This is a fun response. I think the point about theism assuming psychophysical harmony rather than explaining it is the key. PH is only a strong argument for God because we've already baked so much content into God to start (content like harmonious connection between God's intentions and the results of his actions).
That said, I have to be an evangelist for abandoning the term "intrinsic probability." There is no such thing. You won't find it in probability textbooks. You won't find it in formal epistemology textbooks. Probabilities aren't intrinsic (contra Draper/Swinburne)... and they're not logical (contra Carnap/Tooley)... see van Fraassen's "Laws and Symmetry" for a complete demolition of the idea.
Some quick points: I think this is mostly what someone trying to resist the argument should say. I am not committed specifically to the pure perfection explanation: there are a couple different ways of trying to explain why theism might not have a super low intrinsic probability, some of which we survey in the paper, and I think it's kind of intuitively obvious that it has a higher intrinsic probability than various other weird possibilities, however you explain that.
I also don't understand how the explanation at the end is supposed to work. I guess one of the upshots of the argument is that, for any set of behavioral dispositions, there are oodles more disharmonious laws that would produce them than harmonious laws. That should be true for the disposition to create universes, too.
I watched the video and read your explanation, and I feel like I'm being gaslighted. Is this a parody? The argument doesn't make any sense. Everything is as it would be with evolution (except consciousness itself). There are no "harmonious laws." There are just sensations and "feelings" that help get genes to the next generation.
I can't even come up with a good parallel argument. That I feel lust for the mother of my child is proof of a god. Like seriously, it is just bizarre.
I think there might be a much less concessive response to the theist. It starts from the observation that phenomenal states play certain explanatory roles. Some examples: feeling pain explains feeling sad, wanting it to stop and so on, having visual seemings explains forming certain judgments, wanting to raise my arm explains the phenomenology of moving, observing movement and so on. In effect, the various phenomenal states (note: just by being there!) stand in a complex web of explanatory relations with each others.
Now, one way to explain this is in terms of dispositional properties: maybe feeling pain, by itself, disposes you to have certain phenomenology, and having visual seemings, in itself, disposes you to form certain judgments. The underlying dispositional properties are obviously much more complex than this, and it is important to stress that they are pro tanto causal powers, that can be trumped by external causal influences (like when you endure pain because you believe it is worthy). In any case, the resulting picture is one where how we fill the vertices of our phenomenal graph forces or severely constraints the existence and direction of the pro tanto causal edges.
Now, the mapping from physical states to phenomenal states is indeed a causal homomorphism (i.e. causal-structure preserving map) for most theories in the metaphysics of the mind (trivially for physicalism and panpsychism as there the mapping is closed to being an identity relation, and I guess even for property dualism it is the default assumption), and if what I wrote above about phenomenal states entailing certain dispositional properties is right, the set of epistemically possible causal homomorphisms is substantially smaller than the set of generic mappings. Indeed, it might even be that the set does not contain any intuitively deviant mapping, as one might argue that we see certain mappings as deviant precisely because they do not respect the natural phenomenal causal pathways.
Objection: but what about the conceivability of a deviant mapping? My response would be that in those scenario we are implicitly assuming that there are external causal forces in play that we are not allowed to assume by the description of the scenario (or we are implicitly removing certain causal forces that the scenario commits us to). So for example, we can locally map C-fiber firing to a visual phenomenology, but then there will be no way to extend it to a global causal isomorphism between physical states and phenomenal states (maybe it is worth pointing out that we actually need to preserve more than causal structure, as some physical states might have proper parts in common, or some internal structure that the mapping needs to preserve)
If you just look at the way that atoms are arranged in the universe, it makes sense that entities that respond to c-fiber activation by feeling pain would come about, since things that cause pain are correlated with lower genetic fitness. What is unusual is that we consciously experience it instead of it being handled automatically like reflexes (predictive processing theory says that this would be sense-data in the bottom-up stream being papered over by the top-down stream).
Buddhism (or I guess maybe just pragmatic dharma?) says that we only consider c-fiber activation as negative and painful because our conscious minds (attention/the theater of consciousness in global workspace theory) are initialized to not want that (an acquaintance calls this agency-antagonization), and that it disappears if you do some cognitive tricks to stop caring about it.
Blindsight by Peter Watts (a sci-fi book based on genuine cog sci and philosophy of mind) takes the position that conscious minds are unnecessary for cognition and that one can imagine intelligent minds that handle everything automatically like reflexes, and more speculatively that this is in fact superior and consciousness is just a weird inefficient hack that'll evolve away.
Probably this comment doesn't make sense if you don't know much about global workspace theory. Also I'm talking about a bunch of theories I don't fully understand.
probably I'm missing something here but isn't there an evolutionary reason for this? experiences that caused pain had to cause discomfort, else we would want more of it. Animals that avoided painful circumstances survived, those that had an enjoyable painful experience and wanted more of it died away.
This is a fun response. I think the point about theism assuming psychophysical harmony rather than explaining it is the key. PH is only a strong argument for God because we've already baked so much content into God to start (content like harmonious connection between God's intentions and the results of his actions).
That said, I have to be an evangelist for abandoning the term "intrinsic probability." There is no such thing. You won't find it in probability textbooks. You won't find it in formal epistemology textbooks. Probabilities aren't intrinsic (contra Draper/Swinburne)... and they're not logical (contra Carnap/Tooley)... see van Fraassen's "Laws and Symmetry" for a complete demolition of the idea.
Some quick points: I think this is mostly what someone trying to resist the argument should say. I am not committed specifically to the pure perfection explanation: there are a couple different ways of trying to explain why theism might not have a super low intrinsic probability, some of which we survey in the paper, and I think it's kind of intuitively obvious that it has a higher intrinsic probability than various other weird possibilities, however you explain that.
I also don't understand how the explanation at the end is supposed to work. I guess one of the upshots of the argument is that, for any set of behavioral dispositions, there are oodles more disharmonious laws that would produce them than harmonious laws. That should be true for the disposition to create universes, too.
I watched the video and read your explanation, and I feel like I'm being gaslighted. Is this a parody? The argument doesn't make any sense. Everything is as it would be with evolution (except consciousness itself). There are no "harmonious laws." There are just sensations and "feelings" that help get genes to the next generation.
I can't even come up with a good parallel argument. That I feel lust for the mother of my child is proof of a god. Like seriously, it is just bizarre.
I think there might be a much less concessive response to the theist. It starts from the observation that phenomenal states play certain explanatory roles. Some examples: feeling pain explains feeling sad, wanting it to stop and so on, having visual seemings explains forming certain judgments, wanting to raise my arm explains the phenomenology of moving, observing movement and so on. In effect, the various phenomenal states (note: just by being there!) stand in a complex web of explanatory relations with each others.
Now, one way to explain this is in terms of dispositional properties: maybe feeling pain, by itself, disposes you to have certain phenomenology, and having visual seemings, in itself, disposes you to form certain judgments. The underlying dispositional properties are obviously much more complex than this, and it is important to stress that they are pro tanto causal powers, that can be trumped by external causal influences (like when you endure pain because you believe it is worthy). In any case, the resulting picture is one where how we fill the vertices of our phenomenal graph forces or severely constraints the existence and direction of the pro tanto causal edges.
Now, the mapping from physical states to phenomenal states is indeed a causal homomorphism (i.e. causal-structure preserving map) for most theories in the metaphysics of the mind (trivially for physicalism and panpsychism as there the mapping is closed to being an identity relation, and I guess even for property dualism it is the default assumption), and if what I wrote above about phenomenal states entailing certain dispositional properties is right, the set of epistemically possible causal homomorphisms is substantially smaller than the set of generic mappings. Indeed, it might even be that the set does not contain any intuitively deviant mapping, as one might argue that we see certain mappings as deviant precisely because they do not respect the natural phenomenal causal pathways.
Objection: but what about the conceivability of a deviant mapping? My response would be that in those scenario we are implicitly assuming that there are external causal forces in play that we are not allowed to assume by the description of the scenario (or we are implicitly removing certain causal forces that the scenario commits us to). So for example, we can locally map C-fiber firing to a visual phenomenology, but then there will be no way to extend it to a global causal isomorphism between physical states and phenomenal states (maybe it is worth pointing out that we actually need to preserve more than causal structure, as some physical states might have proper parts in common, or some internal structure that the mapping needs to preserve)
If you just look at the way that atoms are arranged in the universe, it makes sense that entities that respond to c-fiber activation by feeling pain would come about, since things that cause pain are correlated with lower genetic fitness. What is unusual is that we consciously experience it instead of it being handled automatically like reflexes (predictive processing theory says that this would be sense-data in the bottom-up stream being papered over by the top-down stream).
Buddhism (or I guess maybe just pragmatic dharma?) says that we only consider c-fiber activation as negative and painful because our conscious minds (attention/the theater of consciousness in global workspace theory) are initialized to not want that (an acquaintance calls this agency-antagonization), and that it disappears if you do some cognitive tricks to stop caring about it.
Blindsight by Peter Watts (a sci-fi book based on genuine cog sci and philosophy of mind) takes the position that conscious minds are unnecessary for cognition and that one can imagine intelligent minds that handle everything automatically like reflexes, and more speculatively that this is in fact superior and consciousness is just a weird inefficient hack that'll evolve away.
Probably this comment doesn't make sense if you don't know much about global workspace theory. Also I'm talking about a bunch of theories I don't fully understand.
probably I'm missing something here but isn't there an evolutionary reason for this? experiences that caused pain had to cause discomfort, else we would want more of it. Animals that avoided painful circumstances survived, those that had an enjoyable painful experience and wanted more of it died away.
Dual Aspect Neutral Monism accounts for psychophysical parallelism without a god-of-the-gaps.