Excerpt from a Dan Barker writing on how an atheist can be moral

[Getchasome]

"God is a Spirit," Jesus supposedly said; but what is that? The word "spirit" has never been defined, except in terms that tell us what it is not: immaterial, intangible, noncorporeal, supernatural. No one has ever described what a spirit is. "To talk of immaterial existences," Jefferson wrote, "is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise." (To John Adams, August 1820. This does not mean Jefferson was an atheist: he conceived of God as a material being, or as nature itself, which is consistent with Deism.)

Since "god" has never been defined, much less proved, its "image" can't be used as a basis for anything. "Nature," on the other hand, means something. Darwinism shows us that all living organisms are the result of a natural evolutionary process. We have been fashioned by the laws of nature.

This revelation can only fail to impress you if you have been taught that there is something wrong with nature, something shameful about being a mere animal in a debased realm beneath the supernatural, whatever that is. Many theists seem eager to play this game of nature-bashing. The "blind chance" of evolution, they say, is a brute force incapable of producing something as "lofty" as us humans.

But evolution is not blind chance: it is design that incorporates randomness--not intelligent design, but design by the laws of nature, by the limited number of ways atoms interact mathematically and molecules combine geometrically. It is design by extinction, by the way a changing environment automatically disallows organisms that happen not to be adapted, leaving the "fittest" behind, if any. The randomness of genetic variation is a strength of evolution, providing a greater chance that something will survive.

This is amazing. Instead of speculating about an unknown "creator," we can actually look at our origins. Evolution shows how complexity arises from simplicity: creationism can't do that. Creationism tries to explain complexity with more complexity, which only replaces one mystery with another mystery. If functional complexity requires a designer, then how do you account for the functional complexity of the mind of the designer?

Darwin's enlightening concept is empirical, testable, provable, and relevant to creatures that inhabit a physical planet. It shows us who we really are. We are not above nature. We are not just a part of nature. We are nature. We are natural creatures in a natural environment. Through the startlingly sloppy, painfully unpredictable, part-random, part-determined process of natural selection, life, imperfect yet doggedly hanging on, has become what it is.

And that's what makes life valuable: it didn't have to be. It is dear. It is fleeting. It is vibrant and vulnerable. It is heart-breaking. It can be lost.

It will be lost.

But we exist now. We are caring, intelligent animals, and can treasure our brief lives. Why is eternal better than temporal, or supernatural "higher" than natural? Doesn't rarity increase value? God is an idea, not a natural creature. Why should his "image" be more valuable than our own "nature"? What right would an immaterial existence--a ghost in the sky--have to tell us natural creatures what is valuable? Has he ever felt the pain of giving birth? Does he struggle to pay the rent?

If we were created in his unknowable image, then we have no idea who we are. But being fashioned in the "image of nature," we do know who we are, and we can find out more. Right in our backyard, here on earth, we can investigate, study, and continue to improve conditions on this planet. It wasn't faith that eradicated smallpox. Contemplating the "image of god" will not cure cancer or AIDS.

Science has given us much. What has theology ever provided?

Theology has given us hell.

The threat of damnation is designed to be an incentive to right action; but this is a phony morality. Humanists think we should do good for goodness' sake, not for the selfish prospect of reaping individual rewards or avoiding punishment. Any ideology that makes its point by threatening violence is morally bankrupt. (Hitler's ovens, at least, were relatively quick. The torment Jesus promised is a "fire that shall never be quenched.") Anyone who believes in hell is at heart not moral at all.

If the only way you can be forced to be kind to others is by the threat of hell, that shows how little you think of yourself. If the only way you can be motivated to be kind to others is by the promise of heaven, that shows how little you think of others.

Most atheists will say, "Be good, for goodness' sake!"

[On the Road]

1. Religious Morality is Tautological

If morality derives from a religion's view of God or religious texts, all someone has to do is adhere to the religion. Anything consistent with that is "moral," no matter how perverse.

[sui generis]

2. I like the secular humanist philosophy myself

but your title is interesting. For many people of faith it is impossible to imagine that morality can exist apart from the teachings of faith, and therefore atheists must be immoral.

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. Interesting read --

Who is Dan Barker? What is this exerpted from?

I'd like to read more. I've always disliked the notion that without religion there is no basis for morality.

ON EDIT

I just noticed I've stepped over the line into !!1,000 POSTS!!

How exciting.

[Getchasome]

6. Here's a link to some of his writings and more info.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dan_barker/index.shtml

[RaleighNCDUer]

13. Thanks. Once there, I realize that I'd read some of his material

on the Freedom From Religion site.

[McKenzie]

4. Scottish Humanist Society has broadly the same views - link inside

http://www.humanism-scotland.org.uk/

[JuniorPlankton]

5. Well, as far as I am concerned

the very idea of this discussion "are atheist moral persons?" is like discussing "are blacks persons too?"
Why should it be discussed?

:mad:

[Ando]

7. Interesting

While interesting, the article doesn't address the thread title. The more interesting discussion is about how we decide morality. Do right and wrong exist? Does absolute truth exist? How can I say "x" is right and "y" is wrong? These are the interesting questions. I don't question an atheist's assertion that he/she is a moral person, I just want to know how they define and derive their morality. I think that is a fascinating discussion. I read "Can Man Live Without God?" by Ravi Zacharias a while back and thought it had some good insight into this question. I'll have to read it again. He also gave a series of lectures at Harvard on the subject that were good too, that would be a good resource for those interested in the debate.

[Getchasome]

8. A little more from his writing that might help answer your question

Although most atheists accept the importance of morality, this is not conceding that "Morality" exists in the universe, a cosmic object waiting to be discovered. The word "morality" is just a label for a concept, and concepts exist only in minds. If no minds existed, no morality would exist.

Morality is simply the avoidance of unnecessary harm. Since harm is natural, its avoidance is a material exercise. Organisms suffer as they bump into their environment, and as rational animals, we humans have some choice about how this happens. If we minimize pain and enhance the quality of life, we are moral. If we don't, we are immoral or amoral, depending on our intentions.

To be moral, atheists have access to the simple tools of reason and kindness. There is no Cosmic Code Book directing our actions.

[Ando]

9. an example

How would the atheist explain the morality or immorality of Pedophilia? What do the majority of atheists think about Monogamy? I guess you can see what I'm trying to say, I believe that there is much more to morality than minimizing pain.

[RaleighNCDUer]

12. For religionists, morality is all about a person's relationship with

god. For atheists, morality is all about a person's relationship with other people and the world around him (or her). Pedophilia is obviously immoral, because of the impact it has on the still-forming personality of the child. Monogamy/polygamy is more complex, as it deals with adult participants. My personal feeling is that polygamy would be just too complicated for me to deal with. I don't see any moral requirement for monogamy, however, assuming all participants are equal partners.

Do no harm. Do not do to others that which is hateful to yourself. Respect life. I think that all goes well beyond simply minimizing pain.

[newyawker99]

15. Hi Ando!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[Stunster]

10. The problem with this is....

....that there is no material explanation of morality.

Or of consciousness.

Or of why there are any laws of physics or laws of nature in the first place.

Here's some material from an email exchange I had back in March about all this. My bits are without the indents:

******************************************
I mean, it would be just weird for them
> > to exist, especially given the fact that the
> > universe is an awful lot older than the human
> > race.
>
> That's a bit of a subjective relative judjement. Why is it 'weird'?

Well, it's weird because the only examples of anything real which are (arguably) *not* completely reducible to the physical, are persons, or minds and their contents. We encounter physical things all the time, and we encounter minds or persons all the time (at least our own). We simply *don't* encounter *freestanding* abstract entities. When we encounter abstract entities, they are always encountered as the contents of minds.

Moral obligation, for example, isn't something we bump into *independently* of personhood. Mathematical or logical relations, for example, are never found 'out there'. They're only ever found 'in here', meaning, as part of our mental contents. The physical things which obey those relations *are* 'out there'. But the relations
themselves, like all abstract entities, however, *don't* occupy spacetime. They only occupy minds. We don't find physical things
or mental contents as weird as non-physical things which aren't mental contents either. In fact, we never ever encounter such things.

So if that's what moral properties are--non-physical things which don't occupy spacetime OR minds, they would be very weird indeed.
So, that's why.

> Is it any more weird than the idea that some rational
> intelligent 'creator' created all this for the sake of some
> apocalyptic sleepover.

We are familiar with personhood. It is wonderful and amazing, but not *weird* precisely because we're intimately familiar with it. Mind and its characteristic content are 'givens' of human existence--utterly basic, fundamental, and logically prior to our knowledge of anything else in existence. Hence, if we postulate that the creator is a mind, this would strike us as less weird than there just being abstract entities eternally existing but not essentially occupying any mind. We are familiar with physical things, and with minds and their (abstract) contents. Relative to those things, a non-physical thing which is not a mind and not essentially the content of any mind, is weird.

> Atheists, of course, generally claim
> > that moral properties are created or generated
> > in some way by human beings. But that human
> > beings would have such a capacity would be itself
> > quite, quite remarkable.
>
> That's a matter of opinion not an argument against.


I didn't say the mere fact of it was an argument against. It's an explanandum, something which cries out for explanation. Now, if we ask which explanans is more plausibly abduced for this explanandum, then we can proceed to present an argument.

The capacity to generate moral concepts and grasp moral properties is something which theism can readily account for given theism's fundamental ontology, but for which materialism can't *as* readily
account, given *its* ontology.

There is nothing it is 'like' to be a chair--there is nothing it feels like to be a chair. Chairs have no experiences, and have zero capacity to engage in morality. And yet chairs and humans are made of precisely the same physical stuff (quarks and electrons), exist in the same spacetime framework, and are subject to the same forces of nature (strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravity). So it *is* remarkable from a materialist perspective that such *fundamentally different properties* as having and not having moral capacities can be true of humans and chairs. It is remarkable too from a theist perspective, but more to be *expected* and more *comprehensible* within that perspective.

>And anyway there
> are lots of remarkable things in the world, it's an amazing place.
> Although I'd put my amazement down to my ignorance.

I presume you accept the science and reality of gravity. The science says it is the curvature of space. You can't see the curvature of space. However, in a sense, you can feel it.

But what is a feeling? Can you see or touch a feeling? Does it have a smell or taste or sound? I don't believe so. So why is it
a good and legitimate thing (if it is) to make an inference to the best explanation in the case of gravity, but not in the case of feelings, or the contents of consciousness more generally? It seems to me that it is legitimate and reasonable to make abductions to account for feelings, consciousness, moral perception---in short all the operations of the mind. In fact, given that these are so constant and intimate to our experience of existence, it would seem that they are
the first things we should try to explain and come to a full understanding of. Placing ad hoc, artificial or arbitrary limits on
rational inquiry is a Bad Thing. Philosophical theology is a legitimate part of the continuum of that inquiry, and should be allowed to flourish.

There is another reason why the theistic inference seems more reasonable than an inference to the non-physical existence of abstract moral properties, and that is that it *coheres much better* with the personal, spiritually and morally transformative experiences which many people have had. A very common element of these experiences is that they bear a strong analogy to *interpersonal, mutual knowledge and love*. They *don't* commonly have the content of being an encounter with an abstract, causally inert, impersonal entity. I would consider it likely that, as a matter of causal genesis of ideas, it is
these experiences which initially suggest and give rise to the concept of theism, and thus make it make it mentally and socially--socially, because the experiences are communicated to others--available for the relevant abductive inference.

>> But then
> > it's terribly, terribly hard to see and explain
> > in detail how humans generate objectively binding
> > moral norms (indeed, I would argue impossibly hard.)
>
> I'd agree.

As I've got older, I've found the argument from morality to be more and more persuasive. I used to think that one could account for
moral reasoning naturalistically. But I came to the conclusion that this can only be done at the expense of moral objectivity and universality. Morality can be interpreted naturalistically, but only if we accept that morality is subjective and relative. I am not willing to accept that because I experience morality as something which is binding on me not because of any human subjective and/or
relative judgements, but quite objectively and quite independently of subjective human judgement. Like Immanual Kant, I am profoundly
moved by two things: the starry skies above me, and the moral law within me. I interpret them both as pointing to God.

Theism, in short, *makes sense* to me. Atheism doesn't.


> Having read this I think the point remains, if abduction involves heavy
> doses of induction as the above passage points out then we're still
looking
> for some other universe creations for you to be able to induce the
fact that
> there is some design in the creation of this one. The last piece about
> underdetermination is crucial too.


First, I think you're misunderstanding the point about underdetermination. What it's referring to is the fact that often (always, in fact) the empirical data underdetermine the conclusion--that is, the data do not select one hypothesis to the exclusion of all others. Alternative hypotheses are always possible, consistent with the data, and the question of which hypothesis to
select is determined in the final analysis not by the empirical data, but by considerations of simplicity, scope, coherence with other accepted theories, etc.

This is a point about the way science itself is done in general; it's not a special point about the theistic hypothesis. For example, the hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics is consistent with all known data, yet is accepted by only a small minority within the physics community.

Now to the point about induction. An inductive inference is one in which one infers a conclusion from repeated prior examples of the phenomena which the conclusion predicts. Your objection would be valid
IF the theist was arguing that there was going to be another universe created because this one had been created, and it would be valid as an objection because the validity of inductive inferences REQUIRES that
that there have been (generally speaking) MANY prior examples of the predicted phenomenon, whereas in this case there is just one known case of the 'phenomenon' in question (the creation and existence of the universe) occurring. But of course, the theist is claiming NO
SUCH THING! The theist is not claiming that because one universe has come into being, there is going to be another one coming into being. That would be an invalid induction. But it's not one that the theist is guilty of making. So for you to point out that there is only
one known case of a universe having been created is completely irrelevant.

But of course, the theist IS making SOME inductions. The theist is noting that there are many, many examples of the mathematical ordering of nature; many, many examples of the functioning of rational
minds; many, many examples of the experience of free will, and of moral obligation; many, many examples of the experience of love, goodness, beauty; many, many examples of religious experience,
and so on. And the theist is concluding that these phenomena will continue to characterize the existence and nature of the universe, that these properties will continue to be observed in future. This
strikes me as a series of valid inductive inferences.

But then the theist make ANOTHER inference, this time not inductive, but abductive. The theist asks what is the best available explanation of this set of inductively established phenomena. What would, with
the best degree of simplicity, scope, rational elegance, etc, ACCOUNT for this richly diverse and inductively very well established set of phenomena; and the theist postulates, as it were, the theistic hypothesis as explaining these phenomena more powerfully, simply,
adequately and beautifully than any competing, non-theistic hypothesis. The theist argues, for instance, that *naturalism* systematically FAILS to account for the phenomena of consciousness,
morality, and remarkable mathematical order of physical nature, etc. The theist argues, for instance, that *Platonism*, while accounting for the *nature* of these phenomena, systematically fails to account
for their causal generation (since there are no known examples of pure abstracta, such as Platonic Forms are supposed to be, causing anything). And the theist argues that the phenomena associated with reason and value require that the ultimate explanatory reality be
a) pre-eminently endowed with reason and value (since nothing devoid of reason and value can cause reason and value--"nemo dat quod non habet" as the Romans used to say); and b) pre-eminently endowed with causal power. An ultimate explanatory reality endowed with (a) and (b) gives us a first working idea of the concept of God. And this is all by way of abductive, not inductive, inference.

Further refinements of the concept of God are generated by careful logical analysis. But the initial work is done by abductive inference relative to a range of inductively established phenomena.

I'll save a reply to your other comments for a later time, but let me just say that Hume, whom you cite, of course believed, and said, and wrote, that it WAS valid to infer the existence of a deity from the
existence and apparent order of the universe. It's amazing how many people seem to be ignorant of this!

Of course, Hume was not a theist, but a deist. He thought an argument from design made deism rationally credible, but not theism. What's the
difference? Well, the basic one is that in theism God is conceived as an infinite perfect spirit, whereas in deism God is not infinite and not perfect. There are many reasons why deism has generally had it rough since the late 18th century and now has very few defenders. But Hume, at least in his published writings, accepts the validity
in principle of the deistic, though not the theistic, inference. So I'm not sure you would want to rely entirely on him, since he actually argues for a point that is actually contrary to the one you're
arguing for in this thread. You're arguing that the inferential step is itself faulty. Hume argues that the step itself is not faulty, but the content of the conclusion should be deistic rather than theistic.

I included a large chunk of a reply to you regarding the precise
nature of what Peirce was getting at in my last reply, but somehow or
other it did not show up in the post once I sent it! Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrghhh!

I'll try to summarise what I typed, but I'm pretty annoyed that I've
lost it, because it was good. ;-)

The basic idea is that induction is to do with predicting what we will
observe in the future on the basis of what we have observed in the
past, whereas abduction is to do with explaining what we observe. The
example I wrote about was gravity. Again, I'll try to summarise.

We observe apples falling from trees, avalanches sliding down mountainsides, the tides going in and out in step with the phases of
the Moon, the sun coming up, etc. We can predict that we'll continue
to observe similar phenomena in future. This is a valid inductive
inference, because we have many many prior observations to base it on.

But, Peirce would say, we *also* make an abduction. We don't *just* say that the tide will go out, that apples will fall, that the sun will come up. Yes, we do make these inductive inferences. But, and
this is what Peirce and contemporary philosophers of science think
science typically does, we advance as the best explanation of all
these repeated observations of diverse phenomena a powerful, simple,
elegant and cogent theorised reality: in this case, gravity.

But strictly speaking, we don't *inductively* infer the existence of
gravity, because we don't see gravity, literally speaking. Induction
has to do with saying what we are going to observe on the basis of
what we have observed in the past. But we can't see Newton's 'force
of gravity'. We can't see Einstein's 'curvature of space'. These are
not observable, even in principle.

No, we postulate gravity to explain what we do observe, but we don't
actually observe gravity. *This* is not induction, but (to give it
another name since it's another kind of reasoning), abduction.

Sure, we do validly infer that the sun will come up, the tide will go
out, the apple will fall and the avalanche will slide down the
mountainside. We *predict* these future events on the basis of past
observations of similar events. That's induction. Gravity? That's
abduction. I hope this clarifies the difference.

Ok, the theist inductively infers that the universe will continue to
exhibit these various properties and various phenomena. On the basis
of many, many past observations and experiences, the theist predicts
that the universe will continue to contain experiences of moral
obligation, goodness, love, beauty, and religious experiences; the
apparent phenomenon of free will; that it will continue to exhibit
profound mathematical ordering in the detailed workings of physical
objects and processes. Etc. The theist then puts forward as the best
explanation of these phenomena the theistic hypothesis. Furthermore,
the theist argues that competing non-theistic hypotheses
systematically fail to explain adequately these phenomena. Naturalism
fails to do the job because it cannot explain how phenomena associated
with reason and value can be generated by things which are devoid of
reason and value ("nemo dat quod non habet", as the Romans used to
say). As even non-religious philosophers have readily admitted, the
difficulties for naturalism are notorious and huge, for instance in
terms of even accounting naturalistically for consciousness (see
McGinn, Chalmers, et al).

The theist argues that Platonism fails because, while it does account
for the *nature* of the phenomena to be explained, it systematically
fails to account for how they could be causally generated (since we
know of no examples of pure abstracta, such as Platonic Forms are
supposed to be, causing anything).

At one point you say that you don't see that the effects need to be
explained theistically. Well, of course you can CLAIM that they don't
need to be. But that won't establish that they can be explained
non-theistically. Adequately explained, that is. And even if you did
adequately explain them, that wouldn't show that your explanation was
best, since the theistic one might have superior scope and simplicity,
for example. The theist in fact argues that theism is a powerful
explanans with a very wide scope--it explains a lot of diverse
phenomena, positing just one reality. The nature of this posited
explanans (God) is such as to quite naturally lead us to *expect* that
the explananda would have the character and properties they do
(consciousness, free will, moral value, reason, etc), and much more
naturally would lead us to expect that than the non-theistic
alternative explanations do. That theism is a *simpler* explanation
than naturalistic explanations is also argued for, though I would
concede that the issues here are subtler.

Anyhow, I hope you can see that theists abduce the existence of God,
they don't induce it. They do induce that the future will be like the
past, up to a point in terms of human experiences (we might not always
be here), and fully in terms of the operation of the universe
according to rationally intelligible mathematical laws. The nature of
the physical world and the nature of human experience are inductively
established sets of facts. We abductively infer God, conceived
theistically, as the best explanation of these sets of facts.

[Getchasome]

11. Ah, but if moralism comes from within, and thus from God

then why such differences in opinion on what is right and moral, even among Christians. People who find "moral absolutes" in the revelation of a deity have never agreed what those absolutes are. Take any crucial social moral issue of the day--capital punishment, abortion, physician-assisted suicide, women's rights, divorce, gay rights, corporal punishment, animal rights, slavery, pacifism, environmental protection, birth control, overpopulation, state/church separation--and you will notice that praying, bible-believing Christians have come down on opposite sides. The apostle Paul alleged that the biblical deity is "not the author of confusion," yet never has a single book caused more confusion or divisiveness than the bible.

[Stunster]

14. I never claimed

that human beings are infallible, or even that they are not prone to gross error about many things, and very frequently into the bargain.

That they would be very confused about morality should surprise us no more than that they should be confused about anything else, and indeed should surprise us less, since morality's subject matter is not amenable to quantitative physical methods of investigation.

Christians have a name for this: the Fall (which, not being a fundamentalist, I do not regard as having anything to do with eating forbidden apples in gardens, but as a valid existential generalization).

Catholic theologians (and I'm a Catholic) have generally claimed that the content of morality is not given by Scripture, but by reason. Indeed, even Scripture tells us that morality is known interiorly, not by external revelation. And that's leaving to one side the fact that most humans have been illiterate, and/or never heard of the Bible.

For a Catholic, your question is a non-problem.

The true content of morality is not made epistemologically available by means of Scripture, but by means of minds thinking correctly about the Good, just as the true content of science is made available by correct thinking about the Physically Real.

But both processes are imperfect.

That would not cause me to disregard science. Nor does it cause me to disregard morality.

[Jim__]

17. Can you provide a comprehensible non-material explanation of consciousness

... there is no material explanation of morality.

Or of consciousness.

Both statements are incomplete. I think the better statement is that there is no known explanation of consciousness, material or otherwise (let's leave morality aside for the moment - consciousness should be quite sufficient to occupy us). Given that there is no known explanation of consciousness at this time, should we then conclude that there is no material explanation of consciousness? And then leap to the conclusion that consciousness has some "non-material" explanation, even though we have no idea what this "non-material" is? Or, should we first either exhaust the search for a material explanation, or develop a method for proving the existence of the "non-material", before concluding that it is this quite elusive and undefined "non-material" that explains it - sort of a non-explanation explanation? Science is currently searching for the material explanation of consciousness; and, if history is any guide, science will provide us with quite satisfactory, testable answers, while the proponents of the non-material explanation remain forever locked in metaphysical debate.

To put it another way, there is no non-material explanation of consciousness. You claim that the non-material non-explanation of consciousness is somehow superior to the the material non-explanation of consciousness. That's an unsupported claim.

... They're only ever found 'in here', meaning, as part of our mental contents. The physical things which obey those relations *are* 'out there'. But the relations
themselves, like all abstract entities, however, *don't* occupy spacetime. They only occupy minds. ...

Well, I don't know all that preceded this statement, but certainly nothing that is in your current presentation establishes that minds are not in spacetime; and so, by implication, all things contained in the mind are also contained in spacetime. If you're really advocating a non-spacetime existence for the mind, you might want to take some care with your metaphors; 'in here' implies spacetime. And I know, you put it in tick marks; the point being we can't conceive of something that doesn't exist in spacetime; no less claim that its an explanation of anything.

The capacity to generate moral concepts and grasp moral properties is something which theism can readily account for given theism's fundamental ontology, but for which materialism can't *as* readily
account, given *its* ontology.

When theism can demonstrate the existence of the non-material, the existence of anything outside of spacetime, then theism might be able to account for this non-material capacity to generate moral concepts and grasp moral properties; until then, theism can't account for anything that is not material.

There is nothing it is 'like' to be a chair--there is nothing it feels like to be a chair. Chairs have no experiences, and have zero capacity to engage in morality. And yet chairs and humans are made of precisely the same physical stuff (quarks and electrons), exist in the same spacetime framework, and are subject to the same forces of nature (strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravity). So it *is* remarkable from a materialist perspective that such *fundamentally different properties* as having and not having moral capacities can be true of humans and chairs. ...

Well, existence itself is remarkable; but given existence, the difference between chairs and humans is fairly well understood. Simply put, it's the structural arrangement of the "physical stuff".

But what is a feeling? Can you see or touch a feeling? Does it have a smell or taste or sound? I don't believe so. So why is it
a good and legitimate thing (if it is) to make an inference to the best explanation in the case of gravity, but not in the case of feelings, or the contents of consciousness more generally? It seems to me that it is legitimate and reasonable to make abductions to account for feelings, consciousness, moral perception---in short all the operations of the mind. ...

There are medical treatments for some "feelings." How is it a "better" explanation of feelings to speculate that they are the product of some non-material thing which has never even been demonstrated to exist acting in some non-specified way than to hypothesize that they are the result of material things which are known to exist; to further hypothesize about how material things cause feelings, then to study these hypotheses? We know material things can alter feelings. Has anyone demonstrated that non-material things can effect feelings?

There is another reason why the theistic inference seems more reasonable than an inference to the non-physical existence of abstract moral properties, and that is that it *coheres much better* with the personal, spiritually and morally transformative experiences which many people have had. A very common element of these experiences is that they bear a strong analogy to *interpersonal, mutual knowledge and love*. They *don't* commonly have the content of being an encounter with an abstract, causally inert, impersonal entity.

Right, all these experiences bear a very strong resemblance to our physical, material experience. Why should we accept that they are non-material? What basis could someone possibly have to claim that they have had a non-material experience?

...Morality can be interpreted naturalistically, but only if we accept that morality is subjective and relative. I am not willing to accept that because I experience morality as something which is binding on me not because of any human subjective and/or
relative judgements, but quite objectively and quite independently of subjective human judgement.

I am curious as to how you were able to judge that something was independent of subjective human judgement.

Etc.

[Stunster]

18. Consciousness and materiality

From the fact that there is no known material explanation of consciousness it does not follow that there ought to be some explanation of consciousness. Consciousness might be ontologically basic. So asking me what non-material explanation there is of consciousness rests for its sense on an assumption which I need not accept---that consciousness is not itself ontologically basic. And in fact, I don't accept it.

The idea that we have no idea what the non-material is ought not to go unchallenged. I submit that if consciousness is ontologically basic and irreducible to the material, then we are more familiar with the non-material than with anything material. We are familiar with our own consciousness more than with anything else. I further submit that the reason we find it difficult to explain consciousness is because it is basic. There is nothing other than consciousness in terms of which it can be explained.

What I was referring to with respect to not being in spacetime was freestanding abstract entities. I was saying that we never encounter such things. We only encounter abstract entities as the contents of our minds. However, I think it is controversial to say that minds occupy space. They are not in any obvious or self-evident or uncontrovertible sense space-occuping physical objects.

On medical treatments for feelings--don't confuse being the product of something physical and being something physical. You already admitted that there is no known material explanation of consciousness. If being the product of something physical just was the same thing as being physical then this lack of explanation wouldn't even be apparent.

As for feelings causing physical effects, I think examples of this are legion. Every doctor will tell you that mood has physical effects. A feeling of pain will cause physical movements. But the the feeling of pain is not itself uncontroversially a physical thing, nor is one's mood.

We judge lots of things to be independent of subjective human judgements, in the sense that they are not constituted by such judgements. For example, the number of stars in the Milky Way.

[Jim__]

19. The value of non-testable hypotheses

From the fact that there is no known material explanation of consciousness it does not follow that there ought to be some explanation of consciousness. Consciousness might be ontologically basic. ...

Yes, and somewhere on the earth there might be a pig that flies. No one can prove there isn't. But, it's not really worth discussing; it contributes vanishingly little to human knowledge and understanding. Similarly, speculations about non-explanatory, non-testable hypotheses on the nature of consciousness are not worth discussing. We can conjecture all we want; without a test, the conjectures are meaningless.

The problem with this is that there is no material explanation of morality.

So, you claim that there being no {as yet known} material explanation of morality {consciousness} is a problem for materialism; but there being no known non-material explanation of morality {consciousness} is not a problem for non-materialism. It appears that all you're doing is placing all responsibility for explanations on materialism; and anything that is not currently explained is then a presumptive argument in favor of non-materialism. That's just a 'god of the gaps' argument, or if you prefer a 'non-material of the gaps' argument.

As I said before, materialism is rapidly closing in on a material explanation of consciousness. Basically, consciousness is self-awareness; and the structure of the brain apparently (not yet conclusively) indicate that the brain is self-aware. When the conclusion is firmed up; we'll just scratch off one more gap. Of course, the non-materialist arguments remain valid as long as there are any gaps in human knowledge. We merely assume that these gaps are answered through some unexplained non-material manner.

The problem is that people seek understanding. And your answers provide no understanding, no explanation; just speculative and untestable possibilities.

Or, to repeat the quote that was given in the opening post of this thread:

"To talk of immaterial existences," Jefferson wrote, "is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise." (To John Adams, August 1820. ...)

I would add consciousness and morality to Jefferson's list.

[Stunster]

20. Are you familiar with the work of leading philosophers of mind

such as David Chalmers and Colin McGinn?

Your comment about flying pigs suggests that perhaps you aren't.

And if so, there may not be much point in my debating you, as you would be too seriously under-informed in that case.

Chalmers' book THE CONSCIOUS MIND, for example, holds the position that consciousness is ontologically basic. McGinn's work (e.g. THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME) argues that the problem of consciousness cannot be solved by the methods of physical science. Now, Chalmers and McGinn may be mistaken in their claims. But to act as if their being mistaken is uncontroversial, or obvious, or self-evident, as you seem to want to do, is decidedly unwarranted. Their work has been at the forefront of recent debates in philosophy of mind. I mention it because they are both non-religious, non-theistic philosophers. So any charge of special pleading on that score in their regard would be inaccurate.

By testable hypothesis, what do you mean? Physically testable?

Well, if consciousness isn't physical, then it likely isn't going to be the case that hypotheses about it are physically testable. In other words, your criterion is rather obviously question-begging.

Going back to the issue of consciousness being in space or not, you may wish to read this paper by McGinn: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html

And let me re-state some things I said in an earlier separate posting:

There is a naive conception of something which I'll call The Scientific Worldview or TSW for short. It's often called 'scientism'
to distinguish it from science, since it is view that is actually
based on philosophical preference, and NOT on any empirical finding
established by scientific experiment. And there is a naive belief
that this conception, the TSW, is *obviously* true, or *self-evidently* true, or that only nutters would dispute it, that a
person must be bonkers to deny it, and that it's just plain bloody
common sense that it's true.

Now, I'm trying to get the other side to see that even if the TSW as
they conceive it IS true, or that some more refined version of it is
true, it is not *OBVIOUSLY* true, not *SELF-EVIDENTLY* true, and that those who reject it are NOT bonkers or lacking in common sense (even if they're wrong.)

In order to see this, it's *important to understand* the debate in
contemporary philosophy of mind about consciousness. I'm not trying
to get you to accept my stance as regards that debate. I'm trying to
get you to understand the nature of that debate. You can make up your
own mind about it, of course. That's fine, and I don't really care if
you don't change your worldview after you understand it.

What I am trying to get you to see is that when one understands it, it
becomes clear that, on the contrary, it's IN ACTUAL FACT the
*adherents* of TSW, scientism/scientific naturalism/materialism, NOT
the opponents, who have their work cut out trying to give a rational
defence for *their* view .

Now, a fundamental underpinning of TSW is naturalism (or scientific
naturalism---the word is used in other senses too). Without
naturalism, TSW is logically unsupported. Ok. The problem is that
consciousness is widely thought by many philosophers of mind to be
something that does not fit into TSW. In fact, it's the folks trying
to defend naturalism in philosophy of mind who are having a great deal
of difficulty doing so.

One response has been the New Mysterianism. This says that naturalism
is true, and we not only don't know how naturalism and consciousness
co-exist, but that it's *impossible* to know how they do. It's an
intrinsically unsolvable mystery. We just have to have faith that
naturalism is true nevertheless.

Do you see what's being said? The New Mysterians are saying and
arguing that we have to take naturalism ON FAITH. Not only is there
no good argument for how consciousness fits with naturalism, no good
argument is EVEN POSSIBLE . The way they fit together is intrinsically UNKNOWABLE by any conceivable method of natural science. But we just have to *assume* that somehow naturalism is true. The leading New Mysterian is Colin McGinn, professor at Oxford.

Do you see how and why a critic of naturalism might object? Of course
you do!

I won't bore you with the arguments for the view that consciousness
logically cannot be given a scientific explanation. But they're
there, as strong as ever, and they're not going away, and have not
been refuted.

In fact, that's why the New Mysterians became New Mysterians. They realized that the arguments re consciousness not fitting conceptually or logically with naturalism, are logically valid, and irrefutable. They're saying, yes, those arguments are right, there is no possibility of explaining how consciousness can be explained by naturalism.

But rather than do the obvious thing when you get data that don't fit the theory (consciousness does not fit the theory of naturalism) and which you concede CANNOT EVER be made to fit the theory by human beings--the obvious thing being to dump the theory, naturalism--these guys just say no, IT'S AN UNSOLVABLE MYSTERY HOW NATURALISM CAN POSSIBLY BE TRUE, BUT WE'RE JUST GOING TO BELIEVE IN IT ANYWAY.

Contrary to what you might be thinking at this point, though, I
actually regard New Mysterianism as a rather brilliant position for
complex wee philosophical reasons which I can't get into here, and
that it might WELL be true as regards consciousness--that it's an
unsolvable mystery. McGinn's argument is very ingenious. Where I
differ of course is from their stubborn clinging to naturalism. To
me, they abandon the procedure we generally adopt in science when
faced with recalcitrant data, and this is particularly improper in
their case, since they profess faith in natural science as part of
their commitment to naturalism. Very, very, very ironic from a
theist's point of view.

Of course, not every believer in naturalism is a New Mysterian. But
it's vital, as regards our wee debate on this forum, that you all
realize that naturalism is NOT self-evident, obviously true, the only
logical or rational position, based on reason not on faith, etc. The
emergence of New Mysterianism DEMONSTRATES this fact. Just the
existence of the Mew Mysterians indicates naturalism is easily shown
to be CONTROVERSIAL AND, PERHAPS, EVEN *IMPOSSIBLE* TO DEFEND RATIONALLY.

Another would-be naturalist, David Chalmers, has recently developed a
different position. His position says, in essence, that TSW is false.
In addition to all the physical reality studied and knowable by
science, there is also conscious experience as a separate and
fundamental ontological category. I provide a quote from him below.

Now suppose Chalmers is right about that. I think that has ENORMOUS
implications for the debate about theism and atheism. Theists have
been saying all along, in essence, that not only is consciousness an
irreducible reality, but that the ultimate reality that grounds and
explains everything is characterized by a fundamental irreducible
consciousness. (There are in fact lots of reasons one could give for
this, once you start to ask what is the essence or 'nature of being'.
using concepts like self-generation, self-communication, information,
etc; and one can regard consciousness as the 'purest form' of
informational self-generating self-communication. Or something like
that. But that's another whole topic.)

More importantly, if Chalmers is right, the TSW is, far from being
obviously true, actually false. There's a whole chunk of reality that
TSW does not and cannot account for. Moreover, it's an absolutely
central chunk of reality. ALL of our knowledge, scientific knowledge,
presupposes consciousness---we have to be conscious to do science at
all. And yet scientific knowledge is not possible as regards
consciousness itself. But that just means that naturalism, defined in
terms of a proposition stating that all reality must be amenable to
the scientific method and be a part of physical realm, is false.
Consciousness itself, if Chalmers is right, is real but not amenable
to natural science nor is it a physical bit of the world.

That would rule out all atheist argumentation which presumes or relies
on a belief in naturalism.

Now, I'm not asking you to accept Chalmers, or the New Mysterians, or
anybody else's position on this. I'm asking you to understand that
all claims to the effect that naturalism is OBVIOUSLY true, or is
DICTATED BY REASON AS BEING VERY LIKELY to be true, are in fact NOT
really that simple.

Anyway, here's a little of Chalmers, and a quotation from Harnad which
expresses the nature of the problem.

DAVID CHALMERS
I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as
fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the
addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in
physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We
might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience
can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be
like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental
feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we
take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of
constructing a theory of experience.

STEVAN HARNAD
What is the mind/body problem? It's a problem we all have with
squaring the mental with the physical, with seeing how a mental state,
such as feeling melancholy, can be the same as a physical state, such
as certain activities in brain monoamine systems (Harnad 1993b).

The old-style "solution" to the mind/body problem was simply to state
that the physical state and the mental state were the same thing. And
we can certainly accept that (indeed, it's surely somehow true), but
what we can't do is understand how it's true, and that's the real
mind/body problem. Moreover, the sense in which we do not understand
how it's true that, say, feeling blue is really being low in certain
monoamines, is, I suggest, very different from the kinds of puzzlement
we've had with other counterintuitive scientific truths. For, as Nagel
(1974, 1986) has pointed out (quite correctly, I think), the
understanding of all other counterintuitive scientific truths except
those pertaining to the mind/body problem has always required us to
translate one set of appearances into a second set of appearances
that, on first blush, differed from the first, but that, upon
reflection, we could come to see as the same thing after all: Examples
include coming to see water as H2O, heat as mean kinetic energy, life
as certain biomolecular properties, and so on.

The reason this substitution of one set of appearances for another was
no problem (given sufficient evidence and a causal explanation) was
that, although appearances changed, appearance itself was preserved in
all previous cases of intuition-revision. We could come to see one
kind of thing as another kind of thing, but we were still seeing (or
picturing) it as something. But when we come to the mind/body problem,
it is appearance itself that we are inquiring about: What are
appearances? -- for mental states, if you think about it, are
appearances. So when the answer is that appearances are really just,
say, monoaminergic states, then that appearance-to-appearance revision
mechanism (or "reduction" mechanism, if you prefer) that has stood us
in such good stead time and time again in scientific explanation fails
us completely. For what precedent is there for substituting for a
previous appearance, not a new (though counterintuitive) appearance,
but no appearance at all?

[Jim__]

21. Oh please!

Are you familiar with the work of leading philosophers of mind such as David Chalmers and Colin McGinn?

Sigh! Whenever I am on a message board and someone starts telling me about the experts they've read, the degrees they hold, and how learned they are; e.g. And if so, there may not be much point in my debating you, as you would be too seriously under-informed in that case; I know they are not ready for a debate. I have spoken with any number of experts in my lifetime; I've never had one of them tell me who they've read, or how many degrees they hold. Their knowledge has always spoken for itself. Any one who can't state and defend his position clearly; should go back and master the material before trying to debate it.

Now, Chalmers and McGinn ... Their work has been at the forefront of recent debates in philosophy of mind. I mention it because they are both non-religious, non-theistic philosophers. So any charge of special pleading on that score in their regard would be inaccurate.

From the McGinn's paper you cited: God may see the elementary particles as arrayed in space, but even He does not perceive our conscious states as spatially defined - no more than He sees numbers as spatially defined. Most non-theistic philosophers do not tell us what "God" sees and perceives.

By testable hypothesis, what do you mean? Physically testable?

Well, physical tests are the types of tests I'm familiar with. But, if you can come up with another kind, that's fine. If we can't test our ideas we have no way of knowing whether or not they are correct. Any system built on untested ideas is an awfully shaky system.

Well, if consciousness isn't physical, then it likely isn't going to be the case that hypotheses about it are physically testable. In other words, your criterion is rather obviously question-begging.

If your hypotheses are untestable, your system will, at best, be purely speculative. Before we embrace untestable ideas, we should at least have very strong evidence that testable ideas can't work. I haven't seen any such evidence.

Do you see what's being said? The New Mysterians are saying and
arguing that we have to take naturalism ON FAITH. Not only is there
no good argument for how consciousness fits with naturalism, no good
argument is EVEN POSSIBLE . The way they fit together is intrinsically UNKNOWABLE by any conceivable method of natural science. But we just have to *assume* that somehow naturalism is true. The leading New Mysterian is Colin McGinn, professor at Oxford.

How ironic. The New Mysterian that you cite is none other than the supposed non-theist, the non-theist who cites "God" in his philosophical argument, Colin McGinn.

First we get the "god of the gaps" argument, now we get the "strawman" argument.

[Stunster]

22. You are profoundly ignorant

if you think that McGinn is a theist because he uses the concept of God.

McGinn is a self-proclaimed naturalist. He is not a theist.

Stephen Hawking, the celebrated physicist, talked in his best seller A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, about 'knowing the mind of God'.

It's a 'facon de parler'. As in Einstein's famous phrase 'God doesn't play dice with the universe'.

Einstein wasn't a theist either.

When people obviously don't know what they're talking about--in this case, you, and the philosophy of mind---it's quite appropriate to attempt to familiarize them with some the best known work that has been at the forefront of the subject they're spouting off quite ignorantly about.

Think about pain. Let's say it's a particular configuration of brain neurons firing in a particular way---just as heat is, say, mean molecular kinetic energy. Heat is still heat even if nothing feels hot to any conscious being. There was heat in the universe long before any conscious beings (as far as we know) existed in the universe.

But if you take away the way pain feels to a conscious being---its phenomenal property---then there is no pain. Pain's phenomenal property is at least partly constitutive of pain. Not so with heat.

Conscious experience is essential to something being pain. It's not essential to something being heat.

Some things, in other words, are constituted, at least in part, by their phenomenal properties. If you take away those properties, the thing itself ceases to be.

This is why consciousness is not reducible to physical properties. If you take away, in the case of certain things, their phenomenality, they cease to be altogether. So, for instance, pain can't just be some physical property, for that property (whatever one you select) is not a phenomenal property (though it may cause such a property to be instantiated). But pain is constituted (at least in part) by the phenomenal properties of pain. If pain doesn't include the way it feels, it isn't pain. But the way it feels isn't something observable to a third party. Clinton was wrong. He couldn't feel your pain.

That, in a nutshell, is why materialism can't explain consciousness, and why consciousness is ontologically basic.

Now, go and talk to someone about Relativity, but make sure you don't mention Einstein.

[Jim__]

27. Ah yes, god of the gaps, straw man, and now, name calling

You are obviously deeply steeped in philosophy.

Well, taking the minor points first: Now, go and talk to someone about Relativity, but make sure you don't mention Einstein. Actually, if I were explaining relativity to someone, there wouldn't be much point in my mentioning Einstein. I certainly wouldn't refer them to his papers on relativity. If they don't know about
relativity, they obviously wouldn't understand his papers. I would find it far more difficult to explain relativity to them without mentioning Lorenz; but, I wouldn't refer them to his papers either.

McGinn is a self-proclaimed naturalist. He is not a theist.

I read McGinn's paper because you claimed he was not a theist. I couldn't believe that any non-theistic philosopher would postulate the existence of a non-material realm to explain consciousness; it just doesn't make sense. As soon as I began to read his paper, I knew he was a theist. His world-view is immediately evident.

You claim he is a naturalist; and you also claim he is a New Mysterian: The New Mysterians are saying and
arguing that we have to take naturalism ON FAITH. Not only is there no good argument for how consciousness fits with naturalism, no good argument is EVEN POSSIBLE . The way they fit together is intrinsically UNKNOWABLE by any conceivable method of natural science. But we just have to *assume* that somehow naturalism is true. The leading New Mysterian is Colin McGinn, professor at Oxford.

You are deluding yourself if you think this "New Mysterianism" is a position embraced by people who seriously argue for naturalism; in any of its forms. People who embrace a worldview do so because it seems correct to them. Colin McGinn has a theistic view of the world; not a naturalistic one. So, while you may claim that he is a naturalist, and he may follow a naturalistic procedure; ultimately, he doesn't accept a naturalist view of the world. I doubt you'll find someone who embraces a particular world view who will also say the view can't be right - as the statements above indicate Colin McGinn does. They may well recognize difficulties and unanswered questions; but they will also believe that is due to the current state of knowledge.

When people obviously don't know what they're talking about--in this case, you, and the philosophy of mind---it's quite appropriate to attempt to familiarize them with some the best known work that has been at the forefront of the subject they're spouting off quite ignorantly about.

First of all, we are not discussing the philosophy of mind. I joined this discussion because of your misleading and incomplete statement: The problem with this is that there is no material explanation of morality. ... Or of consciousness.

I don't have to discuss philosophy of mind to discuss material explanations of consciousness. Like I said before, I hate to cite experts as the citation really adds nothing to a debate; and, I have made my defense of my position in an earlier post; namely, that consciousness is basically self-awareness and that the structure of the brain is such that it is self-aware; therefore there can be a material explanation of consciousness. But, since you tell me that
I am profoundly ignorant, I feel I should point the finger of profound ignorance at one of the leading lights in the field of the biological basis of consciousness, the Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman. And, if we're going to refer each other to books, I can refer you to one of his earlier works on the biological basis of consciousness.

Like I say, references to experts and their works do not add much to our debate. But, I have read books on the philsophy of mind; and also on the physiology of the brain. My "profound ignorance" may be based on my broader understanding of the topic. Yes, broader understanding. You stated: Not only is there no good argument for how consciousness fits with naturalism, no good argument is EVEN POSSIBLE . Now, I refer you to a Nobel Laureate who is making an argument for a biological basis of consciousness. Go tell him his argument is not EVEN POSSIBLE.

Now, to your claims about pain.

Think about pain. Let's say it's a particular configuration of brain neurons firing in a particular way---just as heat is, say, mean molecular kinetic energy. Heat is still heat even if nothing feels hot to any conscious being. There was heat in the universe long before any conscious beings (as far as we know) existed in the universe.

But if you take away the way pain feels to a conscious being---its phenomenal property---then there is no pain. Pain's phenomenal property is at least partly constitutive of pain. Not so with heat.

Conscious experience is essential to something being pain. It's not essential to something being heat.

Some things, in other words, are constituted, at least in part, by their phenomenal properties. If you take away those properties, the thing itself ceases to be.

This is why consciousness is not reducible to physical properties. ...

First, you haven't defined consciousness, so, it's difficult for me to know exactly what you are talking about. For instance, I don't know if in your definition of consciousness, a sparrow is conscious. The recursive brain structures that I claim are required for consciousness, are not present in the sparrow's brain; so, by my
defintion, a sparrow does not have "consciousness" (I'm trying to avoid the silliness of you telling me that a sparrow is awake and therefore conscious - there is tremendous ambiguity in these terms). So, in my definition, the sparrow is not conscious, but, by all measures I am familiar with, a sparrow can feel pain. So, I agree that "awareness" is necessary for there to be pain; self-awareness is not necessary.

Still, no matter what you argue about the consciousness of the sparrow, or whether or not it feels pain; you have said nothing that precludes the feeling of pain from being a physical phenomenon. We know that the sense data that indicate pain are transmitted over physical channels and received in a physical medium; and once in the brain, the signal will be physically transmitted over various neural circuits. You have to claim that all this physical activity is not sufficient for the bird to feel pain. But, you haven't stated why this must be so.

[Stunster]

29. My last word

I did not engage in name-calling. I simply said that if you think that McGinn is a theist because he uses the concept of God in philosophical writing, you are profoundly ignorant. That's because McGinn is not a theist, and because in philosophical writing people use the concept of God very often as a facon de parler, or as a short-hand hypothetical conceptual construct useful for dealing with certain issues. For example, it's sometimes useful to posit an omniscient being as a way of framing certain questions or expressing certain modal propositions.

I didn't suggest that you refer to Einstein's papers on relativity. But people routinely contrast, say, a Newtonian conception of gravity with the Einsteinian one. You had suggested that the idea that consciousness is ontologically basic is in flying pig territory. In fact, however, it's a leading contender idea in contemporary philosophy of mind. So your suggestion would be like that of someone saying in 1916 that curved space was in flying pig territory, to which an appropriate response might be, "Are you familiar with the recent work of Einstein?" Dismissing in 1916 the need to be familiar with Einstein's work would turn out to be a silly move, and I am suggesting that dismissing the need to be familiar with the work of Chalmers, McGinn (et al, such as the very well known philosophers Galen Strawson, John Searle, Saul Kripke, Thomas Nagel, etc) is also a silly move. All of them disagree with your position, and of that particular group only Kripke is a theist.

Your citing of Edelman betrays a common confusion or misunderstanding. Nobody doubts that consciousness has some causal basis in some set of physical/functional/organizational/structural properties. But for reasons which have been extensively canvassed in the literature over the past 30 years, this does nothing to resolve what Chalmers has called the 'Hard Problem' of consciousness. The problem derives from the following observation: every time one tries to explain consciousness by reducing phenomenal properties to non-phenomenal properties, one is inevitably leaving out that which is precisely what is constitutive of consciousness--namely, its phenomenality. So, for example, saying that recursive brain structures are required for consciousness a) merely says something about the causal conditions of consciousness--and remember, if x causes y, x is not identical to y; and b) posits a non-phenomenal set of properties, when the issue is that properties are constitutive of consciousness must be phenomenal properties, and phenomenal properties are not non-phenomenal properties! Without the phenomenal properties, there is no consciousness.

So, for instance, without the way pain feels, there is no consciousness of pain, and without the way the color green looks, there is no consciousness of green----albeit pain involves some non-phenomenal physiological properties, as does the perception of green. But without the phenomenality of, say, pain or of, say green color perception, we don't yet have consciousness.

It's not especially telling to ask for a definition of consciousness, any more than it is telling to ask for a definition of some fundamental physical quantity or property. What is matter, or space, or energy, or time, or charge, or mass, or whatever you want to include in your list of rock-bottom basic physical entities or properties? The point is not to give some definition of consciousness. The point is to note that conscious experience has as at least one of its constitutive features the fundamental involvement of appearances, whereas lots of other things don't. Rocks can be rocks without anything appearing to be a certain way to rocks. But consciousness can't be consciousness without something appearing to be a certain way to consciousness. Any conception of consciousness which misses out its phenomenal features, or replaces them with non-phenomenal features misses out on what is utterly distinctive/essential/constitutive about consciousness. The universe could be devoid of appearances, and still be there. Consciousness couldn't be devoid of appearances and still be there.

This point has been such a commonplace in contemporary philosophy of mind, and is regarded as so central to the problem of consciousness, that I find it hard to take seriously any interlocutor who seeks blithely to dismiss or sidestep it.

We know that the sense data that indicate pain are transmitted over physical channels and received in a physical medium; and once in the brain, the signal will be physically transmitted over various neural circuits. You have to claim that all this physical activity is not sufficient for the bird to feel pain. But, you haven't stated why this must be so.

Unfortunately, this just misses the point. Nobody is denying that if such-and-such a physical process occurs, such-and-such an instance of conscious experience is likely to result. The point is that the physical process is capable of being identified and is logically constituted without any reference to any phenomenal properties, but the resulting conscious experience isn't.

Here's a well known statement by Chalmers describing the 'easy problems and the hard problem':

2 The easy problems and the hard problem

There is not just one problem of consciousness. "Consciousness" is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into "hard" and "easy" problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.

The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:
# the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
# the integration of information by a cognitive system;
# the reportability of mental states;
# the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
# the focus of attention;
# the deliberate control of behavior;
# the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake.

There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. To explain access and reportability, for example, we need only specify the mechanism by which information about internal states is retrieved and made available for verbal report. To explain the integration of information, we need only exhibit mechanisms by which information is brought together and exploited by later processes. For an account of sleep and wakefulness, an appropriate neurophysiological account of the processes responsible for organisms' contrasting behavior in those states will suffice. In each case, an appropriate cognitive or neurophysiological model can clearly do the explanatory work.

If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem. Although we do not yet have anything close to a complete explanation of these phenomena, we have a clear idea of how we might go about explaining them. This is why I call these problems the easy problems. Of course, "easy" is a relative term. Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work. Still, there is every reason to believe that the methods of cognitive science and neuroscience will succeed.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience". Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g. Newell 1990, Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other.

The ambiguity of the term "consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists writing on the subject. It is common to see a paper on consciousness begin with an invocation of the mystery of consciousness, noting the strange intangibility and ineffability of subjectivity, and worrying that so far we have no theory of the phenomenon. Here, the topic is clearly the hard problem - the problem of experience. In the second half of the paper, the tone becomes more optimistic, and the author's own theory of consciousness is outlined. Upon examination, this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more straightforward phenomena - of reportability, of introspective access, or whatever. At the close, the author declares that consciousness has turned out to be tractable after all, but the reader is left feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch. The hard problem remains untouched.

Here is the link to the full article:
http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html

[Jim__]

30. My citation of Dr Edelman does not betray any confusion

Your citing of Edelman betrays a common confusion or misunderstanding. Nobody doubts that consciousness has some causal basis in some set of physical/functional/organizational/structural properties. But for reasons which have been extensively canvassed in the literature over the past 30 years, this does nothing to resolve what Chalmers has called the 'Hard Problem' of consciousness.

Have you read Edelman? I'm not confused about what Edelman is working on, a biological theory of consciousness. Let me quote a paragraph from his introduction to the book The Remembered Present:

Any adequate global theory of brain function must include a scientific model of consciousness, but to be scientifically acceptable it also must avoid the Cartesian dilemma. In other words, it must be uncompromisingly physical and be based on res extensa, and indeed be derivable from them. According to this view, all cognition and all consciousness must rest on orderings and processes in the physical world. Unlike the Galilean view (which is noncommital on the issue) and unlike Cartesianism, such a view of brain function and consciousness should be based on a materialist metaphysics and on an epistemology of qualified realism, as I shall explain in the final chapter of the book

I don't think I'm confused about what Dr Edelman is saying. And, he is quite well aware of the 'hard problem.'

We know that the sense data that indicate pain are transmitted over physical channels and received in a physical medium; and once in the brain, the signal will be physically transmitted over various neural circuits. You have to claim that all this physical activity is not sufficient for the bird to feel pain. But, you haven't stated why this must be so.

Unfortunately, this just misses the point. Nobody is denying that if such-and-such a physical process occurs, such-and-such an instance of conscious experience is likely to result. The point is that the physical process is capable of being identified and is logically constituted without any reference to any phenomenal properties, but the resulting conscious experience isn't.

The point is that given certain physical circumstances, we know that consciousness arises. You say the physical circumstances are not sufficient to give rise to consciousness. But you offer no evidence. And then, to postulate the existence of another whole realm, a non-physical realm, and claim that the explanation for consciousness lies there; is somewhat fantastic.

[Stunster]

23. Testability and all that

Let's consider the following proposition, P1:

P1: "The only valid knowledge possible, other than that expressed in logical and mathematical truths, is that which can in principle be gained by empirical scientific testing".

If this is true, how would we know it? P1 is clearly not itself a truth of logic or mathematics---its denial involves no logical or mathematical incoherence.

But how could its truth, if it is true, be established by any conceivable empirical scientific testing? What possible scientific test could verify P1?

It does not seem that there could be any such test. P1 is simply not a statement of empirically testable fact.

It would seem therefore that the proposition P1 could not itself be an item of knowledge, if P1 is true.

Now consider another proposition, P2:

P2: "All statements which are not truths of logic or mathematics, nor statements verifiable in principle by means of empirical scientific methods, are cognitively meaningless."

P2 is not a truth of logic or mathematics, nor is it verifiable by means of empirical scientific methods.

But if it's true, then P2 itself is meaningless.

I would submit that P1, P2, and any proposition to the same effect, are not much more than statements of philosophical prejudice or preference. That in itself might not be very problematic, except that these particular prejudices reek of self-referential incoherence.

[Stunster]

16. Some more email correspondence dealing with this stuff

Contributions by me to some email exchanges several months ago....

*******************************************
There is only one promising argument in favour of atheism, and that's the 'evidential argument from evil'. Unfortunately for the atheist,
the existence of evil is also, when you think about it, evidence against atheism, or at least against materialist ontology. Most atheists are atheists because they accept something kind of materialist ontology. But think of the implications of that ontology. It implies, for example, that there is no real difference between the Holocaust and, say, a storm in the atmosphere of Jupiter, other than in the positions, vectors, momenta etc of the material particles and fields involved.

There is no room, in other words, in a materialist ontology for irreducible moral properties. The rape, torture and murder of small children for the sake of the perpetrators' pleasure is not essentially different from any other physical process in the universe, on this view. Thus, if, contrary to the foregoing suppositions, evil is real--and it has to be to make the argument from evil work---then the materialist ontology is false. One could still be an atheist, but now one would have to admit immaterial entities into your ontology. But if you're willing to do that, then you can't object to the existence of
God on the grounds of God's immateriality. And one might plausibly ask, if you're going to give up any principled objection to immaterial
realities (in order to account for the reality of irreducible moral properties), why not go the whole hog and admit God into one's ontology as the source of moral obligation, and indeed the understanding of sin and redemption presented by Christian theology into one's belief system?

One problem faced by the atheist who admits irreducible moral properties into his worldview is to account for their existence. They can't, if they are irreducible properties, be accounted for by physics and chemistry or biology. They have to be sui generis properties. But if we suppose that such properties do exist, why in the name of the wee man should the world contain them? I mean, it would be just weird for them to exist, especially given the fact that the universe is an awful lot older than the human race. Atheists, of course, generally claim that moral properties are created or generated in some way by human beings. But that human beings would have such a capacity would be itself quite, quite remarkable. And, if humans truly are the source of morality, how could there possibly be such a thing as objectively binding moral obligations?

A lot of people might be against the Holocaust, but some were (and even are) for it. If there is no objective answer as to who is
correct about this, then that is tantamount to saying that there aren't in fact irreducible moral properties, contrary to the hypothesis we accepted for the sake of the argument. But if there *is* an objectively correct answer to this question, what is its source? It can't just be 'the opinion of the majority'. But then it's terribly, terribly hard to see and explain in detail how humans generate objectively binding moral norms (indeed, I would argue impossibly hard.)

So even atheism's best argument tends towards self-contradictoriness and incoherence.

> From the point of view of philosophy, though,
> naturalism is in deep trouble, as even a cursory
> familiarity with contemporary philosophy of mind
> reveals. There's a whole new position being
> championed by the top people (Colin McGinn et al)
> in the field. It's even called 'the New
> Mysterianism.' They want to be naturalists, but
> they hold that it is not possible to explain
> consciousness in a naturalistic framework.
> So, they say, "It's an unsolvable mystery.
> We don't know how to explain it naturalistically
> and no-one ever will. However, whatever the
> explanation is, it MUST be a naturalistic one,
> though it can never be known. So we're still going
> to believe in naturalism." The ironies are HUGE
> and delicious. No wonder theists are chortling
> and chuckling to themselves these days.
>
> By the way, if you think I'm misrepresenting
> things, don't. That really, truly is their
> position. Others say, oh, science will find
> the answer one day. But the New Mysterians
> say the reasons why science couldn't even
> in principle explain consciousness are
> irrefutable (and I agree). Then you have
> a third lot, Chalmers and his supporters.
> I think his is the best response, but what
> he has to do is violate 300 years of
> materialism and the Scientific World View.


I've posted quotes from philosophers before, but it's worth posting
them again sometimes, because this issue is crucial to the debate
we're having. I've included a few at the end.

People might object that here I go again, using authorities in the
field I know best to buttress my position. Actually, that's not true.
I'm not trying to buttress my position. I'm trying to get you
(plural) to see that it's your view which in the Academy, is in need
of buttressing. What I am trying to do is to get you really to
understand something which, as far as I have seen in these debates you
(plural) often seem to ignore or forget or not realize (you're not
philosophers, after all). What 'something' is that, you ask.

It's this.

There is a naive conception of something which I'll call The
Scientific Worldview or TSW for short. It's often called 'scientism'
to distinguish it from science, since it is view that is actually
based on philosophical preference, and NOT on any empirical finding
established by scientific experiment. And there is a naive belief
that this conception, the TSW, is *obviously* true, or *self-evidently* true, or that only nutters would dispute it, that a
person must be bonkers to deny it, and that it's just plain bloody
common sense that it's true.

Now, I'm trying to get the other side to see that even if the TSW as
the conceive it IS true, or that some more refined version of it is
true, it is NOT *OBVIOUSLY* true, NOT *SELF-EVIDENTLY* true, and that
those who reject it are NOT bonkers or lacking in common sense (even
if they're wrong.)

In order to see this, it's *important to understand* the debate in
contemporary philosophy of mind about consciousness. I'm not trying
to get you to accept my stance as regards that debate. I'm trying to
get you to understand the nature of that debate. You can make up your
own mind about it, of course. That's fine, and I don't really care if
you don't change your worldview after you understand it.

What I am trying to get you to see is that when one understands it, it
becomes clear that, on the contrary, it's IN ACTUAL FACT the
*adherents* of TSW, scientism, scientific naturalism, materialism, NOT
the opponents, who have their work cut out trying to give a rational
defence for *their* view.

Now, a fundamental underpinning of TSW is naturalism (or scientific
naturalism---the word is used in other senses too). Without
naturalism, TSW is logically unsupported. Ok. The problem is that
consciousness is widely thought by many philosophers of mind to be
something that does not fit into TSW. In fact, it's the folks trying
to defend naturalism in philosophy of mind who are having a great deal
of difficulty doing so.

One response has been the New Mysterianism. This says that naturalism
is true, and we not only don't know how naturalism and consciousness
co-exist, but that it's *impossible* to how they do. It's an
intrinsically unsolvable mystery. We just have to have faith that
naturalism is true nevertheless.

Do you see what's being said? The New Mysterians are saying and
arguing that we have to take naturalism ON FAITH. Not only is there
no good argument for how consciousness fits with naturalism, no good
argument is EVEN POSSIBLE. The way they fit is intrinsically
UNKNOWABLE by any conceivable method of natural science. But we just
have to *assume* that somehow naturalism is true. The leading New
Mysterian is Colin McGinn, professor at Oxford.

Do you see how and why a critic of naturalism might object? Of course
you do!

I won't bore you with the arguments for the view that consciousness
logically cannot be given a scientific explanation. But they're
there, as strong as ever, and they're not going away, and have not
been refuted. In fact, that's why the New Mysterians became New
Mysterians. They realized that the arguments re consciousness not
fitting conceptually or logically with naturalism, are logically
valid, and irrefutable. They're saying, yes, those arguments are
right, there is no possibility of explaining how consciousness can be
explained by naturalism. But rather than do the obvious thing when
you get data that don't fit the theory (consciousness does not fit the
theory of naturalism) and which you concede CANNOT EVER be made to fit
the theory by human beings--the obvious thing being to dump the
theory, naturalism--these guys just say no, IT'S AN UNSOLVABLE MYSTERY
HOW NATURALISM CAN POSSIBLY BE TRUE, BUT WE'RE JUST GOING TO BELIEVE
IN IT ANYWAY.

Contrary to what you might be thinking at this point, though, I
actually regard New Mysterianism as a rather brilliant position for
complex wee philosophical reasons which I can't get into here, and
that it might WELL be true as regards consciousness--that it's an
unsolvable mystery. McGinn's argument is very ingenious. Where I
differ of course is from their stubborn clinging to naturalism. To
me, they abandon the procedure we generally adopt in science when
faced with recalcitrant data, and this is particularly improper in
their case, since they profess faith in natural science as part of
their commitment to naturalism. Very, very, very ironic from a
theist's point of view.

Of course, not every believer in naturalism is a New Mysterian. But
it's vital, as regards our wee debate on this forum, that you all
realize that naturalism is NOT self-evident, obviously true, the only
logical or rational position, based on reason not on faith, etc. The
emergence of New Mysterianism DEMONSTRATES this fact. Just the
existence of the Mew Mysterians indicates naturalism is easily shown
to be CONTROVERSIAL AND, PERHAPS, EVEN *IMPOSSIBLE* TO DEFEND RATIONALLY.

Another would-be naturalist, David Chalmers, has recently developed a
different position. His position says, in essence, that TSW is false.
In addition to all the physical reality studied and knowable by
science, there is also conscious experience as a separate and
fundamental ontological category. I provide a quote from him below.

Now suppose Chalmers is right about that. I think that has ENORMOUS
implications for the debate about theism and atheism. Theists have
been saying all along, in essence, that not only is consciousness an
irreducible reality, but that the ultimate reality that grounds and
explains everything is characterized by a fundamental irreducible
consciousness. (There are in fact lots of reasons one could give for
this, once you start to ask what is the essence or 'nature of being'.
using concepts like self-generation, self-communication, information,
etc; and one can regard consciousness as the 'purest form' of
informational self-generating self-communication. Or something like
that. But that's another whole topic.)

More importantly, if Chalmers is right, the TSW is, far from being
obviously true, actually false. There's a whole chunk of reality that
TSW does not and cannot account for. Moreover, it's an absolutely
central chunk of reality. ALL of our knowledge, scientific knowledge,
presupposes consciousness---we have to be conscious to do science at
all. And yet scientific knowledge is not possible as regards
consciousness itself. But that just means that naturalism, defined in
terms of a proposition stating that all reality must be amenable to
the scientific method and be a part of physical realm, is false.
Consciousness itself, if Chalmers is right, is real but not amenable
to natural science nor is it a physical bit of the world.

That would rule out all atheist argumentation which presumes or relies
on a belief in naturalism.

Now, I'm not asking you to accept Chalmers, or the New Mysterians, or
anybody else's position on this. I'm asking you to understand that
all claims to the effect that naturalism is OBVIOUSLY true, or is
DICTATED BY REASON AS BEING VERY LIKELY to be true, are in fact NOT
really that simple.

Anyway, here's a little of Chalmers, and a quotation from Harnad which
expresses the nature of the problem.

DAVID CHALMERS
I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as
fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the
addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in
physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We
might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience
can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be
like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental
feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we
take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of
constructing a theory of experience.

STEVAN HARNAD
What is the mind/body problem? It's a problem we all have with
squaring the mental with the physical, with seeing how a mental state,
such as feeling melancholy, can be the same as a physical state, such
as certain activities in brain monoamine systems (Harnad 1993b).

The old-style "solution" to the mind/body problem was simply to state
that the physical state and the mental state were the same thing. And
we can certainly accept that (indeed, it's surely somehow true), but
what we can't do is understand how it's true, and that's the real
mind/body problem. Moreover, the sense in which we do not understand
how it's true that, say, feeling blue is really being low in certain
monoamines, is, I suggest, very different from the kinds of puzzlement
we've had with other counterintuitive scientific truths. For, as Nagel
(1974, 1986) has pointed out (quite correctly, I think), the
understanding of all other counterintuitive scientific truths except
those pertaining to the mind/body problem has always required us to
translate one set of appearances into a second set of appearances
that, on first blush, differed from the first, but that, upon
reflection, we could come to see as the same thing after all: Examples
include coming to see water as H2O, heat as mean kinetic energy, life
as certain biomolecular properties, and so on.

The reason this substitution of one set of appearances for another was
no problem (given sufficient evidence and a causal explanation) was
that, although appearances changed, appearance itself was preserved in
all previous cases of intuition-revision. We could come to see one
kind of thing as another kind of thing, but we were still seeing (or
picturing) it as something. But when we come to the mind/body problem,
it is appearance itself that we are inquiring about: What are
appearances? -- for mental states, if you think about it, are
appearances. So when the answer is that appearances are really just,
say, monoaminergic states, then that appearance-to-appearance revision
mechanism (or "reduction" mechanism, if you prefer) that has stood us
in such good stead time and time again in scientific explanation fails
us completely. For what precedent is there for substituting for a
previous appearance, not a new (though counterintuitive) appearance,
but no appearance at all?

[Stunster]

24. Some recent thinking about consciousness

I pass this stuff along, not necessarily because I agree with the philosophers reviewed below, but simply to point out that in the contemporary field of philosophy of mind, there is a widespread and growing recognition that materialism, or physical science, has no explanation for the emergence of consciousness.

Strawson and McGinn have dealt with this as materialists by declaring their faith that materialism is true, while admitting that materialism as we understand it does not and indeed cannot explain consciousness. Chalmers takes a similar line. Their denial of, or refusal even to contemplate a theistic basis for consciousness is an article of faith, rather than a reasoned conclusion from the evidence.

The theist, of course, takes Conscious Mind as the most ultimate ontological category and reality (God), and so for the theist, it is not surprising that conscious mind should exist in the created order. It is the existence of matter that calls for explanation. However,
what we traditionally thought of as matter has begun to look very different since Einstein and Bohr. Matter is congealed energy. Discrete bits of matter did not always exist in the universe. At the Big Bang, there was just undifferentiated energy. So the question now is, what is energy? This in itself is a supremely fascinating question. Another is the collapse of the quantum mechanical wave function upon measurement, which appears to depend on mind via the notion of discrete information achieved through observation. Observation of course is feature of conscious mind. The
literature on this 'quantum-mind' stuff is now voluminous. Anyhoo....

Mental Reality, by Galen Strawson

Strawson's book is noteworthy for its declaration of faith: faith that
naturalism-monism-materialism is true. (Naturalism-monism-materialism is the doctrine that there is no supernatural realm and that everything that is real is material or made out of matter. From now on I will refer to this simply as materialism.) Noteworthy because Strawson insists that materialism cannot explain or understand conscious experience as material, but that no sane person denies that conscious experience is real.

All declarations of faith raise the question Why this faith rather than some other? In Strawson's case the pertinent question is Why monism rather than dualism, and, indeed, Why not a supernatural realm as well as a natural one?

With respect to the former question, Strawson is ingenious, though, as he brings out, Locke was there first. The essence of Strawson's ingenuity here is this. Dualism comes under severe pressure to posit an immaterial stuff that the mind is which somehow makes possible thoughts, memories, etc. This immaterial stuff turns out to be such that one does not and cannot know its nature. But this allows that this allegedly immaterial stuff may, for all we know, be material, for 'matter may very well have properties of which one has no idea and that can indeed be the basis of...experiential goings-on.'

Once Strawson has made this argument, I believe that, though he himself does not say this, considerations of simplicity favor monism, not to mention the avoidance of the notorious mind-body problem.

I am not entirely happy with Strawson's answer to Why monism rather than dualism? But space does not permit me to bring out why here.

I conclude with the question about a supernatural realm. Strawson says that there is no satisfactory account of mental phenomena to be found in contemporary science or philosophy or anywhere else. He suggests that this is either because some mental phenomena are fundamental, like electrical charge, or because we do not have the revolutionary physics needed to give such a satisfactory account. But why not think about a supernatural explanation for mental phenomena? There's much precedent here: What explains the Big Bang? What explains life's origin? Etc. If there are no natural answers to these questions, why not look to supernatural answers?

The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World
by Colin McGinn

You have a piece of meat in your head called a brain. You also have
perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and ideas, which scientists assert are related in some fashion to that piece of meat. How can this be? Philosopher Colin McGinn looks at this question in depth in The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World, a slim, accessible book that presents a novel answer: we'll never know. We can look at the brain from outside, and look at our consciousness from within, but never the twain shall meet.

Not at all defeatist in tone, The Mysterious Flame rejects strict
materialism and dualism, which seek to solve the mind-body problem in fairly unsatisfactory ways, and claims instead that our intelligence is not an appropriate tool to use for understanding the interface between subjective experience and material reality. (And, unfortunately, we don't have anything better.) Instead of bemoaning our fate, McGinn turns the traditional questions around and asks "What can we know about ourselves?" This is just as interesting as any question being asked by philosophers of the mind, and in fact seems to merit a higher priority.

Whether McGinn's arguments will succeed in the marketplace of ideas is an open question, but they certainly deserve the attention of anyone interested in the nature of human thought.

From Scientific American

McGinn, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, asks several deep questions about consciousness and then answers them in clear and
entertaining prose. "What is consciousness? Where does it come from? ...
What does the activity of the brain have to do with it?" His answer: "My thesis is that consciousness depends upon an unknowable natural property of the brain." The inability of the human intellect to resolve the mind-body problem arises because "our minds are not equipped to solve it, rather as the cat's mind is not up to discovering relativity theory."

McGinn supposes that brains capable of understanding consciousness might be developed by breeding advanced thinkers or by a "genetically engineered super-mind," but he warns that one must consider what such a superbrained person might lose as the cost of what he gains. "As they say, be careful what you wish for!"

New York Times
"There is better introduction to the problem of consciousness than this."

Book News, Inc.
McGinn says Get Over! the burning question of
whether consciousness is a fundamental reality like space and time, or a consequence of purely physical phenomena. He argues that the human intellect is simply not equipped to unravel the mystery, and that if we just accept it as there, we can use it as a foundation for exploring the internal makeup of human intelligence, our cognitive strengths and weaknesses, and the possibility of machine minds. His account is accessible to lay readers...............
One of our most original thinkers addresses the scientific world's premier question: What is the nature of consciousness?

In recent years the nature of consciousness-our immediately known
experiences-has taken its place as the most profound problem that science faces. Now in this brilliant and thoroughly accessible new book Colin McGinn takes a provocative position on this perplexing problem. Arguing that we can never truly "know" consciousness-that the human intellect is simply not equipped to unravel this mystery-he demonstrates that accepting this limitation in fact opens up a whole new field of investigation. In elegant prose, McGinn explores the implications of this Mysterian position-such as the new value it gives to the power of dreams and introspection-and challenges the reader with intriguing questions about the very nature of our minds and brains.

[Stunster]

25. An argument for why materialism cannot be true

I like this one:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/victor_reppert/reason.html

[Stunster]

26. Some doubts about naturalism

Nice, succinct article, this, by Philip Ruetz:

------------------------------------------------------------------

In a number of recent works1 of epistemology, Alvin Plantinga has
expressed doubts about metaphysical naturalism. Specifically,
Plantinga wonders if it is possible for belief in naturalism to be
rational if our belief-forming faculties are what naturalism says they
are. In other words: Is naturalism self-defeating?

Unfortunately, it is a complex argument which involves Bayesian
probability theory and much philosophy of science in general. But
Plantinga's insights are not completely new, and represent more or
less an extension of earlier and (fortunately) much simpler ideas. It
is these previous ideas I wish to explore.

NATURALISM DEFINED

In this paper, metaphysical naturalism refers to the view that reality
is identical to the natural world. The natural world is simply the
material, physical universe which the sciences explore. "Reality
consists of nothing but a single, all-embracing spatio-temporal
system,"2 as one writer puts it. This system was born 15-20 billion
years ago when an infinitely hot and dense mass exploded in a cosmic
big bang. The expansionary effects of this event comprise the entirety
of nature; ultimately speaking, the history of the world is the
history of the evolution of matter.

Now, this is perhaps not an uncontroversial definition; but I believe
it is a fair one, one that is consistent with contemporary philosophy
and cosmology. Generally speaking, the natural sciences involve a
methodological naturalism, which states that the sciences cannot range
beyond the domain of the physical world. Metaphysical naturalism,
however, pushes this methodology significantly further when it insists
that what the sciences explore is the full extent of our world.

METAPHYSICS NATURALIZED

Whether or not science depends upon some form of naturalism is not the
purpose of this paper; what we are concerned about is the rationality
of metaphysical naturalism (hereinafter simply naturalism) as a
comprehensive worldview. Specifically, what I aim to show is that the
nature of our belief-forming faculties should give us reason to doubt
the truth of naturalism.

DESCARTES' DOUBT

According to contemporary evolutionary theory, life progresses in
small, unguided steps from the simple to the complex according to two
mechanisms: blind variation and natural selection. This process
explains not only the development of life, but also the creation of
life in "an earlier era of purely chemical evolution, in which the
molecular elements of life were themselves pieced together."3 Quite
literally, the world (up to and including human consciousness) is
simply a function of the evolution of matter.

Remarkably, Descartes anticipates this idea in the first of his six
Meditations. Perhaps I am the creation of a good God, says Descartes,
who has designed my belief-forming faculties to be reliable. But it is
clear enough that my faculties are not always reliable, for I am
oftentimes mistaken about this or that. So, I might not have been
created by God at all, but something else:

According to supposition, then, I have arrived at my present
state by fate or chance or a continuous chain of events, or by some
other means; yet since deception and error seem to be imperfections,
the less powerful they make my original cause, the more likely it is
that I am so imperfect as to be deceived all the time.4

If human consciousness is the product of "fate or chance or a
continuous chain of events" (e.g. blind, expansionary forces), and not
perfection, this would constitute grounds for Descartes to doubt the
integrity of his belief-forming faculties. If I am the product of
imperfection, how much more imperfect, then, am I?

THE PARADOX OF THE STONE

Let's explore another example, this one from recent history, proposed
by Richard Taylor in his small but important book, Metaphysics. Taylor
asks us to imagine a stone that's just been dug out of the ground, and
covered by peculiar markings. You suppose that these markings are
accidental, and simply the result of millions of years of erosion,
until a friend of yours who happens to be a professor of ancient
languages arrives upon the scene and promptly renders a translation of
as follows: HERE KIMON FELL LEADING A BAND OF ATHENIANS
AGAINST THE FORCES OF XERXES. Now one can, to be sure, still maintain
that the marks are accidental, that they are only scratches left by
volcanic activity, and that it is only a singular coincidence that
they resemble ... some intelligible message. Nature sometimes produces
effects hardly less interesting and arresting as this. The point ...
however, is this: if anyone having a knowledge of this stone
concludes, solely on the basis of it, that there was someone named
Kimon who died in battle near where this stone was found, then he
cannot, rationally, suppose that the marks on the stone are the result
of the chance or purposeless operations of the forces of nature. He
must, on the contrary, assume that they were inscribed there by
someone whose purpose was to record an historical fact.5

Here, Taylor is not claiming that nature is the result of purposeful
design, or requires a designer. It is entirely possible for the rock
to have accumulated various and peculiar markings during vast periods
of time, and that these markings are purely accidental and not
purposefully inscribed. However, it would be a grave mistake, says
Taylor, to also believe that these markings "reveal some truth with
respect to something other than themselves"6 about the world. In other
words, the markings cannot be both the result of chance forces and
indicative of any truth beyond the mere fact that there happen to be
peculiar markings upon a certain stone.

COSMIC IMPLICATIONS

Taylor discusses this example within the general context of human
rationality: how is human consciousness any different from the
accumulation of accidental markings upon a stone? Perhaps, given
enough time, nature is bound to evolve something as marvelous and
astonishing as human consciousness. But we cannot have it both ways,
says Taylor. We simply cannot consistently claim that human
consciousness is both the chance outcome of blind, accidental causes
and a reliable belief-forming apparatus by which we discern truths
about the world.

Now, one could mend this dilemma by saying that none of our beliefs is
ever reliable or true. But notice that the truth of this previous
statement entails that at least one of our beliefs is true, namely,
that none of our beliefs is ever reliable or true, which is apparently
self-contradictory. Perhaps one might choose the other horn of the
dilemma, and abandon the naturalistic view of a blind, purposeless
world altogether.

CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE CAVE

Bertrand Russell once said, "Man is a part of nature, not something
contrasted with nature. His thoughts and his bodily movements follow
the same laws that describe the motions of stars and atoms."7 If this
is true, then there can hardly be any grounds for distinction between
the blind, accidental forces of nature, and human consciousness. If
our belief-forming faculties are simply a function of blind,
accidental nature, it would certainly follow that the deliverances of
our belief-forming processes are just as blind and accidental.

Yet, how could we ever come to know (via accidentally-caused
belief-forming faculties) that our belief-forming faculties are the
result of blind, accidental causes? This also appears to be
self-contradictory. Knowledge implies a certainty about the way things
are that is not blind or accidental. In order to achieve this
certainty, it seems human consciousness would require the ability to
"step outside" or otherwise transcend the blind, accidental nature of
the system in order to objectively evaluate that system. But this is
just what naturalism denies: nothing transcends the system.

Why not simply allow for the possibility that human consciousness is
not exclusively the result of blind, accidental causes? If
consciousness is a part of nature, and consciousness is not blind --
could it just be possible that not all of nature is blind accident?

WHY I AM NOT A NATURALIST

Although I believe the arguments I have just developed are intuitive,
they are not very strict. But what I have hoped to show is that it is
not obviously clear that naturalism makes for a coherent worldview. If
reality is just cosmic, expansionary forces, what about things like
numbers, or ideals like justice? It is not clear how these could be a
contingent, expansionary function of matter; but yet the naturalist
must somehow maintain that they are. Wouldn't it just be better to
admit that some features of the world do not seem to be subject to
change or the result of blind, accidental causes? Quite frankly, there
doesn't seem to be anything foundational enough within the landscape
of naturalism upon which to establish the unchangeableness of things
like number, or justice. For, according to evolutionary theory,
everything is subject to change, to progress -- except for,
apparently, the doctrine of naturalism itself.

WORKS CITED

1See, for example, chapters 11-12 of Warrant and Proper Function. New
York: OUP, 1993,
and "An Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism." Logos 12 (1991): 27-49.

2Armstrong, David M. "Naturalism, Materialism, and First Philosophy."
In Contemporary Materialism: A Reader. eds. Paul K. Moser and J.D. Trout.
New York: Routledge, 1995. (pg. 35)

3Churchland, Paul M. Matter and Consciousness. Rev. ed. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1988. (pg. 21)

4Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy.
In Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings,
trans. Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch. Cambridge: CUP, 1988. (pg. 78)

5Taylor, Richard. Metaphysics. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice Hall, 1974. (pg. 115-16)

6Taylor, 118.

7Russell, Bertrand. "What I Believe." In Why I Am Not a Christian and
other essays.
ed. Paul Edwards. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957. (pg 48)

Another good article on naturalism is this one:
http://www.leaderu.com/aip/docs/alston-naturalism.html

[GreenPartyVoter]

28. Of COURSE athiests can be moral. Religious folk do not corner the

market on values and morals!

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Would Jesus love a liberal? You bet!
http://timeforachange.bluelemur.com/