Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Quashing Materialist Appeals to Magic (Again)

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Ironically enough, materialists are a mystical lot. They say they reject irrational and superstitious beliefs, but when one pushes them past their ability to explain life, the universe and everything in materialist terms, they are very quick to resort to obscurantist pseudo-explanations. And “it emerged” is their favorite dodge.

As we have explained many times before, “it emerged” is the explanatory equivalent of “it’s magic.” But like bugs scattering when the lights are turned on, we have to stomp on this one again and again. Like today for instance. In my Why there is no Meaning if Materialism is True post I argued that on materialist premises – that nothing exists but space, time, particles and energy – there can be no meaning.

Popperian says I can do better. There is “emergence” after all.  And I poked a little fun at Pop:

as Popperian argues on these pages ad nauseam, it’s all emergent. You see, if you stack up the burned out star stuff this way, nothing. But if you stack it up ever so slightly differently, poof!! out of a cloud of smoke emerges rabbits, doves, silly string, consciousness, and morality.

Yes, that is the level to which we have descended — the invocation magic.

And then REC gave us this gem:

Barry, @29, seems close to denying that different arrangements of matter will have different properties. If ID wants to fight with chemistry, that is a development I look forward to.

Sigh.

REC, as we have explained over and over and over, we do not reject emergence as an explanation as such. See here where we said this in so many words.  No, we reject “it emerged” when materialist like you and Popperian use it as a pseudo-explanation to obscure the fact that you haven’t the faintest idea how consciousness arises from the physical properties of the brain.

Your fellow atheist Thomas Nagel also rejects your antics:

Merely to identify a cause is not to provide a significant explanation without some understanding of why the cause produces the effect.

To qualify as a genuine explanation of the mental, an emergent account must be in some way systematic. It cannot just say that each mental event or state supervenes on the complex physical state of the organism in which it occurs. That would the kind of brute fact that does not constitute an explanation but rather calls for an explanation.

If emergence is the whole truth, it implies that mental states are present in the organism as a whole, or its central nervous system, without any grounding in the elements that constitute the organism, expect for the physical character of those elements that permits them to be arranged in the complex form that, according to the higher-level theory, connects the physical with the mental. That such a purely physical elements, when combined in a certain way, should necessarily produce a state of the whole that is not constituted of of the properties and relations of the physical parts still seems like magic even if the higher-order psychophysical dependencies are quite systematic.

Emphasis added.

And if you don’t believe Nagel, maybe you’ll believe Elizabeth Liddle:

[“Emergent” is] simply a word to denote the idea that when a whole has properties of a whole that are not possessed by the parts, those properties “emerge” from interactions between the parts (and of course between the whole and its environment). It is not itself an explanation – to be an explanation you would have to provide a putative mechanism by which those properties were generated. . . .

‘It’s emergent’ would be on an intellectual par with saying ‘It’s magic!’

REC, you most certainly cannot provide a putative mechanism by which immaterial consciousness arises from the material properties of the brain. I know this, because if you could I feel sure I would have seen you on the news accepting your Nobel prize.

Since you cannot provide such a putative mechanism, your own buddy Elizabeth Liddle would say you have done the equivalent of invoking magic. And I bet you think ID proponents are credulous.

Comments
You want a mechanism for design? Here's a three part physical mechanism. The first part is double aspect theory. Without any emergentist appeals to magic, we acknowledge that for every physical thing is attached some form of subjective experience. These things can combine, and as objective complexity rises, so does subjective complexity. From here, we realize that quantum indeterminacy means that positions and trajectories of particles cannot truly be predicted from the physical description alone, and from the Schrodinger equation that their movements are unpredictable physically, only predictable in a probabilistic sense. The last part will show that it is the subject-side of matter that produces this probability. The quantum Zeno effect allows any measurer to deterministically control the wavefunction, allowing one to make particles move in particular ways by merely measuring successively in particular patterns. So the proposed mechanism for design is this: matter itself, with its sentience, focuses its attention in particular manners on itself probabilistically (that is, it does so without being fully predictable how it does so, in each moment), thus moving itself consciously to some extent. From there, these little subjective agents seek novelty, aesthetics, and other such things, resulting in them grouping together into more and more complex, and thus more and more intelligent systems. Autonomy is sought after, and that gives rise to biological life. Everything in cosmology, then, is evolution, but such evolution is naturally intelligent. Likewise, for every integrated wavefunction, there is an associated mind. Since spacetime's properties are emergent from the wavefunction of the universe, the universal wavefunction is necessarily integrated, thus associated with a mind. That mind, then, sets trajectories of behaviors, and relationships of spacetime, in a particular way, so as to make it appear unlikely that biological life would ever exist, but so that the habits and constants fall just into the range necessary, while likewise nudging the subsystems to seek autonomy. These patterns of behaviors of the universal wavefunction appear to us as constants, which seem finely tuned, when the reality is that they are just habits, not constants, and the small probability range was intentionally set so as to demonstrate intellect, so that other intelligent life can interact with the mind of the universe.naturalistictheist
April 1, 2016
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I have a way to completely demonstrate the illogical insanity of any position which attempts to describe subjectivity as emergent from unconscious processes. What is it, in simplest terms? "Subjectivity is not objectivity". In other words, first person experience is never part of any third person picture that directly leaves out first person experience. You cannot *be* some other person solely by looking at the material constituents of that person's body. This is what would be necessarily possible if subjectivity was somehow reducible to objectivity. Pointing this out, then, demonstrates that the materialist appeal to emergence is yet again an appeal to something out of nothing. Some form of smaller subjectivity inherent in extremely small things can build up larger subjectivity and complex conscious processes, but a complete absence of subjectivity can build up into absolutely nothing. A materialist position is not that B is truly contained in A. It is A can magically turn not B into B without doing anything. It is ex nihilo creationism of subjectivity, done by something completely devoid of experience. I guess they're comfortable with this sort of thing though- they seem to pretend the start of the universe is this sort of thing, even though there are potentials for alternatives that don't invoke God (in an ex nihilo or non ex nihilo sense) but aren't exactly physical, such as a dialectical neutral monism of sorts, with a necessary natural dialectical potential generating all existence. (This is Taoism's position) However, in any case, these absurdities in their beliefs need to be pointed out, stomped on, publicly mocked, exposed, and ridiculed for the insanities they are. Science has reached a stagnation point due to their thinking, whereby novel theories get squashed and experiments never get done.naturalistictheist
April 1, 2016
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UB, Thanks! Indeed, physical configurations can only be regarded as information by a processor. Neither the processor, nor the 'information' or data has any point one without the other. Information and the processor form a complex whole.EugeneS
August 25, 2015
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Hi ES, well said. I noted this earlier exchange:
ES: Biology is chemistry + information. Eigen: That’s redundant. Everything physical is information. If it exists, it has state, it is information.
As the living product of translated information, Eigen is endowed with the capacity to observe form(s) within his environment and create information from his sensory experience of that form(s). He can apply human symbols to the information he’s created, and can make calculations regarding the various states of objects in his environment. From the success of his abilities, he conceives that the various states of all things he perceives in his environment are “information”. He further anthropomorphizes his environment by formalizing that “information” is a reduction of uncertainty in the interaction of differing states of objects – a “computation” or “information processing” as he refers to it -- such as an atom of some particular charge interacting with another atom of some other particular charge. Of course, it is not a reduction of uncertainty *in* the atom (atoms are neither certain nor uncertain) but is only a reduction in certainty calculated within eigenstate’s symbol system. He then looks at the success of those calculations and is irrevocably convinced that there is information in everything. That is his model. What he fails to account for is that the processing of information, such as it actually occurs in the living kingdom, has nothing whatsoever in common with the purely dynamic interaction of one atom with another. In the natural world, information is *translated* to produce physical effects, and that process of translation can only occur if the system of translation preserves the natural discontinuity between the arrangement of the medium and its translated effect. The “processing of information” is not the purely dynamic process that Eigen envisions. He has conflated two entirely different physical processes, yet he turns to those who recognize the distinction and points them out as “equivocating” on terms. It is seems generally pointless to engage someone who refuses to acknowledge the distinction. The types of temporal effects required for life to occur *cannot* be produced by local dynamics alone. Why? Because the systems that create those effects are entirely dependent on the discontinuity instantiated in the process. Those systems are based on a relational architecture – where one arrangement of matter evokes an effect within a system, while another arrangement of matter establishes what the effect of that arrangement will be. If those discontinuities were not preserved by the organization of those systems (as they clearly are in the natural world) then life would simple not exist on this planet. There would be no physical process by which to organize the heterogeneous living cell.Upright BiPed
August 20, 2015
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Eigenstate, Using the same physical/chemical medium different information content can be transferred. Therefore the physical medium itself has no bearing on the content. On the other hand, the meaning (=intended pragmatic effect, utility) of the same message that is transferred via different media is invariant to the physical properties of the channel. The semantic cargo of the message and its pragmatic utility do not depend on the physical properties of the source, coder, channel, decoder or the receiver. I can relate the same message with various means from pen and paper, to body language or the internet. A piece of paper with or without things written on it is subject to the same laws of physics that are completely indifferent to the content and function that the message has. A message can have an objective function, i.e. to maximize utility. This function can be objectively identified. It has absolutely nothing to do with anthropocentrism.EugeneS
August 20, 2015
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Eigenstate: "Higher levels descriptions of information transactions still reduce to the same physics of information". In current physics models, yes. But not in reality. Reality is richer. It all depends on the axiomatics and operational definitions. If meaning is not part of it, what can you expect of the models? No one is compelled to your views just because you think they are scientific. Your philosophical reductionist position does not sit well with a lot of research findings in the last few decades. Like I said, chess is not explicable at the level of the laws of motion. Recently I watched a nice 10 minute video by a specialist in history of biology. She said that a majority of biologists today are no longer subscribing to reductionism because they realize that reductionism is no longer capable of explaining the observations. Biology cannot be reduced to physics because it includes logic that is inexplicable at the level of moving particles of matter. Logic, information are fundamentally non-physical. If you insist otherwise, the burden of proof is on you to explain how exactly meaning could emerge from matter. Attempts to do I am aware of are rather speculative. They assume what they are purported to prove. Eigenstate: In physics, “information” is not tied to that concept at all. So? There are other disciplines. You are not trying to say that everything reduces to the four types of physical interaction. I can't believe you are. There are other views on information that are not intersecting with yours. So what? There is even a view that physics is a corner case of biology, not the usual way around. What you are trying to sell here is just one particular view which already cannot adequately explain biology today.EugeneS
August 20, 2015
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@Mung,
Meaningless information is an oxymoron.
Not in the scientific usage of the term "information". Of course we could always just "meaning-ify" any aspect of any physical object. The meaning of the "spin" of some electron in some distant galaxy is information, in the scientific terms, but I suppose we could say that is now meaningful because, well, here we are talking about it! Unless you want to equate "reduction of uncertainty" with "meaningful" -- and for many human cases of this, say, choosing one word over another, that makes good sense -- most of the "information" in the world around us in science terms is not meaningful in the sense we commonly use it. That's tricky, because the popular usage of the term "information" connotes some level of meaning for us. If some content we might asses is not meaningful to us, we might say "that wasn't informative". It didn't convey something that was relevant and meaningful to us. In physics, "information" is not tied to that concept at all.eigenstate
August 19, 2015
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eigenstate: But “meaningful” information is a subset of information. Meaningless information is an oxymoron.Mung
August 19, 2015
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Eigenstate, that is simply your philosophical position. Yes, information has that dimension, as I said. But not only. And the problem is not that I make it ‘anthropocentric’ or vernacular. It is that the entropic side of information simply does not reflect meaning. Looking at information as the reduction of uncertainty is legitimate but it has huge limitations. The rules of chess are inexplicable at the level of describing the motion of chessmen as solid or elastic bodies.
Information at a physical level doesn't entail "meaning". But "meaningful" information is a subset of information. A paragraph of English text is rendered always as a configuration of matter and energy, and any meaning it may have, any symbolism or semantic connotations it may elicit in minds or machines are a) also configurations of matter/energy and b) themselves information by virtue of their capactity to reduce uncertainty or exclude possibilities. The word "Ford" may mean different things to different people, but to the extent it connotes something to the reader, it is informational, and its meaning corresponds to reduction of uncertainties by what it excludes in its symbolism. "Ford" excludes "Apple" or "United Airlines" or "cowboy hat" or innumerable other symbols we might list.
Interestingly, Shannon’s work is ‘a mathematical theory of communication’, not information. Information has a lot more to it than just entropy. What Shannon has as a given is the semantic context. All he is concerned about is reliably passing a message over a physical noisy channel as a sequence of bits. All the rest, the pragmatic context, is out of the equation.
Information is not entropy. Entropy is a measuring concept we can apply, but as I said, information is the reduction of uncertainly, or alternatively phrased the exclusion of other possibilities. If we allow (I don't think this nearly captures Shannon's ambitions but that doesn't matte for this exchange) that Shannon's only goals was reliable message passing, that is a sufficient requirement to demand a formal model of information. For example, measuring bit through a channel requires a metric for bits -- a statistical model. And it's no accident that the formula for entropy is so named per Von Neumann's suggestion due to its parallel form with thermodynamic entropy. That has also caused major confusion since it was named, and may be a big mistake for that reason, but the formalisms are the same, which is the point. To be able to implement noise correction, one must be able to measure and manipulate information, mathematically, statistically, in quantum units (bits) and all in a way that matches our empirical tests and observations. It was a huge breakthrough that transcended channel bandwidth optimization and noise correction.
It seems that you are conflating physicality (bifurcations, equilibrium states, motion of particles, etc) with what can be done about those physicality effects.
Higher levels descriptions of information transactions still reduce to the same physics of information in the same way that human physical actions reduce to biology which reduces to chemistry which reduces to physics. Our levels of description change the scope and terms we use, but the underlying fundamentals are the same across the board. Which is why we call them 'fundamental'.
Physicality cannot do it by itself. Information in its entirety cannot be reduced to the motion of particles of matter. And therefore it is not just an aspect or characteristic of physicality. It can be viewed as such but this view has limitations. Information only has a projection into physicality.
It's intrinsic to STEM - space/time/energy/matter. The way matter subsists in our natural universe entails information. The spin of the most rudimentary particle is endemic to its physical dynamics, its behavior and activity in nature. If there is no information, there is no particle qua particle. And vice versa. "Information" is just a synonym "physical" a synonym we use to point to state and and configuration. You don't have to just accept this from me. This is vanilla physics. A handy college text book or your local physics professor will be able to develop this for you without me.
Where I think you are grossly wrong is in saying that the aspect of meaning or pragmatic utility is non-scientific.
Didn't say that and don't believe that. Meaning and semantics are just as natural as phenomena as any other natural phenomenon you could. Because it is complex function of the brain, it's just not well understood yet. But the more we learn, the more the fundamentals apply.
There is a whole lot of science in decision making and decision support. Biological systems are inherently decision making systems.
Yes, humans are extremely complex biological machines. It's not magic or mystical, it's just a case of extremely complex systems to reverse engineer. Semantic processing is already starting to be mapped by our instrumentation, which seems like sci-fi stuff compared to what we had a couple decades ago, but are crude tools indeed compared to what we expect to have decades hence. The expectation is that the complexity and "fuzziness" of semantic processing in the mind will continue to make headway hard won, but what working models we do develop will reduce to the same physics as, say, our other biological processes (e.g. walking as a higher-level description of physics, and cultural innuendos as a higher level description of information and communication -- also physics). Physicality has no potency to produce biological systems because biology is about logic, rules, pragmatic utility and control whereas physicality is indifferent to all these. Physicality cannot decide. eigenstate
August 19, 2015
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Popperian, you are simply wrong as I have already demonstrated. I exclude "pile of bricks" as a cause of "imaginary unicorn." Popperian: "Just because you've never seen a pile of bricks cause an imaginary unicorn does not mean we can exclude "pile of bricks" as a possible cause of "imaginary unicorn, because that would be inductivism." That statement is absurd isn't it. Yeah, we can exclude, in principle, certain causes as being capable of producing certain effects. Stamping your feet and saying "It's poss-i-bool; it's poss-i-bool" really gets you nowhere unless you show how it is possible.Barry Arrington
August 19, 2015
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Popperian, you are getting tiresome.
Do you have a specific criticism? After all, one could say the same about gravity. I wrote:
... that anything is or is not capable of producing an effect is knowledge. So the question is, how does knowledge, including the capabilities of a thing, grow? To exclude something as a cause because we have not observed it actually causing that effect in the past is inductivism. Furthermore, all observations are theory laden. So, our ideas about what anything is capable of producing are based on theories. To exclude an unseen cause because it does not resemble the seen is also a form of inductivism. The assumption that steel atoms must have properties of steel, such as being hard, before it can be considered being capable of producing that effect commits the fallacy of division. If none of the above, then how do you know what anything is capable of? Please be specific
Barry:
Unless you can demonstrate how chemicals result in thoughts, then you’ve got nothing. And in fact you’ve got nothing.
To say I have nothing "Unless you can demonstrate" is to exclude something as a cause unless you've observing it actually causing that effect in the past. That's a specific philosophical view which you have't argued for or even acknowledged. So, not only are you moving the goal posts, you're not even disagreeing with me.Popperian
August 19, 2015
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Information requires matter and energy to be transmitted and stored in this universe but information is not physical nor is it energy. Just because all things physical contain information does not mean information is physical.Virgil Cain
August 19, 2015
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Eigenstate: Information is the reduction of uncertainty, the exclusion of possibilities. Eigenstate, that is simply your philosophical position. Yes, information has that dimension, as I said. But not only. And the problem is not that I make it 'anthropocentric' or vernacular. It is that the entropic side of information simply does not reflect meaning. Looking at information as the reduction of uncertainty is legitimate but it has huge limitations. The rules of chess are inexplicable at the level of describing the motion of chessmen as solid or elastic bodies. Interestingly, Shannon's work is 'a mathematical theory of communication', not information. Information has a lot more to it than just entropy. What Shannon has as a given is the semantic context. All he is concerned about is reliably passing a message over a physical noisy channel as a sequence of bits. All the rest, the pragmatic context, is out of the equation. It seems that you are conflating physicality (bifurcations, equilibrium states, motion of particles, etc) with what can be done about those physicality effects. Physicality cannot do it by itself. Information in its entirety cannot be reduced to the motion of particles of matter. And therefore it is not just an aspect or characteristic of physicality. It can be viewed as such but this view has limitations. Information only has a projection into physicality. Where I think you are grossly wrong is in saying that the aspect of meaning or pragmatic utility is non-scientific. There is a whole lot of science in decision making and decision support. Biological systems are inherently decision making systems. Physicality has no potency to produce biological systems because biology is about logic, rules, pragmatic utility and control whereas physicality is indifferent to all these. Physicality cannot decide.EugeneS
August 19, 2015
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Suitable for beginners at chess: Here we see a very simple chess position. Simple for us humans. NOT so for computers. Anyone who is slightly familiar with chess 'sees' that the position is a dead draw. The pawns are immovable. The white king cannot enter the black territory and the same goes for the useless white bishops (which would still be harmless if they could). This seeing is from overview — or bird's eye view. Top-down :) We humans don't have to look at all the various king and bishop moves to be sure that they are all perfectly useless. A computer however does not see this. Houdini, current number 3 of the world in computer chess, "thinks" that white is up 3 pieces and is totally winning.Box
August 19, 2015
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@EugeneS
Norbert Wiener: Information is information, not matter or energy.
Norbert Wiener is neither matter or energy, that much is safe to say. Seriously, though, that is really not a quote or perspective you want to start with, or even happen by as you think about this. Information is physical, which is not to say it "is" matter or energy. It is neither, but it is an implicit characteristic of both. Information is the reduction of uncertainty, the exclusion of possibilities. So even the most basic objects in our universe, an elementary particle, necessarily has information, local state that excludes other possibilities. "Spin" for example. You can't have mass be mass, or energy be energy without information, so it's as fundamentally natural as anything you could name.
Information is inherently non-naturalistic.
No, that is precisely backwards. You're contradicting the whole of physics and natural science in saying this, as is your prerogative, but this negates the most fundamental and thoroughly tested knowledge we have about the universe we live in. Google "Maxwell's Demon" or the "Black hole wars" between Hawking and Susskind, et al. These are just two interesting examples of fundamental physics debates that are all predicated on the physical nature of information.
It is an idea even though it does have the entropic dimension to it. Its entropic/physical dimension does not explain what information is about. Information has an intrinsic property of ‘aboutness’. It is the semantic aspect of information that makes it non-naturalistic.
No, that's a non-scientific and casual understanding of the term. Information in science and math does not map the colloquial use of "information" as "meaningful". It certainly can be meaningful when minds are involved, but information is just states and configurations that are exclusive of other possibilities. Like I was pointing out to UprightBiped, who's similarly confused on this, the neutrality of a sodium atom (NA) has different binding characteristics with a flouride Atom (F-) with a negative charge than a Na+ atom. The charge here is not "information" in the human vernacular sense, it's not relevant or meaning for to humans in the way a sales chart might be to sales manager. But this local state, this state that excludes other states (Na vs. Na- or Na+) is (determinative) for the interaction of the atom with other atoms. I think the major problem here, reading this far, is a basic talking-past-each-other on terms. The concept you have of "information" is not applicable to the scientific usage. It will confuse you and be problematic so long as you keep to that connotation when considering scientific subjects. Norbert Wiener, by the way, was a "father" of the seminal work Claude Shannon in information theory. If you're not familiar with all that, these theory and frameworks explicitly disavowing any integration of addressing of "meaning".
To be able to encode/decode information, a material system needs to satisfy certain nontrivial properties. Regularity, which stems from the naturalistic laws of nature, is a killer of information. It is poisonous to it because the information carrying capacity of regular structures is next to 0.
No, but then possibly I don't know what you mean by structure. In a quantum computer, for example, a qubit is storage for a bit realized in a single particle, via its polarization or charge. This is mind-bogglingly dense storage, and if you could get that kind of storage density put into something size of the smallest SSD drive on the market, you could store the whole internet on a part of that drive. That's a tricky feat as a matter of practical manufacturing as of yet, but the point is that nature's information capacity is being staggering, by comparison to puny and primitive scales we like to (or used to) think are impressive. A single particle can encode a bit (and quite possibly more).
Functionality of any kind is an artifact simply because functional systems are those which deliver pragmatic value or utility while the laws of nature could not care less about pragmatic utility of multi-component systems.
That's not an operating concept in physics. That would in the more subjective, soft domains of engineering by humans, manufacturing, etc.
Biological systems are inherently functional. Biology is chemistry + information. The information that organisms encode, pass on, receive and process, is the enabler of their functionality.
That's redundant. Everything physical is information. If it exists, it has state, it is information. Biology is rich with information, but that's just an artifact of being a higher level description of physics.
To say that biology rests on semiosis does not mean to fall into anthropocentrism because information is an objective phenomenon.
Yes, but the way you've put it equivocates on "information". "Information" in the scientific denotation of the term is an objective, measurable (at least in principle) characteristic of some element or aggregation. That is, it's an inevitable feature of the objective state of a natural entity, anything with state, anything that exists in some way but could exist otherwise (a photon being "here" rather than "there" bears such information - by being "here" it is excluding all the other possible "theres", when it's location is realized. When you talk about "information" as "meaningful", it's a whole different concept, and intrinsically tied to the subjectivity of minds (mind is a transcendental requirement for meaning). That is just fine as a concept and is useful for lots of applications, but these are not compatible or interchangeable concepts, even though they are frequently confused and conflated.
Several researchers in the past questioned objectivity of information (probably because they realized it was otherwise implying a limit to explanatory power of naturalism) but nowadays it seems to be taken as consensus. Autonomous information processing systems, biosystems included, operate independent of you or me knowing about them. The contention is not whether information really exists, it is where it comes from.
I don't think either is in question. If you go ask your friendly professor of physics at your local university, you will find that neither is a mystery or the source of controversy. Unless you want an explanation for "casual information" rather than "physical information". Then you'd certainly have some tough problems to tackle in terms of the origin and evolution of linguistics and semantics as a feature of human psychology... but that's not what science is referring to when you read about "information" in a physics or biology (biology is chemistry is physics) context.eigenstate
August 18, 2015
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Popperian, you are getting tiresome. Unless you can demonstrate how chemicals result in thoughts, then you've got nothing. And in fact you've got nothing. You don't have the first inkling of a hint of a notion of how that could possibly be. Yet you keep going on and on and on as if you are certain that it is. That's enough. Put up or shut up. Show us how thoughts arise from chemicals. Or admit that you can't.Barry Arrington
August 18, 2015
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Barry:
Until you do, the OP stands unrefuted, and invoking emergence is equivalent to invoking magic.
What is the OP? How did I "invoke" emergent properties and emergent explanations?
Ironically enough, materialists are a mystical lot. They say they reject irrational and superstitious beliefs, but when one pushes them past their ability to explain life, the universe and everything in materialist terms, they are very quick to resort to obscurantist pseudo-explanations. And “it emerged” is their favorite dodge.
The funny thing is, I didn't say "it emerged", as if it were a verb. That's is your words, not mine. I've been making the same arguments all along. Including arguing against the same ideas that were presented here as well. I wrote:
BA wrote:
But as SB said, what we are composed of determines what we are capable of. A materialist says nothing exists but space, time, particles and energy.
Surely, you can do better than this. Right? On one hand, you’ve spent an inordinate about of time arguing against emergent levels of explanation presented by “materialists”. Yet, when you supposedly speak for them, you completely ignore it. Apparently, “materialism” is what ever Barry Arrington happens to accept, or whatever he happens to agree with, when it suits his purpose.
And your response is? Keep pushing the same misrepresentation.
Popperian @ 98. “It emerged” and “It was magic” are equivalent in their explanatory power. I don’t see how invoking magic helps your case.
And you've continued to present this same misrepresentation in each post, despite being corrected in each post.Popperian
August 18, 2015
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I wrote:
When I point out the idea that like things can only beget like things commits a specific fallacy or is a form of inductivism, that is your response?
Barry:
No, that is not what I said. I (and StephenB) have said that an effect (consciousness for example) cannot be brought about by a cause that is incapable of producing the effect.
Again, I questioned how you know what something is capable of. So, if I've got it wrong, then what is your criteria and how is it different. Please be specific.
My analogy is apt. A pile of bricks is incapable of being a cause that produces the effect of the image of a house in my mind. Similarly, the physical chemicals in my head are incapable of producing mental images.
Are making bad analogies par for the course with ID proponents? Again, that's like saying that, if someone was defeated by a computer in a game of chess, they were defeated by atoms, since computers are made of atoms. Emergent properties are phenomena that can be well explained without referring to anything at the atomic level or lower. As such, atoms are not the cause of the players defeat. The fact that no such explanation for that defeat is possible using just atoms in no way prevents us from explaining how the player was defeated. So, if your analogy is apt at anything, it's how confused you are about what it means to say a property is emergent. In the same way, no explanation for conciseness or other mental phenomena will be possible using just chemicals. As such, to point out that any such explanation will be emergent is not to appeal to magic. It's pointing out that your demand for a reductionist explanation is irrational. Second, even if we ignore the fact that you're confused about emergence, that anything is or is not capable of producing an effect is knowledge. So the question is, how does knowledge, including the capabilities of a thing, grow? To exclude something as a cause because we have not observed it actually causing that effect in the past is inductivism. Furthermore, all observations are theory laden. So, our ideas about what anything is capable of producing are based on theories. To exclude an unseen cause because it does not resemble the seen is also a form of inductivism. The assumption that steel atoms must have properties of steel, such as being hard, before it can be considered being capable of producing that effect commits the fallacy of division. If none of the above, then how do you know what anything is capable of? Please be specific. Again, the idea that we need to produce a reductionist theory or that something needs to be "grounded" is a specific philosophical view. When I keep pointing this out, you simply have no response. However, to say the OP has not be refuted implicitly assumes those specific views. Since you know theists share those philosophical views, you know you do not have to explicitly present, argue for them or even acknowledge they are philosophical views at all. After all, why expose those views to unnecessary criticism? IOW, you're simply preaching to the choir.Popperian
August 18, 2015
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Mike1962: The extent of impairment can go beyond senses and body control. What do you do with the fact that people with brain impairments due to injury can have great difficulty in reasoning and procedural thinking in ways that they didn’t have prior to the injury? Have you ever been mentally impaired where your ability to reason was diminished?
Yes it goes beyond senses and body control, since, as I have stated, if people no longer have access to properly ordered sensory input and bodily control it effects the mental. Things can get quite confusing. During earthly life we identify with the physical body. The illusion ends at the moment of death.
Mike1962: Is your ability to think and reason while dreaming the same as when waking? If not, how do you explain the difference?
You seem to hold that dreaming and sleeping are something the brain does — “brain goes into sleep mode” — in my view dreaming and sleeping are mental states.Box
August 18, 2015
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Eigenstate #46, Norbert Wiener: Information is information, not matter or energy. Information is inherently non-naturalistic. It is an idea even though it does have the entropic dimension to it. Its entropic/physical dimension does not explain what information is about. Information has an intrinsic property of 'aboutness'. It is the semantic aspect of information that makes it non-naturalistic. To be able to encode/decode information, a material system needs to satisfy certain nontrivial properties. Regularity, which stems from the naturalistic laws of nature, is a killer of information. It is poisonous to it because the information carrying capacity of regular structures is next to 0. Functionality of any kind is an artifact simply because functional systems are those which deliver pragmatic value or utility while the laws of nature could not care less about pragmatic utility of multi-component systems. Biological systems are inherently functional. Biology is chemistry + information. The information that organisms encode, pass on, receive and process, is the enabler of their functionality. To say that biology rests on semiosis does not mean to fall into anthropocentrism because information is an objective phenomenon. Several researchers in the past questioned objectivity of information (probably because they realized it was otherwise implying a limit to explanatory power of naturalism) but nowadays it seems to be taken as consensus. Autonomous information processing systems, biosystems included, operate independent of you or me knowing about them. The contention is not whether information really exists, it is where it comes from.EugeneS
August 18, 2015
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Box:I hold that the effects of drugs, car crashes and so forth on the mental can be explained by an impaired ordering of sensory input combined with an impaired control system of the body.
The extent of impairment can go beyond senses and body control. What do you do with the fact that people with brain impairments due to injury can have great difficulty in reasoning and procedural thinking in ways that they didn't have prior to the injury? Have you ever been mentally impaired where your ability to reason was diminished? Is your ability to think and reason while dreaming the same as when waking? If not, how do you explain the difference?mike1962
August 18, 2015
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Mike1962, I hold that the effects of drugs, car crashes and so forth on the mental can be explained by an impaired ordering of sensory input combined with an impaired control system of the body.
Mike1962: AFAICT, all the evidence available seems to point to the fact that the brain is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of human thought and reasoning. Why do you believe otherwise?
My reasons for believing otherwise are mainly of a philosophical nature. In short: I hold that "I" is one. I'm a unity. I don't consist of disjoint parts that work in concert. Awareness, rationality, will power and sentience are aspects of one thing: "I". BTW how about the evidence that stem from NDE experiences?Box
August 18, 2015
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Box: no, the brain does NOT think Just curious, but have you ever taken any mind altering drugs? Ever consumed alcohol to the point of mental impairment? What about when your brain goes into sleep mode: are you still able to think and reason then? What about people who suffer strokes or brain damage from car crashes, and who obviously acquire impaired reasoning and thinking skills because of it? AFAICT, all the evidence available seems to point to the fact that the brain is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of human thought and reasoning. Why do you believe otherwise?mike1962
August 17, 2015
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Mapou #112, my compliments to you on having given that problem some extensive thought already. That's not to say that 'unintelligent spirits' and 'rational brains' make sense to me. Thank you for now.Box
August 17, 2015
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Box:
BTW did the designers’ brains do the designing of our brains?
Certainly.
If so, who or what programmed the designers’ brains wrt the use of symbols?
Well, it goes without saying that the designers could not have used their brains to create their brains. So where did the designers' brains come from? Here's my hypothesis based on my research of the ancient texts. Obviously their spirits must have created their brains. But how, since spirits are not intelligent? Well, IMO, spirits do not need to be intelligent in order to create complex and beautiful things. Spirits are concerned only with spiritual things such as order or beauty. Even something like a color or a taste is spiritual. The colors that you see do not come from the physical world (not even your brain) but from your spirit. Some of the spirits of the designers (Yahweh Elohim) are non-random search agents that do one thing: create beautiful and ordered patterns. In the beginning, this is all they could do because they did not have brains to think with. Thus an evolution must have ensued, but unlike Darwinian evolution which is stochastic, this spiritual search is non-random. And when non-random things happen, they evolved in beauty and complexity, eventually giving rise to complex mechanisms. Other spirits started using the mechanisms to create even more beautiful things such as music and mathematics. Eventually, after eons of trial and error, they grew in knowledge and power to the point of being able to create entire universes. They eventually settled on their current form. They tell us that they look like us. I remember reading this somewhere: "I, Yahweh Elohim" am the first among all the other Elohim." I think it was in the book of Isaiah. It's obvious there was a beginning.Mapou
August 17, 2015
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Mapou #109, The external world is a lot to take in — the brain orders a massive amount of sensory input. Also the body needs an elaborate control system. BTW did the designers' brains do the designing of our brains? If so, who or what programmed the designers' brains wrt the use of symbols? Mapou #110, read #103 again wrt 'strong impact'.Box
August 17, 2015
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Box:
Computers function as they do because they have been constructed by human being endowed with rational insight. A computer, in other words, is merely an extension of the rationality of its designers and users; it is no more an independent source of rational thought than a television set is an independent source of news and entertainment. [Hasker, Metaphysics, 49.]
And you don't think that the brain's rationality is genetically determined? Meaning that it was designed to be rational by its designers? You obviously do not believe that mentally ill people (bipolar disorder and schizophrenia) are ill because of some neurological disorder since, according to you, the brain does not think. That is blatantly ridiculous and absurd.Mapou
August 17, 2015
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So the designers created a fantastically beautiful and incredibly complex organ with 100 billion neurons and trillions of synapses just for grins and giggles? Or did they design it just so you and I can have arguments over it?Mapou
August 17, 2015
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Mapou #107,
Computers function as they do because they have been constructed by human being endowed with rational insight. A computer, in other words, is merely an extension of the rationality of its designers and users; it is no more an independent source of rational thought than a television set is an independent source of news and entertainment. [Hasker, Metaphysics, 49.]
Box
August 17, 2015
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Box, why do I even bother arguing with someone who ignores half my argument to say something devoid of any sense? First off, I did not say a word about materialism being true. I am a dualist, not a materialist. Materialists are monists and so are you, apparently, since you believe you can think without your brain. Second, the Aristotelian logic example you gave:
1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man. 3. Socrates is mortal
is a trivial thing to do in a computer program. Logic is based on symbols and computers have no problem manipulating symbols. In fact, the modern computer is a direct consequence of the rules of logic developed by Augustus De Morgan and George Boole.Mapou
August 17, 2015
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