That doesn’t provide a reason why they’re wrong. Nor does it take out agency, unless you mean something mystical by that word.
Well, at least it’s a word that means what you think it means. So progress, I suppose. But no, materialists don’t say it’s an illusion. But here we’re back to arguing about whether libertarian free will is incoherent. By “agency”, you mean something outside of causality and yet non-random. What could that mean?
No. Apparently “brain-dead” is another term that doesn’t mean what you think it means. You don’t come back from being brain-dead to report on your experiences.
Yet again you cite this dubious, third-hand claim. Don’t believe it for a second. And let’s recall that natural selection may be mindless, but it’s not unguided. So the relevance of this “gotcha” moment is slight, even if it actually happened even once.
Yes. Stop digging.
That would help.
That’s you mixing those two separate topics again, right after saying you’d try not to. Please try harder. And the Egnor bit was irrelevant because it had nothing to do with the questions you were supposedly responding to.
That isn’t all I say on that topic, and I give reasons to think the relationship isn’t all that simple for protein function.
That’s exactly what we can’t just assume (reducing the capacity to buffer against the destabilizing effects of mutations doesn’t necessarily mean the enzyme the enzyme suffers loss of catalytic activity, these two factors can’t be directly interconverted), and why Axe needs to do activity assays. And it’s another reason for why the constraints on protein function don’t function in the way typos affect readability of a sentence.
That merely asserts what is being questioned here.
Nobody disputes that Axe did in fact make local randomizations of fragments of his already constructed to be temperature-sensitive enzyme.
And the basis of where he chose to put the thresholds is what is being questioned here.
That doesn’t answer my question. LOL.
I also note that you have no response to the fact that if Axe’s argument with the sentence readability held any water, it would undermine his own experiment.
Already responded to this. That correct inferences generally tend towards survival is, to borrow your new favorite phrase, “fairly self-evident.”
One could construct innumerable thought-experiments to show this. Consider a game of chess where poor moves trigger a gun to blow your head off. Would correct or incorrect inferences about what moves to make next be more likely to promote survival?
There can be no other basis for putting trust in anything at all. Can I eat this? Try it in practice. Can I trust my reasoning? → test it. This really is how we assess whether trust is justified in the real world: put it to a practical test. If it works well enough for me then it IS a good, fundamental basis for trusting the validity of reasoning.
None of that follow from my statement. You appeal to the presumptive authority of Darwin and Haldane to support your conclusion, but since you actually don’t consider them authorities on other matters, your decision to declare them authorities on this one is obviously self-serving and ad-hoc.
So, having dismissed the inappropriate appeal to authority, we must return to assessing the arguments on their own terms, rather than the putative historical significance of whichever characters might or might not have made such arguments before us.
That principle is just mistaken, then. The reason we should reject their claims is that they conflict with observational reality, not that the cause of their errors might be “unreasoning.” Nobody distrusts a wall-clock to tell you time correctly on the basis that it’s internal workings are unreasoning and mechanical. In so far as you do, it’s because you have other reasons for thinking the clock does not show time correctly, such as the clock showing noon when it is clearly night outside.
Sadly these are all just assertions we have no reason to think are true.
Because we don’t, in fact, do this. All your hypotheticals implicitly assume that a man is telling you stuff you already have experienced to be false. In other words, that you have entered a place, looked around, saw what the place was like, and then you encounter a man who says something evidently false. Evidently because you’ve already collected the evidence, with your own sensens, indicating that his claims are false.
Then your capacity to think of reasons for giving this reply aren’t all that, I have to say.
No, that isn’t the reason why we are obviously limited in exactly the way we should expect of a biology-based computer. The reason is that we are biology-based computers. That’s the most obvious conclusion that best fits the available evidence.
If I do not it’s because I already possess knowledge of the state of the room. It’s amazing how you just can’t see how all your hypotheticals about people saying outrageous things simply assume a situation where their claims have already been shown to be false.
No, it would not be the same. One is a correct identification of the nature of a phenomenon, where the other is a semi-coherent utterance about something fundamentally unobservable.
No, I think people are smarter than that. They can tell the difference between a process and an object carrying out the process. A computer chip is not identical to the program it runs. Thoughts are not atoms. They are the activity of brains. You confuse such things, and you think others are this dumb, too. I do not.
And I think I did not ask your advice, thank you very much. You quote me explicitly stating that there is an argument to be had over whether or not we are our bodies. Are you suggesting I am confused about whether or not the brain is part of the body like you are? Why do you insult me so? I said mind, because I meant mind. Had I meant brain, I would have said brain. I’m not that incompetent.
Which, again, has nothing to do with the justification of justifiability of reason. Something is not any more justified or justifiable for being “independent” from its physical underpinnings. If anything, I should intuitively expect quite the opposite. A process that is in no way tied to any physical foundations should have no compulsion whatsoever to reflect nature correctly. Whether a physical process would is an argument to be had, but surely it wouldn’t fare any worse than a process that is entirely divorced from nature, what ever that even means.
No, you mentioned previously that people did not hold you responsible for the things you say. My criticizing what you say is not my failing to hold you responsible for it. Therefore, it is not an example of what you mentioned previously.
They are “due to an irrational cause” insofar as you are being irrational when making them. Nobody says they aren’t yours though, at least to the extent to which you actively choose to present them. So again, not an example of the thing you say people do, where they deny your agency and attribute your deeds to something else.
The question is why are they wrong, not why do you no likey.
While some minimal set of axioms must be assumed before any further inferences can be drawn, it is not the case that philosophical systems such as naturalism or even scientific theories include higher level rationale to justify those basic assumptions retroactively. The axioms upon which a (logically consistent) system is built cannot be justified from within the system, because one would have to depart from the system in order to consider what an axiom’s falsehood even means. A version of this statement is Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem.
It should also be noted that the base assumptions of philosophical schools of thought tend to be rather minimal, precisely to avoid the risk of self-contradiction. Things like the validity of modus ponens or the law of identity, or that observing nature is for better or for worse the only way to learn anything about it, do not state anything anywhere comparable to there being a sentient entity that exists not in any place nor at any time, with thoughts and feelings quite like ours but without a body like ours to produce them, and with the power to violate physical law. The fact alone that there exists apologetics to try and justify the latter is a telltale sign that, though it is assumed and needs to be arrived at, it is not, in fact, beyond question quite like basic laws of logic or pragmatic principles of empiricism.
Suffice to say, he is not a person who is taken seriously, or even heard of, by anyone of note dealing with philosophy of mind.
At the risk of sounding paranoid, that whole thing may have been the result of Tour scheming with other members of the DI to try get me in trouble with my University. Long story…
Wrong again. Not only is that position not entailed by materialism (or, to use my preferred term, physicalism). It is not even one held by more than a minority of physicalists.
Which is not to say a reasonable argument could not be made for the position.
Sorry, but the new atheists engaged in the same type of activity than those engage in apologetics. In both cases, the game is to defend a particular doctrine.
In fact, it seems to me that every doctrine starts with facts/observations. Then there is interpretation of these facts/observations, which then lead to a particular doctrine, for examples naturalism or Christianity, or common descent, etc…
Sure, I agree. “New Atheism” was a form of apologetics. Do you think that is a bad thing? If so, why?
One of those things is not like the others (I bolded it to make it easier to figure out which one). Why not say “the earth is not flat” or “the sky is blue” instead?
… are not relevant to this discussion, since you were talking about philosophical schools of thought and scientific theories, and being a new atheist does not make one an authority on nor a representative of either.
No, science begins with observations. Hypotheses, to be useful, have to account for all extant observations. “ID theory” is a sham because it does not do so.
Which from the perspective of ID as a science makes absolutely no sense. ID proponents aren’t even asking the same questions as evolutionary biology or OOL research.
On the other hand, it makes perfect sense when ID is viewed as what it truly is: a thinly veiled attempt to push conservative Christianity and associated public policy.
It certainly does, surely you don’t think atoms have agency in the normal sense of the word, meaning having purposes and making plans, and carrying them out.
That’s not what people actually think they are doing, when they make plans and carry out purposes. So Dawkins would say they’re deluded, they’re under an illusion.
I don’t think that topic has come up yet, actually.
What people think they are doing when they make a plan and carry it out. They don’t think their thoughts are completely caused by the motion of atoms in their brain, they think they are really choosing. Try “my brain atoms made me do it” in front of a judge, and see where that gets you!
You have investigated all such reports? But here at Wikipedia I found a study where people who were arguably brain-dead revived: “In 2001, Sam Parnia and colleagues published the results of a year-long study of cardiac arrest survivors that was conducted at Southampton General Hospital. 63 survivors were interviewed. They had been resuscitated after being clinically dead with no pulse, no respiration, and fixed dilated pupils.” But no NDE experience.
I have a book about NDE experiences, but I have to leave for work now and look further later.
Well, would you trust your laptop if you knew this about it?
It’s certainly aimless, I expect that’s what Lennox means.
You are alas, prone to just making claims, how so, please?
