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I agree! I don't think consciousness can be further analyzed or broken down into its constituent parts. It's just a fundamental property of the universe. It doesn't mean, however, that human consciousness has no explanation. (An explanation for human consciousness would be nice, because otherwise we have two kinds of things in the world: the physical and the mental, and none of these would be explicable in terms of the other, except maybe via solipsism.) Human consciousness, along with everything physical, is well explained by Christian theism, according to which God created the material world, which is inert and wholly subject to him, and then created mankind in His image. Man belongs both to the physical and the mental world and (s)he can be described as a consciousness made in the likeness of the Creator. Humans have/are a consciousness because God desired a personal relationship with them; for this reason they are not inert substances, but have free will.
Clearly, a process of experiencing is going on in humans. I don't dispute that. But that is strictly a different argument.
No, the process of experiencing is the main thing that distinguishes the mental (consciousness) from the physical. In fact, one way to define the mental is this (R. Swinburne): mental events are those that cannot happen without being experienced/observed. Mental events are not fully determined by the physical events, e.g. in the physical world there are no colors, only wavelengths of light. It is only in our consciousness that wavelengths of light acquire the quality of being a certain color, and even that may differ between one individual and another (what you see as green I might see as red).
The statement that they are potential lives is incorrect. An embryo is already alive and, since it has continuity through time with an adult human being (obviously actual living human), it has human identity as well. Therefore, it is a living human being.
"Only one life can come out of this process" is also incorrect. This is like having 4 teenagers and choosing 3 of them to be shot, and then concluding that "only one adult can come out of this process, therefore the 3 teenagers are merely potential lives and can be destroyed".
Why would inherent moral worth depend on the number of neurons or complexity of the brain?
My God... The discarded embryos are human beings with all the associated moral worth. The procedure described in the post does not eliminate diseases or increase the iq of a child. It merely kills the humans who are more likely to develop a disease or those who are likely to have lower iq.
This is evil.
no, why?
the existence of decision-making beings is the best thing ever
I didn't say it's the best thing ever. Why are you misrepresenting what I said?
Effects caused by natural laws aren't "caused by God". They are caused by natural laws. It's not the same thing. God did create natural laws, but they serve a number of good purposes as I began to outline above.
what caused the evils of the Thirty Year War?
Struggle for power between the Habsburgs and France?
Oh, an one more thing. My updated premise 2 is:
2'. Whenever John says that X, then X. ( ∀ X:proposition, says(John, X) ⇒ X )
Note that X here is not a statement (grammatically valid sentence?), but a proposition. John can express it however he likes: by means of written word, by means of a demonstration or example, by means of a telepathy, etc. There is no need, specifically, to convert a proposition to a string or vice versa; as long as (1) is true and we most likely understand what proposition John is trying to convey, we will most likely believe in the correct normative proposition (that, if expressed in a statement, requires an "ought").
"It's all for the best in the end" is not a good argument, no. Such things are justified because the kind of world that serves the purposes God had in mind when creating it (for example, world in which moral agents exist and in which their choices are meaningful, i.e. make a practical difference) requires regular and predictable natural laws, and these (again, in the presence of meaningfully moral agents) have the side-effect of causing suffering from time to time. People have the option of committing good or committing evil, and these options are open to them only because certain actions lead to consequences that are considered good or evil: for example, if I hit my brother with a stone, I know that he might die. Thus if I want to kill my brother, I have the option of hitting him with a stone. This is so because of the presence of natural laws that connect my action to the desired effect. These natural laws also imply that a stone might fall on my brother's head by accident, not thrown by anyone in particular, and he might die.
A world with meaningfully moral agents is an immensely good world, much better than a world without free agents. It is good that a person has the power to decide on the path the world (or part of it) would take, for it confers on them a creative function, a good in itself. The so-called natural evils(*) are an unfortunate side effect of us being such agents.
(*) The expression natural evil doesn't really sit right with me, because the concept of evil presupposes an agent causing it. Nothing that is inert can be good or evil. It can cause happiness or suffering, but it's not good or evil, strictly speaking.
Of course the above account is not consistent with utilitarian ethics, but utilitarian ethics is rejected by the Bible anyway, so that's not a problem.
For more along these lines I recommend Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God.
Ugh, you are using the language of programming in an area where it doesn't fit. Can you explain what are these funny backslashes, % signs etc.? Why did you name a variable fmtstr instead of simply X?
Anyway - statements obviously exist, so if your theory doesn't allow for them, it's the problem with your theory and we can just ignore it. In my theory, every sentence that corresponds to a proposition (not all do of course), if that sentence is utterred by John, that proposition is true - that's what I mean by John being truthful. There is no additional axiom here, this is just premise 2, rephrased.
"we find out that we used the axiom true(QUOT[ought(X)]) ⇔ ought(X) from the schema. So in order to derive ought(X), we still had to use an axiom with "ought" in it."
But that "axiom", as you call it, is trivially true, as it follows from any sensible definition or understanding of "true". In particular, it follows from the axiom "true(QUOT[X]) ⇔ X", which doesn't have an ought in it.
Moreover, we don't even need the true predicate in this argument (we can formulate it in the spirit of the deflationary theory of truth):
2'. Whenever John says that X, then X. ( ∀ s:proposition, says(John, s) ⇒ s )
What about that thing where you can't derive an "ought" from an "is"? Just from the standpoint of pure logic, we can't derive anything about morality from axioms that don't mention morality. If you want to derive your morality from the existence of God, you still need to add an axiom: "that which God says is moral is moral".
The hypothesis that we can't derive an ougth from an is is not a proven theorem. In fact, it is easy to prove the opposite - we can derive an ought only from purely descriptive statements. Here is how we can do it:
- John says that I ought to clean my room.
- John always speaks the truth (i.e. never lies and is never mistaken).
- Therefore, I ought to clean my room.
Justifying the two premises is of course another matter, but the argument is logically valid and is not circular or anything like that.
God is not a human. Why would the moral duties of humans be applicable to God?
Edit: unless you meant "God is evil by those moral standards that govern human behaviour". In which case I agree. It's not a very useful statement though. An omnipotent and omniscient being who is a creator of everything has more moral freedom to do to his creation as he pleases. For example, he gave us life (unlike our parents, he is the ultimate creator of it), so he also has the right to take it away.
One flaw with your argument though...
eventually you may see the private prison industry die
you seem to think it would be a good thing? Why?
It feels rather funny when LW rediscovers the ideas of famous philosophers and acts as if they were the first to think about them.
"And yet there are these regular causal connections. These are causal connections (in both directions) between kinds of brain event and kinds of mental event, so detailed and specific that it is most improbable that they would occur without an explanation; yet it is immensely improbable that there could be a scientific explanation of the connections. Mind–brain connections are too ‘odd’ for science to explain; they cannot be consequences of a more fundamental scientific theory, and there are simply too many diverse connections to constitute laws. But once again there is available a personal explanation: God being omnipotent, is able to join souls to bodies. He can cause there to be the particular brain-event–mental-event connections that there are. He can do this by causing molecules when formed into brains to have powers to produce mental events in souls to which they are connected, and the liabilities to execute the intentions of such connected souls (new powers and liabilities not deriving from the ordinary ones, which chemistry analyses). And he can make the souls in the first place and choose to which brain (and so body) each soul is to be connected when foetal brain events require a soul to be connected to the brain. God has good reason to cause the existence of souls and join them to bodies, in the goodness (on which I commented in Chapter 6) of the existence of humanly free agents who would need to have bodies through which to have enjoyable sensations, form largely true beliefs about the world, and form their own purposes in the light of these beliefs, which would make a difference to the world. I argued that there was a significant probability that God would make such creatures. Their existence involves the existence of regular causal connections between mental events and events in their bodies. Given that humans are humanly free agents, it involves regular causal connections between mental events and events in human brains. We cannot make a difference to the world if, each time we try to move our leg, some different effect is caused in the brain and thereby in the body—one time the arm moves, one time we find ourselves sneezing, and so on. Likewise, if we are to discriminate between one object and another, they have to look (feel, etc.) different, and so there has to be a regular causal connection between the brain events caused by objects of each kind and the mental visual impressions of them. And, if we are to have the awesome power of reproduction, there have to be regular connections between our sexual acts, the foetus to which they give rise, and some soul or other linked to that foetus. God has reason to set up all these connections. He may have a reason to make this brain state cause a red sensation and that one to cause a blue sensation rather than the other way round, but, if there is no particular reason why one connection is better than a rival one, God has a reason by a ‘mental toss-up’ to produce one-or-other connection. He may have a reason to join this soul to this particular body, but again, if there is no reason for joining one soul to one body rather than to a different body, he has reason by a ‘mental toss-up’ to produce one-or-other connection—that is, to make it a chance matter which connection holds. So then, because we have every reason to believe that there can be no scientific theory and so scientific laws correlating brain states with souls and their states, we have every reason to believe that the causal connections that exist between them do not have a scientific explanation in terms of the properties of brain states; they are additional causal connections independent of the set of scientific laws governing the physical world. Nothing about the physical world makes it in the very least probable that there would be these connections. Let e be the existence of souls with mental states connected to brain states in the ways in which we have been analysing; k be the premisses of the arguments of the previous chapter—that there is a law-governed physical world of the type analysed in Chapter 8 with laws and boundary conditions tuned so as to allow the existence of human bodies; and let h as before be the hypothesis of theism. Then P(e | ~h) is very low. But, for all the reasons analysed in Chapter 6, a God has very good reason for creating humans (and good reason to create animals); hence P(e | h) has a moderate value. Hence the argument from consciousness is a good [inductive] argument for the existence of God."
R. Swinburne, The Existence of God, Second Edition, ch. 9, pp. 209-211.
Since qualia don't have any influence upon the external world and qualia are not caused by the physical world, then qualia must have a causal history that is independent of the physical world. The best explanation is that they are created by a mental substance which all of qualia-possessing beings have, the best explanation of which is God's creative action.
Qualia don't serve any evolutionary purpose. They don't have any causal influence on the external world at all. Which is also why we may never know whether animals have qualia (unless someone like God reveals that information to us).
How do you explain the fact that the state of the mind known as "seeing color" has the property that it cannot be accessed/observed by anyone except its owner (I hope you know what I mean by the "owner"), while the neuronal excitations can be observed by anyone in principle? Doesn't it mean that colors are not neuronal excitations?
"there is a mental state of "experiencing green", which is a certain functional state of a mind"
Alright... now, how do you explain the fact that this state of the mind has the property that it cannot be accessed/observed by anyone except its owner (I hope you know what I mean by the "owner"), while the properties of the brain can be observed by anyone in principle? Doesn't it mean that e.g. the image in the mind is not a brain process?
I'm confused. Do you think you don't actually have mental experiences?
Only a handful of Nazis believed in pagan religion. Most notable was Himmler. Hitler, afaik, considered it silly and distracting from the main cause.
Why do you think that "a god that deliberately and knowingly created a world like this is evil by normal moral standards"?
It would have conscious qualia.
Color is not a shape?
There is no such thing as 'green" in the physical universe (obviously). It has no explanatory power, it has no causal power, and there is no viable theory of how it can be produced by other things (e.g. by light of whatever wavelength, since my experience of light of that wavelength could be different than yours). Yet, we know that "green" exists. Therefore dualism.
Green is not a wavelength of light. Last time I checked, wavelength is measured in units of length, not in words. We might call light of wavelength 520nm "green" if we want, and we do BECAUSE we are conscious and we have the qualia of green whenever we see light of wavelength 520nm. But this is only a shorthand, a convention. For all I know, other people might see light of wavelength 520nm as red (i.e. what I describe as red, i.e. light of wavelength 700nm), but refer to it as green because there is no direct way to compare the qualia.
I'm not sure how the first two paragraphs are analogous to consciousness at all. Yes, the screen prints out numbers. These printed numbers are still mere physical entities. The screen doesn't really produce the number Pi from the physical objects, it just manipulates the physical objects. Consciousness is not about manipulating physical objects, as two identical physical configurations could correspond to two distinct conscious experiences.
As for something being "green", we can detect "green" with webcams and computers. My Gimp as a "anti-red eye filter" that can not only detect a kind of red and even its shape, and remove it. Being green is a very physical property of light, or of matter that emits/absorbs light. There is even less dualism in that than in my Pi example, or in any other kind of file (text, pictures, sound, movie, ...) stored in a hard disk.
Haha, no. Strictly speaking, we cannot detect "green" with webcams or computers (such an expression is only a simplification). We can detect light of a particular wavelength with a camera and we can detect a particular value of the G channel with a computer. But that's not the green color. The green color is what we see (and we can't even be sure that we see the same color when we use the word "green"). Any equivalence between that and the state of a camera of disk memory is false.
Oh, so then the question should be "What would I think about these arguments if I hadn't already committed myself to faith and I were an open-hearted truthseeker?". Your claim is that:
1) such a person should consider arguments for the Christian faith to be good, on balance (otherwise "Christianity is greatly wounded"), and
2) such a person often would not consider arguments for the Christian faith to be good.
Why do you believe (2)? That is, how can you know what a sincere seeker is going to think of any particular argument? Or, even worse, about all the arguments so that they can decide which theory is more probable on the balance?
I met unbelievers who found some arguments convincing and others who found them unconvincing, but there is no way for me to know if any of them were open-hearted truthseekers. If doctrine (1) is true, it's just not an empirically verifiable doctrine, since there is no observation by means of which you could determine even your own sincerity, much less that of others.
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/is-gods-existence-evident-to-every-sincere-seeker
The thought patterns you cite are not universally demanded by religion. They might be demanded by some religious people sometimes, but they are by no means a universal feature of religion. So, as a never-religious atheist, your perception of religion does seem to be skewed. In my experience with religious people, I very rarely encounter the kind of attitudes you mentioned.
Why does objection 1 seem valid to you? Something like "Jesus rose from the dead" is not obviously false; it is in fact true and has good evidence of being true.
What's wrong with not following epistemic rationality then if there are no moral truths? If there are no moral truths, it doesn't matter whether you are rational or not; no option is better than the other.
The claim that religion is a separate magisterium that can neither be proven nor disproven is a big lie indeed. But it is not the lie of RELIGION per se. Some religious people believe it (perhaps more than in the past) while many others don't. Just as some non-religious people believe it and some don't.
Why would this question be relevant? Let's say that the answer is "I would think that the arguments in favour of religion are stupid". What is that supposed to prove?
Why do you consider religious faiths to be obviously untrue? "They would be child's play for an unattached mind to relinquish, if the skepticism of a ten-year-old were applied without evasion." Why do you consider the questions of a ten-year old to be unaswerable except through evasion? On the contrary, such questions are almost invariably easily answerable to anyone who has the slighest knowledge about philosophy of religion and the doctrine of their particular religion. I would be silly to be guided by the questions of a 10-year old instead of the answers of a 20- or 45-year old whose knowledge of the subject matter is non-negligible.
"a belief whose absurdity a fresh-eyed ten-year-old could see" Why would it matter if a belief seems absurd to a 10-year old? It would be fairly stupid to be guided by children's opinions about an important subject.