An omnipotent benevolent god would shout at us from the clouds like the Monty Python movies, saying "stop that factory farming shit right now, assholes!". We don't observe this, therefore he doesn't exist.
If there is a god, she is either evil or amoral. This much is almost certain.
But an amoral god won’t do any of the work BB wants Her to do, things like ensure humans aren’t deceived about causality, there is a grounding for morality etc.
It could have been lot easier. God could have created (or "guided the evolution" or whatever) humans to be strict herbivores.
For instance, quoting from above:
<<All they [theists] need to hold is that God sets up the evolutionary process so that our beliefs about math, logic, morality, and the likelihood of different states of affairs is accurate. >>
God "set up the evolutionary process" so that our beliefs about certain things were correct. But alack, She didn't set it up such that we were strict herbivores.
1/ I can't explain/account for/justify X (where X can be motion, physical reality [!!!], morality, causation, psychophysical harmony, consciousness etc)
2/ Therefore, perfect God.
Even if I grant you premise 1/, the conclusion doesn't follow.
Such arguments haven't done well historically - with the best example being evolution explaining humans as opposed to creation.
Reading these sorts of things in the 21st century from the Greatest Undergraduate Student In Philosophy in the World, I'm having even more respect for Spinoza. You can disagree with him but at least, he honestly tried to come up with an objective conception of a god and wasn't just a slave of his time's prejudices.
For example, this is from a D- tier argument:
<<By regress, the first thing can’t be made of parts, because it would need something else to bind it together. Thus, there must be something without parts, which is argued to be God>>.
We can't explain how parts bind together -> therefore God.
I also don't understand why adding a god helps explain the world at all. It just gets you to "what made god?" Presumably this argument falls back on, a god just appeared from nothing.
This seems at least as unexplainably unlikely as arguments that rest on the supposed impossibility or improbability of various observed realities.
The "a dog can never learn calculus" explanation seems more likely. There are realities we're just not equipped to understand. That may be as mysterious to us indefinitely as evolution or the stars are to a kangaroo.
This is in response to you responding to "I also don't understand why adding a god helps explain the world at all. It just gets you to "what made god?""
Point being that God adds no explanatory power whatsoever to the question of why anything exists. (And arguably it detracts power, because the whole idea of a god raises more questions than it answers.)
A necessary being would be needed explain the existence of other contingent things. A necessary being explains itself and doesn’t rely on anything for its existence. Now you could posit that the universe doesnt need an explanation for its existence but that would then bring into question PSR.
God is usually seen as omnibenvllent so maybe something to do with that. I think that in this instance the theistic response of “we cannot comprehend or understand some of the things God does” could apply here. Although some may see it as a cop out, i think its just honest.
I honestly don't see how my comment would lead to your question. I'm not a nihilist because I realized long ago that meaning and purpose are found or discovered, not given from on high.
Actually, isn't the existence of other minds evidence against God? If God existed and he was perfect and heaven is just oneness with God, then why would God bother with anything outside of himself?
Small note: the improved version of the argument from motion (which is due to people like Geach, Martin, and Lamont) doesn't require the impossibility of infinite causal chains; what is requires is the claim that if every member of a plurality has a cause, then the whole plurality has a joint cause. This plurality could be infinite, and the principle still applies.
Re: the anthropic argument, Can't I pascal's mug you into believing any X by claiming that X implies aleph_3↑↑↑3 ems? And then I can pascal's mug you into believing not X by claiming that not X implies aleph_3↑↑↑↑3 ems? These anthropics can basically be dutch booked if you attach any non-zero credence to the various claims about infinite numbers of people existing.
Meanwhile, you can replace "people" in the argument with anything that you like.
Suppose you're in the Louvre standing in front of the Mona Lisa
1. this Mona Lisa exists
2. this Mona Lisa is more likely to exist if there are more total Mona Lisas that exist
3. If 10 Mona Lisas existing makes this one's existence ten times likelier and 100 Mona Lisas existing makes this one's existence 100 times likelier, infinity Mona Lisas existing makes this one's existence infinitely likelier.
4. thus, you should think there are infinite Mona Lisas. This doesn’t stop at the smallest infinity—you should think the number of Mona Lisas that exist is the most that there could be.
5. That’s a really huge number. Theism can nicely explain why that number of Mona Lisas exists, but atheism has no comparable explanation. In fact, because it’s good to create Mona Lisas, theism actively predicts that number of Mona Lisas existing, while atheism does not.
So the argument boils down to:
1. some thing X exists
2. that evidence is infinitely more likely to be observed if the biggest infinity of X exist, therefore after observing one X we are infinitely certain that the biggest infinity of X exist.
3. only god could create the biggest infinity of X, therefore god exists.
It doesn't seem any better than Descartes. It has grossly inadequate contact between the map and the territory.
For this reason, I don’t even find the presumptuous philosopher result particularly counterintuitive. It’s true that on anthropic grounds, according to SIA, worlds with more people are more likely to contain me, which implies I should have a higher credence in physical theories with more people. But this seems like straightforward updating on the evidence of my existence—worlds with more people are likelier to have me, just as, upon discovering a blueberry, one has some reason to think the world has more blueberries.
This might seem to be mistaken reasoning. Upon seeing a blueberry one gains evidence that the universe has blueberries in a large percentage of places, not that there are many blueberries overall (one gains no evidence, for instance, that the universe is big enough to have many blueberries from seeing a blueberry). But crucially this is because one only looks in a limited area, so the odds of seeing a blueberry are higher if the world is more densely populated with blueberries. In contrast, however, if I thought of a random possible blueberry, before having some method of determining if that blueberry is actual, and discovered that that particular blueberry was actual, I’d get evidence that there are many blueberries. This is because in this case, wherever the blueberry is, I’d be in a position to observe it. But this is analogous to the case of my existence: wherever I exist, I’ll be the first to know.
Perhaps one worries that this is the wrong way to think about one’s existence. Your existence is, on such a view, not the kind of thing you should think of as a random event made more likely to occur in a universe with more people. Instead perhaps, as proponents of SSA argue, you should think of your existence as a random event selected from the pool of existences in your reference class. But this is simply to deny SIA. Of course if one thinks about the presumptuous philosopher result from the perspective of some view other than SIA, they won’t find it appealing. But my claim is that there is a perfectly reasonable and consistent way to think about it, in accordance with SIA, where the result becomes not merely some unfortunate result to explain away, but one that actively makes sense. If the objection relies entirely on thinking about things in a way that a proponent of SIA would reject, then it is ineffective in the dialectical context.
I like the blueberry example because it makes something clear: Encountering a blueberry makes you gain evidence that *your nearby area* has blueberries in a large percentage of places, not the universe as a whole. Blueberries don't exist in most of the universe; they're just a random aberration of our dear planet Earth.
Since *our nearby area* is a finite space, it doesn't make sense to try to induct this infinitely in step 3.
"Similarly, it’s a big coincidence that our laws apply to the things that exist on the governing account. The overwhelming majority of conceivable laws would not be this way. The overwhelming majority of imaginable laws wouldn’t apply to the things that exist; it’s thus a major coincidence that the actual laws are applicable."
Suppose there are laws that do not apply to the things that exist, or to things that are in any way accessible to our senses. In fact, suppose there are a tremendous number of such laws, dwarfing those that apply to the things that exist and interact with us. What would we perceive differently? And if the answer is nothing, couldn't this argument equally well be an argument that, insofar as it makes any sense for there to be such laws, we ought to suppose there are?
Precisely. The vast majority of arguments predict nothing more than a very powerful initial condition for the universe. It's a far leap from that to the god they want to believe in.
I'm more positive on the project than the are, but different arguments give you different implied priorities. I think you get to a low resolution God of Israel or even a trinitarian concept, but it is work to make those connections.
I can give a partial response as I think a full answer is probably a book.
I'll just cover Contingency, Moral Knowledge and Fine Tuning. I will leave the explanation of those to the article.
I'd argue that Contingency gives you both oneness (monotheism) and a creator. Basic logic in all cases is to assume the argument holds, then ask what does that mean about your god-concept. I don't see the claim here from contingency as crazy, so let's continue.
Moral knowledge argument gives us a good God and ongoing influence on humanity. "Good" just means aligned with moral knowledge, but effectively what we as humans perceive as good is in alignment with a divine order. That which is good comes from God in a real way. This also backs you off deism with some sense of continued influence on humanity because ever moral person has access to knowledge from God which implicitly shapes human affairs.
Fine Tuning gives us deep foreknowledge/wisdom, some form of agency, intelligence and power. If you assume fine tuning is the result of an entity (or collective) relative to humans this is a super intelligence that had knowledge of the implications. The form of that intelligence is unknown, but considerable math was done or intuited. The entity that did this fine tuning also has the capacity to enact said tuning. I'm not a physicist but relieve to human power, this is "Almighty".
Three arguments give us one, good, deeply wise, Almighty Creator God that acts in the world. One could reasonably object that the three arguments refer to three different entities. I'm sort of ok with a deep God with layers of entities emergent there from (aka angels), that's still consistent with a low resolution god-concept aligned with the God of Israel.
Other arguments will give you more (simplicity, miracles from well miracles etc) and other arguments I would need to think deeply about (phycoharmony). Reasonable philosophical theism is really something like "convinced by arguments in set A therefore I find arguments from set B likely so I should consider the following theology derived from those arguments." Example: Guy is convinced by anthropic argument, therefore buys fine tuning, moral knowledge and contingency arguments to be likely explanations and lands on Judaism as a plausible theology (per argument above).
Thank you Paul. That is well articulated. However, I don't follow your reasoning.
Regarding Contingency, the argument only necessitates an explanation for the formation of the universe. I.e., some thing(s) "created" the universe. It doesn't tell us much of anything about it, even whether there is only one of it.
Regarding Moral Knowledge, even Bentham in this article states that theists only need to hold "that God sets up the evolutionary process so that our beliefs about math, logic, morality, and the likelihood of different states of affairs is accurate". There is no necessity of an ongoing influence on humanity (etc).
Regarding Fine Tuning, this argument is rather explicitly about the instantiation of initial conditions in the universe. This does not imply an intelligent God (or any other properties of God). It implies only that some thing(s) set the initial conditions.
Some of this needs more time and study to flesh out. I could definitely sit with many of the arguments longer.
Contingency and the traditional unmoved mover point to a casual convergence. If you posited multiple self contingent entities, they would act upon each other (limit each other) and would therefore be contingent on each other. Assuming this standard formulation of the argument, it implies oneness (monotheism).
Moral Knowledge is quirky. The fact I have access to moral knowledge and I respond to it means God is acting on me. This is a fairly passive reading, but fully in line with how the God of Israel acted: natural phenomenon that shaped history, the law (moral knowledge), the covenant (more moral knowledge) and consequences of leaving the law (foreigner do bad things to you). You could have a creator that is not accessible to people, nature etc. Here the argument is that the natural order is imbued with the knowledge of God. (You can disagree that this is a good argument for God, but assuming it is correct there is considerable implications).
Fine Tuning is where I have the biggest issue. The argument is not that the universe is fine tuned, it is that the explanation for fine tuning is an entity that intended to create a universe that allowed for/made inevitable emergent complexity like us. We know the physical systems and interactions are complex. To have this knowledge you need a mind (a network of concepts). Furthermore identifying a particular tuning among many possible requires another layer of complexity. This mind and agency and power to enact a specific vision to an end. It's less about assuming initial conditions about assuming the end was intended.
This is already too much to be buried in a comment section. I think we have a sketch of one, creator God who is good, almighty and wise beyond human understanding who gave the law.
> Now, the most common reply is that evolution solves the problem. It really, really doesn’t, and this is something that everyone who understands the argument agrees on.
The opposite, actually. Noone who subscribe to this argument, properly understands how evolution works and how and why it would produces any mental state. Try re-reading Simple Math of Evolution https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8 It has all the required insights to dissolve the confusion.
First of all, evolution does not care about behaviors. If we sufficiently antropomorphize we can say that evolution "cares" for direct outcomes. But a more correct way is to say that evolution is a no-planning-ahead optimization process for inclusive genetic fitness. If gene A rises in population it's because it itself is improving inclusive genetic fitness, not because in can later be used in conjunction with a future gene B for some awesome behaviors. No-planning-ahead! Every smallest change promoted by evolution has to be an improvement itself.
The only reason why evolution creates mental states is because every individual element of their biological machinery improves inclusive genetic fitness relative to the previous status quo. This makes clear why evolution couldn't have developped any simple mental state. Constant observation of a a red wall (or anything else) does not benefits your fitness any more than lack of such observation. Mental states are are useful only as far as they are distinct and sufficiently rich, when it's more effecient to compress information from multiple input channels into one, so that a single central planner could deal with this representation, and could arrive to a coherent strategy.
> I’m starting to think I’m friends with everyone in the world who likes the argument
This is not much of a coincidence. Without really knowing any of your friends I can pretty confidently predict that all of them are dualists and theists. That's because psychophysical harmony is just a good old mind-body problem , which historically required dualists to postulate God, because they couldn't find any satisfying solution and somehow saying "God" counts as good enough. A fun comic on the topic: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/47
For monists, however, the argument is not persuasive at all.
Came here to say much the same thing: this seems to misunderstand both evolution and the argument that consciousness is intrinsically linked to the underlying physicality. After all, we should not find it surprising that a red pen leaves a red mark, and we equally should not find it surprising that consciousness reflects the sensory inputs of the body.
If anything, I find the existence of consciousness itself (C-ranked) to be much more persuasive.
"Mental states are are useful only as far as they are distinct and sufficiently rich, when it's more efficient to compress information from multiple input channels into one, so that a single central planner could deal with this representation, and could arrive to a coherent strategy."
I may be misunderstanding, but I believe Bentham's formulation of psychophysical harmony argues that mental states are not useful in and of themselves, that any "useful" outcomes could've occurred without a corresponding mental state, that the processing of information could exist without interior mental states, thus evolution does not explain them (consciousness argument), and does not explain their harmony with physicality. Like in the comic, the harmony is a difficult thing to explain, but its existence makes more sense on theism than atheism. I don't think the argument has as much force as Bentham does but I don't think objections from evolution are relevant.
> I may be misunderstanding, but I believe Bentham's formulation of psychophysical harmony argues that mental states are not useful in and of themselves
Let's investigate this position! If mental states were not useful for reproduction then they couldn't have possibly evolved via natural selection. Which is an extroordinary claim, considering how evolution produced everything else, not to mention how it would contradict the whole field of evolutional psychology.
Upholding such position already requires you to be a dualist. And yes, as I've already written, on dualism mind-body harmony is indeed surprising. The harmony is difficult to explain if you treat mental and physical as different domains. But on reductive materialism it's not. Evolution produced mental states in "harmony" with the body because only in harmony they are useful. Harmony part doesn't add any extra improbability, because uselessness of mental states without harmony is obvious.
We can still try to challenge the usefullness of harmonic mental states, but this is the consciousness argument not the psychophysical harmony one.
> the processing of information could exist without interior mental states, thus evolution does not explain them
In principle, most likely it can. It seems possible to achieve the same output that human produces by executing a completely different algorithm without mental states the way we have them. Maybe even most of the algorithms achieving similar outputs do not include mental states.
But, and that what I was explaining in the comment, we were not created via random search through all possible programs satisfying a particular outcome - that's not how evolution works. We were created through iterative building upon on what performed better in the last iteration with zero planning ahead.
And based on such limitations, it seems plausible that evolution would create something like mental states. At first we have some simple if-else biological machinery: some sensor is stimulated -> a reaction is produced. Simple reflexes, no mental states required. But as the complexity grows you get more and more of these and the need for coherency between multiple different such mechanisms arises. A better programmer would have refactored the whole system from scratch, but evolution had to work with what there was and so we got one system interpreting the actions of other systems in its own terms. Now this kind of self-reflection does sound like a mental state. There is still a lot of unknowns here of course, but the overal picture seems to be more or less clear.
Thanks for the reply! Very fascinating and I think I see where we diverge. It all comes down to the hard problem of consciousness. I'm not sure if psychophysical harmony is a functional argument if one believes that subjective experience can be accounted for somewhere within the brain, but I don't believe it can be and thus the argument has force as an extrapolation of the consciousness argument -- consciousness itself is unlikely on materialism, consciousness *with psychophysical harmony* is even less likely, as not only has a ghost sprung up in the machine, but the ghost's experiences line up with the machines. And the argument is that, because the ghost is separable from anything with presence in the world, even at the level of sophisticated agentic electrical patterns in the brain, the ghost's correspondence is miraculous and therefore divine. This is for the Dualists. I don't agree with Bentham's defense of this argument on Physicalism, but I also don't understand it completely.
> It all comes down to the hard problem of consciousness.
I think we can both agree that if we simply knew which patterns in the brain coincided with which mental states, there would still be an unresolved mystery: Why these patterns? Why these mental states? What's the general rule that determines which pattern corresponds to which mental state? Which is what is usually meant by "hard problem".
Where the difference between us probably is, is the conclusion that we make from this premise. You conclude something like: "and therefore meterialistic science will never be able to properly explain consciousness". And I conclude: "and therefore materialistic science has to do more to properly explain consciousness, which with all likelihood it will".
> consciousness itself is unlikely on materialism
I agree that initially it indeed appears improbable. That materialism needs some kind of account for consciousness in materialistic terms, an explanation that would reduce the improbability of consciousness.
> consciousness *with psychophysical harmony* is even less likely, as not only has a ghost sprung up in the machine, but the ghost's experiences line up with the machines.
And with this I do not agree. This is a dualist problem, which you can notice even by the terminology that is being used: ghosts and machines.
Let's start from the beginning. Imagine reasoning about a world while knowing that matter exists and that consciousness exists, and that they interact in some way, even though they appear to be different in nature. Three theories come to mind:
Idealism: Consciousness is fundamental and matter is downstream of it.
Materialism: Matter is fundamental and consciousness is downstream of it.
Dualism: Both matter and consciousness are fundamental
All theories have their own problems.
For idealism it's surprising that matter exists and behaves in an orderly fashion. If consciousness produces matter, why can't I simply will an object into existence in front of me?
For materialism it's surprising that consciousness exists. Why would matter interactions produce this things that appears to be of a different kind?
For dualism it's surprising that consciousness and matter can interact and do it in the way they do. If they are two different domains why would there be any connection between them at all, and especially a harmonic one?
I think BB's reasoning went like this: he started from materialism, noticed it's problem and encounters dualism in search for the answer. It does feel that dualism resolves the problem. But now there is the dualist problem of ghost in the machine. And from his perspective he has just solved a previous materialism problem, so this has to be a new materialism problem. However, actually, if he didn't switch to a dulalist view this problem would not be encountered in the first place.
Regarding the anthropic argument, 5 is also extremely controversial. It's far from clear that it's good to create and even if it was, you would also need to show that God doesn't have a morally sufficient reason to abstain from creating (even given that it was good), which seems also very hard to do
>Evolution guarantees creatures will act to survive, but the whole puzzle is why a being’s conscious states match up with its actions to survive.
This resolution here is obvious. Mental processes drive the behaviors and so are subject to the same selective forces. It's less parsimonious for conscious experience to be completely decoupled from those behaviors, therefore the parsimonious thing for evolution to have done was to have our conscious experience in harmony with our physical existence. I mean really, how is this even a question? Why would evolution design mentally-driven behaviors and then, FOR NO ADAPTIVE REASON AT ALL, add an internal conscious experience that was completely decoupled from those processes?
Thanks. Essays like this always push me in the direction of thinking philosophers are the smartest dumb people around. They present meticulously-reasoned arguments that ignore the giant logical holes right in the middle of them. Every "counterintuitive" philosophical result is always obviously wrong once you look carefully at it for 2 minutes. (Looking at you, Doomsday Argument.)
The entire argument is based on a simplistic misunderstanding of how Bayes' Theorem works. We're not randomly drawn from a pre-existing population. The existence of the human race wasn't the result of a probabilistic event that created the potential for an observation bias. There was no cosmic coin flip. That makes the use of Bayes completely inappropriate.
I mean it really is as simple as that. The DA analyzes a scenario which just isn't true. Your birth was the result of deterministic physical processes, not dictated by some crazy coin-flipping deity who said "heads I make 100 billion humans, tails I make a trillion." Cute story and all, but it's just fantasy. Without that historical context the entire argument falls apart.
And actually even if there WAS a cosmic coin flip then the DA is still wrong. Pretend that we really are being drawn from a finite pool of people (we're not, but let's pretend). Our birth order, by itself, provides zero information about the size of the pool that we're drawn from. Consider this analogy: there are 2 gumball dispensers, one with 10 gumballs and one with 100. You pick one at random and turn the handle until you've dispensed 9. Which machine do you have? You have no more idea than when you started! The first 9 provide ZERO update about how many are left because both possibilities yield the same observation: P(9 |10) = P(9 |100) = 1. Both likelihoods are the same! The only thing your observation tells you is that the machine had at least 9 balls in it, but you already knew that. If the balls were numbered then you could use the observed numbers to change your posterior, but if they're all identical then you have no information to go on. (I'll go ahead and point out that humans aren't born with serial numbers on their head.)
Also information doesn't travel backwards in time and so it's literally impossible for the future to influence the present. That's a nice little sanity-check that should tell anyone with any sense that the DA definitely misunderstood something somewhere.
Please argue with this if you disagree or are confused by any of it. I love hitting softballs and there's no fatter softball than the DA. If ANY part of you is even just a little bit "but wait, what about X" then by all means let me know. My moral calling is disabusing people of bad philosophy.
I have a ton of "but wait, what about X" going on here, but sadly, this isn't decision-relevant enough to my life to be worth following up on. Thank you though!
There's one thing I can never fathom about how highly intelligent people work so hard to argue for the existence of god. Many of these arguments seem to presume that there has only been a single universe that ever existed (ours).
It is just as likely that there was a near-infinite number of universes that randomly popped into existence over a near-infinite period of time BEFORE ours popped into existence, and that in those other random universes, the physical characteristics of the universe were NOT harmonious.
Many of those universes may have almost immediately winked out of existence again because the disharmony was destructive and non-viable.
After a near-infinite number of random universes, one popped into existence where all the physical characteristics just happened, randomly, to be harmonious, and that universe survived. And due to the order that developed out of its randomly harmonious physics, creatures eventually formed. Eventually, the most advanced of those creatures developed the capacity for advanced reasoning.
This is a possible explanation for the universe as we know it that doesn't require you to invent a supernatural entity. Why invent a god when there is a perfectly natural explanation that doesn't require one (or defend a god invented by people thousands of years ago for practical reasons to counter their lack of understanding about the physical characteristics of the universe that we have since learned)? It just seems like a logic game more than an honest attempt to understand the true nature of the cosmos.
I also used to think about this, but here's the plottwist:
Our universe does not only have order, but an order that we are able to figure out (see 3. at "fine-tuning").
Our laws of physics seem very similar to what is actually going on, and they are just simple enough for us to understand. Also, the universal constants have a magnitude in the range we can quantify.
Yes, it seems possible to happen at random that creatures emerge that *ask for the origin of their world*. But it is extremely unlikely that of all creatures that got to that point, you and me happen to be among those, who additionally have the opportunity to *understand their world*.
To me, this is enough to imply a god who created our universe with the goal to give creative beings a predictable world. (there could be more goals).
>But it is extremely unlikely that of all creatures that got to that point, you and me happen to be among those, who additionally have the opportunity to *understand their world*.
Why should that be unlikely? Turing completeness is a computational property of the universe. It doesn't seem at all far-fetched to think that a competitive evolutionary process would produce organisms capable of turing-complete computation. Once a brain is sophisticated enough to ask abstract questions like "where did the world come from", it's also sophisticated enough to understand the patterns of the physical laws. They're both downstream of the same cause (turing completeness) and so it's no coincidence that they occur together.
Predictability is probably a requisite for turing-completeness (or any complex life) to evolve.
So I went and read the psychophisical harmony paper, and I'm not convinced. It's a tough one, because it's nearly 50 pages of hard technical argumentation, and I'm not a trained philosopher, but still, there are 3 things I find questionable. I've referenced some page numbers from the PDF (https://philarchive.org/archive/CUTPHA) for clarity.
First, the choice of a dualist metaphysics with one-way causation (p.5). They assume a world with two kinds of stuff, mental and physical, where the physical is causally closed; it can influence the mental, but not the other way round. I don't know if this is fashionable among philosophers, but this is a crazy world!! For one thing, one-way causation is unheard of in the natural world; as far as we know, if A can influence B, B also gets to influence A. Also, this is a world where one cannot meaningfully say "I am conscious", because the fact of being conscious cannot cause the mouth to move. Given that the paper depends on assertions that humans are conscious, this alone makes the whole thing a performative contradiction.
This matters, because the crux of their argument absolutely relies on this (despite attempts to relax the assumptions towards the end of the paper). To make psychophysical harmony appear truly remarkable, it relies on the mental realm being independent enough from the physical that it could get desynched from it, yet thinly connected enough that it could not grow a feedback loop keeping them in sync (p.7 and following). This part is quite technical and well-argued.
Towards the end of the paper (p.25 and following) they try to argue that their argument generalizes beyond the initial chosen metaphysics, but this part is not so well thorough; they look at a handful of alternative views rather than talking from general principles, and at one point they even defer to unrelated arguments for theism.
So beyond the weird choice of a dualist world with one-way causation, does psychophysical harmony really stand out as inexplicable enough to call out for the trump card of God to make sense of it? I really don't think so. So what are our options?
- If you're doing eliminative physicalism, there's literally nothing to explain. But no-one wants to do that.
- If you're keen on dualism with the mental realm having its own structure and information, then it makes much more sense to allow two-way causation, so the mental can also influence the physical. In that case you have a straightforward feedback loop, the entire mental-bodily organism is subject to evolution (of which behavioral evolution is only the physical projection), and harmony naturally falls out of that.
- But if you prefer a minimalist mental realm and a closed physical world, then you can take a perspectivist view, where the mental "world" has no information of its own, no hidden variables that could have one value or another, but merely reflects the physical information present in the structure of the brain. In that case again, since there are no two sets of information to compare, there is no problem of why they stay in harmony.
Did I miss anything? Again, not a philosopher here, maybe I'm not talking in the right jargon, but I think I did go to the bottom of the paper.
I'm also not a philosopher so take what I say with a grain of salt.
I think you're right that a certain kind of reductive physicalism resolves the issue. The authors start with a dualism with one-way causation, yes; but it applies to two-way causation. I found Apologetics Squared very useful for understanding why: see around the 11:34 mark of https://youtu.be/uk-2FdSVy10.
I think a "minimalist mental realm" still has things to explain. Why is the mental realm related to the physical anyways? Why does it correlate with brain states specifically and why in a way that gives us non-chaotic experiences?
Heard a small bit of the video around the 11:34 mark; it's kind of painful really. I get the impression these guys are deeply stuck in a world where complex systems, feedback loops and self-organizing systems cannot possibly exist, and everything must be run by static laws. But these things exist, all over the place, at all kinds of scales, from inside a cell to entire ecologies, and have been a major topic of study for decades!
To be honest, I find the "God" angle on the question of psychophysical harmony less than interesting. What kind of weird god would outsource the whole body plan of its creatures to blind evolution, including such obvious misdesigns as the optical nerve connected the wrong way and a brain prone to dysfunctions like depression, but then feel the need to personally micromanage the interface between body and mind, without which your mind might see squares when your eyes are seeing triangles? It sounds more like a clumsy god of literary fiction, than the awesome God(s) of actual faiths.
But it does point to an interesting wrinkle in mind-body dualism. If you assume the two realms to be truly separate, then how can we account that they practically always go in sync? Unless we want to give up on dualism being viable at all, we should try to figure that out. And upon further thought, I think it works out, both with one-way and two-way causation. In both cases, it's a matter of a system learning to figure out the signals coming from another.
Assume first a kind of old-fasioned dualism with two-way causation, where the mind actually drives a good chunk of the body's behavior. When the body/mind conjunction happens, they don't understand each other's signals. We can compare such a body and mind to two young boys who don't speak each other's language, compelled to live together and collaborate for survival — you can be sure they'll be learning to understand each other quickly enough! What is needed for that is basically memory and a feedback loop; even if they start yelling at each other without understanding a word, there's a clear gradient between feeling like "I have a slight idea what he's saying" and "I don't", and soon enough a virtuous feedback loop is formed and they start figuring it out. So in the case of body and mind, contrary to what I said above, you don't even need to call upon evolution for this; each side has all it needs to attune itself to the other's signals, presumably somewhere between the later part of gestation and the first year of life (babies are well-known for being uncoordinated, so it wouldn't be surprising that they didn't have very good psychophysical harmony yet.)
Now assume one-way causation, as in the main part of the article. In this case we can compare the mind to a baby hearing lots of English-language speech. The information flow is one-way, because it can't talk back, but the patterns in the speech are correlated enough with his life that it can bootstrap an understanding, and soon enough it responds to simple sentences. (For that matter, LLMs also learn like that.) This requires the basic ability to learn; in the case of one-way causation, it requires the mind to have some inner state or memory of its own, or in other words, the ability to also have causal input into its own future.
Finally there's a third option as I wrote above; if the mind side is so simple that it just mirrors matter, if the only thing it does is see the same information from a different perspective, then you don't need any laws to translate between two languages, because the mental side doesn't even have a language. This is a model where consciousness is just a neutral witness, and all the processing happens on the physical side.
In conclusion, the reflection on psychophysical harmony does pose some constraints on any kind of mind-body dualism. Either the mental side has to be so simple as to have no information of its own beyond the fact that it's there, or it has to be complex enough to dynamically attune itself to signals coming in a foreign encoding. Anything in between is basically ruled out as far as I can tell.
TLDR: I don't think there are any universal "psychophysical laws" to speak of, any more than there are cosmic laws of English grammar. Dynamic systems learn to speak to each other the old-fashioned way, by doing it, and that's regardless of whether the interactions are material or mental or cross-domain, as long as they happen at all.
I'm having trouble seeing the difference between the Nomological Argument and the Argument from Laws. I'm surprised the latter gets a C+ while the former gets an F.
everything good that exists is evidence for god but everything bad that exists is explained away by an afterlife pascal's mugging for which there is no evidence.
On Modal Rationalism: I’m not sure how much this favors theism. Suppose MR is true, and suppose we think atheism is true and that there’s at least one necessary concrete entity. The idea is supposed to be that this makes things tricky for the atheist because at least, on theism, some ontological argument might be sound (even if not persuasive). However, Plantinga’s Modal Ontological argument famously suffers from a symmetrical ontological argument for atheism (namely, that it is possible that God doesn’t exist implies that God doesn’t exist at any world). I don’t see why the atheist can’t say that *this* sort of ontological argument, or something like it, could be the a priori deduction MR requires. Theism being necessarily false is just as plausibly deducible from the armchair as theism being necessarily true.
You might respond that the problem is that any *specific* atheistic proposal for the necessary being isn’t going to be deducible. But, in fact, the atheist doesn’t have to accept that there’s some specific physical structure which is necessary (and thus deducible). It might be that some more general thing (say, a simple wave that could take on infinitely many complex variations) is necessary, and that it is clearly deducible by: (1) showing non-theism is necessarily true, (2) showing that this general structure encompasses all the metaphysical possibilities.
I actually think there is a correct version of the modal ontological argument, which is:
1. It is possible that a maximally excellent being doesn't exist.
2. If a maximally great being exists, then it is necessary that a maximally excellent being exists.
3. Therefore, a maximally great being doesn't exist.
Here, a "maximally excellent being" is defined the same way as an MGB, except that it's not required to be necessary. Basically it's an MGB minus the modal parts. The first premise doesn't suffer from any circularity issues like the original MOA does, nor is there any problem with a symmetrical argument for theism because an MEB can be possible without being necessary. Thus, we can accept the symmetric premise that it's possible for an MEB to exist without rejecting Premise 1 (the symmetric argument would only undermine an atheist who thinks that, necessarily, and MEB doesn't exist, rather than one who thinks that necessarily an MGB doesn't exist or that a contingent MEB doesn't exist). The first premise also seems to follow from modal rationalism as well as basically every other plausible hypothesis about how we can determine that something is possible.
The second premise is just the definition of an MGB: An MGB is a necessary MEB.
The conclusion, of course, doesn't undermine theists who believe in a contingent God. It's only meant to undermine necessitarian theists and the original MOA.
Nice! This argument bolsters the point about MR above. However, for what it’s worth, I think theists who believe in a necessary God have really good reason to reject (1)—namely, all the reasons they have for rejecting the premise that a MGB possibly doesn’t exist. The two are on a par (especially because each of the premises are true if and only if the other one is). It’s not as though the *necessary existence* of a MGB plays any role (evidentially) in thinking that there isn’t a possible world where the MGB fails to exist. Now, notice that this isn’t a [persuasive] reason to think (1) is *false*—it’s just pointing out that (1) should cause no less worries for the theist than the possibility premise in the usual reverse MOA.
Yeah, the main point of this is just to show that if you have a presumption in favor of possibility, which the MOA assumes, then the correct argument to make would imply that both necessitarian theism and necessitarian atheism are false, leaving us with the possibility of a contingent MEB only. If someone already thinks there are strong reasons to believe that a necessary God exists, this argument won't work against them, just as the possibility premises in favor of theism wouldn't work against someone who already thinks God is impossible.
I just doubt that "great" has any profound meaning. To me, "great" is like but less real even than "red" which is purely a human perception but of a real fact. What is "great" a human perception of?
Just to be clear — “great” and “excellent” here are just words for specifying technical definitions of features in modal logic. E.g., the proposition “a MGB exists” is a member of every set (worlds), whereas not so for a MEB
I think "great" is one of those qualities that exists but is not real. The question is how close to real it is. "Red" isn't a real quality but it's an echo of a physical phenomenon. "Great" it seems to me is purely a human construct. "Greater than" is a human perception but it's part of mathematical analysis. "Great" doesn't seem to be to have much to do with reality.
"If you want a good heuristic for an ideal tier list, just take the opposite of Redeemed Zoomer’s"
Before I read this, I saw the tier list below and thought, "What the fuck, why does put the absolute worst arguments on the top and the good ones on the bottom?"
I have three objections to the argument from psychophysical harmony.
1.
The argument goes that God is a conscious being and creates psychophysical harmony because he wants us to have it, and this is more probable than use getting psychophysical harmony by random chance. But this logic could be used to justify belief in God under any circumstances, even ones where materialism is true.
I could argue that it's more likely that the universe was created by a god who really likes Platypuses than by impersonal forces because the odds of Platypuses existing are almost infinitely low. If life never existed on Earth the odds of there being a creature anywhere in the universe that can reproduce with a platypus are basically zero. In this case, materialism has no explanation for the existence of platypuses and under materialism you should assume platypluses wouldn't exist.
2.
If God is a conscious being that he must have psychophysical harmony in the first place. If God didn't have psychophysical harmony then he wouldn't be God because at that point you are just arguing that impersonal forces created the universe. So what explains God's psychophysical harmony? The psychophysical laws in God's realm could easily be such that the only possible conscious state is seeing the color red, but clearly it's not for some reason.
And if your answer is that God used his omnipotence to give himself psychophysical harmony then you are still just conceding the point that impersonal forces are what leads to psychophysical
harmony.
3.
If God wants us to have psychophysical harmony why wouldn't he make it perfect? There are schizophrenic people who are clearly very out of touch with reality and people with advanced dementia who have basically no understanding of the world.
argument from factory farming:
An omnipotent benevolent god would shout at us from the clouds like the Monty Python movies, saying "stop that factory farming shit right now, assholes!". We don't observe this, therefore he doesn't exist.
Simple: there is a God, and He is Evil. The Gnostics were correct.
If there is a god, she is either evil or amoral. This much is almost certain.
But an amoral god won’t do any of the work BB wants Her to do, things like ensure humans aren’t deceived about causality, there is a grounding for morality etc.
It could have been lot easier. God could have created (or "guided the evolution" or whatever) humans to be strict herbivores.
For instance, quoting from above:
<<All they [theists] need to hold is that God sets up the evolutionary process so that our beliefs about math, logic, morality, and the likelihood of different states of affairs is accurate. >>
God "set up the evolutionary process" so that our beliefs about certain things were correct. But alack, She didn't set it up such that we were strict herbivores.
Then the ancient Jews were on the right track since God makes humans vegans in Genesis 1, and they only eat meat as a consequence of sin.
Most of these arguments are of the form.
1/ I can't explain/account for/justify X (where X can be motion, physical reality [!!!], morality, causation, psychophysical harmony, consciousness etc)
2/ Therefore, perfect God.
Even if I grant you premise 1/, the conclusion doesn't follow.
Such arguments haven't done well historically - with the best example being evolution explaining humans as opposed to creation.
Reading these sorts of things in the 21st century from the Greatest Undergraduate Student In Philosophy in the World, I'm having even more respect for Spinoza. You can disagree with him but at least, he honestly tried to come up with an objective conception of a god and wasn't just a slave of his time's prejudices.
For example, this is from a D- tier argument:
<<By regress, the first thing can’t be made of parts, because it would need something else to bind it together. Thus, there must be something without parts, which is argued to be God>>.
We can't explain how parts bind together -> therefore God.
I also don't understand why adding a god helps explain the world at all. It just gets you to "what made god?" Presumably this argument falls back on, a god just appeared from nothing.
This seems at least as unexplainably unlikely as arguments that rest on the supposed impossibility or improbability of various observed realities.
The "a dog can never learn calculus" explanation seems more likely. There are realities we're just not equipped to understand. That may be as mysterious to us indefinitely as evolution or the stars are to a kangaroo.
God definitionally exists necessarily so he is not contingent.
You could say the same thing about a Godless universe.
You could but that is kinda of the point in question
This is in response to you responding to "I also don't understand why adding a god helps explain the world at all. It just gets you to "what made god?""
Point being that God adds no explanatory power whatsoever to the question of why anything exists. (And arguably it detracts power, because the whole idea of a god raises more questions than it answers.)
A necessary being would be needed explain the existence of other contingent things. A necessary being explains itself and doesn’t rely on anything for its existence. Now you could posit that the universe doesnt need an explanation for its existence but that would then bring into question PSR.
God is usually seen as omnibenvllent so maybe something to do with that. I think that in this instance the theistic response of “we cannot comprehend or understand some of the things God does” could apply here. Although some may see it as a cop out, i think its just honest.
Also, I am surprised the existence other minds as X wasn’t featured as a sh*t tier argument for god. That is to say,
1/ The atheist cannot explain/account for justify the existence of other minds.
2/Therefore, moral God.
That’s not really what the arguments are, they simply say these things are more expected on theism than naturalism. And that’s true.
I have always wondered: based on our sample size of ONE (1) how do we know what existence/reality is **EXPECTED** to be like?
Just because we can imagine different outcomes, that does not tell us ANYTHING about what actually is possible.
Then why not be a nihilist?
I honestly don't see how my comment would lead to your question. I'm not a nihilist because I realized long ago that meaning and purpose are found or discovered, not given from on high.
That is subjective. Not objective purpose.
Actually, isn't the existence of other minds evidence against God? If God existed and he was perfect and heaven is just oneness with God, then why would God bother with anything outside of himself?
Small note: the improved version of the argument from motion (which is due to people like Geach, Martin, and Lamont) doesn't require the impossibility of infinite causal chains; what is requires is the claim that if every member of a plurality has a cause, then the whole plurality has a joint cause. This plurality could be infinite, and the principle still applies.
Also, this is a good list.
Re: the anthropic argument, Can't I pascal's mug you into believing any X by claiming that X implies aleph_3↑↑↑3 ems? And then I can pascal's mug you into believing not X by claiming that not X implies aleph_3↑↑↑↑3 ems? These anthropics can basically be dutch booked if you attach any non-zero credence to the various claims about infinite numbers of people existing.
Meanwhile, you can replace "people" in the argument with anything that you like.
Suppose you're in the Louvre standing in front of the Mona Lisa
1. this Mona Lisa exists
2. this Mona Lisa is more likely to exist if there are more total Mona Lisas that exist
3. If 10 Mona Lisas existing makes this one's existence ten times likelier and 100 Mona Lisas existing makes this one's existence 100 times likelier, infinity Mona Lisas existing makes this one's existence infinitely likelier.
4. thus, you should think there are infinite Mona Lisas. This doesn’t stop at the smallest infinity—you should think the number of Mona Lisas that exist is the most that there could be.
5. That’s a really huge number. Theism can nicely explain why that number of Mona Lisas exists, but atheism has no comparable explanation. In fact, because it’s good to create Mona Lisas, theism actively predicts that number of Mona Lisas existing, while atheism does not.
So the argument boils down to:
1. some thing X exists
2. that evidence is infinitely more likely to be observed if the biggest infinity of X exist, therefore after observing one X we are infinitely certain that the biggest infinity of X exist.
3. only god could create the biggest infinity of X, therefore god exists.
It doesn't seem any better than Descartes. It has grossly inadequate contact between the map and the territory.
I address the worry that this would generalize to objects other than oneself in my paper https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-024-04686-w. Specifically, I say:
For this reason, I don’t even find the presumptuous philosopher result particularly counterintuitive. It’s true that on anthropic grounds, according to SIA, worlds with more people are more likely to contain me, which implies I should have a higher credence in physical theories with more people. But this seems like straightforward updating on the evidence of my existence—worlds with more people are likelier to have me, just as, upon discovering a blueberry, one has some reason to think the world has more blueberries.
This might seem to be mistaken reasoning. Upon seeing a blueberry one gains evidence that the universe has blueberries in a large percentage of places, not that there are many blueberries overall (one gains no evidence, for instance, that the universe is big enough to have many blueberries from seeing a blueberry). But crucially this is because one only looks in a limited area, so the odds of seeing a blueberry are higher if the world is more densely populated with blueberries. In contrast, however, if I thought of a random possible blueberry, before having some method of determining if that blueberry is actual, and discovered that that particular blueberry was actual, I’d get evidence that there are many blueberries. This is because in this case, wherever the blueberry is, I’d be in a position to observe it. But this is analogous to the case of my existence: wherever I exist, I’ll be the first to know.
Perhaps one worries that this is the wrong way to think about one’s existence. Your existence is, on such a view, not the kind of thing you should think of as a random event made more likely to occur in a universe with more people. Instead perhaps, as proponents of SSA argue, you should think of your existence as a random event selected from the pool of existences in your reference class. But this is simply to deny SIA. Of course if one thinks about the presumptuous philosopher result from the perspective of some view other than SIA, they won’t find it appealing. But my claim is that there is a perfectly reasonable and consistent way to think about it, in accordance with SIA, where the result becomes not merely some unfortunate result to explain away, but one that actively makes sense. If the objection relies entirely on thinking about things in a way that a proponent of SIA would reject, then it is ineffective in the dialectical context.
I like the blueberry example because it makes something clear: Encountering a blueberry makes you gain evidence that *your nearby area* has blueberries in a large percentage of places, not the universe as a whole. Blueberries don't exist in most of the universe; they're just a random aberration of our dear planet Earth.
Since *our nearby area* is a finite space, it doesn't make sense to try to induct this infinitely in step 3.
"Similarly, it’s a big coincidence that our laws apply to the things that exist on the governing account. The overwhelming majority of conceivable laws would not be this way. The overwhelming majority of imaginable laws wouldn’t apply to the things that exist; it’s thus a major coincidence that the actual laws are applicable."
Suppose there are laws that do not apply to the things that exist, or to things that are in any way accessible to our senses. In fact, suppose there are a tremendous number of such laws, dwarfing those that apply to the things that exist and interact with us. What would we perceive differently? And if the answer is nothing, couldn't this argument equally well be an argument that, insofar as it makes any sense for there to be such laws, we ought to suppose there are?
It would be interesting to go through the arguments and pull out the implied properties of God from each philosophical argument.
Precisely. The vast majority of arguments predict nothing more than a very powerful initial condition for the universe. It's a far leap from that to the god they want to believe in.
I'm more positive on the project than the are, but different arguments give you different implied priorities. I think you get to a low resolution God of Israel or even a trinitarian concept, but it is work to make those connections.
I am intrigued and open minded. Can you share which argument(s) get us to a low resolution God of Israel, and perhaps the reasoning? Thanks!
I can give a partial response as I think a full answer is probably a book.
I'll just cover Contingency, Moral Knowledge and Fine Tuning. I will leave the explanation of those to the article.
I'd argue that Contingency gives you both oneness (monotheism) and a creator. Basic logic in all cases is to assume the argument holds, then ask what does that mean about your god-concept. I don't see the claim here from contingency as crazy, so let's continue.
Moral knowledge argument gives us a good God and ongoing influence on humanity. "Good" just means aligned with moral knowledge, but effectively what we as humans perceive as good is in alignment with a divine order. That which is good comes from God in a real way. This also backs you off deism with some sense of continued influence on humanity because ever moral person has access to knowledge from God which implicitly shapes human affairs.
Fine Tuning gives us deep foreknowledge/wisdom, some form of agency, intelligence and power. If you assume fine tuning is the result of an entity (or collective) relative to humans this is a super intelligence that had knowledge of the implications. The form of that intelligence is unknown, but considerable math was done or intuited. The entity that did this fine tuning also has the capacity to enact said tuning. I'm not a physicist but relieve to human power, this is "Almighty".
Three arguments give us one, good, deeply wise, Almighty Creator God that acts in the world. One could reasonably object that the three arguments refer to three different entities. I'm sort of ok with a deep God with layers of entities emergent there from (aka angels), that's still consistent with a low resolution god-concept aligned with the God of Israel.
Other arguments will give you more (simplicity, miracles from well miracles etc) and other arguments I would need to think deeply about (phycoharmony). Reasonable philosophical theism is really something like "convinced by arguments in set A therefore I find arguments from set B likely so I should consider the following theology derived from those arguments." Example: Guy is convinced by anthropic argument, therefore buys fine tuning, moral knowledge and contingency arguments to be likely explanations and lands on Judaism as a plausible theology (per argument above).
Thank you Paul. That is well articulated. However, I don't follow your reasoning.
Regarding Contingency, the argument only necessitates an explanation for the formation of the universe. I.e., some thing(s) "created" the universe. It doesn't tell us much of anything about it, even whether there is only one of it.
Regarding Moral Knowledge, even Bentham in this article states that theists only need to hold "that God sets up the evolutionary process so that our beliefs about math, logic, morality, and the likelihood of different states of affairs is accurate". There is no necessity of an ongoing influence on humanity (etc).
Regarding Fine Tuning, this argument is rather explicitly about the instantiation of initial conditions in the universe. This does not imply an intelligent God (or any other properties of God). It implies only that some thing(s) set the initial conditions.
Some of this needs more time and study to flesh out. I could definitely sit with many of the arguments longer.
Contingency and the traditional unmoved mover point to a casual convergence. If you posited multiple self contingent entities, they would act upon each other (limit each other) and would therefore be contingent on each other. Assuming this standard formulation of the argument, it implies oneness (monotheism).
Moral Knowledge is quirky. The fact I have access to moral knowledge and I respond to it means God is acting on me. This is a fairly passive reading, but fully in line with how the God of Israel acted: natural phenomenon that shaped history, the law (moral knowledge), the covenant (more moral knowledge) and consequences of leaving the law (foreigner do bad things to you). You could have a creator that is not accessible to people, nature etc. Here the argument is that the natural order is imbued with the knowledge of God. (You can disagree that this is a good argument for God, but assuming it is correct there is considerable implications).
Fine Tuning is where I have the biggest issue. The argument is not that the universe is fine tuned, it is that the explanation for fine tuning is an entity that intended to create a universe that allowed for/made inevitable emergent complexity like us. We know the physical systems and interactions are complex. To have this knowledge you need a mind (a network of concepts). Furthermore identifying a particular tuning among many possible requires another layer of complexity. This mind and agency and power to enact a specific vision to an end. It's less about assuming initial conditions about assuming the end was intended.
This is already too much to be buried in a comment section. I think we have a sketch of one, creator God who is good, almighty and wise beyond human understanding who gave the law.
> Psychophysical harmony
> Now, the most common reply is that evolution solves the problem. It really, really doesn’t, and this is something that everyone who understands the argument agrees on.
The opposite, actually. Noone who subscribe to this argument, properly understands how evolution works and how and why it would produces any mental state. Try re-reading Simple Math of Evolution https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8 It has all the required insights to dissolve the confusion.
First of all, evolution does not care about behaviors. If we sufficiently antropomorphize we can say that evolution "cares" for direct outcomes. But a more correct way is to say that evolution is a no-planning-ahead optimization process for inclusive genetic fitness. If gene A rises in population it's because it itself is improving inclusive genetic fitness, not because in can later be used in conjunction with a future gene B for some awesome behaviors. No-planning-ahead! Every smallest change promoted by evolution has to be an improvement itself.
The only reason why evolution creates mental states is because every individual element of their biological machinery improves inclusive genetic fitness relative to the previous status quo. This makes clear why evolution couldn't have developped any simple mental state. Constant observation of a a red wall (or anything else) does not benefits your fitness any more than lack of such observation. Mental states are are useful only as far as they are distinct and sufficiently rich, when it's more effecient to compress information from multiple input channels into one, so that a single central planner could deal with this representation, and could arrive to a coherent strategy.
> I’m starting to think I’m friends with everyone in the world who likes the argument
This is not much of a coincidence. Without really knowing any of your friends I can pretty confidently predict that all of them are dualists and theists. That's because psychophysical harmony is just a good old mind-body problem , which historically required dualists to postulate God, because they couldn't find any satisfying solution and somehow saying "God" counts as good enough. A fun comic on the topic: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/47
For monists, however, the argument is not persuasive at all.
Came here to say much the same thing: this seems to misunderstand both evolution and the argument that consciousness is intrinsically linked to the underlying physicality. After all, we should not find it surprising that a red pen leaves a red mark, and we equally should not find it surprising that consciousness reflects the sensory inputs of the body.
If anything, I find the existence of consciousness itself (C-ranked) to be much more persuasive.
"Mental states are are useful only as far as they are distinct and sufficiently rich, when it's more efficient to compress information from multiple input channels into one, so that a single central planner could deal with this representation, and could arrive to a coherent strategy."
I may be misunderstanding, but I believe Bentham's formulation of psychophysical harmony argues that mental states are not useful in and of themselves, that any "useful" outcomes could've occurred without a corresponding mental state, that the processing of information could exist without interior mental states, thus evolution does not explain them (consciousness argument), and does not explain their harmony with physicality. Like in the comic, the harmony is a difficult thing to explain, but its existence makes more sense on theism than atheism. I don't think the argument has as much force as Bentham does but I don't think objections from evolution are relevant.
> I may be misunderstanding, but I believe Bentham's formulation of psychophysical harmony argues that mental states are not useful in and of themselves
Let's investigate this position! If mental states were not useful for reproduction then they couldn't have possibly evolved via natural selection. Which is an extroordinary claim, considering how evolution produced everything else, not to mention how it would contradict the whole field of evolutional psychology.
Upholding such position already requires you to be a dualist. And yes, as I've already written, on dualism mind-body harmony is indeed surprising. The harmony is difficult to explain if you treat mental and physical as different domains. But on reductive materialism it's not. Evolution produced mental states in "harmony" with the body because only in harmony they are useful. Harmony part doesn't add any extra improbability, because uselessness of mental states without harmony is obvious.
We can still try to challenge the usefullness of harmonic mental states, but this is the consciousness argument not the psychophysical harmony one.
> the processing of information could exist without interior mental states, thus evolution does not explain them
In principle, most likely it can. It seems possible to achieve the same output that human produces by executing a completely different algorithm without mental states the way we have them. Maybe even most of the algorithms achieving similar outputs do not include mental states.
But, and that what I was explaining in the comment, we were not created via random search through all possible programs satisfying a particular outcome - that's not how evolution works. We were created through iterative building upon on what performed better in the last iteration with zero planning ahead.
And based on such limitations, it seems plausible that evolution would create something like mental states. At first we have some simple if-else biological machinery: some sensor is stimulated -> a reaction is produced. Simple reflexes, no mental states required. But as the complexity grows you get more and more of these and the need for coherency between multiple different such mechanisms arises. A better programmer would have refactored the whole system from scratch, but evolution had to work with what there was and so we got one system interpreting the actions of other systems in its own terms. Now this kind of self-reflection does sound like a mental state. There is still a lot of unknowns here of course, but the overal picture seems to be more or less clear.
Thanks for the reply! Very fascinating and I think I see where we diverge. It all comes down to the hard problem of consciousness. I'm not sure if psychophysical harmony is a functional argument if one believes that subjective experience can be accounted for somewhere within the brain, but I don't believe it can be and thus the argument has force as an extrapolation of the consciousness argument -- consciousness itself is unlikely on materialism, consciousness *with psychophysical harmony* is even less likely, as not only has a ghost sprung up in the machine, but the ghost's experiences line up with the machines. And the argument is that, because the ghost is separable from anything with presence in the world, even at the level of sophisticated agentic electrical patterns in the brain, the ghost's correspondence is miraculous and therefore divine. This is for the Dualists. I don't agree with Bentham's defense of this argument on Physicalism, but I also don't understand it completely.
> It all comes down to the hard problem of consciousness.
I think we can both agree that if we simply knew which patterns in the brain coincided with which mental states, there would still be an unresolved mystery: Why these patterns? Why these mental states? What's the general rule that determines which pattern corresponds to which mental state? Which is what is usually meant by "hard problem".
Where the difference between us probably is, is the conclusion that we make from this premise. You conclude something like: "and therefore meterialistic science will never be able to properly explain consciousness". And I conclude: "and therefore materialistic science has to do more to properly explain consciousness, which with all likelihood it will".
> consciousness itself is unlikely on materialism
I agree that initially it indeed appears improbable. That materialism needs some kind of account for consciousness in materialistic terms, an explanation that would reduce the improbability of consciousness.
> consciousness *with psychophysical harmony* is even less likely, as not only has a ghost sprung up in the machine, but the ghost's experiences line up with the machines.
And with this I do not agree. This is a dualist problem, which you can notice even by the terminology that is being used: ghosts and machines.
Let's start from the beginning. Imagine reasoning about a world while knowing that matter exists and that consciousness exists, and that they interact in some way, even though they appear to be different in nature. Three theories come to mind:
Idealism: Consciousness is fundamental and matter is downstream of it.
Materialism: Matter is fundamental and consciousness is downstream of it.
Dualism: Both matter and consciousness are fundamental
All theories have their own problems.
For idealism it's surprising that matter exists and behaves in an orderly fashion. If consciousness produces matter, why can't I simply will an object into existence in front of me?
For materialism it's surprising that consciousness exists. Why would matter interactions produce this things that appears to be of a different kind?
For dualism it's surprising that consciousness and matter can interact and do it in the way they do. If they are two different domains why would there be any connection between them at all, and especially a harmonic one?
I think BB's reasoning went like this: he started from materialism, noticed it's problem and encounters dualism in search for the answer. It does feel that dualism resolves the problem. But now there is the dualist problem of ghost in the machine. And from his perspective he has just solved a previous materialism problem, so this has to be a new materialism problem. However, actually, if he didn't switch to a dulalist view this problem would not be encountered in the first place.
Regarding the anthropic argument, 5 is also extremely controversial. It's far from clear that it's good to create and even if it was, you would also need to show that God doesn't have a morally sufficient reason to abstain from creating (even given that it was good), which seems also very hard to do
>Evolution guarantees creatures will act to survive, but the whole puzzle is why a being’s conscious states match up with its actions to survive.
This resolution here is obvious. Mental processes drive the behaviors and so are subject to the same selective forces. It's less parsimonious for conscious experience to be completely decoupled from those behaviors, therefore the parsimonious thing for evolution to have done was to have our conscious experience in harmony with our physical existence. I mean really, how is this even a question? Why would evolution design mentally-driven behaviors and then, FOR NO ADAPTIVE REASON AT ALL, add an internal conscious experience that was completely decoupled from those processes?
Well said!
Thanks. Essays like this always push me in the direction of thinking philosophers are the smartest dumb people around. They present meticulously-reasoned arguments that ignore the giant logical holes right in the middle of them. Every "counterintuitive" philosophical result is always obviously wrong once you look carefully at it for 2 minutes. (Looking at you, Doomsday Argument.)
What's obviously wrong with the doomsday argument?
The entire argument is based on a simplistic misunderstanding of how Bayes' Theorem works. We're not randomly drawn from a pre-existing population. The existence of the human race wasn't the result of a probabilistic event that created the potential for an observation bias. There was no cosmic coin flip. That makes the use of Bayes completely inappropriate.
I mean it really is as simple as that. The DA analyzes a scenario which just isn't true. Your birth was the result of deterministic physical processes, not dictated by some crazy coin-flipping deity who said "heads I make 100 billion humans, tails I make a trillion." Cute story and all, but it's just fantasy. Without that historical context the entire argument falls apart.
And actually even if there WAS a cosmic coin flip then the DA is still wrong. Pretend that we really are being drawn from a finite pool of people (we're not, but let's pretend). Our birth order, by itself, provides zero information about the size of the pool that we're drawn from. Consider this analogy: there are 2 gumball dispensers, one with 10 gumballs and one with 100. You pick one at random and turn the handle until you've dispensed 9. Which machine do you have? You have no more idea than when you started! The first 9 provide ZERO update about how many are left because both possibilities yield the same observation: P(9 |10) = P(9 |100) = 1. Both likelihoods are the same! The only thing your observation tells you is that the machine had at least 9 balls in it, but you already knew that. If the balls were numbered then you could use the observed numbers to change your posterior, but if they're all identical then you have no information to go on. (I'll go ahead and point out that humans aren't born with serial numbers on their head.)
Also information doesn't travel backwards in time and so it's literally impossible for the future to influence the present. That's a nice little sanity-check that should tell anyone with any sense that the DA definitely misunderstood something somewhere.
Please argue with this if you disagree or are confused by any of it. I love hitting softballs and there's no fatter softball than the DA. If ANY part of you is even just a little bit "but wait, what about X" then by all means let me know. My moral calling is disabusing people of bad philosophy.
I have a ton of "but wait, what about X" going on here, but sadly, this isn't decision-relevant enough to my life to be worth following up on. Thank you though!
There's one thing I can never fathom about how highly intelligent people work so hard to argue for the existence of god. Many of these arguments seem to presume that there has only been a single universe that ever existed (ours).
It is just as likely that there was a near-infinite number of universes that randomly popped into existence over a near-infinite period of time BEFORE ours popped into existence, and that in those other random universes, the physical characteristics of the universe were NOT harmonious.
Many of those universes may have almost immediately winked out of existence again because the disharmony was destructive and non-viable.
After a near-infinite number of random universes, one popped into existence where all the physical characteristics just happened, randomly, to be harmonious, and that universe survived. And due to the order that developed out of its randomly harmonious physics, creatures eventually formed. Eventually, the most advanced of those creatures developed the capacity for advanced reasoning.
This is a possible explanation for the universe as we know it that doesn't require you to invent a supernatural entity. Why invent a god when there is a perfectly natural explanation that doesn't require one (or defend a god invented by people thousands of years ago for practical reasons to counter their lack of understanding about the physical characteristics of the universe that we have since learned)? It just seems like a logic game more than an honest attempt to understand the true nature of the cosmos.
I also used to think about this, but here's the plottwist:
Our universe does not only have order, but an order that we are able to figure out (see 3. at "fine-tuning").
Our laws of physics seem very similar to what is actually going on, and they are just simple enough for us to understand. Also, the universal constants have a magnitude in the range we can quantify.
Yes, it seems possible to happen at random that creatures emerge that *ask for the origin of their world*. But it is extremely unlikely that of all creatures that got to that point, you and me happen to be among those, who additionally have the opportunity to *understand their world*.
To me, this is enough to imply a god who created our universe with the goal to give creative beings a predictable world. (there could be more goals).
This god is compatible with christianity.
>But it is extremely unlikely that of all creatures that got to that point, you and me happen to be among those, who additionally have the opportunity to *understand their world*.
Why should that be unlikely? Turing completeness is a computational property of the universe. It doesn't seem at all far-fetched to think that a competitive evolutionary process would produce organisms capable of turing-complete computation. Once a brain is sophisticated enough to ask abstract questions like "where did the world come from", it's also sophisticated enough to understand the patterns of the physical laws. They're both downstream of the same cause (turing completeness) and so it's no coincidence that they occur together.
Predictability is probably a requisite for turing-completeness (or any complex life) to evolve.
So I went and read the psychophisical harmony paper, and I'm not convinced. It's a tough one, because it's nearly 50 pages of hard technical argumentation, and I'm not a trained philosopher, but still, there are 3 things I find questionable. I've referenced some page numbers from the PDF (https://philarchive.org/archive/CUTPHA) for clarity.
First, the choice of a dualist metaphysics with one-way causation (p.5). They assume a world with two kinds of stuff, mental and physical, where the physical is causally closed; it can influence the mental, but not the other way round. I don't know if this is fashionable among philosophers, but this is a crazy world!! For one thing, one-way causation is unheard of in the natural world; as far as we know, if A can influence B, B also gets to influence A. Also, this is a world where one cannot meaningfully say "I am conscious", because the fact of being conscious cannot cause the mouth to move. Given that the paper depends on assertions that humans are conscious, this alone makes the whole thing a performative contradiction.
This matters, because the crux of their argument absolutely relies on this (despite attempts to relax the assumptions towards the end of the paper). To make psychophysical harmony appear truly remarkable, it relies on the mental realm being independent enough from the physical that it could get desynched from it, yet thinly connected enough that it could not grow a feedback loop keeping them in sync (p.7 and following). This part is quite technical and well-argued.
Towards the end of the paper (p.25 and following) they try to argue that their argument generalizes beyond the initial chosen metaphysics, but this part is not so well thorough; they look at a handful of alternative views rather than talking from general principles, and at one point they even defer to unrelated arguments for theism.
So beyond the weird choice of a dualist world with one-way causation, does psychophysical harmony really stand out as inexplicable enough to call out for the trump card of God to make sense of it? I really don't think so. So what are our options?
- If you're doing eliminative physicalism, there's literally nothing to explain. But no-one wants to do that.
- If you're keen on dualism with the mental realm having its own structure and information, then it makes much more sense to allow two-way causation, so the mental can also influence the physical. In that case you have a straightforward feedback loop, the entire mental-bodily organism is subject to evolution (of which behavioral evolution is only the physical projection), and harmony naturally falls out of that.
- But if you prefer a minimalist mental realm and a closed physical world, then you can take a perspectivist view, where the mental "world" has no information of its own, no hidden variables that could have one value or another, but merely reflects the physical information present in the structure of the brain. In that case again, since there are no two sets of information to compare, there is no problem of why they stay in harmony.
Did I miss anything? Again, not a philosopher here, maybe I'm not talking in the right jargon, but I think I did go to the bottom of the paper.
I'm also not a philosopher so take what I say with a grain of salt.
I think you're right that a certain kind of reductive physicalism resolves the issue. The authors start with a dualism with one-way causation, yes; but it applies to two-way causation. I found Apologetics Squared very useful for understanding why: see around the 11:34 mark of https://youtu.be/uk-2FdSVy10.
I think a "minimalist mental realm" still has things to explain. Why is the mental realm related to the physical anyways? Why does it correlate with brain states specifically and why in a way that gives us non-chaotic experiences?
Heard a small bit of the video around the 11:34 mark; it's kind of painful really. I get the impression these guys are deeply stuck in a world where complex systems, feedback loops and self-organizing systems cannot possibly exist, and everything must be run by static laws. But these things exist, all over the place, at all kinds of scales, from inside a cell to entire ecologies, and have been a major topic of study for decades!
To be honest, I find the "God" angle on the question of psychophysical harmony less than interesting. What kind of weird god would outsource the whole body plan of its creatures to blind evolution, including such obvious misdesigns as the optical nerve connected the wrong way and a brain prone to dysfunctions like depression, but then feel the need to personally micromanage the interface between body and mind, without which your mind might see squares when your eyes are seeing triangles? It sounds more like a clumsy god of literary fiction, than the awesome God(s) of actual faiths.
But it does point to an interesting wrinkle in mind-body dualism. If you assume the two realms to be truly separate, then how can we account that they practically always go in sync? Unless we want to give up on dualism being viable at all, we should try to figure that out. And upon further thought, I think it works out, both with one-way and two-way causation. In both cases, it's a matter of a system learning to figure out the signals coming from another.
Assume first a kind of old-fasioned dualism with two-way causation, where the mind actually drives a good chunk of the body's behavior. When the body/mind conjunction happens, they don't understand each other's signals. We can compare such a body and mind to two young boys who don't speak each other's language, compelled to live together and collaborate for survival — you can be sure they'll be learning to understand each other quickly enough! What is needed for that is basically memory and a feedback loop; even if they start yelling at each other without understanding a word, there's a clear gradient between feeling like "I have a slight idea what he's saying" and "I don't", and soon enough a virtuous feedback loop is formed and they start figuring it out. So in the case of body and mind, contrary to what I said above, you don't even need to call upon evolution for this; each side has all it needs to attune itself to the other's signals, presumably somewhere between the later part of gestation and the first year of life (babies are well-known for being uncoordinated, so it wouldn't be surprising that they didn't have very good psychophysical harmony yet.)
Now assume one-way causation, as in the main part of the article. In this case we can compare the mind to a baby hearing lots of English-language speech. The information flow is one-way, because it can't talk back, but the patterns in the speech are correlated enough with his life that it can bootstrap an understanding, and soon enough it responds to simple sentences. (For that matter, LLMs also learn like that.) This requires the basic ability to learn; in the case of one-way causation, it requires the mind to have some inner state or memory of its own, or in other words, the ability to also have causal input into its own future.
Finally there's a third option as I wrote above; if the mind side is so simple that it just mirrors matter, if the only thing it does is see the same information from a different perspective, then you don't need any laws to translate between two languages, because the mental side doesn't even have a language. This is a model where consciousness is just a neutral witness, and all the processing happens on the physical side.
In conclusion, the reflection on psychophysical harmony does pose some constraints on any kind of mind-body dualism. Either the mental side has to be so simple as to have no information of its own beyond the fact that it's there, or it has to be complex enough to dynamically attune itself to signals coming in a foreign encoding. Anything in between is basically ruled out as far as I can tell.
TLDR: I don't think there are any universal "psychophysical laws" to speak of, any more than there are cosmic laws of English grammar. Dynamic systems learn to speak to each other the old-fashioned way, by doing it, and that's regardless of whether the interactions are material or mental or cross-domain, as long as they happen at all.
I'm having trouble seeing the difference between the Nomological Argument and the Argument from Laws. I'm surprised the latter gets a C+ while the former gets an F.
everything good that exists is evidence for god but everything bad that exists is explained away by an afterlife pascal's mugging for which there is no evidence.
On Modal Rationalism: I’m not sure how much this favors theism. Suppose MR is true, and suppose we think atheism is true and that there’s at least one necessary concrete entity. The idea is supposed to be that this makes things tricky for the atheist because at least, on theism, some ontological argument might be sound (even if not persuasive). However, Plantinga’s Modal Ontological argument famously suffers from a symmetrical ontological argument for atheism (namely, that it is possible that God doesn’t exist implies that God doesn’t exist at any world). I don’t see why the atheist can’t say that *this* sort of ontological argument, or something like it, could be the a priori deduction MR requires. Theism being necessarily false is just as plausibly deducible from the armchair as theism being necessarily true.
You might respond that the problem is that any *specific* atheistic proposal for the necessary being isn’t going to be deducible. But, in fact, the atheist doesn’t have to accept that there’s some specific physical structure which is necessary (and thus deducible). It might be that some more general thing (say, a simple wave that could take on infinitely many complex variations) is necessary, and that it is clearly deducible by: (1) showing non-theism is necessarily true, (2) showing that this general structure encompasses all the metaphysical possibilities.
I actually think there is a correct version of the modal ontological argument, which is:
1. It is possible that a maximally excellent being doesn't exist.
2. If a maximally great being exists, then it is necessary that a maximally excellent being exists.
3. Therefore, a maximally great being doesn't exist.
Here, a "maximally excellent being" is defined the same way as an MGB, except that it's not required to be necessary. Basically it's an MGB minus the modal parts. The first premise doesn't suffer from any circularity issues like the original MOA does, nor is there any problem with a symmetrical argument for theism because an MEB can be possible without being necessary. Thus, we can accept the symmetric premise that it's possible for an MEB to exist without rejecting Premise 1 (the symmetric argument would only undermine an atheist who thinks that, necessarily, and MEB doesn't exist, rather than one who thinks that necessarily an MGB doesn't exist or that a contingent MEB doesn't exist). The first premise also seems to follow from modal rationalism as well as basically every other plausible hypothesis about how we can determine that something is possible.
The second premise is just the definition of an MGB: An MGB is a necessary MEB.
The conclusion, of course, doesn't undermine theists who believe in a contingent God. It's only meant to undermine necessitarian theists and the original MOA.
Nice! This argument bolsters the point about MR above. However, for what it’s worth, I think theists who believe in a necessary God have really good reason to reject (1)—namely, all the reasons they have for rejecting the premise that a MGB possibly doesn’t exist. The two are on a par (especially because each of the premises are true if and only if the other one is). It’s not as though the *necessary existence* of a MGB plays any role (evidentially) in thinking that there isn’t a possible world where the MGB fails to exist. Now, notice that this isn’t a [persuasive] reason to think (1) is *false*—it’s just pointing out that (1) should cause no less worries for the theist than the possibility premise in the usual reverse MOA.
Yeah, the main point of this is just to show that if you have a presumption in favor of possibility, which the MOA assumes, then the correct argument to make would imply that both necessitarian theism and necessitarian atheism are false, leaving us with the possibility of a contingent MEB only. If someone already thinks there are strong reasons to believe that a necessary God exists, this argument won't work against them, just as the possibility premises in favor of theism wouldn't work against someone who already thinks God is impossible.
100%
I just doubt that "great" has any profound meaning. To me, "great" is like but less real even than "red" which is purely a human perception but of a real fact. What is "great" a human perception of?
Just to be clear — “great” and “excellent” here are just words for specifying technical definitions of features in modal logic. E.g., the proposition “a MGB exists” is a member of every set (worlds), whereas not so for a MEB
I think "great" is one of those qualities that exists but is not real. The question is how close to real it is. "Red" isn't a real quality but it's an echo of a physical phenomenon. "Great" it seems to me is purely a human construct. "Greater than" is a human perception but it's part of mathematical analysis. "Great" doesn't seem to be to have much to do with reality.
"If you want a good heuristic for an ideal tier list, just take the opposite of Redeemed Zoomer’s"
Before I read this, I saw the tier list below and thought, "What the fuck, why does put the absolute worst arguments on the top and the good ones on the bottom?"
I have three objections to the argument from psychophysical harmony.
1.
The argument goes that God is a conscious being and creates psychophysical harmony because he wants us to have it, and this is more probable than use getting psychophysical harmony by random chance. But this logic could be used to justify belief in God under any circumstances, even ones where materialism is true.
I could argue that it's more likely that the universe was created by a god who really likes Platypuses than by impersonal forces because the odds of Platypuses existing are almost infinitely low. If life never existed on Earth the odds of there being a creature anywhere in the universe that can reproduce with a platypus are basically zero. In this case, materialism has no explanation for the existence of platypuses and under materialism you should assume platypluses wouldn't exist.
2.
If God is a conscious being that he must have psychophysical harmony in the first place. If God didn't have psychophysical harmony then he wouldn't be God because at that point you are just arguing that impersonal forces created the universe. So what explains God's psychophysical harmony? The psychophysical laws in God's realm could easily be such that the only possible conscious state is seeing the color red, but clearly it's not for some reason.
And if your answer is that God used his omnipotence to give himself psychophysical harmony then you are still just conceding the point that impersonal forces are what leads to psychophysical
harmony.
3.
If God wants us to have psychophysical harmony why wouldn't he make it perfect? There are schizophrenic people who are clearly very out of touch with reality and people with advanced dementia who have basically no understanding of the world.