I wouldn't put it like that. — Moliere

I would. But perhaps you’re saying that’s not how you see yourself in relation to a claim like: ‘science is what we arrive at when philosophy has been successful and weeded out all the dead ends.'

I think this a position often held by positivists. Russell makes similar points about philosophy:

As soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science...

Some people hold a view that philosophy is merely speculative, whereas science deals with reality - no doubt there are hard and sift version of this.

I have never really heard an account of God that demonstrates how God is good. I see no good reason to take a theistic morality seriously. Apart from threats of punishment, which amount to a kind of protection racketeering. The problem, of course, is that theistic morality has no stable foundation. Believers can’t seem to agree on anything. So believing in God doesn’t furnish us with a coherent set of moral behaviours, only a series of widely different interpretations about what a particular god may prefer.

Interesting. Thanks for the overview. Would you say that puts you within a camp that is broadly sceptical of metaphysics and more closely aligned with methodological naturalism? What do you say to the view that science is grounded in philosophical assumptions about reality and that its methods and findings are fundamentally shaped by the values that structure them?

— You're a somewhat special case, Tom, because your goal is often just to understand what someone else thinks and why, especially if it's quite different from what you think. That's your choice — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that’s mostly it. The point of this thread, as I mentioned a few times in only to understand the argument being made, which I have tried to do. Whether the argument is located in some form of Christian thinking or whether the reasoning is compelling or not isn’t of much interest.

What I am claiming is that no one is under any obligation to refute Hart's arguments. — Srap Tasmaner

Which matches my aims too.

You see, I wasn't actually arguing for "Shut up and calculate." I was quietly contesting the view that the business of philosophy is primarily argument, or, rather, argument conceived in a particularly narrow way. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, that’s beyond me. I’m not sure what philosophy is primarily for. It always struck me as being too diverse to have a central concern or approach. I’ve never been close enough to the subject to develop a view.

I’m afraid much of what you set out above is beyond me.

(I think it's a fundamentally mistaken approach, and it's why I have so much trouble with SEP. The best philosophy is always, like science, work that is done on the phenomena themselves—even when those phenomena are theoretical rather than practical or physical—rather than purely counter-arguments to arguments.) — Srap Tasmaner

So if we were to take "conscious" as a subject, in two or three dot points what direction does your approach lead, in terms of method?

Something besides sidestepping or dissolving is possible, then: ignoring. Which will sound a bit un-philosophical, but among working scientists, you'll find some (and some famously) openly hostile to philosophy, some intrigued because they're curious and like puzzles, and a considerable amount of indifference. I can't imagine you'll find many, of any predisposition, willing to take marching orders from David Bentley Hart—"Pack it up boys! Hart says it's not gonna work." — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed, "Shut up and calculate". Although it seems to me that Hart isn’t saying "it's not going to work", he is identifying that a particular presupposition may be less secure than many dogmatically assume. If accurate that seems to me a reasonable piece of work, and there is certainly an enthusiastic audience for Hart's many books on these sorts of matters. Personally I find his prose close to unreadable.

The only answer that makes sense to me—one where there would be genuine consequences for the success of the argument—is believers who have somehow become "natural science curious". Here, Hart's arguments could find real purchase, and keep that little sheep from straying, or, rather, bring the sheep that has already strayed back into the fold.

I can't think of anyone else who would be interested and would take seriously what he has to say. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, I'm someone who has ignored philosophy for most of his life, so I should be biased in your favour.

But isn’t it sometimes the case that the subjects people are least interested in turn out to be among the most important?

I’m interested in what Hart has to say, up to a point. It should also be said that Hart may appeal to agnostics/atheists who are “classical-theism curious” and wondering about alternatives to what might strike them as the scientistic dogma of the present era. Either way, since this is a philosophy site which frequently examines precisely these kinds of recondite issues, I figure it's probably legitimate try to understand his argument.

To summarize: I think Hart's challenge is serious. I'm sympathetic to the claim that intentionality and
normativity are irreducible, but I'm less convinced that irreducibility forces you all the way to Plotinus or classical theism, rather than to a richer-than-mechanistic view of nature. Hart's argument doesn't force you to become a theist — but it does force you to decide whether you really believe nature is exhausted by efficient causes. — Esse Quam Videri

Nice - that's also a point I made earlier. We can set aside the Neoplatonism and admire the construction of his argument.

Rorty is interesting here because I don't think he would try to answer Hart on Hart's terms at all. He wouldn't say "intentionality is reducible to physics." He'd say something closer to: "Hart assumes that if aboutness can't be reduced, it must correspond to some deep metaphysical structure. But why? Maybe aboutness is just part of how we talk — a feature of our vocabulary and practices, not a window into the architecture of being. It doesn't need metaphysical grounding any more than humor needs a metaphysical theory of funniness." — Esse Quam Videri

Indeed. And sometimes it seems to me that philosphy is about sidestepping problems rather than answering them: dissolving not resolving. Not sure where I sit on this. A case by case basis, I guess.

Hart's counter would be sharp: even to describe vocabularies and practices, you're relying on meanings, norms, and directedness — you're relying on intentionality while refusing to account for it. The "it's just how we talk" move is parasitic on the very thing it waves away. I don't think Hart decisively refutes Rorty, but he does expose the cost of the Rortyan move. Rorty will avoid Hart's metaphysics, by treating "what is intentionality?" as a pseudo-problem — and Hart will insist it isn't. — Esse Quam Videri

That's a keen insight. I was thinking similarly but I'm no expert or Rorty. Meanings, norms and directness are unavoidable. I love the idea of waving away the thing you are resting on. Perhaps it can be done.

But like Moliere has been saying:
The argument is going to sound plausible to those who reject naturalism as an adequate metaphysics and not plausible to naturalists. — baker

I think that’s a superficial description, which I’ve already addressed. The point is: can naturalism account for intentionality? Forget God: what can naturalism explain? Surely that’s the nub of it, as I’ve said before. It's possibel to answer “no, naturalism doesn’t account for this” and still not arrive at Mr. God.

But arguments don't somehow "speak for themselves", don't somehow stand in a vacuum, don't "stand on their own". They depend on unstated premises that are simply taken for granted -- just not necessarily always and by everyone. — baker

I don't think you're understanding the point I am pursuing.

Follow the reasoning, not what you think about theism or theists, or what you think I, or others, think about theism.

Now, I happen to believe that, for the most part, behind all this, the atheist’s and the theist’s reasons for believing are much the same. Their accounts make sense to them for reasons informed by emotion and aesthetics. The reasoning is often post hoc.
Of course. And this is something to bear in mind when approaching your OP. — baker

I always incorporate this point. But you are not engaging with the point of this OP. I am asking: what is Hart’s argument? You seem to be focusing on the argument based on implicit assumptions of theism. I don’t care what the implicit assumptions might be - such assumptions are surely obvious. I am trying to understand his reasoning, which seems complex.

Fortunately has arrived somewhere with this.

I really appreciate your responses here.

But his deeper claim is that any naturalism that accepts real intentionality has already conceded something that sits very uncomfortably within a naturalist framework, even a generous one. Real aboutness, real directedness toward ends — these look a lot like the formal and final causality that the scientific revolution was supposed to have banished. So the generous naturalist may have a harder position to maintain than it first appears: you've let the camel's nose into the tent. — Esse Quam Videri

Yes, good. What's your reaction to this point?

So as with all philosophical arguments, it's less a proof and more a challenge. Hart is saying: show me how mechanism gets you aboutness without presupposing it. He thinks no one has ever met that challenge. Whether that constitutes a demonstration or just a very confident bet is a fair question. — Esse Quam Videri

And I think this may be the best distillation of what it all means.

I would be interested to learn more about what a post-modern response would would be or what someone like Richard Rorty might say. One possible approach might be to argue that Hart assumes that purely physical processes should be able to fully account for aboutness, but this expectation may misrepresent what explanation can do. The fact that any account of intentionality already presupposes meaning shows that some aspects of our engagement with the world are not reducible to lower-level processes, highlighting the limits of explanation rather than pointing to something beyond the physical. Does that make sense?

Nice work and thank you for the effort. It's all a bit too deep, too complex for me.

So the real issue, for Hart, is whether intentionality is eliminable or irreducible — and if it's irreducible, whether it forces us beyond the mechanical narrative toward a metaphysics in which finality, form, and unity are basic features of reality rather than emergent accidents. — Esse Quam Videri

Yes. What do you make of the argument? Given the potential problems in premises 3 and 6?

P3. This directedness toward what is not-yet (and even toward what may never be) cannot be captured in purely immanent mechanical terms. No arrangement of present matter, however complex, constitutes aboutness — orientation toward an absent end — without presupposing an irreducible intentional structure that already exceeds efficient causality. — Esse Quam Videri

I'm not sure how one would demonstrate this is necessarily the case.

The noetic order, as a realm of determinate intelligible unities, cannot be self-grounding. Any determinate unity — any "this" rather than "that" — is a limited participation in unity as such, and so points beyond itself to a principle of unity that is not itself one determinate thing among others. — Esse Quam Videri

What does this mean? It seems to be saying that a specific idea is one thing rather than another, but it can’t explain why it is one at all; that unity must come from something more basic than the idea itself.

Hart is at his strongest when he's targeting the Rosenberg/Churchland end of things, where intentionality really is denied or explained away. But you're right that there are much more capacious naturalisms that would happily accept real intentionality and even something like teleology. — Esse Quam Videri

Yes, I would have thought that this is low hanging fruit.

My thought where he says "this is impossible" is to ask "Why's that?" -- in some sense, if we're good naturalists, we'd say we may not know how something arises and so need not "sit on both sides" to point to a limitation. Rather that seems to me that Hart believes reality is intrinsically structured with intelligibility and it's a rather handy explanation for a problem he sees in naturalism. — Moliere

I think this seems to be a good summary of the matter along with the tension for naturalists.

He has a tendency to treat certain metaphysical intuitions as self-evident that aren't self-evident to everyone. — Esse Quam Videri

I think he would agree with this, but he would say he can’t help it if others are too dull or intellectually captive to understand the point properly.

Argument 2: The Argument from Intelligibility — Esse Quam Videri

Nice. Yes I think that’s a detailed account, which goes further - to Mr God - than we need to.

The other arguments may have been made by CS Lewis too I seem to recall.

I found this from a rather well written and somewhat intractable essay by Hart on the matter.

Or, more simply, the whole issue is intentionality, which stands at the very heart of the phenomenological project, but which phenomenologists in the vein of Marion—which might just mean Marion—tend to treat not as determinative of our understanding of being, or even of our understanding of our capacity to seek and find, but principally as the limitation of what we receive in any phenomenon, defined every bit as strictly as the Kantian rule of representation. This is very odd indeed, since such limits by definition would be unsurpassable and for that very reason unrecognizable; any awareness of a givenness in excess of our intentional capacity—any ‘saturated phenomenon’, to borrow a phrase—would be impossible not only to perceive, but to intuit. That, however, is a secondary consideration. That there is such a thing as intentionality at all invites a certain set of metaphysical conjectures, and those of an almost inescapably idealist kind (as Husserl, for all the restraint he exercised in making large pronouncements, understood). There is, of course, no such thing as an ‘analytic’ idealism, since every metaphysical picture requires a synthetic judgement pronounced upon certain phenomenologically specified structures of experience. But there is a certain inevitability in the sort of questions our experience of intentionality prompts, and a limited range of intelligible answers.

There is no great mystery, of course, as to why the idea of intrinsic intentionality is abhorrent to a consistent naturalist, or why a ‘scientistic reductionist’ such as Alex Rosenberg (that is his description of himself) should feel obliged to deny its very existence. It simply cannot be reconciled with the mechanical narrative of emergence. There is no avenue strictly upward from mere behavior, understood in terms of stimulus and response, to intentional agency, except (and this is the preposterous alternative favored by Rosenberg and others) as an epiphenomenal illusion. Along even the most gradualist of evolutionary paths, the slow, cumulative, agonizing ascent from entropy to homeostasis to metabolism to interiority to intentionality is impossibly fantastic; such a sequence of developments would never reach that point of inflection where actual intention toward an end arose from the sheer momentum of life out of the primordial night. The horizons of intention would have to be pushed ever further back into the past and ever further ahead into the future without cessation in order to tell the tale, because both horizons are necessarily presumed within the very structure of persistence, and must be present (as so much current biological thinking powerfully suggests) at every systemic level, from the highest to the lowest. So, if intentionality is real, it must—contrary to the mechanical narrative—mean that the future and the purposive and the final, on the one hand, coexist with the past and the energetic and original, on the other, in every present act of a real agent. This requires that there is always already a noetic realm in which chronos is wholly present in a replete aeon, a notional order in which the end is always already accomplished—even if that end is never realized here below, in the land of unlikeness. And yet this too cannot intelligibly be understood as a composite order, in which diverse extrinsic causes collaborate to produce a mere totality. It must be a true intrinsic unity, and so must be subordinate to and contingent upon a yet higher realm of unity as such. If there is intentionality, simply enough, a metaphysics of participation is always proposing itself for consideration, and with considerable persuasive force.

Perhaps, however, I should lay out the sequence of investigations I would think necessary to determine whether my understanding of, say, Plotinus’s hierarchy of emanations could be regarded as a ‘phenomenological’ deduction—or even, to employ the terminology of the guild, a phenomenological reduction.

The very first question I would pose is whether the pre-Kantian or pre-critical assumption that metaphysics can be directly deduced by reflection on the conditions of experience, without any prior methodological rationale, actually concealed certain rigorous principles tacitly at work in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic thought. The next is whether the modern critical project, in identifying the necessity of a proper distinction between epistemological investigation of the categories of understanding and metaphysical speculation on ‘essences’ or forms, at once revealed what most premodern philosophy had failed to discriminate and yet also, paradoxically, served further to conceal those governing principles mentioned above. In that sense, perhaps, Kant’s first Critique might be regarded not so much as a barrier erected between the confident metaphysics of the premodern world and modern thought so much as a prism that can separate the formerly blended light of the metaphysical, empirical, phenomenological, practical, and culturally contingent into their distinct colors. Chiefly, my concern is whether, rather than constituting merely an illicit leap from the temporal into the eternal, the attempt in Platonic and Aristotelian tradition to understand the structure of reality according to rational categories derived from mental agency (such as idea, form, and finality) might more properly be understood, in a great many cases, as an ontology of time, naïvely but in many respects consistently based upon what we now might describe as a phenomenology of all agency, mental and otherwise. Again, I am not persuaded that the partition that contemporary continental phenomenology erects between its method and ‘metaphysics’ tout court can possibly remain impermeable in the way it is so often asserted to be. I think a particularly fruitful way of framing the issue might be to ask, for instance, whether Heidegger’s project of the ‘temporalization of ontology’ was not, in a manner that he did not recognize, an accidental inversion of an ancient project of the ‘ontologization of time’, whose beginning we can vaguely locate in the dictum from the Timaeus that “Chronos is the moving image of Aeon” (which, misleadingly to our modern ears, is usually rendered as “Time is the moving image of Eternity”) and whose first culmination might be found in that aforementioned Plotinian hierarchy of hypostases. My aim would be not some elevation of either ‘the ancients’ over ‘the moderns’ or the reverse, but rather a partial erasure of a hard distinction of method between them and a reconciliation of certain ancient and certain modern philosophical impulses at a more original level of reasoning. There is a point at which the boundaries enforced by phenomenological ‘bracketing’ might profitably be encouraged to dissolve, if only to reveal the ‘phenomenological’ method implicit in what has been defined historically as mere metaphysics.

So I would begin from Heidegger’s example of the differing ways in which a hammer is understood—or, better, grasped—by the one who is wielding it. The image is emblematic of both an agent’s inescapable pragmatic engagement in the disclosure of being and also the temporality of Dasein; but what tends to disappear in his account of the ecstatic openness of Dasein to the future, as determined toward the horizon of death, is any sufficiently precise analysis of the element of specific intentionality in the agent’s use of a hammer, and of the way that finite intention always arises within the context of a more original orientation toward certain more absolute ends. In one sense, Heidegger’s project of enclosing ontology within a pragmatic and hermeneutical horizon arrived very late in the day within the larger modern project inaugurated by Descartes’s rational reconstruction of reality from the original position of the subject, which reached its most epochal expression in Kant’s transcendental deduction; but, in another sense, Heidegger was also resuming the earlier Protestant resistance against the ‘Athenian captivity’ of the schoolmen. Ever since the critical threshold was crossed, there has been a great deal of philosophical ferment around the possibility of retrieving the premodern faith in the unity of being and thought, now purged of its naïveté by critical scruple. In a broad sense, this is the guiding pathos in much modern continental thought, Romantic, Idealist, Phenomenological, and so on. Needless to say, this ambition has been hindered by the triumph not only of the critical vantage, but of the mechanical view of nature as well. The latter may be hospitable to substance dualism, materialist emergentism, or physicalist reductionism (even eliminativism), but not to any genuine rapprochement between our pictures of mental agency and of the intrinsic structure of reality. Absolute Idealism constituted the most daring attempt at overcoming the breach, and Hegel’s logic the most monumentally systematic.

Be that as it may, I wish to cast a glance back toward the earlier syntheses, before the threshold of the critical was reached, but to do so without retreating back across that threshold. In brief, if intrinsic intentionality truly exists, it already from the first forbids a complete mechanization of our picture of reality simply by virtue of the actual efficacy of rationales, purposes, and meanings. If mental agency requires the real existence of an antecedent finality as a rational relation within all intentional acts, then this naturally suggests that there must be a distinct ‘noetic’ space in which every act enjoys at least a notional existence as a complete totality; and, so Plotinus and others assumed, this ‘aeonian’ totality, which is meted out in a fluent succession of episodes in the sublunary world of chronos, must be sustained more originally by a principle of unity prior to all distinctions of states. And, if nature is hospitable to efficacious intentionality, it is perhaps not irrational to suppose that it is configured intrinsically upon this model of agency, especially if intentionality can be discerned within even its most elementary functions. The Critique of Judgement tells us that teleology can at most be assumed to be a necessary aspect of our rational perception of totality, and nothing more; but (as Hegel noted) this too is a metaphysical supposition, and an arbitrary imposition of limits upon reason’s grasp of the real. So, if as I say I were to begin with Heidegger’s hammer in hand, the first line of inquiry would be to ask what the absolutely indispensable features of any complete account of my intentional engagement with it must be. The next would be to ask, with some caution but real application, what the actual structure of intentional acts suggests about causality in regard to time, and so about the ontology of those causal relations. And, at the end of that train of reflections, it might be possible to ask whether there must be an ultimate point of indistinction in the structure of reality between the mind as knower and being as the known.

Thoughts? It's a little too difficult for me.

Maybe there is nothing to understand. If no one can lay it out, we might conclude that there is no argument―that is what I've been leading up to — Janus

I don’t think that’s right. That would be something like mistaking an absence of an account with an account. But I think some like @Wayfarer have come part of the way and I am exploring @Esse Quam Videri comprehensive attempt. But again if I or others can’t make sense of it that’s not the same thing as there being no argument.

I’ve already said I don’t fully understand the argument. I need someone to lay it out. That’s the point of this OP. I did provide a couple of sketches earlier with premises.

I’ve been pretty clear. I want to understand the argument. I’m not interested in debunking it or incorporating other material. I just can’t to understand it.

Apologies in advance if this has already been discussed, but what do people think about the phrase "My truth"? (Or its variants, "your truth" and "his/her truth"). I don't remember hearing it until about five years ago, — Peter Gray

I think variations of this have been circulating for many years. I can recall it from decades ago. It probably originated in psychology and self-help movements, and was later taken up in identity politics.

Ok, but what if an outdated model leads you into false assumptions and ineffective answers? Fine to use Freud (say) on Hamlet, but on self? Hence my original comment about the poetic application of theory. When I hear terms like vices or self-destructive tendencies, they echo older moral or quasi-religious ideas of sin and personal failing, which contemporary psychology has largely moved away from. These days, behaviours are better understood as adaptive responses, often creative attempts to cope with anxiety, unmet needs, or difficult emotional conditions.

Yes: the purpose of this discussion is to focus exclusively on intentionality, without getting bogged down in the weeds of related material. If intentionality can’t be explained by a naturalistic view, then we don’t need the endless, tedious debate about consciousness which has been addressed on the forum in numerous ways already. This is about taking one small argument and trying to understand it.

Reminds me of a nice Wittgenstein aphorism: — Srap Tasmaner

Ah, that's a nice quote of Witty's.

Also saying that we may never have a complete account does not necessarily leave the door open to God and esoterica, because those posits can never be scientific or satisfactorily explanatory. — Janus

I think you misunderstood me. I should have said that we would leave the door open to superstitions, folk traditions, and supernatural ideas, God and esoterica. There is little doubt that wherever there is a gap, God will be inserted, as a kind of explanatory wall filler.

Again I think this is not right. — Janus

I don't think that is a fair assessment of either physicalism or naturalism. — Janus

I’m not saying that other more circumspect views, like the ones you mentioned, aren’t also present. I’m just describing what I often hear and regarding physicalism and naturalism: the usual claims about eventually achieving a full understanding of consciousness in the future. In the meantime, trust in complexity and brain states. And yes, some naturalists agree that we may never have a complete account, leaving the door forever open to versions of God and esoterica.

A big issue for naturalism is whether we are talking about methodological or metaphysical naturalism, as people often shift the meaning of their claims.

The concept of ego may have gone out of fashion, especially as the term consciousness has become used to cover so much ambiguity in meaning. — Jack Cummins

I wouldn’t say these ideas are out of fashion so much as understood as wrong, outmoded. Personally, I'm not attracted to the “masters of suspicion,” and I don’t really accept the will to power, the ego, or similar explanatory schemas. I’m not convinced those kinds of frames are particularly useful.

What's your attraction to these sorts of descriptions?

. It would be like talking about contradictions in art. Art doesn’t care about contradictions. — Angelo Cannata

Hmm, well, I’m not entirely convinced by this. Academics and critics do identify when art is incoherent or when it fails to follow its own internal logic. It isn’t the case that any art is ipso facto beyond critical understanding or even judgement, as if art were off-limits to rational or evaluative standards. But I do kind of understand what you’re saying.

If we clarify that this creation that subjectivity operates is not a metaphysically realistic creation, but an interpretation of our experience, then yes, I think that everything in this world can be considered as created by us. — Angelo Cannata

We invent the names, the measurements, and the descriptive frameworks; the coherence is largely ours, and the regularities may well be a product of how we conceptualise the world rather than features of the world itself, though I’m not entirely sure. Hence, objectivity could be understood as shared subjectivity.

Nice. I don’t think the world in general has caught up to any of this. How long will it take?

torturers and interrogators and The Spanish Inquisition, have known that since the dawn of time. — RogueAI

I think that initiative was a bit later than this. :wink:

This make me deduce that true subjectivity is that part that is impossible to express, that part that remains in each personal experience, that everybody can feel inside themselves, but cannot be communicated because, since it is unique, we should create a dedicated specific word for each unique experience that otherwise is inexpressible. — Angelo Cannata

Isn’t the opposite also true, objectivity is an artifact of human constructivism, culture, language and values? Objectivity perhaps being a shared subjectivity. Perhaps we could even say objectivity is a contradiction inside subjectivity?

Do we have access to anything that isn’t spun, woven and contextualised by our cognitive processes and principles we have created?

A salient question for me, and apologies if I have missed this since I dip in and out, are to what extent are any patterns we observe “in the world” or are they a co-created outcome of human interactions?

Fair point.

I'll try to stay more focused. These were just my first thoughts. — Moliere

Coming back to this. I wasn’t being critical of you or your thinking; I apologize if it came across that way. We’re all just fumbling through this stuff. :up: :up:

We often end up in physicalist or naturalist circles claiming that our mysteries are explained by evolution or complexity and emergence, and that time will answer them definitively, or that we’ve described the problem incorrectly, so we simply restate it in a way that makes it disappear.

Which, yes, charitably that means I don't understand the argument. — Moliere

What I potentially like about the argument is its apparent simplicity (although, obviously, I don’t fully understand it). It isn’t talking about consciousness, mind, or any number of tedious philosophical problems; it is simply saying that a mere point of view can’t be explained by naturalistic processes.

Probably both. But a problem with "naturalism" is that it’s so vague that you can smuggle a lot into it. I think the explanatory gap for intentionality applies to both naturalism and physicalism, because both seem to share the central assumption that everything, including mental states can be explained in terms of physical processes or natural laws.

If the non-naturalist explanation is that intelligibility is somehow an essential feature of things, even a matter of essences that allow an "agent intellect" to grasp their meaning and significance, would that apply only to symbolic language enabled beings or would it apply to animals also — Janus

Yes, I think it might apply to animals. But we can't talk to them.

The argument pivots on whether physicalism can explain intelligibility. The reasoning for why it can’t is what I’m trying to drill into. See above.

The argument is going to sound plausible to those who reject naturalism as an adequate metaphysics and not plausible to naturalists. — Moliere

I think that’s unfair. There are people who were naturalists and have changed their minds precisely because of this reasoning. I’ve met people who are persuaded by good arguments. Forget the ones who have already decided, they exist in every area and can be left in brackets for this discussion.

For my part I'm not sure naturalism "explains" anything anymore than non-naturalism does with respect to intentionality. I feel like that's the wrong sort of way to think about metaphysical questions. — Moliere

I’m not accusing you of sidestepping the problem, but you can see how people might call this avoidance. In other words, if I say the model is wrong, I don’t have to engage with it, I can just change the subject.

Fair. I'm not convinced I do either, especially as I haven't read Hart -- only the thread. — Moliere

Yes, and this is really the area I’m interested in: understanding the argument, not refuting it or trying to sidestep it. I want the best possible formulation of this argument. We often move so fast on this site that, for the most part, people are playing a kind of tennis with their own preconceptions: you hold this, I return your serve with mine.

Hart’s argument concerns an explanatory gap. Even if every mental state is correlated with a brain state, that only gives a correlation, it doesn’t explain why the brain state represents the world rather than merely being a physical pattern. The point, it seems is that naturalistic accounts struggle to bridge the gap from physical patterns to meaningful content.

I find this argument lacking because it depends entirely on one's beliefs. If one is a theist then the plausibility of naturalism is simply false, and if one is a naturalist then intelligibility couldn't have come from anything but a blind watchmaker. — Moliere

The problem with this formulation is that even for Hart the argument is independent of theism. Hart is quite comfortable to say that his argument does not lead to theism specifically; it merely identifies an inadequacy in physicalism's explanatory power, for reasons that @wafarer has often pointed out (and he is not a theist either). Thomas Nagel holds a similar view and he is an atheist.

I think it's better to identify the specific reasoning and work out what is actually going on. But the first step is to understand the argument properly, and I’m not convinced that I do. Hence my OP.

But some things aren't in need of an explanation. "Why is the world intelligible?" may not have an answer at all. It's something like asking "Why is there something rather than nothing?" -- if there be an answer it won't be of the sort which we abduce. — Moliere

I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. They are only similar in that both issues seem to be unresolved, but they are not addressing the same type of question. Even your formulation of the issue isn’t quite right: the question is not 'why the world is intelligible', but how naturalism explains intelligibility. Given that naturalism presents itself as the predominant explanatory framework for all things, the question seems apropos.

In my own life (I agree with you) I am content with not having explanations for things, like life or consciousness. My favourite three words are 'I don't know' and I wish more people would employ them. But that's a separate matter to trying to understand this argument.

Yes and this too. :up:

Cool. There should still be a process. At least I would like one. There are still situations and facts behind any action that would not be gleaned from a video alone: history, situation, etc. if you’re saying that an AI can oversee all this with no mistakes and based on human values then I might be skeptical.

I'm not a science guy. But I have never 'ruled in' god as a candidate explanation since it is bereft. The idea is incoherent and often gets a work out when people don't know answers.

We can't rule out a natural cause of life and since there is pretty much zero evidence of supernatural entities, a natural cause seems more likely to me. But "don't know" are two words that should be used more often by more people.

If the yet to be explained can never be explained because it would be outside the remit of science — kindred

You can’t say something can never be explained. That claim can’t be demonstrated. At best, all you can show is that this is where the inferences lead you, but that largely reflects a belief you already hold.

I would not say there is no god, because that claim can’t be demonstrated either.

But this question isn’t about god. It’s about whether life can, in principle, be explained by natural processes. At present, we simply don’t know, but lack of explanation now is not evidence of impossibility. And none of us here have any expertise on the lates scientific research into this matter.

What is wrong with believing in god or god and science ? — kindred

You tell me.

The point of the argument is to prove that god exists by way of understanding the artefacts of creation such as life and intelligence. — kindred

For my money, the argument proves nothing, for the reasons I’ve already given. God is not really an explanation for anything. An explanation explains, by showing how or why something occurs. Saying “God did it” merely replaces the question with a supernatural label. It amounts to saying that a supernatural power, or magic, did it, which adds no explanatory content.

I imagine that the argument might work if you already believe gods are real.

The best you can say is "don't know." I am as suspicious of god being thrown into explanatory gaps as I am of the overreliance on evolution made it. Although evolution at least has an evidential basis.

So, 8 billion people x 24 hours x 500 angles. How does the video get processed? Where does it get stored? Who decides what is criminal and what isn’t? Who judges whether a particular behavior constitutes a crime? — T Clark

I imagine AI woudl be able to do it based on parameters set up by some committee /government

Too many quesions inherent in this small sketch. I'm not all that interested in privacy or freedom as a themes so these sorts of scenarios don't set me off the way they do libertarian types.

What does:

People would have zero privacy and full and swift justice — Copernicus

mean?

If you are talking about a dystopia with instant death sentences, then perhaps not, hey?

I just find it improbable that life could emerge on its own without some sort of divine push to get things started…what is your take on this ? — kindred

I think the most sensible answer to this is that we don’t know as yet. A “God of the gaps” explanation, or an appeal to magic, while understandable, seems primitive and comes with its own problems. Since the idea of God is largely unknowable and arguably incoherent (depending on which of the many models one adopts), God has no real explanatory power. What does it actually mean to say “God did it”? It seems less like an explanation and more like an inscrutable placeholder that stops inquiry rather than advancing it.

I think you may well enjoy Anthropocentric Purposivism conceptually. — AmadeusD

Interesting. There's a theory for everything and everyone, isn't there? Perhaps this is a kind of soft-Aristotelian, telos affair.

Cool. :up: :up:

Consciousness is not physical. Although it is inextricably bound to the physical, and doesn't exist without a physical component (at least we are not aware of any consciousness without a physical component), it is not, itself, physical. It does not have any physical properties, like charge, mass, density, hardness. It does not have physical characteristics, like size, hardness, and weight. We cannot measure it's speed, direction, or any other characteristics of physical processes. It cannot be sensed with any of our senses, or our technology. It is not describable with mathematics. — Patterner

Would you say you were a dualist? You believe that there’s a physical world and are not an idealist?

Hart’s argument is clearly informed by idealism.

I’m not anlways attracted to arguments from evolutionary biology, they sometimes seem to function as a catch all for anything we can’t quite explain.