“To say that there is more to reality than physics can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it is an acknowledgement that we are nowhere near a theory of everything, and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain.”
Some people surely have an unhealthy attachment to mysteries, but Dennett has an unhealthy aversion to them, which compels him to stake out unsound positions. His belief that consciousness is an illusion is nuttier than the belief that God is real.
You know that Plantinga said belief in God is like belief in other minds?
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
66
As opposed to what? To ground it in what? Incredulity? Everything is grounded with absurdity. What’s special about consciousness? As Dennett would say.
All it takes is a single choice or action by a single person to defeat determinism. Call it absurd, but flicking my fingers on my keyboard is objectively real.
Replace ‘science’ with ‘knowledge’ and you have a more interesting statement, but the intention of the writer (who google helped me find) is to understand anything other than atheism or theism… and that is what?
Hint… Richard Watson wrote a book about it. Having taught philosophy at Washington University for 40 years and considered one of the foremost living authorities on Descartes, he sadly passed away in 2019.
And wow!! To think it as a clever twist of fate, that he should write such a book as another field of specialty for him was caves.
Question: Because I am not sure how you arrived at your opposition to determinism which seems to be suggested in your last post, I wonder if you’d be willing to entertain the idea of reading David Bentley Hart’s opinion on determinism and retracting your own, … in a new thread?
I don’t see how I could possibly retract the statement if I am doing it.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
71
Your choices and actions are highly determined. And what have your objectively real flicking fingers not got to do with that?
So again, what is causally special about matter becoming organized enough to be conscious? What is transcendentally special about it compared with nuclear waste?
If you’re retracting, or have retracted your apparent opposition to determinism, either I misunderstood your earlier post to which I responded or I’ve failed to see your path from opposition to retraction. And you’re going have to show me that path more clearly.
If you never suggested that you’re opposed to determinism to begin with, I apologize for thinking you had.
Are you sure you are not grounding your certainty that consciousness must arise from life processes in your own incredulity at the idea there could be any other way? Where physics/chemistry/biology apply they are the royal road. But they do not apply everywhere: not to literature, not to existential questions and not to the nature of our experience as that appears from the inside. To insist on searching for you watch near the lamp post when you know ■■■■ well it can’t have been lost there is silly. The light is good where physics/chemistry/biology apply but what warrant have you for insisting that is where we’ll find the roots of consciousness?
Science is the stronger for being freed from the superstitious beliefs that are foisted on her by her false friends, those who are in love with certainty and need to know they are right (there are many of these in religion, and in politics, too, so science is not alone). There is among many of the public, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out, ‘a religious belief in the unconditional power of organised science, one that has replaced unconditional religious belief in organised religion …We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.’
It is a tenet of science that its basic intellectual aim is to improve knowledge about the world, nothing being permanently presupposed about the world independently of evidence. But ‘to say, with the radical empiricist, that only factual statements have validity is to be not only dogmatic but self-contradictory, since the statement itself is not factual.’
Both quotes are from The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist and appear in chapter 11 which is also the subject of this video.
I’d read it. Does it come from the book I started with here or is it from his book on Paul? Have you transcribed it already? I’d look at it. Obviously determinism applies in many contexts with things but not in the same way or degree with human subjects, though there are aspects of our physiology which are deterministic including our cognitive capacity. There is a reference to determinism in this book I’ve been quoting which I could share for comparison sake if your source is a different Hart book.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
79
Yes I’m absolutely certain that consciousness is incredibly entirely natural. I have no incredulity at that idea whatsoever. Neither do I have any incredulity that there could be an unnatural cause. No unnatural cause is necessary as there is no gap in the continuum of incredible nature that only the unnatural could fill. If there were, I couldn’t be incredulous about it.
There could be no literature without physics/chemistry/biology=nature. Literature is as natural as photons. Existential questions, explored literarily even, arise in entirely natural consciousness. I haven’t lost my watch. If we find the roots of consciousness it won’t be by dowsing.
Thanks for the source of your indubitably valid paraphrase.
Science deals only in probabilities. Certainty depends on ignorance.
That isn’t at issue, leastwise we would both declare it to be natural. Where we disagree is over how much of the big picture we are naturally endowed to comprehend. Rather than give in to fundamentalist fervor toward science now instead of religion, why not just look into what it is we can understand and admit at the outset that we don’t know everything. The institutional knowledge of science doesn’t permit you to expunge the mystery from consciousness.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
81
What’s the probability that that is meaningless rhetoric? Consciousness certainly depends on nature.
