death considering the ultimate fate of its atoms. Moreover, 200 years ago the same “fine tuning” might have been applied to human physiology or ecosystems.. until Darwin made a hash of such sloppy nonsense. Consciousness and morality, were both inexplicable are proof of nothing but our ignorance. Even if we presumed a god we’d have no reason to suppose anything was moral on his/her/its arbitrary dictate.
Apparently you’ve forgotten the original blog post? The reason that I’m discussing it is because it is de facto the standard naturalist explanation of consciousness, and I had applied it to my original blog post. And I’ve tried to show you why this is a plausible view on naturalism. Your view as it has been explained is incoherent.
So what differentiates silicon at the beach from a computer, then? I’ve conversed with numerous atheistic philosophers who hold that there are properties such as “computerness.”
No, you said, “things that used to be 100% purely subjective are now only partially subjective” (post #7). If I misunderstood you, my apologies, but it seemed to me that you were saying that subjective experience itself is somehow less subjective than it used to be. I’ll grant you that we can scientifically study emotion better than before, but that is still entirely objective. Indeed, we are so familiar with the brain that it can be claimed,
And indeed, this was precisely the claim made by neuroscientists in the TIME magazine article, Glimpses of the Mind (page 8, accessible online: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,983176-1,00.html). The authors then go on to describe how consciousness is, indeed, an epiphenomenon, should we grant that it exists at all.
This is your opinion, but neuroscientists disagree. Later on in that article:
Also, if you read that article, you’ll note that the authors explicitly and vehemently reject dualism. This is not something written by apologists. Either consciousness is an epiphenomenon, it’s due to panpsychism, or it doesn’t exist, given naturalism.
Theories in EP are not testable at all. Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran (an atheist) criticizes EP for being untestable. To prove this, he wrote an article explaining why people generally find blonde-haired people as beautiful, using a somewhat ridiculous explanation. He sent this into a peer-reviewed journal as a joke–to his surprise, it got published! He had done little to no research, and did not take his own argument seriously. He details it in an endnote in his book, Phantoms in the Brain. Also, EP is not a study of the evolution of the brain; evolution itself covers that. It’s a study of proposed ways that human culture evolved into how it is today.
Many, many postmodern philosophers could tear your world to pieces. Postmodern philosophy is powerful, but it is not definite. It could teach you a thing or two. I’m not postmodern myself (I’m a critical realist), but everyone can benefit from reading some Derrida or Rorty.
Also, I made a distinction between properly basic beliefs and biases which you entirely ignored, and then proceeded to repeat your bare assertion. Sorry, but you’ll have to refute what I wrote before your viewpoint can be taken as valid again.
Without including my statement, “Something is semantically incoherent if and only if it cannot be understood,” my assertion does sound like a logical fallacy. However, even if only 1 person (with correctly functioning cognitive facilities in an environment conducive to true belief) could grasp a proposition, then it is not a semantically incoherent proposition. Thus, if 80% of Americans grasp a proposition, that’s a lot more than one person, and my point is demonstrated: it’s not a semantically incoherent proposition.
Now, see, this illustrates my point. It is impossible to grasp the proposition of a square circle; again, “Something is semantically incoherent if and only if it cannot be understood.” Therefore, a square circle is semantically incoherent. But supernatural objects are not semantically incoherent, for reasons explicated above. You also make a bare assertion. You must prove that all that exists is matter and energy if you want your argument to have any validity.
You’ve read The God Delusion, haven’t you? I’d recommend reading this review of it by Plantinga:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/marapr/1.21.html
That aside, let me critique these points:
“If a universe with a beginning needs a god, then god needs a creator and so on and on.”
No, no proponent of any kalam argument would ever claim that everything needs a cause. That is precisely the opposite of what the kalam argument seeks to establish: an uncaused cause. It is not just that the universe needs a cause, it is because the universe began to exist that it needs a cause. Since God did not begin to exist, God would not need a cause. Likewise, if it could be proved that the universe were eternal, it would not need a cause. However, this is not where the current evidence points.
“The universe is just as fine-tuned for death considering the ultimate fate of its atoms.”
Every possible universe is eventually reaches death; but the odds of our universe’s initial low-entropy condition coming into existence are 1 part in 10(exp10(exp123)) –there are more zeros in this full number than there are elementary particles in the universe. This isn’t even to consider things like the cosmological constant and the like. That life exists is almost infinitely more improbable than that all things reach death in any possible universe.
“Moreover, 200 years ago the same “fine tuning” might have been applied to human physiology or ecosystems.. until Darwin made a hash of such sloppy nonsense. ”
Two things: (1) This commits the formal fallacy of an appeal to history: just because it’s happened before doesn’t mean it will happen again; and (2), initial conditions cannot be explained away by any process–they’re initial, after all. Even if symmetry breaking could be established as a cause for the fine-tuning of the rest of the constants, all of the initial conditions still can never be explained away like biology was.
“Consciousness and morality, were both inexplicable are proof of nothing but our ignorance. Even if we presumed a god we’d have no reason to suppose anything was moral on his/her/its arbitrary dictate.”
If God is the ontological basis for morality, than we avoid the (false) Euthyphro Dilemma altogether–indeed, we actually have an objective ontological grounding of morality if and only if it is rooted in God’s being. And I don’t have space to go into J. P. Moreland’s argument from consciousness, but if you’ll look it up, you’ll see it’s nothing of an argument from ignorance.