I am open to relativism, so this concern doesn't really bite for me.

Some degree of relativism is one thing. Most thoughtful thinkers are relativists in some manner or another, e.g., Aquinas' "all knowledge is received in the manner of the receiver." However, it seems problematic to say that truth is completely relativized, even vis-á-vis introspection —that people cannot look back on past events and say "that was a bad decision," with any more validity than their thoughts at that given moment. It's not moral relativism that is at stake when practical reason is reduced to emotional claims, but a thoroughgoing relativism for all claims.

This was the point of the reference to the drug addict. Not that "heroin is an objective bad," but rather that someone whose drug problem has ruined their life can claim, with good warrant, "it was not good for me to begin doing drugs."

Showing that notions of truth are affected by language, social practice, etc. is of course different from showing that they are nothing but social practice, "all the way down." Unfortunately, positivism, a very short lived philosophical movement, has become a sort of ready made strawman such that pulling the rug out from underneath it is made to seem solid grounds for dismissing the concept of truth.

My view would be that conceptions of truth are prephilosophical. They show up when your mechanic fails to have fixed your car, or when your child claims they didn't throw a rock you just saw them throw, etc. There are some very good studies on the phenomenology of truth, the basic aspects of experience from which the notion emerges. Good metaphysical explanations of truth then need to explain this, to explain this adequately, which is easier said than done.

For one thing this is an anthropomorphism fallacy - by attributing human-like characteristics (such as legislating laws) to the concept of the 'laws of nature'. Laws of nature are descriptive, not prescriptive, and do not imply a conscious lawgiver. The word 'laws' is a distraction. 'Natural regularities' might be a better term.

:up:

Strangely, this is a very common conception outside of religious contexts as well — that "laws" and "regularity" can only exist as the sui generis creations of minds. I have never found arguments of this sort compelling, all though it's worth noting that they also make accusations of "anthropomorphizing." I.e. "how can you say nature acts in any law-like way, you only know that your experience of nature works in that way." "But," they will claim, "the mind 'constructs' that view," and so relying on it for any judgement leads to a sort of "making the world into the image of the mind."

I am not sure how these folks think they have grounds for even believing other minds exist in this case though.

I find it hard to believe in any transcendent, creator God, and especially the personal, hectoring, demanding and strangely needy sky-gods of the kind that are worshipped in the West.

Ironically, this is an image of God that is often criticized by the Patristics, some of the big Medieval Latin theologians, and many contemporary Catholic philosophers. The Catholic philosophy space is quite vibrant, and so it's always surprising to me how this doesn't seem to trickle down into the lower levels of religious education.

There seems to be a tendency in religious education, where it even exists in churches, to tend towards "simple is best." I am not sure if this is always helpful for their goals though. It seems to me that precisely what people are hungry for in the "spirituality space," would be these deeper looks at theology and philosophy, along with the sort of intensive practice that was common in the ancient church.

Sorry Count, but I totally disagree with what you posted. Freedom is clearly prior to ethics, as the reason why ethics is needed. If it was the case, that there was no freedom prior to the existence of ethics, then ethics would never come into existence because there would be no need for ethics, being no freedom to act otherwise, nor even the freedom to create ethics.

I really shouldn't have said "prior," especially when trying to present Plato. The two are mutually reinforcing. Ethics is prior to the freedom of the freeindividual in some ways. For example, the person who is raised as a slave, without any education, subject to all sorts of abuses, is made less free by those circumstances (even if they might overcome them eventually). The extreme case would be the person who is murdered as a child. Obviously, they never get a chance to develop their freedom.

The just society makes its citizens more free and the citizens who have achieved a higher level of freedom make their society more just, having come to be able to both discover and actualize the Good. There is a sort of circular causality at work here.

It appears that we are treating 'good' as something concrete, when it is merely an adjective applied conditionally. How would one make the case that a concept such as good is anything more than a sign we apply to things we approve of (a construction of our practices, language and norms) and that this approval is perspectival?

It definitely is treating the Good as something concrete. But Plato thinks he has good reasons for doing this.

Rather then start with considering the existence of "the Good," it might make more sense to start by considering more "concrete" universals, e.g. "square," "red," or "cat." Would something's being square be a "social construct?" No doubt the word "square" is such a construct, but the very existence of such things?

If social constructs don't spring from the aether uncaused, it would seem there must be such things. And generally people are quite accepting of the claim that there are such things as cats, squares, trees, etc.

At first glance, things like "goodness," or "justice" seem more amorphous. However, there are also good reasons for thinking these are not illusions, something wholly created by the mind.

Plato points out one of these reasons during his exchange with Thrasymachus early in The Republic. If justice is just "what is good for people in power," it is still the case that the powerful can be wrong about justice or what is good for them. For example, consider a dictator who raises taxes 50% in order to fund his new palace. The result is a coup and his being imprisoned and tortured while awaiting execution. To both the dictator and others, it is clear that the tax policy was not "a good move." The dictator thought the decision was good at the time, but it was not. Likewise, pouring lead into an elementary school water supply seems to be "bad" for the children in a fairly unambiguous, objective way, regardless of what the person who does it thinks at the time.

So, what is "good" seems to have a certain independence from how people feel at any given moment, making it more than simply a "sign of things we approve of." Our dictator "approved of" his tax policy, yet it would seem odd for us to say that this entails that it must have been a "good" decision for him to make, given it leads to his torture and death. The same applies to dumping lead into the school water supply. Indeed, taken to an extreme, "good" being taken as merely a sign of approval would seem to suggest that we can never be wrong about what is good for us. Yet this does not seem to be the case; we regret our decisions and experience guilt all the time.

Should we instead say that the good for the dictator simply changed, that the tax policy was good when he implemented it, but bad when the coup occured and his opinions about the action changed? Likewise, was starting to use heroin good for heroin addicts until they began to regret it? Or does the IDF's policy in Gaza remain good so long as decision makers think it is good? Etc.

The problem with such a claim is that it slips into an extreme relativism. For why would truth be better the falsehood? It wouldn't. Truth would only be better in cases where we feel it is better, and so our feelings ultimately dictate truth claims. If it falsehood feels better then, at least for that moment, it is better. If our feelings change, the good simply changes.

This simply doesn't seem to pass the sniff test. We all make bad decisions in our lives. It seems silly to say these were good right up until we regret them.

I think you are right on the nomenclature. W. Norris Clarke's "The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics," presents itself as "existentialist," Thomism, and doesn't seem to draw on phenomenology at all. Unfortunately, he doesn't really expand much on what he thinks is particularly "existentialist" in his system. The two seem discrete, with some existentialists not being influenced much by Husserl and Stein. But they can also overlap, e.g. Sokolowski draws heavily on Husserl and the Aristotlean tradition, but also from St. Thomas as well, producing a blend of phenomenology, personalism, and Thomism.

But it's a confusing area because personalism is associated with both phenomenology and existentialism. E.g., basically every personalist also gets labeled as an existentialist in encyclopedias.

And then some folks who want to go back to 19th century Thomism call themselves "paleo-Thomists."

I'm yet to see an argument that proves the non-reductive thesis - though I probably just haven't read enough.

I don't think there is anything like proof for either case. However, I do think there are very strong arguments for not assuming the reductionist view is true until decisively proven otherwise. For the following reasons:

Smallism is the idea that "facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts." Wholes are defined by their parts, rather than vice versa. Whatever is "fundamental" in the universe must exist on the smallest scales. It preferences "bottom-up" explanations over "top-down" ones.

Certainly, smallism has its appeal and some empirical support. A common way we are able to understand things better is by breaking complex things down into constituent parts.

However, there is no prima facie reason that smallsim or reductionism should be a preferred "default" in the sciences or metaphysics. "Bigism," the preferencing of the universal and "top-down" arguments, parts being defined in terms of wholes, is just as supportable.

Further, the empirical support and track record of reductionism is simply not that strong. Chemistry is a mature field and quantum mechanics has been around for a century now. Yet molecular structure has not been reduced to physics, and there are arguments that it will never be. 1 Indeed, even within the realm of physics there are ongoing debates regarding the nature of apparent emergence in quantum level phenomena.

The waters are further muddied here because exactly how to define "scientific reductions" is an area of much debate. Additionally, scientific unifications (the explanation of disparate phenomena in terms of more general principles) are often misunderstood as reductions. Unifications though, would tend to support a sort of "bigism," and there have been many of these.

The whole idea of fundamentality adds another wrinkle. For example, in quantum field theory the fields that fill the entire universe are more fundamental than particles - the whole more essential than the part. Indeed, the Italian physicist G.M. D'Ariano likens "particles" to the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave, claiming that fields and relational information hold a higher ontological ground. 2 There are good arguments that computation isn't decomposable in the way assumed by smallism either ("more is different"), and there is a lot of support for pancomputationalism in the physics community. 3 If the pancomputationalist view is correct in certain major respects, it would seem that smallism is simply a bad presupposition, a useful view for understanding some sorts of problems, but flawed as metaphysical doctrine. At the very least, this would seem to caution against common views that seem to assume reductionism and smallism are true until decisively proven otherwise.

Neuroscience tends to be very bottom up, particularly because we lack good top-down theories for major phenomena like consciousness. Physics tends to have a lot of top-down explanations. Although I am not aware of any polling on this, I would not be surprised to learn that reductionism is more popular in the special sciences, and among non-scientists, than with physical scientists themselves.

I would add that Jaegwon Kim's arguments against the possibility of strong emergence given current reductionist accounts of physicalism make it extremely difficult for anything like strong emergence to exist. But, assuming we are concious, and assuming panpsychism isn't true, I would take this to suggest that even if something like smallism is true, it will nonetheless require some sort of major paradigm shift that allows for some sort of "emergence-like" phenomena to occur to resolve this impasse. That is, something like what Einstein did for physics, reshaping our fundemental conceptions instead of trying to make the world fit into them.

Well, I think you have to conceptualize this in terms of the Plato's vertical conception of reality:

By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality” that the Forms have more of is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is in our experience of ourselves.

In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different "parts of the soul” leads him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one, and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”:

Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (Republic 443d-e)

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.”

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

Indeed, we can see nature as a whole as illustrating this issue of how fully integrated and “real as itself ” a being can be. Plants are more integrated than rocks, in that they’re able to process nutrients and reproduce themselves, and thus they’re less at the mercy of their environment. So we could say that plants are more effectively focused on being themselves than rocks are, and in that sense they’re more real as themselves. Rocks may be less vulnerable than plants are, but what’s the use of invulnerability if what’s invulnerable isn’t you?

Animals, in turn, are more integrated than plants are, in that animals’ senses allow them to learn about their environment and navigate through it in ways that plants can’t. So animals are still more effectively focused on being themselves than plants are, and thus more real as themselves.

Humans, in turn, can be more effectively focused on being themselves than many animals are, insofar as humans can determine for themselves what’s good, rather than having this be determined for them by their genetic heritage and their environment. Nutrition and reproduction, motility and sensation, and a thinking pursuit of the Good each bring into being a more intensive reality as oneself than is present without them.12

Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater reality than our sense experience is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves.

But presumably something that’s a precondition of our being fully real must be at least as real as we are when we are fully real. It’s at least as real as we are, because we can’t deny its reality without denying our own functioning as creatures who are guided by it or are trying to be guided by it.13 And since it’s at least as real as we are, it’s more (fully) real than the material things that aren’t guided by it and thus aren’t real as themselves.


Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present - Robert M. Wallace

It's not hard to see the similarities here to St. Paul, e.g. Romans 7.

Hegel expands of this sense of vertical reality in the Logics, showing how true concepts need to unfold from a certain sort of necessity, and the failings of external teleology to truly ground moral teleology. True telos must emerge from within a thing.

There is a "transcedent" Good, but it isn't a sort of spirit realm sitting to the side of the realm of the senses. The question of knowing what is truly good is not absolute then, particularly in later Platonists. One can know and be led by the good to relative degrees, and be more or less self-determining.

"Spirit" is what motivates action, it drives ambition, will, and determination. Adopting a "code of ethics" which you attempt to force yourself to follow, will only stifle your spirit. So a code of ethics is not what you are looking for. What you need is a way of guiding or directing your spirit so that it can maintain its strength.

If you adopt a code of ethics because you believe it is truly good behavior and find yourself unable to do what you think is good, how is that freedom? That seems like the opposite of freedom to me.

Freedom has to involve an element of being able to enact what one thinks of as the highest good, not simply being free to fulfill desires. The alcoholic who wants to stop drinking but cannot is deeply unfree in a way, their appetites have come to rule over their intellect.

My advice would be to look at something like Plato's Republic, how he moves to define "just". It appears to be a matter of doing one's own thing without interfering with others. That allows your spirit to move you freely.

I agree with the recommendation, but I think this is very far from what Plato is saying. Consider the Apology. Socrates stirs the people of Athens on to self-knowledge at great personal risk and to his own detriment. He doesn't avoid conflict to "live and let live," but rather tries to push people towards the good and the just.

Plato presents Socrates as a new sort of hero, a moral figure to replace the old Homeric heroes. Socrates is a hero precisely because he strives for justice, and it is clear in Plato's political writings that justice and freedom must ultimately be fulfilled at the level of an entire society and that justice is not relativistic. Since men can take away other men's freedom, and since education and training is necessary to gain freedom, society must be organized in a just way for men to become free and self-moving.

Ethics then is a prerequisite for freedom. The man who can't actualize what he thinks is truly good is limited in some way, as is the man who acts out of ignorance about what is truly good.

I also grew up outside of any religious background. I would say my father at least was militantly atheist. However, now I attend a non-denominational church about once a month (too far away now with my son to go each week), have a home church otherwise with another family, and go to a Catholic Church on Wednesdays or holidays (of which Catholics have very, very many).

I'm of the opinion that many Christians profoundly misunderstand why people can say they are "spiritual" but have essentially zero interest in Christianity. They tend to think the areligious aren't interested in Christianity for very Christian reasons, e.g. shame over past sins. Because of this, evangelism often targets the emotions primarily, and in so doing it misses the mark. The problem for secular people is more often that Christianity is implausible.

I tend to group the problem into three buckets:

The Scientism Problem: the problem here is that people often think that "the way science says the world is," is incompatible with the existence of a personal God. There are many manifestations of this problem, but the most important seems to be a belief that science says "free will" is impossible, that all our actions are reducible to how little balls of stuff bounce of each other, and that this in turn is incompatible with religious moral teaching and a personal God.

The other way this problem manifest itself is in people thinking that what the Bible says about the world is incompatible with science. This problem is made more acute by the prominence of fundamentalists/literalists, who play an outsized role in public perceptions of Christianity. Even if people know the Bible can be read in ways that do not contradict science, they often assume these are ad hoc rationalizations, modern changes to save the religion from contradiction. In reality though, fundementalism is a modern movement, and strict literalism was not the norm during most of Church history.

The Plurality Problem: is the problem that, if you have many mutually exclusive claims made by various world religions and different sects, it seems unlikely that any of them are due to real divine revelation. Given the principle of indifference and very many different faiths, we should assign a very low probability to each faith. Another issue here is that of extinct religions now widely seen as mere myth (Greek, Egyptian, Norse, etc.). If these religions were mere myth, why wouldn't other ones be the same way, destined for the same fate?

What are the chances of any one faith or sect getting it right? If the Holy Spirit aids Christians, why do they disagree? Of course, theology addresses precisely this issue. Schism might be seen as a necessary historical process, or as an organic process of differentiation, of different organs within a single body (a body that must learn to rule over itself and become self-moving). But simplicity seems to win out here in the popular imagination, "everyone else has it wrong."

The Exemplar Problem: a major appeal of Christianity is that it offers the promise of transforming the person — freedom from sin, from being ruled over by instinct, appetites, passions, and circumstance — the possibility of deeper, more loving relationships. And yet many seemingly devote people do not seem to have been remade in this way. Indeed, they might seem downright hateful, impulsive, and mean spirited.

But if the faith doesn't result in being reborn in this positive way, then its claims about the workings of the Holy Spirit in the individual come into question.


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I think these questions can be adequately addressed, but they rarely are. Faith is often described as something you either have or don't, a miracle (the influence of Reformed/Calvinist theology). Churches no longer focus much on the process of metanoia, the changing of the mind, the ascetic disciplines that used to be standard in the Church, etc. In trying to make everything "easier," the ascetic, meditative, contemplative, philosophical, and intellectual traditions of Christianity have been pushed to the fringes.

Christian moral teaching is only going to make sense in the context of a relationship with God. Yet these often get rolled out first, as if it makes any sense for a person raised in a secular environment to feel shame over premarital relations, etc.

You don't start by understanding though. As Saint Augustine puts it, we have faith so that we might understand.

Conversion involves metanoia. One wants to know God and the Good, as all men naturally want to know (Aristotle's opening lines). It is wanting to know what is truly good, not just what seems good, or what others say is good, that allows us to transcend current belief, desire, circumstance, and instinct and become truly self determining (Plato). You can't be free if you're just an effect of other causes.

Christianity is ultimately a religion of freedom. Romans 7 is probably the pound for pound most influential text for the philosophy of free will. There Saint Paul describes how he does what he hates and is ruled over by desire. He is dead in sin, not a biological death, but a death of any true autonomy and personhood. He is only resurrected by Christ, the Logos.

For man can only be free if he knows why he acts, does what he thinks is good, and can know the true good.

Metanoia is generally supported by ascetic practice, a sort of exercise to train the rational part of the soul to rule over the spirited and appetitive parts, to be self-determining. Without these, mentoring relationships, etc. you often end up in a situation where newcomers are immediately turned around to witness without feeling like they have understood what they are witnessing to.

Christians feel uncomfortable engaging with the Scientism Problem and the Plurality Problem. These are generally studiously avoided, rather than grappled with, to the detriment of all involved.

It's a little strange to make an appeal for historical nuance and then launch into a simplistic dichotomy of secular/good/progress and Christianity/evil/regression like:

Think of the advances which secular society has made towards the improvement of the human condition, in Western society, over the last 500 years; we are speaking of the transition from a feudal, religiously-intolerant society to a society governed by the rule of law and freedom of religious belief.

Now try to name one step along this road which was not bitterly opposed by the Christian religion. The emancipation of women; birth control; the abolition of slavery; universal free education; inoculation against diseases which cripple children; the universal franchise. Every modern development which has tended to reduce the sum total of human misery, and increase the general balance of health, happiness and prosperity, has been fought on the beaches and in the streets by one section or another of the Christian church.

The historical events you are talking about, with the exception of birth control, took place in societies where the overwhelming majority of people were Christians and attending religious services regularly. The issue of slavery in the British Empire and the US, or of serfdom's extremely late end in Russia, occured in contexts where almost everyone on both sides of the issue was a practicing Christian. Certainly, it was not the case that progressive policy in mid-1800s America/Russia/the UK was driven largely by explicitly secular movements. The "Battle Hymn of the Republic," is, of course, a hymn, John Brown was an Evangelical puritan, etc.

Free education is a particularly bad example because it was started and advocated for on religious grounds.

Nor does the dichotomy work going in the other direction, with secularism always being a force for progress and good. The Soviet Union was aggressively atheist and suppressed the Orthodox Church, dynamiting a great cathedral to make the world's largest swimming pool. But Stalin essentially recreated serfdom in all but name, made massive use of slave labor, and carried out a number of genocides against ethnic minorities. You could consider the abuses of Mao, the French Terror, etc. as well.

This seems like a weird application of current "culture war" categories to periods in history when they make little sense — e.g. look at the documents produced by either side of the US Civil War and there will be allusions to religion everywhere.

I am not really sure what you're trying to to get at here. What counts as intuitive might be debated, but certain statements like "a line of points cannot be simultaneously continuous and discrete," or "2+2=4," can largely be agreed upon. Are you claiming we lack good warrant for believing these sorts of things?

Eliminitivism, in its most extreme form, does violate these sorts of intuitions. This would be the claim that "you don't actually experience anything, see blue, hear sounds, etc." But does anyone actually advocate this? Dennett himself calls this type of eliminitivism "ridiculous," in "Conciousness Explained."

The problem with the claims of more plausible forms eliminitivism aren't necessarily that they are counter intuitive, it's that they claim that conciousness has been adequately explained when it hasn't been.

Ok, well we might debate what counts as adequate explanation here. But what is not a good response is to say, "yes, it does seem inadequate, but that's only because human reason is ultimately deficient." This essentially amounts to saying "I do not need to offer a convincing explanation or demonstration, because such a thing is not possible, but you should still accept the truth of what I'm saying."

This is like Luther's response to Erasmus. Erasmus says "a God who predestines — forces — man to sin, and then punishes him for it seems evil."

To which Luther responds: "yes, but it only seems evil because our reason is deficient due to the fall." This is not an explanation though.

If the second is true, and physical processes such as energy are also fundamental, it seems that the combination problem is trivial: we have observed that physical processes can form complex objects without human intervention, such as trees: if we assume that another quality is fundamental (ignoring consciousness), and this quality is used to make a complex system like a tree, which seems to have fundamental components working together to form a complex system, why can’t the same be true of consciousness

The way I understand combinatorial objections to panpsychism, the issue isn't that fundemental forces cannot combine to form complex systems. Rather, it is that the boundaries that delineate "things" are arbitrary from the standpoint of physics. Information, causality, mass, and energy flow across all such "boundaries" as if they didn't exist. This means you can draw arbitrary lines around different physical ensembles and claim an almost infinite number of distinct consciousness.

So the issue isn't that fundemental forces cannot combine to create human level intellect, but that it seems all sorts of systems can do this.

Another problem is that the Earth's core, clouds, the sun, etc. all also in involve a ton of information transfer. So too, a room with 10 people having a conversation can be thought of as a physical system, and this system has even more complexity than a single human body.

Why then does it not appear that the sun has a mind like a human? Why don't rooms of people produce self-aware group minds? If you cut my arm off, my conciousness stays mostly the same, but presumably my arm's level of conciousness deteriorates to some sort of basic, fundemental level. Why is this?

To explain this, we need to explain what it is about human beings and animal life that works differently to make conciousness become "more full" in them. But then this problem turns out to look a lot like the "Hard Problem of Conciousness" that we had before we invoked panpsychism, so we end up in the same spot.

That, or we have to suppose that the sun might have an awareness similar to ours, but be unable to act due to its composition, which seems strange. A problem for this avenue is what happens with brain injuries, where people lose whole chunks of their conciousness. If brain injuries, Alzheimer's, certain drugs, etc. that disrupt the brain cause such profound shifts in experience, then it seems like we still need to explain many of the same things that the Hard Problem asks us to, even with panpsychism.

But one of the comparisions Murti makes is between the 'two-truths' teaching of Madhyamaka and the Kantian distinction between phenomena and the noumenal. Conventional truth, samvritti, corresponds with the phenomenal realm, paramartha is ultimate truth, but at the same time, empty of own-being and beyond predication, as it were. Nāgārjuna (who authored the principle text) said he makes no claims and holds no thesis of his own. He has no absolute truth to proclaim and writes only as a kind of propadeutic. The analogy is, words are like a stick used to stoke the fire, but once the fire is ablaze, the stick is thrown in with it.

Reminds me of Plato's Divided Line and his difference between opinion (about mutable things) and knowledge (about things that are always true). It struck me a while back that the Platonic preference for this sort of knowledge is essentially reborn in modern philosophy's preference for Humean "relations of ideas" or Kantian analyticity. The whole idea of "a priori" truths is very akin to the theory of remembered truths, known prior to all sensory experience, in the Phaedo.

But this is a point where I tend to go over more to Aristotle, even if I generally find more to like in Plato. We learn from sensory experience and from experience of our own thoughts. Plato might be right to preference the realm of being over becoming to some extent, but it isn't true that all knowledge is of being alone.

For example, imagine, to take your example, there are five basic atoms which everything is ontologically reducible to. Imagine a theist says “this ‘atomic five theory’ doesn’t account for miracles”, and we need to posit God to explain them. IF the ‘atomic five’ naturalist can explain sufficiently such “miracles” under their theory, then it seems, to me, to be more ontologically parsimonious, even though God would provide a form of monism whereas ‘atomic five theory’ does not because the latter doesn’t have to posit a whole new category of entities.

Yes, this makes sense. And I think it applies to the "classical theism" of most contemporary philosophy of religion, where God is just a very powerful entity outside the world who created the world and occasionally intervenes in it against the normal "laws of nature."

Religion is only more parsimonious in systems where there is a higher level reality that the world of appearances is plausibly reducible to. This tends to be true in panentheistic systems, whereas pantheism would seem to require an identical number of entities to naturalism and theism additional entities. Advaita Vedant, Neoplatonism, and most Catholic and Orthodox theology would seem to fit the bill here. The reduction flows from a vertical conception of reality based on what is more essential.

The Catholic Mass has a line where everyone says something to the effect of "praise God in whom 'live and move and have our being'" (from The Book of Acts 17:28). God's essence is said to be identical to God's being, but this is true of nothing else. All created things are a sort of derivative partial being, existing according to their essence. All essence is derivative of the Logos (Christ) in the same way light comes in many colors but is one thing. Being is God's being alone (existence, haecciety), which is incarnated/instantiated in Logos according to essence, where essence is derivative of Logos. This maintains a true ontological God/creation distinction unlike Advaita, but it nonetheless collapses the plurality of ontological entities. But there is also a personalist trend here (normally associated with the Holy Spirit) that also tends to make persons ontologically basic, which increases the number of entities.

But a thing cannot be the opposite of what it is. What are we to make of this puzzle Bob Ross?

Dialectical. A thing is / encapsulates its opposite (Eriugena, Boehme, Hegel, etc.) . :cool:

I am not sure if this is an apt point of comparison. Consider that we tend to think all sorts of animals experience phenomenal conciousness. That is, there is something that "it is like" to live as a bat, a dog, a turtle, a fish, a squid, etc. Fish can feel pain, etc.

But if this is the case then conciousness is not akin to Marfan Syndrome. It's essential to seemingly all higher level animal life, something that has been around for hundreds of millions of years. So you're not talking about a gene with some unintended consequences that aren't all that relevant for selection, but rather a huge portion of the entire genome, genes stretching across species and genus, genes that affect niche construction and the context of eco systems in which animals have evolved, etc.

Second, we have good reason to think that phenomenal awareness is different in different animals. Dogs do not experience the world like we do. Some animals demonstrate some rudimentary mathematical abilities, most do not. Some animals seem to have a certain embryonic sense of logic, in that they are perturbed by what are essentially "magic tricks," chains of events that don't "add up," e.g., making food seem to vanish, etc.

However, epiphenomenalism says that none of this subjective awareness can have anything to do with natural selection. So we need to explain why awareness changes with intelligence, why more complex animals seem to have a "fuller picture," of the world.

The deeper problem is that, if causal closure is true, awareness never has anything to do with behavior. So the way "the way the world seems," is never selected for. And yet evolutionary psychology assumes, and in some ways seems to demonstrate fairly convincingly, that "the way the world seems to us," is affected by natural selection. But this seems to hurt the plausibility of phenomenal awareness having no causal role in behavior (and thus selection).

The other thing is that at any point in these hundreds of millions of years mutations could have caused phenomenal awareness to "drift apart" from the world, such that it represents the world less and less accurately. But, per epiphenomenalism, such a thing could never affect selection. So there is nothing to keep awareness from moving further and further away from reality. Yet if this is true, then we have no reason to trust our senses, and so no reason to trust the science and metaphysical doctrines that suggest to us that epiphenomenalism is true.

What would help epiphenomenalism would be if there was some demonstrable, necessary link between how phenomenal awareness "seems" and how sensory systems and intelligence have to work. That is, it would need to show some mechanism by which "the way the world seems" is kept from floating away from "the way the world is." No such link exists though because conciousness is very poorly understood.

The last problem comes from the question: "why even posit epiphenomenalism?" It seems prima facie unreasonable that our thoughts never cause our actions, so how do we end up here? The route tends to lead through smallism, the belief that all facts about larger things are entirely reducible to facts about smaller things. Empirical support for this philosophical presupposition is weak, even chemistry cannot be reduced to physics. But epiphenomenalism has us accepting a very counter intuitive and potentially self-refuting set of presuppositions largely to defend the coherence of a metaphysical doctrine that has weak empirical support and no prima facie plausibility (e.g. "bigism" seems just as good of a presupposition, parts are defined by wholes).

I'm using "intuitive" the way it is generally used throughout philosophy. Something is intuitive, a noetic "first principle," if we cannot conceive of it being otherwise. 2+2 is intuitively 4. It is intuitive that a straight line cannot also be a curved line, that a triangle cannot have four sides, etc.

There is nothing intuitive about the statement "when lots of information gets processed in a very complex way the result produces first person subjective experience." This is not intuitive in the way 2+2=4 is, so it requires demonstration, showing how the claim follows from first principles or empirical observations based on these same intuitive inference rules.

To say, "well I can't demonstrate it in a way that makes sense, but this is just because your intuition is broken," undermines virtually all truth claims, because now we can no longer feel certain about the principle of non-contradiction, inference rules, mathematics, etc. The work around of claiming "x is true, it just seems to not be because your reason is broken," can be applied equally to any claim, e.g. that we are actually light from the Pleroma trapped in a material prison, that 2+2=7, etc.

That everything is extension and motion is not an intuition. It is not intuitive that "color isn't real," for instance. People don't say, "color isn't real, this is obvious and could not possibly be otherwise." It's rather an inference from atomism/corpuscularism, which itself is created as a solution to the apparent unity of the universe and its equally apparent multiplicity and change (The One and the Many problems).

The problems of phenomenal consciousness are to begin with the result of tension between different intuitions

Not sure what you mean here. For most of the history of philosophy it wasn't really much of an issue. There are things. Of these, some are living. Of the living things, some are animals and have sensation. That's just part of their essence.

The Hard Problem only slowly comes into focus with the attempt to reduce all things to extension in space and motion. It even sort of goes back under the radar again with Newton, because now you have fundemental forces that can act at a distance, which led to people posting a similarly sui generis "life force," to explain conciousness.

But "things are only extension in space and motion," or "all that exists can be explained in terms of mathematics and computation," are not basic intuitions.

Neither is, "how does things being very 'complex' or involving lots of integrated information processing result in first person perspective?" a question of a violation of a basic intuition, it's a question of the explanation being extremely murky with no specific causal mechanism identified.

It would be extraordinary if mere logic were to conclude that this or that thing exists. That is nto the sort of thing logic is capable of.

I've got a book for you...


(Granted, it would make more sense if it was the Logic)

A good explanation shows in some way why something is necessary. I do not see how something "computing really hard," ever necessitates the emergence of first person subjective experience.

I am not particularly convinced by eliminitivist lines of argument. They seem to be a sort of bait and switch, or a fundemental misdiagnosis of the problem. They show all the ways in which conciousness is not what folk psychology takes it as, and provide a lot of information about current thinking in neuroscience, but I don't think any of this actually gets at the fundemental question of "why does subjective experience exist?"

My response would be: "ok, my thoughts are not what they seem. Ok, there are lots of plausible theories in neuroscience, global workspaces make sense, recursion and "high level summary," make sense. That's all good. But how does this explain how something mechanistically produces first person subjective experience? That my experience might be different from how I describe it doesn't really say anything about why it necessarily exists given x, y, z, etc."

So then we see the next move: "well, because conciousness is so different from what it seems to be, it turns out that your need for an explanation in terms of necessity is just a bad hunch. There is no reason for you to trust that what you think is an incomplete explanation is actually incomplete."

But then you could literally apply this to any explanation of any phenomena. "Actually, the explanation is perfect, it just seems bad because your thoughts don't work the way you think they do," undermines all claims about the world.

If our core intuitions can be this wrong, and there is "nothing to explain," then I have no idea why we should be referring to neuroscience for explanations in the first place. We only have a good reason to think science tells us anything about the world if our basic intuitions have some sort of merit.

Epiphenomenalism adds another wrinkle. If mechanism is understood in current terms then it follows that mental life can have no causal powers. But then, if what we experience and think has absolutely no effect on how we behave then there is no reason for us to think our perceptions and thoughts have anything to do with the real world. Why would natural selection ever select for accuracy? What we think or experience is completely irrelevant to survival given the causal closure principle, mental events never determine physical outcomes and so the accuracy of mental experience can never be something selected for.

Hoffman, who you mention, doesn't touch on this problem, but it's particularly acute. He just assumes that the way things "seem to us" on our "dashboard" plays a causal role in survival. The causal closure principle denies this. Of course, Hoffman ends up rejecting mechanistic explanations for other reasons, but he could have just stopped here with this disconnect.

If epiphenominalism is true, then we have no grounds for our faith in science, mathematics, etc. and no good grounds for the mechanistic view that leads to epiphenomenalism in the first place. Epiphenomenalism is self defeating.

Now if we don't assume epiphenomenalism, then we appear to have something like strong emergence. But if we have strong emergence, then we need to explain how it works. Yet, Kim's work suggests will be likely impossible in the current mechanism -substance framework, so there does seem to be an explanatory gap here in that some sort of paradigm shift seems needed to resolve this issue.

Another noteworthy point on miracles, is that, given our understanding of nature (and how mystical it really is--e.g., quantum physics, general/special relativity, etc.), it isn't implausible that an extradimensional being (or one with representative faculties capable of representing not in time or space) may exist and still be a part of the natural processes of nature. It seems like one could still, even if one does not want to posit that minority of miracles as misunderstandings, more parsimoniously posit a natural, extra-dimensional being over a supernatural one. Making is supernatural just seems very extraneous.

Right, the boundaries of nature can stretch quite a bit. Eriugena's conception of "nature" includes God. Or we might place the boundary at the truly infinite and transcedent, in which case such a thing is in a way inaccessible, only known through finite causes.

I think that if there were phenomena which reasonably could not be explained with our knowledge of the natural order, in the sense that it was consistently violating the laws of nature and there was no good naturalistic explanation, then that would, prima facie, all else being equal, count in favor of supernaturalism. I think I have to concede that, in order not to beg the question.

If something routinely violated the laws of nature in a uniform way, we would just posit a new law. If it did so in a random way, we could just conclude that nature is random in some respects. Miracles then seem to be more than simple violations of what we assume to be "natural law" (i.e., Hume's view, which I think is ultimately question begging).

I think what makes a miracle evidence for the supernatural would be that it displays a certain type of intentionality. If a new, bright star appeared in the sky out of nowhere, defying all our theories of star formation, we would not tend to think of this as necessarily miraculous. It would be a confusing new natural phenomena.

If several new stars appeared in the sky spelling out "Allah is the Greatest," we would almost certainly take this as miraculous. To me, the difference seems to be the intentionality and the fact that it seems directed towards us for some purpose.

An argument against such supernaturalism is often that if God could do this, God would want to because then we would believe. I am not so sure about this. Certainly, very many people would initially convert to Islam if those stars appeared, but in the long term I don't think it would make people that much more pious or loving — it would get old, and so less miraculous. Plus, if one God reveals themselves to be real, it is now more plausible that others exist, and so the miracles boost the warrant for seeking alternative aid as well, which a major theme in the Old Testament. Seeing the works of God, the people, not happy with what God says, have more warrant to seek after the help of Baal, Moloch, and co., turn to walking in the ways of Jeroboam, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I think, perhaps, you hold a distinction between epistemic and ontological parsimony that I am not fully appreciating.

I think I might be able to clarify:

Consider that naturalism still has to explain gods, angels, djinn, genies, etc. Clearly, people think these exist, and so there needs to be a naturalist explanation for these entities, it will just be a different explanation.

Would we then say naturalism cannot be more parsimonious because it still needs to posit every supernatural entity that people conceive of? I don't think so. Naturalism accepts that people think these entities exist, but it will tend to claim that their apparent existence is reducible to something else. If some thing in the world can be fully explained in terms of some other things, then we are able to remove that thing as a sort of ontologically basic entity (making the system more parsimonious).

E.g., people used to think heat was a substance, phlogiston. Now we understand it through a process view rather than as its own entity — one less irreducible substance in our naturalism.

So, you could consider a very parsimonious naturalism where there are just atoms that come in five flavors. Each flavor has its own properties, and they relate to one another differently in different combinations. But here, it seems possible that we might be able to explain everything in terms of just these five things and maybe their relations, leaving us with very few ontologically basic entities.

But current forms of naturalism have a great many "brute facts." The more brute facts you have, the more ontologically basic things you have.

Someone like St. Maximus by contrast has a very parsimonious system because all the multiplicity of the many (logoi for him) are reducible to the Logos. There is an infinite ground (the Father), and the Logos (Son) that divides and incarnates it, and there is the subjectivity of the Spirit. Three things, but begotten and proceeding from a single source (without being reducible to them). Creation just is Logos incarnated, and doesn't have to be a separate thing.

Shankara gets even more parsimonious by having just one thing, although it's questionable if he falls into the excluded middle by having Maya (i.e.,the illusion of multiplicity) be as sort of "actual illusion." Ultimately, all things are reducible to Brahman (maybe requiring dialtheism).

A naturalist might say, "well there is one thing, Nature," but then they have a plausibility problem because "from whence the apparent multiplicity?" remains an open question. Parmenides bites the bullet and avoids the excluded middle by having just one changeless, divisionless thing, ultimate parsimony, at the cost of making implausible statements about the lack of diversity in the world. Naturalism, without recourse to a sort of "higher level" of being to which to reduce things, tends to get stuck with all the brute facts that science leaves it with (less some for some hopeful thoughts about their reduction). But if supernatural explanations are less parsimonious, they may have more evidential problems.

In PI, Wittgenstein talks about how people are convinced to adopt totally different starting positions due to their symmetry and parsimony. We might include beauty here too. If you look at theistic thinkers, this is often part of their explanation. Whether we accept the thought of someone like St. Maximus or Plotinus as plausible or not, they certainly do create very beautiful systems, which seem to lead to their enduring appeal.

But then again, prima facie there is nothing necessary about the idea of cats, protons, or communism. It could be that numbers are innate ideas, being then "world-independent".

Well, this sort of depends on one's view of the world. In ontic structural realism, things sort of are the mathematics that describe them. A proton or a cat can be described as a sort of mathematical entity, and so might be thought to exist in the way number do.

There is, however, a boundary issue here in that "things" tend to have fuzzy boundaries. That's why these sorts of proposals tend to take the entire universe as a single mathematical object and things as just parts. But this does not rule out the possibility that there are morphisms across various subprocesses within the universal process that describe "things," and these could exist in the ways numbers exist or sets exist, as abstract objects.

I do think there is something to this, but to boundary issue remains tricky. Any "thing" only exhibits some of its properties over any given interval, and its properties are defined by how it relates to other things or by relations between parts of the thing and itself. There is a contextuality in how the world works that makes it so that one can not describe any given thing without recourse to describing other things and how they relate. This isn't that far off the formalist mantra re mathematical entities: "a thing is what it does."

How things relate to minds is a very special sort of relationship then. When a thing is considered in thought, a great deal of a thing's relational properties become "present" at once to some observer. This is where things "most fully are what they are," because it is where more relations are pulled together into a unity.

The fullest realization of any entity possible would be in a perfect mind, to which all relations are present at once. In medieval thinkers, there is a general acknowledgement of the fact that truth exists in relation to minds, not being simply equivalent with being. The "mind of God," then is the place where this sort of "knowing" relation, all properties made present at once, exists. I've often thought that the "view from nowhere," would be better termed the "God's eye view," because what it really wants is to see things in this way. God was seen as problematic, so God gets axed, and then we get this problem where truth is the way things can be conceived of with no mind to pull any relations together.

Platonism though, makes more sense if things don't exist most fully arelationally, "in themselves," but rather both relationally and in-themselves, which I take it is how Plato himself understood the Forms, and this entails a sort of God-mind to which all relations are present at once. When modern Platonisms drop this for abstract entities existing "in-themselves," I think they start to lurch off the rails. The "view from nowhere," really wants to be the "God's eye view," but it has pulled the rug out from underneath it.

Psychologism is sort of the opposite extreme. It excepts the need for mind in an explanation, but then has mind floating off by itself, a sui generis entity in which abstract entities appear to be emerging ex nihilo. But this doesn't make sense either, it's the relation of abstract entities, nature, and mind from which knowledge emerges.

It's quite good. It's nice to dip into from time to time. You have to really sit with each aphorism. I find it similar to my Rumi's collected works in a lot of ways — a lot of short, deep poems.

I am not totally sure where they come from though. I have read The Book of Divine Consolation and most of the Penguin collected works, and it seems like the aphorisms are being pulled from various places. This is good and bad. On the one hand, I really do appreciate them this way. On the other, you do lose some context.

I've seen New Age Eckharts, Perennialist Eckharts, Gnostic Eckharts, and even Buddhist Eckharts in many cases. But I do think these take him out of context. The sermons all focus on the Bible. Often the aphorisms don't seem to be trying to challenge Christian orthodoxy at all, but rather they try to get you to look at their simple principles in a new and deeper light. So, there is a sense where it seems easy for people to "invent their own Eckhart," if this is all they read. And that would be a shame because he is a pretty unique thinker, and in many ways a philosopher with a deep systematic view alongside being a mystagogue.

I agree. Like I said, there would seem to be two horns here, the evidential and the ability to apply predicates to God. I do not see the evidential as much of a problem. We can have only grasped a finite number of natural numbers in with our intellect and yet we still have evidence that they are infinite. We don't have to have ever seen an uncomputable number to believe in such a thing, etc. The finite points to the infinite.

There is a problem of plurality here too. Many people claim to have knowledge of the divine, but they often disagree, so there is a question as to what is truly known. But of course, they often agree on many points.

The question then is if a plurality of exclusive viewpoints entails the impossibility of knowledge. I would say it clearly doesn't. At one point people had a great many theories about the shape of the Earth, the nature of the sun, the origins of species, etc. Plurality here did not entail unknowability. And knowledge can exist in the context of plurality. It would be silly to say we know nothing about quantum foundations just because there are like 9 major competing theories in this area. It is also possible that one among these theories is true, or more true than all the others, even if this can't be demonstrated. Otherwise, we'd have to say that truth doesn't exist before demonstration and consensus.

IIRC Maimonides puts forth a sort of radical negation of this sort, in that things simply cannot be predicated of God. However, Maimonides still allows that God can be known as cause, and of course God can be known via revelation. So, it's a somewhat similar idea, but I think it hangs together better because people experiencing miracles have warrant for their beliefs, it's just that their finite predicates have no grip on the infinite.

However, St. Denis and the tradition following him, particularly St. Aquinas believe they have a way out of this. Yes, all our predicates of God are equivocal, but they are ordered equivocal statements. It's not the same as "plane" and "plain," where the two terms just arbitrarily sound the same with no relation.

In The Meanings of Truth: Disputed Questions on the Truth, Thomas gives this example: take a the predicate of being "healthy." This applies to living things. A living being can be more or less healthy, and to talk of a man's health is a univocal predication. However, we also call certain foods, say lentils, "healthy." This is not an univocal predication. Lentils are healthy because they promote health. Likewise, taking medicine is "healthy." But the predication here is derivative of the healthiness of the organism, ordered equivocation.

Likewise, God's goodness, God's steadfast mercy, etc. are not the human versions of these predicates, but they are also not unrelated to them. So, for St. Denis and those following him, God can be known as cause, excess (above all predicates), and then negation (negating the human mode of the predicate). Maimonides is more dower on this.

So, this might not apply to all of your argument, which seems to be about knowing in general, but it gets at one horn (the one I find more serious), the ability to predicate things of God. I think the knowing can be addressed empirically, through religious experience, through how a thing is know through its causes, etc.

There is also metaphor, which St. Denis says is in many ways superior in most cases. When we do analogous predication, it is easy to mess up and confuse the mode of human wisdom with the wisdom being predicated of God. But when we say things like "God is an everflowing stream," or "God is a rock," we do not mistake God for these things.

I actually don't think ↪Count Timothy von Icarus' absolute prohibition on asking for signs is Biblically tenable.

Yes, this is absolutely true, I did not mean to imply otherwise; there is nuance here. I was thinking of Gideon in particular and Jesus' words about the value of signs in John. The nature of the asking matters.

Wouldn't knowing that God is unknowable constitute knowing something about God? Or knowing that God is infinite and that our terms cannot be predicated univocally of God? And might we be able to still make statements about what God is not (apophatic negations)?

But then there seem to also be ways of justifying analogical predication of God within these constraints as well, at least potentially given divine revelation. For as respects knowledge via revelation, "with man, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible."

Declaring it a sign of poor character, to engage in critical thinking when it comes to one's religion,

This is really a misreading of the concerns with Gideon. Gideon points to his material conditions and says the Lord has abandoned Israel and asks why he hasn't already seen wonders. When asked to do something for the Lord he makes excuses and demands a sign. Contrast this with the Patriarchs, whose response is always "here I am." The idea is that Gideon fails to recognize the Angel of the Lord in the first place precisely because of his weak faith.

And this would probably be passed over if not for Gideon's later history. God helps Gideon achieve a miraculous victory over the people oppressing Israel. He then piously turns down becoming king. But after this he becomes vindictive and violent, pursuing his own ends, eventually making a huge golden idol that the Hebrews come to worship. So it's a textual analysis about the seeds of this when compared to other figures who always instantly recognized angles.

It's in line with the main theme: "in those days of the judges, there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what seemed right in his own eyes," (including the Judges). This is where we get Sampson and some of the other warrior heros that seem much more in line with Greek heroes or other near Eastern ones than the rest of the Biblical heroes. The general point seems to be that greatness alone, Herculean strength, etc., is nothing if not oriented towards the higher good, e.g. Sampson's great powers are undone by vice.

Plenty of other places seem plenty in favor of critical thinking. Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon, Peter's invocation to be prepared to explain the reasons for one's faith, etc.

The Stanford Encyclopedia article on Hegelian Dialectics, which is quite good too. I can see why people found similarities between Spencer Brown's "Laws of Form" and this. There is some interesting work on formalizing Hegel's Logic using category theory but it's sort of over my head. I would assume that if it can truly replicate the idea of can overcome many limits to formal systems in that contradiction is no longer an issue, but the very engine of changing the system itself.

There seems to be an interesting link between Hegel's Logic, Brown, information theory, and St. Denis/Eriugena I want to write about some day if I ever feel like I understand them well enough.

The Gideon example is also interesting because in general it's not considered to be a good sign of his character that he "puts the Lord to the test." Gideon, like all the Judges aside from Deborah and Samuel, ends up being ultimately flawed, a backslider, and his need for this evidence is often taken as an indicator of his future deficits. For the idea is that one should love the Good and God in themselves.

Indeed, Jesus denigrates the need for signs and those who ask for them (despite working many signs).

How could such a test, in principle, ever verify that the more powerful being is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, etc. let alone the creator of the entire world? It can’t. It just demonstrates, at its very best, that there was at least one being, in that day and age, capable of doing things humans could not.

Well, consider how one learns what a banana is. People show you bananas or describe them to you. People discuss their unique properties. They transmit a definition.

Given this, you now can compare you experience to what you have learned about bananas and say: "this is what people call bananas."

In the same way, super natural beings have unique attributes and abilities, and through observing these the same sort of inference can be made.

But of course, you raise a good point. Finite experience can never be evidence for a truly infinite God. So, the trouble distinguishing between "powerful and seemingly 'supernatural,'" and God is a real difficulty.

This is precisely why St. Aquinas says we cannot know God's essence. Also because God is simple, but human reason is necessarily discursive, working through joining and dividing concepts.

Yet he draws a distinction between knowing "what God is," and knowing "that God is." God's existence can be determined by signs/traces of God in the natural world (Romans 1:20), as can things about God. But for Aquinas, this unknowability was why revelation had to work as the first principles of any divine science. The point of theology then is not to prove the axioms, as this undermines faith at any rate (a person is "forced" to accept a logical demonstration). The point is to pull out what revelation entails.

But this intersects with the proof question in that recognizing God would ostensibly work in the same way we can recognize something that has been described to us or shown to us in pictures.

Aside from this, there is also direct noetic experience of God, God known in the same way we grasp self-evident truths that ground our knowledge in anything. So there is this path too, the "infused" knowledge, which is the focus of St. Denis and many of the mystics. Since God can make people grasp truths about God in this fully noetic way, outward demonstrations are less important.

Right, but it isn't just St. Paul.

St. Peter includes Christ right amidst the Father and the Holy Spirit in his doxology in his first letter. He then tells his people explicitly that their salvation lies in their faith in Christ. They are to be obedient to Christ, who is "the guardian and shepherd" of their souls. He tells them the to "sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts," "lord" here being the same word used for Adonai, the Father. Christ, who has been elect from "before the foundation of the world."

Peter follows up the appeal to keep Christ as "Lord in your hearts" by seeming to describe Christ descending into Hell to redeem souls (a theme he talks about elsewhere, as does Paul). Then he refers to Christ to whom "angels and authorities and powers are subject."


The second letter is even more explicit, opening with and appeal to "the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ," although opinion on Petrine authorship on this one is more divided (possibly not, or possibly it is a paraphrase by a different scribe since much material is the same but the style is different).

St. James likewise appeals to "our glorious Lord Jesus Christ," and appeals to "the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." Jesus himself also uses "the kingdom of God," and "the kingdom of heaven," interchangeably with "my kingdom" in the Gospels at any rate.

I am not sure how "prima facie" these appear to be the works of people who do not think Jesus is divine, even if it doesn't rule out something like Arianism (Jesus as created or somehow subordinate to God the Father). Peter would have to not be the author of either letter, and James not the author of James. But for various reasons, I Peter and and James are often dated at or before any of the Gospels. So unless these are pushed up significantly this leaves the earliest Christian texts as the letters of Paul, Peter, and James, who all seem to think Jesus has dominion in heaven and should be referred to as Lord next to the Father, etc.

But of course the synoptic Gospels also place the Son with the Father and Holy Spirit (at Jesus' own listing). Jesus accepts worship from men in them. In them Jesus claims "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," that he will judge the dead, that he will be seated with God's throne in allusions in Ezekiel and Daniel, etc.

Revelation has probably the most solid date of the NT books because it can be situated during Domitian's reign. In Revelation, Christ is clearly divine. Dating for the Gospels overlaps this period though, but even if you head towards the earlier range, the gap is 10-20 years, maybe thirty for early datings of Mark and late datings of Revelation. Thirty years might be enough for that sort of shift, but Jesus going from a teacher in the equivalent of 2014 to the obvious king of heaven in the equivalent of 2024?

This is why I find the thesis implausible. The various ranges for composition and authorship of the texts all have to line up "just so," to be even somewhat plausible, and even then it would still seem that most of the earliest sources have clear references to the divinity of Christ.

What the Apostles thought before they wrote anything is of course pure supposition. Any window into their thoughts starts with the Epistles and Gospels, and here Jesus hardly seems to be a preacher or even another prophet. James even goes out of his way to point out that Elijah, was "just a man" like the partitioners, in a contrast to the "Lord Christ."

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A more interesting question IMO is the status of the understanding of the Son as Divine Logos. This is most obvious in John 1 with its allusion to Genesis 1 and God's speaking being into existence and in John's letters, but then Colossians 1 (Paul) dovetails with it fairly well. Less obvious, I Peter seems to be possibly conflating Christ with the word/utterance of God, but the Greek term is different from logos so the exact connection is less clear. I am not aware of any potential Divine Word references in James.

This idea has profound implications for how Christianity interacted with philosophy in general and Platonist thought in particular, as the Logos can be the incarnated principle of divine ideas in general (Eriugena, St. Maximus, etc.).

Of course you can also trace the emergence of quantity to contradictions inherit in sheer, indeterminate being :grin:

Actually, on second thought, that might not be true. Various conceptions of panentheism have just one ontological entity. Shankara has Brahman and Maya and Maya is illusion, so that seems to get us to one entity. It doesn't seem possible to do with less. Because no higher reality stands behind the apparent one in naturalism, it would seem to require quite a number of ontological entities.

It depends on how you define parsimony. How many "brute facts," does naturalism require? The jury is out on that. Seemingly, it might be quite a lot.

So you end up with a lot of things that have no reason for being, they just are, irreducibly. Just from the Fine Tuning Problem, you would seem to have quite a few.

An explanation where God creates the world to have life only has to posit one such fact that "is its own reason."

If parsimony is considered from the point of view of explanation, it doesn't seem possible to beat theism. The answer "from whence comes..." always has one ultimate answer.

But from the perspective of ontological entities, I would agree that the argument holds in favor of naturalism.

I was imagining that if the Church were truly being guided by 1 person, that there would be much less confusion. I'm not aware of any human ruler in history whose followers were so confused about what he wanted while he was still alive.

But why should God's rule be anything like that of a human leader?

It seems possible that God might want to say different things to different people at different times, as is held by theologians embracing polysemy.

There are a lot of good articles on divine hiddeness. However, I have noticed that they seem to take the individual as the universal standard for judging divine hiddeness. However, the view from the Bible would tend to suggest something more corporate and world historic.

Knowing that man is categorically unable to fulfill God's commands without ongoing assistance, perhaps God is more focused on setting the historical conditions in which man comes to freely fulfill his purpose?

The Biblical narrative is that God did dwell with his people in a quite obvious way, telling them what to do in explicit terms. This did not stop them from turning to idols and disregarding God, wronging each other, etc. This seems plausible to me as far as people go.

That's really irrelevant, because the point is that we understand that it isthings which are interacting.

Yes, that is the defining claim of a substance-based metaphysics. I fail to see how this is a knock against process-metaphysics. It's saying "if we assume substance metaphysics is true, then process metaphysics isn't." Well obviously.

I will agree that substance metaphysics is more intuitive. However, our understanding of nature has often required us to drop intuitive models for less intuitive ones.

The particle is defined by its interaction with the equipment that detects it, which is substance. The fields represent the potential for interaction. So the particles are not "mathematical constructs" in the way that the fields are. "Particles" is an assumption made from, and supported by, sense observation, just like the existence of a table, chair, or any other object is an assumption supported by sense observation.

This just seems like question begging. If a particle is defined by "interactions" it seems just as correct to say it is defined by processes. To claim that "detection equipment" is fundamentally substance just assumes the truth of substance metaphysics.

There exist entirely consistent process-based explanations of physics. The existence of fields is likewise supported by sense observation in the same exact way that particles are.

Substance explanations have had a bad track record in general:

here is, however, a historical move away from substance models toward process models: almost every science has had an initial phase in which its basic phenomena were conceptualized in terms of some kind of substance — in which the central issues were to determine what kind of substance — but has moved beyond that to a recognition of those phenomena as processes. This shift is manifest in, for example, understanding fire in terms of phlogiston to understanding fire in terms of combustion, heat in terms of random kinetic motion rather than the substance caloric, life in terms of certain kinds of far from thermodynamic equilibrium processes rather than in terms of vital fluid, and so on. Sciences of the mind, arguably, have not yet made this transition

In particular, it seems hard to explain quantum foam, virtual particles, the spontaneous emergence of quark condensate, etc. in terms of "fundamental things." The "fundamental things" brought in to explain these are universal fields. But then you just have a thing, and it is changes in the thing, which are always occurring by the thing's very nature, which do all the explanatory lifting. That starts to sound a lot like process metaphysics.

What is meant by "stabilities" is also not unexplainable In brief:

The default for substances and Democritean “atoms” is stability. Change requires explanation, and there are no self-movers. This is reversed in a process view, with change always occurring, and it is the stabilities of organizations or patterns of process, if such should occur, that require explanation.

There are two basic categories of process stability. The first is what might be called energy well stabilities. These are process organizations that will remain stable so long as no above threshold energy impinges on them. Contemporary atoms would be a canonical example: they are constituted as organizations of process that can remain stable for cosmological time periods [but they can be created or destroyed].

The second category of process stability is that of process organizations that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Unlike energy well stabilities, these require ongoing maintenance of their far from equilibrium conditions. Otherwise, they go to equilibrium and cease to exist...

Aside from the track record and difficulties in being adapted to modern physics, I'd also count against substance metaphysics the way it splits the world into subjective/objective, provided strong emergence is barred. But if strong emergence isn't barred, then it seems like interactions, process, ends up generating new fundamental properties/substances. But then process now again seems to be driving the explanatory vehicle.

Positing a metaphysical realm of substances or atoms induces a fundamental split in the overall metaphysics of the world. In particular, the realm of substances or atoms is a realm that might be held to involve fact, cause, and other physicalistic properties and phenomena, but it excludes such phenomena as normativity, intentionality, and modality into a second metaphysical realm. It induces a split metaphysics.

Not sure how you can say it is hardly a problem. We fail to agree over the fundamental building blocks of civilization itself, forget the flat Earth or vaccine debates - they are symptoms of a bigger issue, aren't they? In increasingly diverse and polarized societies, if there is no shared mainstream narrative, chaos or internecine tribalism would seem to be a consequence. Is it any wonder that some people are calling for a return to religion or Christian values as a kind of nostalgia project, harking back to a perceived golden era?

Ha, no I didn't mean the denial of these things is hardly a problem. I meant that it isn't a problem to teach well justified positions just because some people disagree. Citizens shouldn't all get an equal vote on what an appropriate chemistry, carpentry, or biology curriculum might be; let's leave that to the chemists, carpenters, and biologists.

Well, I guess we could equally say that nothing needs to be a thorny issue, whether it be health care or fire arms policy. But it is.

Right, here I was thinking of how ethics tends to get approached in the upper grade levels. Rather than focus on areas where their might be broad consensus, like the Aristotlean vice-incontinence-continence-virtue distinction, the psychology/neuroscience of habit formation, the theory of virtue as a mean between extremes, virtue as a route to self-determination, etc. we seem to instead jump to focusing on the most ideologically contentious and complex issues (at least here in the US).

Identity politics, the individual versus society, etc. are all important. They shouldn't be the ground floor. Where ethics is actually taught, curricula try to build up an analytical and theoretical tool kit before approaching these issues. Having "race and the West" tacked on to history class as an aside is probably not the best way to go about this, especially when a sort of emotivist nihilism is already the cultural norm.



That post wasn't supposed to be "how do we get ethical behavior." It was a list of what I think are generally uncontentious notions about some of the ways in which we can promote ethical behavior.

If hard determinism is true, then no one is morally culpable.

I am not sure if this follows. Consider a basic sketch of compatibalist free will as one's relative degree of self-determination:

A. Initially, following conception, we are not conscious. We are the effects of causes external to us.
B. As we develop, more and more of what effects us lies internal to us, as in "within our bodies." For example, organ development is spurred on by signals that originate in the fetus, not by signals coming from the mother's body. Although obviously the mother's body continues to play an important causal role even in a normal pregnancy.
C. At some point, phenomenal awareness begins and we become aware of our own bodies and our environment.
D. As we develop, we develop faculties for self-control, planning, etc.
E. By the time we are adults we can engage in introspection and try to determine our reasons for acting. Further, we can shape our environment in accordance with our will. We can write post-it notes to remind ourselves to do things, we can sign up for fitness classes with a friend so that social pressure forces us to engage in exercise we would otherwise shrug off, go backpacking so that we are far away from cigarettes so that we can't smoke, etc.

Somewhere in this process of development, at least some of what we do comes to be determined by the thoughts and decisions that enter into our conscious awareness. Obviously, people can be more or less introspective, they can have varying degrees of self-control, and they can do more or less to shape their environment so that it supports courses of action that they prefer.

The free person is a self-organizing system. Self-determination isn't a binary. It's something that emerges over time and builds on itself. Everyone has the capability to be driven by what they think is right action to some degree, such that their thoughts about what is right plays a determining role in their actions.

We can also have what Frankfurt terms "second-order volitions," i.e., desires about what we do or do not want to desire. We can take action on these as well, e.g., someone on a diet eats a salad and drinks broth so that they will not have a strong desire to eat high calorie food because they do not want to have that desire.

Freedom then, would be a sort of state. It is when:
1. We do what we want to do.
2. We want to want to do what we do (second-order volition).
3. We consciously intend to do what we do.
4. We know why we want to do what we do, and we agree that those are good reasons for acting.

Obviously, such freedom is never absolute. A person who acts in a way they otherwise wouldn't due to ignorance fails to meet #4. No one ever knows all the reasons behind why they act a certain way, or all the reasons determining why they want to act the way they want to act. But I'd argue that at least some people manage to have a pretty good idea about these things in at least some instances, and in these instances they are responsible for their actions because it is "who they are" that determines their actions.

The universe being deterministic seems sort of aside the point, although I'd tend to agree with compatibalists that some sort of determinism is actually a prerequisite for freedom. What seems important for culpability and freedom is if a person's acts are determined by their thinking, and if their thinking has been determined by a life that has allowed them to become relatively self-determining, such that an appropriate amount of the proximate causes underlying their actions can be traced back to their own conscious reflection and decisions.

This entails that people can be culpable to some degree. We might also consider that people's own choices can either make them more or less self-determining. Self-control, knowledge, and introspection can all be developed or eroded based on the choices we make. Therefore, we might well find people culpable for not developing these capabilities if it leads to their acting poorly. There is a sort of negligence that comes from having a good environment for developing freedom and choosing not to take advantage of it.

g. Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe (a type of mathematical monism) includes the view that every possible mathematical structure exists. Would the Mathematical Universe of Max Tegmark then be a naturalised FBP?

It's worth noting that Tegmark justifies his view with the claim that it fixes the Fine Tuning Problem in physics. I do not think this actually works. Basically, if every possible universe exists, then we seem to run into all sorts of undetermination problems and issues that are somewhat akin to the Boltzman Brain problem, although different.

Apparently, my objection is not novel and someone pointed it out to Tegmark, although they did it by only focusing on the problem as respects non-computable mathematical objects. This caused Tegmark to revise the hypothesis such that only computable objects exist. Aside from seeming ad hoc though, I do not think this actually solves the problem of how the MUH is not a good solution to the Fine Tuning Problem.

It is, nonetheless, an interesting idea. I think it's worth pointing out that Tegmark's 3rd (or maybe 4th?) level multiverses are themselves mathematical objects, singular. That is, universes are not composed of multiple discrete mathematical objects, which makes them a bit different than some other forms of platonism/ontic-structural realism.

d. Conceptualism: really anti-realist? If we admit that the mind is part of reality, doesn’t research in mathematics equate with investigating our own minds? You might insist that it is still anti-realist because it’s not mind-independent, but the anti-realist label brings a connotation of fiction (not in the sense of fictionalist nominalism). In this case, the question is: does conceptualism really imply some sort of fiction (something we make up like stories, or perhaps useful stories like myths) or implies an investigation of our own minds as an object of study (cognitive science and psychology)? It seems to be the latter, given the fact that conceptualism turns mathematics into a branch of psychology.

Right, and if our minds produce such things, we might ask "why do they do so?" Trading off arguments made by enactivists, we can say that brains don't produce any consciousness in most environments. From development to death, there is a constant two-way flow of causes across any supposedly discrete barrier that constitutes a person. If we come to have mathematical intuitions and develop mathematical ideas, we do not do so in isolation, so how does this tie back to the world?

I can imagine all sorts of answers here, and many would not be anti-realist. IMO, it's really not that different from questions as to whether cats, trains, atoms, recessions, communism, etc. all really exist, if they are "mind-independent," etc.

My personal take would be that minds are somewhat unique in being able to use syntax to bring many properties of things together and make them phenomenologically "present" at once. However, this still represents a relation between things in the world, and is in no way a sort of "less real" relationship for involving phenomenal awareness. Indeed, I can see an argument for these relationships being "more real" in that the development of clear knowledge of "what a thing is," is itself the relation in which a thing "most essentially is what it is." In knowledge, many of a thing's properties come together at once, whereas normally any one thing is only manifesting some of its properties over any given interval.

c. Can a physicalist (or generally naturalists) be a platonist, or should they stick with nominalism or immanent realism? It seems they can't, because commitment to abstract objects seems to be a commitment to non-physical objects, but see for example naturalised platonism (3).

Naturalism seems generally to be defined loosely enough that I don't see an issue here. Consider Pinkhard's argument that Hegel is a naturalist for example. More broadly, it seems like there could be a naturalism that distinguishes between realms of being and becoming, existence/subsistance and actualization, actual and potential, etc., which might leave room for platonism.

Physicalism, if it's in the conventional package of "everything that exists is physical," superveniance, and causal closure seems more dicey unless a number of moves are made.

Gisin's application of intuitionism to physics adds an interesting wrinkle here, but I still think it might be consistent with a certain sort of naturalist platonism. If anything, it would seem to change physicalism more if it ever becomes mainstream.

Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to "speak" of indeterminism, its inability to present us a worldview in which new information is created as time passes. In such a case, scientific determinism would only be an illusion due to the timeless mathematical language scientists use. To investigate this possibility it is necessary to develop an alternative mathematical language that is both powerful enough to allow scientists to compute predictions and compatible with indeterminism and the passage of time. We argue that intuitionistic mathematics provides such a language and we illustrate it in simple terms.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02348

What counts as a "confirmed fact" is debatable, of course, but I don't know of any scholar or historian who seriously doubts (and provides some evidence for their view) that Mark was the first Gospel. If you do, could you share that? I'd be grateful.

The Synoptic Gospels were very likely not written like War and Peace, set out for publication by a single author, and then distributed. Material in the Gospels is widely thought to date to different periods and to be drawn from various sources, with adjustments occuring over an overlapping time period. This is what I mean by overlap - which material is oldest is difficult to determine.

Mark is widely thought to be the first Gospel compiled in roughly its eventual format, and it is generally given a date before 70 AD, but there is a difference between being the first compiled in roughly its current format and having the "oldest material." The Markan Priority Theory was not always as in vouge as it is today, and Mathew is still proposed as "first" sometimes, although as often the claim is that it doesn't make much sense to think of them in serial order. Much of the Markan theory hangs on the fact that Mark shows bad grammar and word choices, while Matthew and Luke are much more polished. The thinking runs that this is best explained by the fact that the other two are later attempts to fix deficits in Mark, but of course this is supposition, and there are reasons to think that the polish of Luke and some of its unique material has to do with its continued evolution. The argument is abductive, and this is what I mean by "not a confirmed fact." Yes, it's the most widely held position, but it's also a position that has to be extrapolated on not very definitive evidence.

At any rate, the thinking is that there are later additions to Mark and also that the other Gospels draw from sources used to compile Mark, as well as others. So, when we talk about "what the earliest sources say about Jesus," the priority of Mark shouldn't be thought of in the way modern books are published, with a single final manuscript coming out and being faithfully transcribed from that date on. And so my point would be more than we have a hard time knowing which material is the oldest out of all of these -