The important part - on which we all agree - is that AP believes that we have reason to think God would give us reliable truth-detecting capacities over or instead of those given to us by evolution. The sensus divinatus is just one example of such a truth-guiding capacity. I did not, and do not, mean to suggest that the sd is THE truth-guiding capacity for all beliefs. Frankly, I don't care if the claim is that beliefs about tigers emerge from the sensus divinatus or the sensus expelliarmus: both are equivalent as far as I am concerned.

As it turns out, last night Massimo Pigliucci posted his response to the Gutting interview.

Some excerpts relevant to the thread:

W/r/t wellnamed and BeaucoupFish's questions about materialism:


W/r/t the question-begging assertion that content of a belief is not material:

I'd very much like you to expand on this at some point.

Not much more to say, he's just a bit of a naughty cat.

I agree with it, it was something I was thinking about a bit but hadn't tried to elucidate.

If you think about evolutionary processes and the kinds of beliefs that would be correlated with fitness (leaving aside the ontological stuff about contents of beliefs and the EAAN for the moment) it certainly seems reasonable that the kinds of beliefs that have a more obvious direct relation with survival would be selected for, rather than very abstract beliefs for which there is no obvious connection. Properly interpreting direct sensory input has some clear applications towards avoiding danger, finding a mate, etc etc. It's reasonable to think that evolution does not lead to the reliability of beliefs of a very abstract nature, but does lead to the reliability of beliefs about when to high tail it away from the bush.

Yep.

I was wondering why you wanted to continue this when you're so obviously wrong. Now I'm really glad I made the correction - it was needed more than I thought.

I've yet to see that I've actually said anything wrong. As far as I can make out you are just launching a pre-emptive strike - against hypothetical arguments someone might make - that had little to do with anything I said.

I.e:

I've said that I didn't mean to imply what your "impression" suggested.

Also this exchange:

Not sure why you are being so aggressive, tbh.

You keep leaving the impression that A.P. bases ALL decisions on the s.d. rather than logic, evidence, etc. As I said, this is similar to positions taken by internet skeptics re WLC on the same point. The s.d. is evidence for the believer, but it is (internal)evidence only for the existence of God and other related beliefs, such as faith, God's love, etc. We still make decisions on natural matters, such as the Big Bang and the lack of evidence for macroevolution the same way everyone else does - evidence and reason.

Righto... Lemonzest, Aaron, wellnamed, other non-batcrap crazy Christians: am I leaving this impression?

Forget it - my point is made - this is no longer worth it.

I did not get that impression. That said, my position (which is not plantingas) is open to charges of irrationality so perhaps I am less sensitive about the possibility.

Although I might try to argue that arational is not irrational

I don't agree to forget it. You are accusing me of saying something I've explicitly denied multiple times. If this is a case of me genuinely giving the wrong impression then I want to know so I don't make the same mistake again.

If, however, this is just you throwing mud around in order to cover your weird tangent about WLC then I want to know so I can just ignore your posts in future.

You're the mud slinger here - think what you like - I've already decided to ignore you.

OK tiger.

I think the critics of materialism understand what materialists are saying. What isn't so apparent is that Pigliucci understands the criticism. From Plantinga’s Against Materialism (p. 14):

And now the difficulty for materialism is this: how does it happen,
how can it be, that an assemblage of neurons, a group of material objects
firing away has a content?
[….] The fact is, we can't see how it could have a content.

Of course “the content of the belief is also such in virtue of particular electrical signals in the brain” holds if materialism is true. But no one is challenging the internal validity of materialism. What’s being challenged is materialism’s ability to explain the phenomenon of consciousness, or more to the point the content of consciousness, without just decreeing its emergence from a physical substratum. In other words, how can it be that physical happenings, which aren’t inherently about anything, suddenly come to be about something?

Steve Martin seems to be lacking a sensus divinitatis.

Well, there are tons of examples where something has a property that does not belong to it's constituent parts. For example, atoms do not have a temperature, but collections of atoms in certain dynamic arrangements create temperature. Temperature is an emergent property of atoms. There is no, a priori reason to think that consciousness cannot be an emergent propery of neurons etc. So if that is your point then it is a simple composition fallacy, easily disproved by both logic and virtually every analysis of the properties of complex systems and the properties of their components.

Given that this would be such an obvious error, perhaps you understand that there is no a priori reason to preclude a materialistic account of consciousness, but are instead just asking for the actual explanation. Clearly, we don't know what the explanation is as yet. A hundred years or so ago we did not know how to explain the emergence of temperature from physical systems.

My experience has been, in reading on philosophy of mind, that really the difference between physicalists with regard to consciousness (say Dennett) and non-physicalists (Searle, Chalmers, etc) is that the non-physicalists are entirely persuaded by an intuition that there has to be something that is irreducible. The intuition is stated pretty plainly in that quote:

That's not actually an argument, except from incredulity. Same with the argument about meaning, although it's slightly different. Douglas Hofstadter is a great read as far as thinking about meaning, language, and reductionism. Godel, Escher, Bach is a classic.

Again, I am somewhat in the same boat as Searle et al, in a certain way, but I think it's important to realize that it is the intuition itself, rather than an argument, that is the fundamental reason for the disagreement. The Mary's Room thought experiment I linked before is useful. Dennett will say that Mary does not learn anything new. Plantinga does not agree. There is no argument for why she will learn something new, it is taken as self-evident by non-physicalists that all conceivable possible knowledge about neurons and cones and retinas and photons will not constitute an experience of color

I read the Mary's Room experiment and as is typical for these types of argument it makes the fundamental mistake of making the observer all-knowing. The observer knows everything about Mary's world and also exactly to what extent her knowledge is precise. Two things the observer could not know if put in Mary's world. So basically, when you boil it down to the bones, it is a claim of omniscience. "I know everything, therefore I am right". And if we accept that someone is omniscient... well, you get my drift.

However, what I find far more amusing is that it also fails on a practical level. If Mary's brain and eyes has never seen color, she will likely not see it when she gets out either, as that part of her brain would not have developed properly.

And arguing for the superiority of intuition by using an example that is refuted by inquisition is quite funny.

I don't think the idea of an omniscient observer is central to Mary's Room as a thought experiment, but maybe I'm not understanding you properly.

The reason it is a thought experiment instead of a real experiment is because it asks you to consider what would happen in a scenario you can't possibly test, because it involves Mary essentially having inhuman levels of intelligence/knowledge (Dennett did a version of this using a robot instead of Mary, although he was speaking about p-zombies), so from that standpoint yes it sort of assumes impossibilities, but I don't think that ruins the usefulness of it, at least not as a way of helping isolate and clarify intuitions about the nature of knowledge about color. It does not entail the person making the argument (who I am taking as your observer) claiming omniscience, although to the extent that you equate that to my point that the conclusion that Mary learns something when she leaves the room amounts to a bare intuition, you are agreeing with me. That's the limitation of Mary's room as an argument. It's really the entire point of it. But not insofar as a claim of omniscience, but as a claim that the idea that Mary learns something is self-evident, intuitively

For those unfamiliar with Mary's Room:

[source]

The problem isn't inhuman levels of intelligence, the problem is that the thought experiment begs the question: The argument states that Mary holds all physical knowledge of color vision and then proceeds to state that she learns something new about color vision.

Thus the conclusion is in the premises.

These things are typical in thought experiments where the "observer" (the one making the argument) assumes total and complete knowledge about the imagined world in which the experiment takes place and then superimposes this on the world he/she knows.

wouldn't it be begging the question to assume prior to the thought experiment that all physical knowledge constituted all knowledge? Given that the point of the thought experiment is to question physicalism?

I think you are wrong that it begs the question for that reason. Also it's not an argument in the sense of having premises. Dennett uses the term "intuition pump" for these things, and I think it's apt. The point of it is to get you to think of a scenario and see what you intuitively think the outcome would be. The premises are really our naive intuitions about qualia, and it's those intuitions that prompt the conclusion that Mary learns something.

Again, I don't really see how the one making the argument is assuming total and complete knowledge about the world here, although I would agree with a slightly less aggressive counter-argument that the intuition which drives the conclusion glosses over the fact that "all physical knowledge about color and color vision" is an impossible-for-humans-to-process amount of knowledge, to the point of calling into question the value of the naive intuition in the first place.

That is the physicalist objection to the thought experiment in a nutshell: that the intuition is not valuable, and that the thought experiment does not really constitute any kind of real argument, only a pretty bare assertion. I agree with that objection.

In any case, the reason I mentioned the experiment twice was not so much that I think it's compelling, but that often times in discussions about these issues I see both sides asserting as obvious the things that are really what the disagreement is about. So duffee posts quotes where a philosopher asks incredulously how firing neurons could constitute content, and you now are pointing out that, as though it were contradictory, that the experiment assumes Mary has "all physical knowledge" yet learns something new, which is more or less begging the question the other way, i.e in assuming that physical knowledge is the only knowledge there could be.

It reminds me a lot of the conversations about free will and compatibilism, and fair enough, it took me quite a bit of time (and some help from zumby) to realize that my intuition that free will couldn't possibly be compatible did not actually exhaust the possible meanings of the terms. I think a lot of times the two sides have trouble even understanding what is motivating the conclusions of the other side because there is such a fundamental disconnect in thinking