Re: Evolutionary question concerning God.


Jon G wrote:
someone4 wrote:
Jon G wrote:
someone5 wrote:
You said:


You got the point that if the physical were actually the source of our
experience that
"the entire organism's behaviour and properties can be explained using
the laws of physics. We may not have very good models yet to predict
everything yet, but that's the idea. Every electron, neutron, atom,
cell and electric current going through your head as you read this is
following those rules. We may not have found the perfect rule yet, to
unify all the laws we have but through investigation and trial and
error we should."

Though on the very next bit:
"I think in your original post you were wondering (sorry for
paraphrasing you) that since we do not see the physical world as it
actually is (a bat definately sees it differently, so who's got it
right?) why should we experience it?"

Which was a total misunderstanding. Could you possibly post the
sentance that you were having trouble understanding in the original
post (which is about there being no evolutionary reason to evolve an
experience that made any sense).


I'll do this instead:
you say:
Our scientific understanding needs no reference to whether an energy
experiences being an energy, as it has not been found through
experimentation to make any difference even if it did

I understand that it is irrelevant to an experiment, if an energy I am
trying to measure is aware and hence has an experience of me measuring
it. If this intepretation is correct, yes I agree, as far as I know it
would not change the result, hence we do not take that into
consideration.

Then you say:

If our current scientific understanding is correct, given our
understanding of evolution, it is highly improbable that the source of
our experience is the physical world itself, as if it was, it could
only be coincidental that it made any sense (assuming a way in which,
with no translation layer (no evolutionary reason to evolve one) the
experience of the visual sense for example can be mapped from brain
state to what we experience).

I say:
If what we see as the physical world is NOT actually the physical
world, how does it make sense? How can evolution describe it, if it's a
fake to start with?

Who says it makes sense? Are you telling me it makes sense to you (ie.
you can picture) the four-dimensional structure of space-time? Because
you would be the first human to do that. The physical world is
different from how we experience it, hence we are wrong all the time.
The scientific method is the only tool we have, although it can never
prove anything. As Descartes said many years ago, you can only be sure
of your own existance, anything else could be fed to your senses by
evil demons. That still stands today and cannot be falsified. Descartes
then went on to introduce a God as a guarantoor of his senses and that
he could trust God that he was seeing reality. This was the illogical
and annoying conclusion to an illuminating thinking. Do not make the
same mistake.

You say:
Therefore beyond reasonable doubt, the physical world we are
experiencing is not the source of our experience.

I say: It is the source of our experiences, because our experiences are
responses to what is outside of our brains.

You say:
Would you accept our evolutionary understanding as being a key piece of
evidence in God's existence?
I'd love to consider this statement if I understood how it follows from
the others.

how did I do?

You understood the first paragraph.

With regards to the second paragraph, you allowed yourself to get
distracted, first by asking two questions, when all you had to do was
understand, and the questions were suitable for discussion after you
had understood. Then once distracted, you carried on with another
question "Who says it makes sense?", and then carried on with your own
line of reasoning.

With regards to it making sense, what we talking about is say your
visual sense being a single colour, and that is the only sense you
experienced for example, or maybe it would be received as noise on a
television set, or maybe you wouldn't have experienced at all. Whatever
it was, it wouldn't effect how the organic robot would behave, what is
experienced doesn't matter or do anything, as you understood in the
first paragraph.

So compared to the above examples would concede that our experience
does make remarkable sense given no evolutionary reason for it to make
sense at all?

.

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