Re: Deconversion
- From: Gareth McCaughan <Gareth.McCaughan@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 14 Jul 2006 02:59:58 +0100
Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:
But you've made no attempt to answer my question -- perhaps
you consider it a seriously misconceived question? -- of why
it should be, if consciousness is fundamental and the physical
world arises from it, that links between different people's
consciousnesses (1) exist but (2) always seem to go via
the physical world.
OK, let me try to answer your question from within idealism's
paradigm of reality. First of all it is important to note that it's
not like reality consisting of both consciousness and the physical
world, only that the former is more fundamental. Rather reality
consists of conscious experience and nothing else.
Sure. You appear unconvinced that I've understood your
position, so let me check my understanding of it by trying
to state it:
What we call "the physical world" is real, but it has
no independent existence: it's wholly dependent on
consciousness and arises from it. Consciousness is
fundamental; "physical reality" consists of certain
patterns in conscious experience; it is real because,
and to the extent that, those patterns genuinely occur.
All existents,
including the physical world, are real in as much as they are stable
patterns present in conscious experience. Similarly all properties of
existents are properties of the relevant patterns. Now, of course
communication between conscious subjects can only go via conscious
experience (after all that's all there is). Clearly, in the condition
you and I find ourselves in communication goes via our conscious
experience of the physical world. In other words we find that we cannot
communicate directly; famously our conscious experience is private. So,
I take it, your question is why that should be so. In other words why
shouldn't we be able to communicate conscious experience directly, in
other words why can't we communicate using telepathy.
That's too specific. There might be less direct, but still
characteristically *conscious*, means of communication; and
I'm thinking not only of communication but of influence
generally.
I can influence your thinking in lots of ways. I can talk
to you, if we're in the same place and I'm able to speak
and you to hear. I can write newsgroup articles that you
read. I can wave at you across the street. Those are all
specifically modes of communication. But I can also (in
principle, granted sufficient access, etc., etc.) influence
your thinking by putting drugs in your food, or by exposing
you to images that arouse your anger or lust, or by hitting
your kneecap with a baseball bat, or by playing soothing
music. Or, even more extremely, I can introduce electrodes
into your brain and pass currents along them, or remove
or grossly disrupt parts of it.
Such a wide variety. And it all goes via the "physical
world".
But how else could it have been? The possibilities are
limited only by our imagination. It could have been that
when I think about something and you're nearby, you're
more inclined to think about the same thing. Outright
telepathic communication could, as you suggest, have
been possible. It could have been that everyone has
some sort of (perhaps dim) awareness of the locations
of other people nearby; or perhaps not of their locations
but of something about their minds. ("I perceive that
there are three Christians and a Communist somewhere
nearby." "Someone in this room is very fond of dogs.")
It could have been that certain patterns of thinking
or emotion disrupt the consciousness of others nearby,
so that if I were sufficiently upset you would be unable
to think clearly.
I've said "nearby" several times there; but there's no
obvious reason (if consciousness is primary) why physical
proximity should be what matters. Those effects could have
had strength varying with some sort of mental proximity,
which might e.g. mean that while I'm writing this, with
you as primary recipient, each of us is especially susceptible
to the other's influence. Or it might mean that people with
very similar minds, in some sense, are most able to influence
one another, regardless of distance. Or there could have been
some sort of separate "mental space" in which we encounter
one another and through which we can move by mere volition.
(This last possibility might be open to the criticism that
what we'd then have is just another world that we might as
well call physical; but I'm supposing some greater degree
of relation between that space and our minds, and a lesser
degree of relation between it and our bodies.)
None of these seems to me a far-fetched notion, given the
initial supposition that consciousness is primary. They all
seem pretty far-fetched given what we know about how reality
actually seems to work. So much the worse for the hypothesis
that consciousness is primary.
If I understood your question correctly then it belongs to a class of
questions that about why our power is limited: why can't we fly just
by thinking it (astral voyages), or move things just by thinking it
(telekinesis), or see far away (clairvoyance), etc. I suppose the
general answer is that our conscious experience is optimized for its
purpose, which is to give us space to learn virtue, and that a free but
also limiting conscious experience is optimal in this sense.
That might offer a reason why our abilities are limited.
It offers no reason why the limitations should take the
form they do.
(I'm not claiming that there's any incompatibility between
your hypothesis and the fact that everything behaves as if
the mental supervenes on the physical rather than vice versa;
only that it seems a strange coincidence that it should be so,
if your hypothesis is correct.)
Prayer is indeed efficacious. One mainly prays to feel close to God.
And if one trusts God the only things that make sense to ask are wisdom
and strength.
Why? (I can think of reasons to think that asking God for
various things isn't fruitful, but those reasons would apply
equally to asking him for wisdom and strength.)
Because if one trusts God then somehow all other things one might ask
God appear to be hmm unfitting.
That appears to me to be a perfectly circular answer, a big
round logical zero. That is: you haven't said why, merely
restated what you believe.
You see one realizes that nothing good
can be lost, and that the only thing that can go astray is to waste
opportunity to learn virtue - to better oneself.
You said "wisdom and strength" before; now you appear to
have reduced that to wisdom alone. But it seems to me that
trusting God could sometimes take the form of trusting him
to provide something other than wisdom and strength that's
going to be useful; and that if virtue is the goal then one
could reasonably sometimes ask him for virtue itself, which
is not the same thing as wisdom and/or strength; and that,
since our trust is never perfect, we might reasonably ask God
either to increase our trust (also not the same thing as
wisdom and/or strength, though I suppose you could crowbar it
into the notion of wisdom) or to make our lives such as to
encourage that trust, as for instance by providing miracles
or "religious experiences".
And indeed prayer does change one's quality of conscious
experience in ways that make one more receptive to truth, and makes it
feel more natural to do the right thing.
Maybe it does. Do you think it does so in ways that aren't
in principle explicable in material terms? (I am not claiming
that a negative answer would mean God doesn't exist, or
anything like that.)
All our experiences are explicable in material terms. We don't
experience life as bodiless spirits. This is another clear pattern
we discover in our conscious experience.
(It hadn't occurred to me that you might take what I said
as suggesting that we do, or might, or should, experience
life as bodiless spirits.)
I think this is mere sleight of hand. Of course it's easy to
say "because God" about everything that's otherwise puzzling,
or indeed about everything in the world, but that doesn't
constitute *explaining*. I could decree that my left finger
is the explanation for everything in the world, and that
this understanding unifies everything. But that would be
useless unless I could say something useful about *how*
my little finger explains everything, and unless these
"explanations" actually led to further understanding.
Exactly right. When I say that God is the overarching explanation I
don't mean that any question we don't really know how to answer may
answer by saying "because of God". I mean that as coming up with
explanations is finding stable patterns in our conscious experience, or
finding patterns of patterns, ultimately there is a pattern that covers
the whole of our conscious experience and thus explains it all, which
is God.
I think it's not at all credible that we know enough about God
to say that he (or our experiences of him, or whatever) "covers
the whole of our conscious experience and thus explains it all".
So I claim that all important questions "Why is there a
physical universe in our conscious experience?", "What is the right
thing to do?", "Why should I want to do the right thing?",
"What should I expect to experience after death - if anything?"
can be answered in a positive way that perfectly fits within a coherent
and complete worldview founded on our conscious experience and bound
together by God.
You're welcome to claim it, I suppose, but I think the coherence
and completeness are more pious hope than reality. I keep hearing
claims like that, but when pushed a little further they seldom
amount to much more than putting "because God" on everything
puzzling. In particular, this allegedly coherent and complete
worldview makes predictions only about things already known and
things that are un-checkable. It risks nothing and is compatible
with everything. (I don't mean that *individual believers* risk
nothing; I mean that there's no epistemic risk, as it were,
because nothing could really count as a falsification of the
worldview. Contradictions and errors in the allegedly inspired
holy books? Fine. A world full of suffering and wrongdoing
despite allegedly being created by an omnipotent and omniscient,
and perfectly good, god? No problem. A god who allegedly longs
for all to be united with him in love, but who hides himself
at every opportunity? Whyever would anyone expect anything else?
And so it goes on.)
Let's consider one of those puzzling things that's commonly
"explained" by reference to God, and see whether that actually
helps: ethics. Various people have told me that right and
wrong can't have any meaning in the absence of God, or that
God explains the phenomenon of ethics in a way that nothing
else can. How so?
Well, try to justify the belief "To torture a small child for fun is
wrong" using exclusively materialist language, that is arguing
exclusively from within a materialist worldview.
Not so fast! When you say "exclusively materialist language",
do you mean that words like "person" and "desire" and "mind"
and "pleasure" are to be excluded? If so, then I protest:
a materialist metaphysic doesn't require a purely materialist
language. Everyone is a materialist about computers, but we
still talk about programs, and even about the expectations
and hopes of a computer chess program. (With, of course,
some awareness that those terms have somewhat aetiolated
meanings compared with what they mean when used of humans.)
And there's no contradiction in that; all these things
can be cashed out in purely material terms, but it's just
too painful to do so. With human beings as opposed to programs,
of course we don't know anything like enough to do the same,
and it's debatable -- indeed *we* are debating -- whether
it's even possible in principle, but the use of superficially
non-materialist language doesn't prove anything.
You will be able to
explain why normal people think that this belief is true, but you will
not be able to explain why it is true.
I could do so very readily, if I were as indifferent to
question-begging as one has to be to think that theism
(or non-materialism generally) solves this problem. I could,
for instance, simply declare that it's a fundamental principle
of reasoning that one should act so as to maximize the long-run
expected surplus of satisfaction over misery among beings
capable of feeling such things; since (empirical fact) no one
in fact derives so much fun from torturing children as would
outweigh the children's misery, we're done (modulo some technical
concerns about comparing different people's satisfactions and
miseries). Of course this basically just sweeps the problem
under the carpet; one could ask *why* that's supposed to be
a fundamental principle of reasoning; but one could likewise
ask the theist why God is supposed to be trustworthy in matters
of right and wrong.
Now I am not saying that
something is ethical because God says so, or even because the Bible
says so.
Furthermore, you aren't saying *anything* definite enough to
engage with; you're just declaring that you have a solution
to the problem and I don't, and when I ask you for more details
you just reiterate that you have a solution and I don't.
I claim that a worldview centered in God contains the
conceptual scaffolding in which ethics fits like a jigsaw puzzle. In
other words in a worldview centered in God one can explain why to
torture a small child for fun is wrong.
Well, go on; do it. Then we can see how well that worldview
actually does what you say it does, and whether it makes a
better home for ethics than a materialistic worldview, and
whether it avoids question-begging.
We could try to define right and wrong in terms of the will,
or the plan, of God. "A thing is right if God approves of it,
wrong otherwise." "A thing is right if it conforms with God's
plans for the world, wrong otherwise." "A thing is right
if it involves no contravention of God's commands, wrong
otherwise."
Well, as far as I am concerned, there is such a thing as God's plan,
but there is no such thing as God's commands.
Fine. I wasn't suggesting that someone taking this sort of
approach has to endorse all those statements; rather, that
each of them is characteristic of the approach.
Further, if the problem of evil isn't going to refute theism
altogether then we have to assume that our understanding of
the character and will of God, and of what sort of thing is
good, are terribly defective. This means that our ability to
draw useful conclusions from a statement like "Something is
right if and only if God approves of it" is extremely limited.
You might think you know that God approves of something, but
can you be any more sure of that than you can that letting
millions of people starve whom you could have fed without
effort is wrong, or that standing by while a crazed dictator
massacres millions is wrong?
The problem of evil is serious, and precisely for this reason its
solution is so powerful in helping one understand God and the meaning
of it all.
Excellent! So what is its solution, again?
On the other hand let's not be carried away beyond what is
reasonable when discussing suffering. On average life is sweet. I
don't see people rushing to the exit, even not those who think that
there is nothing to be suffered after leaving this supposedly so very
painful life. In short, warts and all, virtually all people in
virtually all conditions consider life a very valuable good indeed.
I have not claimed, and do not believe, that on balance
life is a bad thing for most people; and the problem of evil
is serious even if it isn't. But I think you're making an
error here. The following two propositions are different
and may be *very* different:
1 "X prefers to remain alive than to die."
2 "The world would have been a better place without X
in it, on account of the misery of his life."
That is: you could have a life that's worse for you than
nonexistence, but still have sufficient dread of death and
sufficient attachment to life that you would not "rush to
the exit". Consider heroin addiction: it's certainly worse
than not being addicted to heroin, at least for the large
majority of addicts, but heroin addicts don't generally
"rush for the exit" -- i.e., take effective steps to stop
being addicted. Why not? Because they're addicted, of course.
We are, all of us, addicted to life; our lives could become
much worse than nonexistence before we could overcome that
addiction.
We might, of course, hope to determine the will of God, and
hence what's right and what's not, by some other means: by
reading the Bible, or consulting the Church, or praying for
guidance. All these activities, too, have turned out to be
terribly unreliable: they give entirely different answers
to different people, and often they give no answers at all.
[SNIP: comments on organized religion, the origins of
dogma, and how best to pray.]
I think we are agreed about the Bible and the rest of
the Christian tradition: for whatever reasons, there's
enough noise mixed in with the signal to make this
unsuitable as a non-question-begging foundation for
ethics. As for prayer ...
As for
praying, I feel there is a misunderstanding. Prayer is not like a
telephone line to God where one hears voices or something, nor some
kind of magic wand.
Neither did I say it is; neither did I say it should be.
But if you want to use prayer as a foundation for ethics --
and I don't know whether you do or not; it was just one of
many possibilities that I listed -- it needs to be something
you can use to get answers to questions of ethics.
Prayer is to take some time to be there for God.
The best prayer is one of silence where you just feel God's presence
like a bird within your chest. The best prayer is a communion of joy.
Perhaps those are the best sorts of prayer in terms of
nourishing the soul, or something; but they aren't helpful
for the particular, perhaps peripheral, matter we were
considering: whether a theistic worldview offers a better
foundation for, or a better explanation of, right and wrong
than a materialistic worldview.
But in my experience when one does need guidance in a specific matter
of ethics prayer is very effective and clear indeed: one just senses
what is the right thing to do as if the right path is illuminated in
front of you.
Fair enough; it's never happened to me, and so far as I can
tell it's not the general experience of the other Christians
I know.
The trouble is actually making the decision of doing the
right thing. In my case fear of ridicule often weights against the
right action.
Oh, I agree that in matters ethical it's usually harder to
do the right thing than to find out what it is. But, again,
we were talking about foundations for ethics and explanations
of ethics.
As for different people getting different answers in prayer, it's
difficult for me to imagine this actually happening,
You don't need to imagine it; you just need to observe that
thousands upon thousands of Christians, many of whom presumably
pray to be enlightened about what's right and to be given a
godly view of things, disagree radically about some matters
of right and wrong. At present, for instance, there's a great
deal of angst in the Anglican Communion about female bishops
and about homosexuality. You might think those ought to be
peripheral matters, but there's another point on which Christians
disagree.
but in any case
somehow other peoples' actions are not for me to judge. But it would
be very hypocritical indeed on my part to feign any doubts about what
is the right thing I should do. I know this pretty well, only I don't
do it.
Almost everyone knows what the right thing to do is. There
are only two problems. The first, as you say, is that they
then don't do it. The second is that different people know
incompatible things about what's right.
Any theory that anchors our notions of right and wrong in
the character of God as a matter of definition, without
reference to any prior notion of moral rightness, has
another problem: it seems that God -- defined, say, as
the creator of the universe, or the supremely powerful
being, or the spiritual being who sent his son to die as
a sacrifice for human sin, or that entity you had such an
overwhelming mysterious encounter with three years ago --
*could* have turned out to have a very different character.
Maybe you confuse me with somebody else. I did not have a particular
encounter with God three years ago. I sense God in the simplest of my
conscious experiences.
I didn't mean to suggest that you did. I was just trying
to enumerate a number of things one could mean by "God"
when proclaiming that God is, or provides, the foundation
for notions of right and wrong. Another thing I could have
listed but didn't is "that being, not myself, of whom I am
intimately aware in the simplest of my conscious experiences".
He could have commanded "Thou shalt commit adultery", as one
famously misprinted edition of the Bible had it, and "Let the
little children suffer", and so on. Opinions vary on this one,
of course, but it seems terribly wrong to me to say that
torture and rape and murder and hatred and lies *could* have
been right. The only way I can see to get around this while
still grounding moral talk in an understanding of God is
to take "God" to mean something like "the morally perfect
creator of the universe", in which case you need a notion
of right and wrong that's logically prior to your notion
of God.
Again, it's not like that at all. Simply, ethics makes sense in a
worldview centered in God, and does not make sense in a worldview
centered in matter. In fact I find that a materialistic worldview is
either wildly incomplete or wildly incoherent.
I find that a theistic worldview is equally incomplete and
more wildly inconsistent. I am very willing to be corrected,
but merely stating your position over and over again doesn't
do anything to convince me.
Let me try to give you the gist of what I mean. In a worldview centered
in God our experience of life makes eminent sense as the opportunity to
learn to be good - and specifically to love others, to
self-transcend. So the ethics of self-transcendence make sense as they
fit very well in the world of experience we live in, which in turn fits
very well with the presence with an all-powerful and all-good God.
Lots of assertions about what makes sense and what fits;
but I don't see anything resembling support for those assertions,
and they mostly seem to me very far from obviously true. Thus:
- A worldview centred in God only suggests "learning to
be good" as our primary aim if you already have some
reason to think that's what God cares about. Where does
that come from? I think any answer you give will end up
making your reasoning circular.
- You say that our experience of life makes eminent sense
as the opportunity to learn to be good. I don't think
anyone, coming afresh to our experience of life, would
think "ah yes, obviously what this is all about is learning
to be good".
- You particularize "being good" as loving others and transcending
oneself. It's not clear to me that the latter means anything,
so I'll skip it. I'll concede that it's reasonable to take
"loving others" as key to "being good".
- You say, again, that these things "fit very well in the world
of experience we live in". I think that's just repeating what
you already said about our experience of life making eminent
sense.
- I'm not sure what it is that you're saying fits well with the
presence of an all-powerful and all-good God -- the ethics of
self-transcendence? the world of experience we live in? the
alleged fit between them? Taking those in order:
- If I understood what you mean by "the ethics of self-
-transcendence", I might be better able to comment on
how well they fit with the presence of an all-powerful
and all-good God. It seems plausible enough that it
might be so, though a priori I think one ought to
expect such a God to arrange for us to have selves
that didn't need transcending. (Fulfilling, perhaps.)
- The world of experience we live in doesn't look remotely
like I think we should expect if there's an all-powerful
and all-good God.
- If there's such a god, should we expect a good fit
between the ethics of self-transcendence and the world
of experience we live in? Well, maybe; this doesn't
seem to me something accessible to the intuition; it
depends on matters such as those of the last two
points.
So what practical or theoretical use is a theistic "explanation"
of right and wrong?
It gives you a worldview in which ethics fits well.
Anyone can make a worldview in which ethics fits well;
all you need to do is to declare that some basic ethical
principle is a fundamental principle of reason, or an
undeniable fact about the world.
And that's exactly what happens. Natural science discovers patterns in
the physical phenomena we experience. So the whole of science and its
methodology is nicely included within the idealistic worldview. What
isn't included are the propositions about how physical reality actually
and really is - so the idealist doesn't have to think about which the
right interpretation of QM is or whether we might exist in a computer
simulation and all that weird stuff that from idealism's point of view
are quite meaningless. There is nothing out there beyond and above
conscious experience.
So you assert. You've offered no reason to think that your
assertion is any more plausible than "There is nothing out
there beyond and above physical phenomena".
OK. Here are my reasons for believing that there is nothing out there
beyond and above conscious experience:
1. Conscious experience clearly is there.
So far, so good.
2. One can understand all of science and technology and derive all
their practical uses without making the assumption that there is
something out there beyond and above conscious experience.
Whether that's true depends, I think, on what you mean by
"beyond and above". One can't understand all, or even much,
of science and technology without taking the "physical world"
seriously; and in practice science proceeds on the (methodological)
assumption that the "physical world" is primary, and that works
extremely well within the domain of science. But, sure, one
*could* (e.g.) just declare that all physical phenomena are
ultimately caused by consciousness, and then proceed in exactly
the same way as the most uncompromising materialist.
3. Those who make the assumption that there is something out there
beyond and above conscious experience get themselves tied up in hard
problems and paradoxes, and are reduced to claiming wildly differing
and wildly fantastic descriptions of how that external reality really
is.
No harder, more paradoxical, or more fantastic, than those
facing you who assume that there *isn't* anything "beyond
and above" (again, whatever exactly that means) conscious
experience. And, *yet again*, at the crucial point you've
abdicated epistemic responsibility by just hand-waving away
the problems from your side and just asserting their
insuperability from the other side.
I find that everything I experience is exactly what God would have made
:-)
For many theists, belief in God is irrefutable because
whatever they see is (since God exists and is perfect,
etc.) necessarily what God would have made, so everything
confirms theism. For the same reason, of course, such
theism is essentially vacuous.
The most momentous fact of our existence as human beings is how it is
to be a human being. Materialism cannot even make any sense of the fact
that we have the capacity of conscious experience, never mind making
sense of how it is to be a human being and what it is all about.
You keep saying this. You keep not justifying it other than by
repeating the same claim.
Sorry, I have done this so often in the past I assume everybody knows
it. I think in this thread Simon gave a pretty good explanation in this
thread. Basically there is nothing in physical knowledge that implies
the existence of consciousness. Something as basic as our experience of
the color blue cannot even be represented in physicalist language,
never mind explained by physics. Materialist philosophers studying the
mind-body problem go nowhere.
To an excellent first approximation, *everyone* studying the
mind-body problem gets nowhere, materialist or otherwise.
Some of the more "scientifically" minded
ones are reduced to claiming weird stuff such as that pre-linguistic
children do not feel pain. It's a real mess. J. A. Fodor put it best:
"Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be
conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the
slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious."
Objectively speaking, this does not look good. I mean even in ancient
Greece people could have the slightest idea of how, say, to travel to
the moon.
Nobody has the slightest idea how *anything*, material or not,
could be conscious. That's largely because no one has the
slightest idea what "conscious" means. No one has the slightest
idea how a being of pure spirit, existing outside space and time,
could be conscious. No one has the slightest idea how something
made of meat could be conscious. No one has the slightest idea
how an algorithm could be conscious.
Ah, but of course you can solve this problem perfectly by
saying "consciousness is fundamental". Except that you can't;
it's a cheat; it's like saying that a drug puts you to sleep
because it has a virtus dormitiva. Because, for just the same
reasons as no one can imagine how matter can give rise to
consciousness, no one can imagine how consciousness can give
rise to matter; and if you think you can, you're fooling
yourself.
I exaggerate, of course; but I exaggerate the non-materialist's
problems no more than the materialist's. One can at least make
vague gestures towards how consciousness could give rise to
matter: make it consciousness plus intelligence plus purpose
plus a bunch of other things that aren't the same as consciousness
and that are much easier to imagine arising from mere matter,
and it almost begins to look like it might make sense. And,
equally, one can make vague gestures towards how matter could
give rise to consciousness; pick various features of consciousness,
declare that actually they're what consciousness *is*, and then
look for ways to implement them using something "easier" than
consciousness. Daniel Dennett is fond of trying this; perhaps
it can be made to work, perhaps not, but the usual (and deplorable)
response is just to say (usually with a bit of obfuscation)
"bah, obviously nothing can work because axiomatically one
can't explain consciousness", which of course renders any
argument from the inexplicability of consciousness worthless.
It's
not that materialism is false; it's by definition true for finding
patterns in our experience of physical phenomena.
By definition? Suppose it were found that about 10% of the time
when Christians pray for things to happen in the physical world
they happen (with, perhaps, some exceptions for things that would
involve *really big* violations of the usual patterns). We could
observe this as part of "our experience of physical phenomena",
but it seems unlikely that any purely materialist explanation
could be anything like satisfactory.
Right, but in reality things do not happen in the physical world when
Christians pray for them.
Of course they do. Sometimes. By coincidence. :-)
Anyway: if you agree that what I described is conceivable,
materialism can't be *by definition* true for finding patterns
in our experience of physical phenomena.
So as a matter of fact materialism is
successful for explaining that part of our experience that is of
physical phenomena. I meant above that this success defines
materialism. Incidentally, I started reading the book "The Empirical
Stance" by Bas C. van Fraassen. The argument is made in this book
that materialism cannot be defined independently of the natural
sciences' success.
Is it a good book?
I can't speak for anyone but myself; I don't assume that,
except in the dull sense of trying it out as a working
hypothesis and seeing how it works. So far, it's working
pretty well; that is, I don't see much sign that materialism
makes it any harder to understand things like consciousness
and beauty.
I think that's because you don't think materialistically when
pondering the latter issues.
Feel free to tell me how I think; I'll feel free to disbelieve you.
Do we have a deal?
In fact we all transcend materialism when,
for example, we discuss ethics.
I don't think that's correct. Firstly, because not everyone is
a moral realist.
True, but I find that even most atheist philosophers are moral realists
and believe in the existence of objective ethical truth - even if
this stance is difficult to reconcile with the rest of their worldview.
Maybe that's true; I don't know. Certainly not all are.
(Random example found in a book I'm reading at the moment:
J J C Smart.)
Secondly and more importantly here (since to
some extent it's my metaphysics that are being scrutinized,
and I am in fact a moral realist, at least pro tempore), because
moral realism doesn't involve moral *reification*; that is, you
can believe that some ethical propositions are true and others
are false without an ontological commitment to any non-material
entities. (It's difficult to discuss these matters without a
*grammatical* commitment to non-material entities, but I think
that's just a matter of how our language happens to work.)
To speak of withholding ontological commitment to any non-material
entities sounds strange in my ears, because I consider you a
non-material entity: a conscious subject experiencing such that
can be modeled as a material world.
Sure; so you don't thus withhold commitment, and hence aren't
a materialist. That isn't a surprise. :-)
In any case I ask you again: How would you justify your belief that
it is wrong to torture children for fun based only on materialist
principles?
In practice, I wouldn't bother; anyone to whom it isn't obvious
is probably so far from me in temperament and basic principles
as to make serious discussion of anything ethical impossible.
I don't mean to include all moral non-realists in that; only
ones to whom the nearest equivalent statable in their terms,
something like "I find it wrong to torture children for fun",
isn't obvious.
(Of course that isn't what you were asking for, but it seems
worth saying.)
It's difficult to know what you would regard as an acceptable
answer because I don't know what you count as "materialist
principles". For instance, I think you regard any sort of
moral realism as ipso facto non-materialist, in which case
obviously your challenge is unanswerable on your terms, but
I disagree with those terms. So I'll try to sketch an answer
and indicate why it seems to me to make sense and to be
consonant with materialism, but it's very possible that it
will fail to scratch where you perceive the itches. Here
goes.
Ethical principle 1: Pain is bad.
Explication 1a: "pain" means something like "whatever
produces strong aversive reactions", the intensity of
the pain being measured by the strength and variety
of those reactions; there are plenty of technical
difficulties, e.g. because someone or something might
be paralysed or too young to have control of their body
or something, but I'm fairly sure they're surmountable.
Explication 1b: "bad" is here a primitive term of the
language of ethics; you may feel inclined to deny me
the right to use the language of ethics, but if so
then you win by fudging the rules, which is boring.
If you think there's an actual incompatibility between
materialism and moral realism per se, do please show me
what it is. Mere assertion won't get you anywhere.
Ethical principle 2: Pleasure, fun, and the like are good.
Explication 2a: we can probably define "pleasure, fun,
and the like" en masse, as whatever is sought after;
again, there are plenty of technical difficulties but
they seem surmountable.
Explication 2b: "good" is definable in terms of "bad"
or vice versa, or one could define them together to
retain symmetry. The same comments apply as in 1b.
Ethical principle 3: One person's pleasure or pain is of
roughly equal moral weight to another's.
Explication 3a: by "roughly equal moral weight", I mean
that the contribution to the goodness or badness (see 1b,2b)
of a state of affairs made by a person's pleasure or pain
doesn't much depend on who that person is.
Remark A on principles 1-3: I'm content to take these as
axiomatic; I have reasons, but not derivations, for them.
(For instance, they Just Seem Right to me; most people,
including most of those who have thought deepest about
these matters, seem to agree; they fit into a system,
indeed into several systems, that have turned out to work
well in practice in the sense of achieving their aims
with some success (i.e., not being self-defeating) and
in the sense that I happen to like societies in which
they're held to.)
Remark B on principles 1-3: They seem at least as evident
as any principles that could be used to make theism serve
as a foundation for ethics.
Empirical observation 4: No one in fact derives nearly an
amount of fun from torturing children that's comparable to
the amount of misery the children would suffer for the word
"torture" to be appropriate.
Justification for observation 4: We defined terms like "fun",
"misery", etc., in terms of how hard the people concerned will
try to seek out or avoid those things. (Modulo the aforementioned
technical difficulties.) I have a reasonable idea of what people
will do to avoid torture, and I have at least a guess of what
sufficiently depraved people might do to get the opportunity of
torturing children. I'm pretty sure the former goes much further
than the latter.
Conclusion from 1-4: Torturing children, at least as far as
pleasure and pain go, is always in practice bad.
Remark on extreme cases: There might in principle be someone
whose depravity is *so* extreme that s/he really does derive
enough pleasure from torturing children to exceed the children's
suffering (immediate and future). I don't think pleasure and pain
are the only things that are good and bad, and other things
that have value and disvalue will generally tend to make
torturing children worse. But make that person's depravity,
and capacity for pleasure, sufficiently great, and you can
probably still make his pleasure outweigh all the other considerations.
What, then? I think the best answer available is that such a person
would be so far outside our experience -- for no actual human
could be like that, I think -- that neither our intuitions nor
the principles we derive from them are trustworthy. What should
I do, if someone with such infinite capacity for taking pleasure
in other's pain asked me to be a victim? I don't know.
I think all the non-materialistic language in the foregoing
tedious analysis is in principle -- though certainly not in
practice at our present level of understanding -- eliminable.
Terms like "good" and "bad" aren't eliminable without changing
my meaning or introducing other equally problematic terms,
but the difficulty with those terms isn't that they're
*non-materialist*.
There is, certainly, some difficulty in saying exactly what
ethical propositions *mean* for a materialist. And so there
is, equally, for a theist. Unless you want to claim, e.g.,
that "right" *means* "approved by God", in which case see
the discussion above.
No. "Right action" means "in harmony with the reality we
experience". If you think about this I think you'll find that how
we experience life (how it is to be a human being) makes perfect sense
as the space for learning to do good.
When I think about it, I find that without a clearer definition
of "harmony" and "the reality we experience" it's an entirely
unusable definition for me; I'm sure I can come up with plenty
of situations where different but somewhat plausible understandings
of those terms produce radically different understandings of what's
right and what's wrong.
God is simply what in the end binds all
all understanding/explanations together. And therefore, if reality is
coherent, God is indeed a necessary being.
If that word "simply" is to be taken seriously, then I fear
your notion of "God" has no content. I expect that in fact
your notion of "God" *does* have content, and that you therefore
don't really believe that God is *simply* what you say he is;
your argument that "God is indeed a necessary being" fails
on those grounds, even if on no others.
Our immediate and direct knowledge of reality is conscious experience.
We discover explanatory patterns in that conscious experience, and then
discover patterns of patterns of ever greater explanatory power. If
reality is coherent then this hierarchy of patterns must necessarily
end in one overarching explanatory pattern, which we call "God". -
I think the above is rather simple, but maybe it only seems simple to
me because I have thought about it for a long time.
There is no reason to expect "God" in that sense to have anything
in common with what is generally meant by "God".
--
Gareth McCaughan
..sig under construc
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Deconversion
- From: Dianelos Georgoudis
- Re: Deconversion
- From: Simon Robinson
- Re: Deconversion
- References:
- Re: Deconversion
- From: Gareth McCaughan
- Re: Deconversion
- From: Dianelos Georgoudis
- Re: Deconversion
- Prev by Date: Re: Completely and utterly off-topic, but...
- Next by Date: Re: Other faiths
- Previous by thread: Re: Deconversion
- Next by thread: Re: Deconversion
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
