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.
I'm not sure that would be a valid inference. Since I would be observing people with these other similarities regardless of whether I inhabit the harmonious world or the harmony-for-me world, I shouldn't be updating my beliefs upon learning that people share other similarities with me.
Further, how can you know that past time-slices of yourself were harmonious? Physically identical past yous' experiences of pain eating strawberries and lounging in the jacuzzi would by definition have produced the same memories which seem to present you to have been pleasurable (and perhaps create apparent echoes of that pleasure).
"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.
It’s not god of the gaps--we have a principled reason for thinking naturalistic explanations of a phenomena suck! Being an identity theories is irrelevant--what matters is if you’re type a or b, as I explain in the article and cutter and crummett explain in more detail in the paper.
"It’s not god of the gaps--we have a principled reason for thinking naturalistic explanations of a phenomena suck! "
Principled but not certain. And positing theism to solve an avoidable problem is literally god of the gaps.
It's not clear that you have to reject physicslism.because it's unexplained. Mysterianism, the claim of inexplicable mind brain identity, is problematical, but it's at least parsimonious. Theism swaps one mystery for another.
And dualists don't need to be theists, because there is dual aspect theory , which predicts that mind states and brain states stay in lockstep.
By your definition, all abuctive reasoning is God of the gaps. The fact that some hypothesis R doesn't entail some evidence P doesn't mean R can't be evidence for P.
Mysterianism isn't a solution--it's just saying we don't know what the solution is.
Dual aspect theory is intrinsically improbable because most of modal space is disharmonious.
Most abductive reasoning isnt literally God of the Gaps, because it doesn't literally posit God. Yes, it is reasonable t sometimes posit sometimes, but it can also.be reasonable to adopt one of the alternative strategies.
"Mysterianism isn't a solution--it's just saying we don't know what the solution is."
Maybe we can't. We don't known apriori that we should be able understand everything, including ourselves.We can metathematically prove that some.maths problems don't have solutionsm
"Dual aspect theory is intrinsically improbable because most of modal space is disharmonious"
Is your view that all abductive arguments that invoke God are God of the gaps? If so, then God has a rather unique property--being the only being in modal space for whom abductive reasoning isn't appropriate.
I know mysterianism (of the strong variety) says we can't know a solution. But there still is a solution of some sort, and it will still imply psychophysical disharmony.
No, as I've explained several times, psychophysical harmony doesn't assume dualism.
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
I’ve observed that I exist. Then I come up with the best explanation. You can get good evidence for a theory even if you don’t have a precise prior in mind first. For example, I don’t know the odds that aliens would visit earth, but if we like see them, that would be good evidence for their visitation.
However you didn’t observe a process that created universe
The existence of an agent that actually created the universe is no more likely than the existence of an object that just happens to causally create a universe such as we observe it
there is no way you could deduce that there is a difference in probability distribution on the above without seeing any aposteriori difference caused by one or the other
There is none, so there is no argument against anthropic principle any more than there is evidence for russels’ teapot
You look for the best explanation of some event whatever it is. If theism is independently plausible and nicely explains my existence, that favours it. If I see an alien that I know could only be produced by sexual reproduction, I get evidence that its parents aren’t infertile.
How do you know that this alien could only be produced by sexual reproduction and not by IVF/IVG/artificial wombs or whatever the alien equivalents of these thing(s) are?
Pretty much anything constructed by a sufficiently sharp mind is plausible, however it doesn’t necessarily give you any evidence
And you’re still referring to conceiving process, which was observed in the past and will be most likely observed in the future
How do you get evidence about pretty much once-in-a-lifetime-of-the-universe thing that created the universe? By extrapolating from having sex as an act of a usually voluntary choice to creating a universe? I don’t get the logic
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”?
He’s probably just assuming radical skepticism is false. He probably thinks this is largely dialectically accepted and so isn’t worth addressing or perhaps it’s just another of many different objections and he couldn’t include them all. (Might be wrong, can’t read his mind).
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.
You don't infer it through other people's behavior, you observe it directly and make inferences from there.
How am I directly observing other people's internal states?
You don't. You infer they have similar internal states by observing their similarities to you.
I'm not sure that would be a valid inference. Since I would be observing people with these other similarities regardless of whether I inhabit the harmonious world or the harmony-for-me world, I shouldn't be updating my beliefs upon learning that people share other similarities with me.
Well, conditional on the world actually being disharmonious, it's super unlikely it would appear consistent and orderly.
Further, how can you know that past time-slices of yourself were harmonious? Physically identical past yous' experiences of pain eating strawberries and lounging in the jacuzzi would by definition have produced the same memories which seem to present you to have been pleasurable (and perhaps create apparent echoes of that pleasure).
It would be unlikely you'd have any complex internal states--even currently.
"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.
It’s not god of the gaps--we have a principled reason for thinking naturalistic explanations of a phenomena suck! Being an identity theories is irrelevant--what matters is if you’re type a or b, as I explain in the article and cutter and crummett explain in more detail in the paper.
"It’s not god of the gaps--we have a principled reason for thinking naturalistic explanations of a phenomena suck! "
Principled but not certain. And positing theism to solve an avoidable problem is literally god of the gaps.
It's not clear that you have to reject physicslism.because it's unexplained. Mysterianism, the claim of inexplicable mind brain identity, is problematical, but it's at least parsimonious. Theism swaps one mystery for another.
And dualists don't need to be theists, because there is dual aspect theory , which predicts that mind states and brain states stay in lockstep.
By your definition, all abuctive reasoning is God of the gaps. The fact that some hypothesis R doesn't entail some evidence P doesn't mean R can't be evidence for P.
Mysterianism isn't a solution--it's just saying we don't know what the solution is.
Dual aspect theory is intrinsically improbable because most of modal space is disharmonious.
Most abductive reasoning isnt literally God of the Gaps, because it doesn't literally posit God. Yes, it is reasonable t sometimes posit sometimes, but it can also.be reasonable to adopt one of the alternative strategies.
"Mysterianism isn't a solution--it's just saying we don't know what the solution is."
Maybe we can't. We don't known apriori that we should be able understand everything, including ourselves.We can metathematically prove that some.maths problems don't have solutionsm
"Dual aspect theory is intrinsically improbable because most of modal space is disharmonious"
Only if you assume dualism.
Is your view that all abductive arguments that invoke God are God of the gaps? If so, then God has a rather unique property--being the only being in modal space for whom abductive reasoning isn't appropriate.
I know mysterianism (of the strong variety) says we can't know a solution. But there still is a solution of some sort, and it will still imply psychophysical disharmony.
No, as I've explained several times, psychophysical harmony doesn't assume dualism.
> If so, then God has a rather unique property--being the only being in modal space for whom abductive reasoning isn't appropriate.
I didn't say GotG was always fallacious. I said it was an ppropriate description.
> No, as I've explained several times, psychophysical harmony doesn't assume dualism.
As I have explained, it does because an identity relation cannot fail to hold.
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
I’ve observed that I exist. Then I come up with the best explanation. You can get good evidence for a theory even if you don’t have a precise prior in mind first. For example, I don’t know the odds that aliens would visit earth, but if we like see them, that would be good evidence for their visitation.
Yep, you did observe that you exist
However you didn’t observe a process that created universe
The existence of an agent that actually created the universe is no more likely than the existence of an object that just happens to causally create a universe such as we observe it
there is no way you could deduce that there is a difference in probability distribution on the above without seeing any aposteriori difference caused by one or the other
There is none, so there is no argument against anthropic principle any more than there is evidence for russels’ teapot
I didn’t observe my parents meeting under usual circumstances, for I wasn’t around the . Still, it’s the best explanation of my existence.
Yes because you observed events similar to that, that other people usually conceive children after they’ve met
And you make an assumption that probably your parents weren’t so different from all other parents
Also you have evidence from your parents, people who knew them, etc, ie you have second hand knowledge of the direct observers
You don’t get anything remotely close to that about the creation of the universe
You look for the best explanation of some event whatever it is. If theism is independently plausible and nicely explains my existence, that favours it. If I see an alien that I know could only be produced by sexual reproduction, I get evidence that its parents aren’t infertile.
How do you know that this alien could only be produced by sexual reproduction and not by IVF/IVG/artificial wombs or whatever the alien equivalents of these thing(s) are?
Any response here?
I’m trying to argue in good faith, fwiw
Pretty much anything constructed by a sufficiently sharp mind is plausible, however it doesn’t necessarily give you any evidence
And you’re still referring to conceiving process, which was observed in the past and will be most likely observed in the future
How do you get evidence about pretty much once-in-a-lifetime-of-the-universe thing that created the universe? By extrapolating from having sex as an act of a usually voluntary choice to creating a universe? I don’t get the logic
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 address that objection to psychophysical harmony in the article! In short, those all flow from more fundamental properties--namely, perfection.
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”?
1) radical skepticism is very implausible.
2) conditional on radical skepticism, it's unlikely I'd have an internal life as rich as I do, that contains appearances of other people.
He’s probably just assuming radical skepticism is false. He probably thinks this is largely dialectically accepted and so isn’t worth addressing or perhaps it’s just another of many different objections and he couldn’t include them all. (Might be wrong, can’t read his mind).