How do I know that I live in the world where we all experience psychophysical harmony, instead of one of the countless worlds where I experience psychophysical harmony and everybody else experiences disharmony? Sure, you might tell me that you experience harmony, but remember, communication is a kind of action: In a disharmonious universe, you would still tell me the same thing. Thus, I think the weight of psychophysical harmony is massively overstated. Unless you believe all agents in a world must necessarily experience the same amount of harmony (and I would implore you to justify that if you do believe this), I don't see how I can produce evidence that you or anybody else experiences the same kind of harmony that I do.
It’s more rational to deduce that your parents met under reasonable circumstances because you ACTUALLY OBSERVED yourself through books/real life that people tend to have kids in reasonable circumstances rather than randomly bumping in each other
You have had zero priors on the process that makes universes and as such, you should have had zero aposteriori knowledge of what the probability distribution looks like
"Now you might think that you can avoid this just by being a physicalist. A physicalist thinks that there is a necessary connection between the mental states and the physical states. But being a physicalist doesn’t get you out of it unless you think that you can rule out disharmonious laws a priori".
Many physiciallsts are identity theorists: identity is a necessary relationship, so, for them, psychophysical harmony could not fail to hold... Indeed , they don't even worry about it.
Inasmuch as simple identity is not a law, they are ruling out laws that are contingent and could have been different.
And bringing in God to solve the problem of psycophysical harmony, is very much God of the Gaps.
I don't think any of these are good evidence for theism. They pretty much all succumb to Euthyphro-style dilemmas. Take psychophysical harmony: God is purportedly a divine mind. In order to accomplish anything, God must enter some sort of mental state, like wanting to create the universe, in order to actually create the universe.
But does God first choose which psychophysical laws obtain, or is God already constrained by some psychophysical laws before he enters any mental state? If he's not constrained by psychophysical laws, then it's unclear why his willing to create the universe would ever succeed in creating the universe. It's also unclear how he could choose which psychophysical laws obtain, since he first has to choose that his choosing for psychophysical laws to obtain actually produces the chosen psychophysical laws, since he first has to choose that he chooses that he chooses... etc.
In all of these arguments it's completely incoherent how God could be the source of any of these postulated metaphysical entities. If anything, we should use them as inductive evidence that God couldn't really have done anything spectacular. He couldn't have created moral laws, nor modal facts, nor mathematical facts, nor psychophysical laws... what evidence is there that he could have created the universe, or even interfered with current physical laws? Pretty much any attempt at grounding something in God's nature hilariously fails (even "basic" facts like the identity of the trinity).
I will just ignore the absent acknowledgement of inside and outside views of systems (or the lack of systems theory in general, which this the biggest problem of American intellectualism), and ask one question: where does this belief in clear borders of the internal rigorousness come from? I can exchange the physical-mental connection between aversion and pain/pleasure, what stops me of performing this swap again on the internal level, and how do any distinctive features of either pain or pleasure even remain in a sense that allows me to make this distinction on anything other than a semantic level? This opens the door wide for pigeon-chess-arguments: if I can conceive a world where every experience is earing hummus, I can conceive that world with Bentham's Bulldog making excellent arguments for it being harmonious, given that he allows himself free interchangeability between insider and outsider-arguments.
More compelling than I expected. The broad strokes do seem quite right.
My knee-jerk response, which I don’t think you’ve dispelled, is to ask how we know our conscious states line up with reality.
There’s no way to verify your memories or “continuity of consciousness” (whatever that means). All the arguments for radical skepticism seem to apply here.
Rationality can’t save you. For all you know your rational arguments might be the equivalent of saying “the sky is yellow therefore I am Jesus Christ”, with you just being convinced that you are behaving perfectly rationally.
Indeed, true radical skepticism could say that we can’t even reason about our own consciousness. If the superintelligence could convince you that you don’t exist, which it probably can, then who’s to say something similar hasn’t happened with “I think therefore I am”?
I feel like we reject these unverifiable possibilities based on pure ipse dixit, not logic. This argument you make just piggy-back rides off of the ipse dixit to reach theism.
At a minimum, shouldn’t you be saying “either the radical skeptics are right OR god exists”?
How do I know that I live in the world where we all experience psychophysical harmony, instead of one of the countless worlds where I experience psychophysical harmony and everybody else experiences disharmony? Sure, you might tell me that you experience harmony, but remember, communication is a kind of action: In a disharmonious universe, you would still tell me the same thing. Thus, I think the weight of psychophysical harmony is massively overstated. Unless you believe all agents in a world must necessarily experience the same amount of harmony (and I would implore you to justify that if you do believe this), I don't see how I can produce evidence that you or anybody else experiences the same kind of harmony that I do.
Still bad arguments against anthropic principle
It’s more rational to deduce that your parents met under reasonable circumstances because you ACTUALLY OBSERVED yourself through books/real life that people tend to have kids in reasonable circumstances rather than randomly bumping in each other
You have had zero priors on the process that makes universes and as such, you should have had zero aposteriori knowledge of what the probability distribution looks like
"Now you might think that you can avoid this just by being a physicalist. A physicalist thinks that there is a necessary connection between the mental states and the physical states. But being a physicalist doesn’t get you out of it unless you think that you can rule out disharmonious laws a priori".
Many physiciallsts are identity theorists: identity is a necessary relationship, so, for them, psychophysical harmony could not fail to hold... Indeed , they don't even worry about it.
Inasmuch as simple identity is not a law, they are ruling out laws that are contingent and could have been different.
And bringing in God to solve the problem of psycophysical harmony, is very much God of the Gaps.
I don't think any of these are good evidence for theism. They pretty much all succumb to Euthyphro-style dilemmas. Take psychophysical harmony: God is purportedly a divine mind. In order to accomplish anything, God must enter some sort of mental state, like wanting to create the universe, in order to actually create the universe.
But does God first choose which psychophysical laws obtain, or is God already constrained by some psychophysical laws before he enters any mental state? If he's not constrained by psychophysical laws, then it's unclear why his willing to create the universe would ever succeed in creating the universe. It's also unclear how he could choose which psychophysical laws obtain, since he first has to choose that his choosing for psychophysical laws to obtain actually produces the chosen psychophysical laws, since he first has to choose that he chooses that he chooses... etc.
In all of these arguments it's completely incoherent how God could be the source of any of these postulated metaphysical entities. If anything, we should use them as inductive evidence that God couldn't really have done anything spectacular. He couldn't have created moral laws, nor modal facts, nor mathematical facts, nor psychophysical laws... what evidence is there that he could have created the universe, or even interfered with current physical laws? Pretty much any attempt at grounding something in God's nature hilariously fails (even "basic" facts like the identity of the trinity).
You missed an important point: a spiritual dimension
I will just ignore the absent acknowledgement of inside and outside views of systems (or the lack of systems theory in general, which this the biggest problem of American intellectualism), and ask one question: where does this belief in clear borders of the internal rigorousness come from? I can exchange the physical-mental connection between aversion and pain/pleasure, what stops me of performing this swap again on the internal level, and how do any distinctive features of either pain or pleasure even remain in a sense that allows me to make this distinction on anything other than a semantic level? This opens the door wide for pigeon-chess-arguments: if I can conceive a world where every experience is earing hummus, I can conceive that world with Bentham's Bulldog making excellent arguments for it being harmonious, given that he allows himself free interchangeability between insider and outsider-arguments.
More compelling than I expected. The broad strokes do seem quite right.
My knee-jerk response, which I don’t think you’ve dispelled, is to ask how we know our conscious states line up with reality.
There’s no way to verify your memories or “continuity of consciousness” (whatever that means). All the arguments for radical skepticism seem to apply here.
Rationality can’t save you. For all you know your rational arguments might be the equivalent of saying “the sky is yellow therefore I am Jesus Christ”, with you just being convinced that you are behaving perfectly rationally.
Indeed, true radical skepticism could say that we can’t even reason about our own consciousness. If the superintelligence could convince you that you don’t exist, which it probably can, then who’s to say something similar hasn’t happened with “I think therefore I am”?
I feel like we reject these unverifiable possibilities based on pure ipse dixit, not logic. This argument you make just piggy-back rides off of the ipse dixit to reach theism.
At a minimum, shouldn’t you be saying “either the radical skeptics are right OR god exists”?