Identity of indiscernibles

You have a different understanding of Thomism than I. I'd say that Thomistic metaphysics has everything to do with whether God's nature is really like that.

If I understand your argument correctly, you're saying that it is possible that there are actually 10 gods, but as long as the consequences for us are the same, it doesn't matter?


But nothing necessitates God to care about about humans' lives, right? It is perfectly consistent with the cosmological argument that God created the universe, but then stopped interfering with it?

Kind of, but more like we can't say it's impossible that there are 10 uncaused causes if one uncaused cause is indistinguishable from another. Maybe think of it like gravity: we can't say it's impossible that there are 10 causes of gravity if all their effects are indistinguishable, but since the effects are indistinguishable we just call it gravity or one cause.

No, it's not 'perfectly' consistent with the argument. Most versions take God as a supportive cause and not simply a direct cause. Kind of like how the laws of physics are the supportive cause of the universe.

Information decay happens in principle (laws of thermodynamics) and in practice (because we cannot measure my intentions yesterday). How are you establishing the necessary preservation of whatever information might be needed?

Edit: Also, how do you establish "intention" as a particular neural activity? Actually, your ability to answer this is related to your understanding of the empirical under-determination of free will and determinism, so I don't think you'll actually answer it in a satisfactory manner.

Again, this is related to the methods you have. It depends on what kinds of information your methodology works with. If you are using method X and that method requires a particular kind of information which has not been preserved, then you won't be able to answer those questions obviously. But who said that science necessarily succeeds in answering everything it starts studying? You can investigate something empirically, but whether the particular methodology you're using is going to be fruitful or not is not guaranteed in any way.

These things should all be pretty obvious to you, why do I have to explain them?

I am not quite sure what you're asking with the first question, it is vague. "Intention" itself is a pretty vague term. There are different kinds of intention and if you want to ask what neural activity corresponds to what intentions, you will have to choose a specific type with a specific definition. One distinction is about prior intentions and intentions in action. In your example, your intention to buy toothpaste is a prior intention which involves a series of intentions in action (some call them motor intentions).

It is going to take a very long time to explain this in detail, especially given your not so rich background in neuroscience, but to put it shortly, motor areas in the brain (M1, premotor cortex, SMA, etc.) which are active while you are executing an action are also active when you just 'intend' to execute the same action; the difference between actions is intentions of actions is blurred. In terms of what's happening in the brain, when you actually execute the action, the inhibition coming from the prefrontal cortex stops; meaning, when you are intending to do something, the only thing that's stopping you from doing it is the inhibition coming from other brain areas.

By the way, this is closely related to Libet's position on free will. He says that you can't initiate anything (using your free will) but you can stop yourself from executing the actions whose intention was activated outside of your control.

Anyway, the point is that for these kinds of subjective experiences like intention, belief, etc. there are corresponding patterns of neural activity in the brain. The literature is more than interesting, if you ever decide to read anything.

Okay, good. So when you say

you will consent that IN PRINCIPLE there exist empirical questions which cannot be answered empirically. (There exist types of information that decay in a way that is unrecoverable.)

Now let's look at the latter half of that sentence:

The clapping of my hands would be unanswerable empirically. It's a very, very simple event. It's nothing supernatural. It's nothing bizarre. It's not extraordinary, so we require no extraordinary evidence... but this question of whether I clapped my hands "cannot be answered at all"... Even though I know the answer. (I did.)

My goal here is to try to convince you that your narrow epistemology is not how you actually operate, and that all of the models that you are trying to apply may not be giving you the complete picture. (Another way of saying this: it's as if you're assuming that the model of the thing is necessarily sufficient to fully describe the thing itself.)

This is why I doubt your intellectual capacity. I started with

You responded

So I ask:

And you don't know what I'm asking, and you think that "intention" is suddenly a vague term?

Let's recount this in summary form:
Me: Is intention empirical?
You: Yes.
Me: How do you know?
You: Well, intention is kind of vague.

This doesn't answer the question. It's a tangent that is hiding the fact that you don't have an answer to the question. The question, once again:

How do you know that "intention" is a particular neural activity? This is one of those places where I'm going to accuse you of simply asserting the materialist position, through which you simply avoid answering the question in any way other than asserting the answer.

What does this even mean? Is your "stopping" yourself something that "you" initiate? Or is the initiation of stopping something else that you can't control? I don't even know if there is a coherent sense of "you" in this presentation.

One more thing... is the question of whether everything is empirical an empirical question? I feel like you've never answered this question sufficiently.

No, that is not what I'm saying. That holds only if you limit yourself to a certain methodology. But often in science one question that was practically unanswerable due to lack of proper methodology was later answered after the development of better methods. That is why I said that no question should be declared in principle unanswerable.

You are playing around with words again. First you ask me if the question is addressable by people in general, then you change it to say "by me". Yes, you CAN give an answer to the question, but because you do have the information necessary to do so (your memory).

This all should be painfully obvious to you. And I suspect that it is, because you are a very intelligent person and you can comprehend these things easily. Which leads me to ask myself the same questions I asked about Craig in the OP. If you know that you're using equivocation and unfair rhetorical techniques in your arguments, why are you doing it? (for the more detailed version of the question, see OP).

Wow, thanks. Time for some more insults. Do you feel a little sore from yesterday when Subfallen kicked your ass and now you want to take it out on me?

*Deep sigh* you did it again. I started with "intention is vague" and then I gave you a lot of information regarding different kinds of intention. But you had to present this dialogue taken out of context to make it sound ridiculous. Seriously man, do you think anybody at all is falling for your "tactics" to "discredit" your opponent? I feel like I'm arguing with somebody like Bill O'Reilly. Well, I guess you might have cheering fans among people dumb enough to not read your opponent's words and trust your misrepresentation, but I doubt you'll find enough of those people in this forum. This is why many people are avoiding you; you are focused so much on "destroying" the person you're arguing with that drive the discussion into areas in which it becomes painful for people to follow. And you are as rigid as one can get, ignoring all the reasoning of your opponent, "arguing the **** out of semantics and frustrating the hell out of everyone, while derailing every thread you're in".

Ugh, how do I know? I just told you. By finding the brain areas responsible for what people call "intention". How do we know that the back part of the occipital lobes is responsible for low-level visual processing of sensory information? By studying the brain in the very same way.

I am not asserting materialism, I am giving empirical arguments why intention is not something magical and immaterial. What arguments do you have that intention is immaterial? Or are you just exploiting the gaps in science again?

I am not even sure if you actually understand all the stuff I am talking about when I start talking about neural mechanisms. I think it should be easy even for a lay person, but I don't know...

I say:

You say:

Hmmm.

Alright. Most scientists and philosophers link free will to the conscious "you". So, when I say "you cannot initiate anything", I mean that your conscious "you" cannot initiate anything. Some brain areas which act outside of your consciousness and your control initiate an action and then you have the conscious experience of initiating it. Now, if you want to call those unconscious processes "you" as well, that's fine. But the point is whether those actions were started using your free will or not. Obviously, if they are outside of your control, they cannot be your free will.

Actually, the previous time you asked me about this, it was if the statement "the empirical reasons are the only legitimate reasons to believe in something" itself has an empirical basis. Which is different from "is everything empirical". To the former question, I already said that you are playing word games again. But yes, it is an empirical question.

As for the question you're asking now, my position is that almost everything around us, everything that we study, we sooner or later find that it is empirical. Somebody like you might point that this is induction and just because in the history of science we have never found anything that can be called "non-empirical" doesn't mean that non-empirical things don't exist. And I would agree with that. But since we don't have any basis whatsoever to think that there should be something non-empirical, the burden of proof is on you to show why there actually are good reasons to think that. So, yes, this question is also empirical.

I basically agree with madnak and bunny: success in public debates is not primarily a matter of who gives the best arguments for their view, but rather who sways the audience more. I think Craig is good at this, but otherwise I don't think he is a particularly interesting thinker. His main significance as a philosopher comes from re-invigorating interest in an old Muslim argument for the existence of God that relies on Aristotelian premises that are suspect in modern science. He is fine as a starting place for when you first start reading Christian philosophy, but in my opinion there are other much more interesting Christian thinkers you should then move on to.

Fair enough.

What do you think about the reasons he's invoking fallacies? Do you think he does it on purpose? If so, doesn't it bother him that his arguments are reliant on fallacies? What does that tell him about his faith?

I am genuinely curios about these questions.

I'm leaving for a conference and won't be back for a while.

So now when you say "empirical methods" you're allowing your other "other methodologies"? Are you defining another class of methods that somehow is broader than the scientific method?

When students do this sort of thing on a test, I call it the "shotgun method." As long as you can keep flinging new ideas out there, you are increasing the chances that you will say something that is related to the answer that you're trying to reach. But when you do this, it also doesn't seem to matter whether you are being consistent with past information that has ended up on the page (screen).

The fundamental issue (which is at the meta-conversation level) is that you keep bouncing back and forth between broad and narrow definitions. And it's simply impossible to follow what it is you mean by anything.

"By you" was not the personal you, but the "generic you" as in one who wants to use empirical methods to determine whether I clapped my hands. The point is that it is possible to have justifiable answers that are not verifiable via the empirical methods of science.

It's hard not to equivocate when the words that you are using keep changing definitions. "Everything" doesn't mean "everything" but rather "everything that is empirically measurable." The word "belief" in JTB implies that there exists room for doubt. "Contemporary philosophers think that..." means the same thing as "Contemporary philosophers are not interested in..." And on and on and on and on...

If the vagueness of "intention" was an issue, then how was it possible in the first place to make your universal declaration about the nature of "intention" (that is must be a neurological pattern)?

Again, it's you making broad statements when you need to be making narrow statements. If you say something like "Some forms of intention have been seen to correlate to specific neurological activity" then there's no issue. But you keep making these blanket assertions and then after 30-40 posts it turns out that you were only making some almost trivial point.

There is a huge difference between "correspond to" and "responsible for."

The difference with sensory information is that it is an input/output system. We know the external source of stimulus that starts the process. Intention does not have such an obvious input system.

This is resolved very simply. Do you allow for the possibility of a non-physical agency that is the driver behind certain physical effects? Since you've asserted that you will not believe in any non-physical entities because they can't be "caught in a net," the answer is "no." And this is materialism.

Thanks for the clarification of terms.

And what "good reasons" would there be (according to your standard of knowing) are allowed? Empirical methods. But once we apply empirical methods, the thing cannot be non-empirical. (Unless you mean something else by "empirical methods," which I guess is possible given that I don't know what you mean by the words you use much of the time.)

You have once again erected a logically impossible standard that must be met by the opposition. You keep doing this, and it's actually not wrong to do it. But if you do this, you need to be able to step back and recognize it for what it is. And once you recognize it, then you must either stop and accept that your standard cannot be applied to that question, or you must accept the conversation ON THEIR TERMS. (Why? Because your terms are meaningless to the conversation.)

So some people have areas that they call "knowledge" that disagree with yours. Whatever. It's not a problem for anybody. But you keep presenting yourself with this false pretense of intellectual openness. And that's what drive me nuts. I don't actually care if you ultimately agree with me or disagree with me on the conclusion of the matter. The conclusion is perhaps the least important feature here. The intellectual processes matter.

If you're going to present yourself as being open to ideas, then you'd better *ACTUALLY* be open to new ideas. But every single indication I get from the presentation of your position is that you're not. You keep setting up these logical loops that do not allow for the particular object to be studied. That's fine. But don't try to force the conversation into YOUR terms, because in your terms, there's nothing to be said.

Edit: As an explicit example, take a second look at the interaction between myself and subfallen. Notice that we've reached a point where (it appears) that the fundamental difference is definitional. There's nothing more to be said now. If he thinks that philosophy is defined by the activity of academic philosophers, that's fine with me. And I showed him how I've concluded what I have about his position, and showed why I disagree with that understanding.

It is the case that either I hold a broader definition of philosophy (to include individual reflections), or a narrower definition of what academic philosophers do (I think in terms of the actual content they publish, which do not include individual assessments of one's own life and circumstances). That's all there is to it.

Not every disagreement is win/lose. But it seems like you feel like you lose if you consent that someone else can be justified in believing something different from you.

No (?!) why would I say that? By new methods I don't mean methods outside of science. I already gave you one such example. The light microscope was not a good enough tool/method to disambiguate between the reticular theory and the neuron doctrine. The electron microscope, a better method, was invented, and scientists were able to answer that question, thus rejecting the reticular theory. There is nothing outside of the scientific method.


I guess you COULD say it is not obvious, but so what? Does it mean that just because it's not obvious, it is non-existent? Neuroscience is giving very fruitful results on the topic. You keep sticking to your abstract philosophical "arguments" for dualism.


But I am doing more than saying "I will not believe in any non-physical entities..." I am giving you material explanations of those things which you call immaterial.

Alright, you might have a point here. I don't have an immediate answer to this, but I'll think about it.

Good luck at the conference.

A quick follow up to this idea:

I just listened to a short podcast by Craig reviewing 2010 and he mentioned a future discussion he will have about radiation rings and Roger Penrose. I looked up the rings and found this:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...cled-universe/

I just briefly scanned this article but it seems the Big Bang is under attack, and it's significant that someone of the stature of Penrose is apparently leading the charge.

The point is that it's very tricky to base theology on current scientific opinion. It should always be done with a qualifier - "TODAY, science says etc.". That's why the philosophical argument for the KCA is more important than less than certain scientific opinion.

I have no idea where this iteration of the cyclic universe is going, but if it fails, count on something else being proposed to eliminate the Big Bang.

This may be true if your goal is to create an argument which is difficult to refute. Personally, I prefer to create an argument more likely to be sound. Therefore I prefer scientifically derived premises to philosophical ones (logically or mathematically derived premises are best of all, IMO) - this is because I think scientific statements are more likely to be true than philosophical ones.

As a response to your characterization of philosophical arguments as "more certain" than scientific opinion. I'd note that the fact philosophical arguments are harder to refute doesn't imply we should be more certain of their truth.

I probably didn't state the matter clearly but what I mean is the premise involving the logical reasoning for a beginning to the universe is more certain than the empirical evidence from current science. It's not really a question of argument since the KCA is a philosophical and theological argument, but a question of which premises are better, more likely to be true, more certain. I think the implausibility of an actual infinite is much stronger than the certainty that what science calls the Big Bang is really the beginning of created reality(the universe) - though for now I think it seems more probable than not. 100% certain proof that there is a cyclical nature to the universe, thus killing that premise of the KCA, would not touch the actual infinite premise.

It's really not important I guess (obviously I disagree, since I see no reason to think an actual infinite would lead to absurdity, merely that it would have properties we dont see exhibited by finite sets). Nonetheless, I think 'certainty' is a poor choice of word since you (and Craig?) have explicitly stated that the purpose of the argument is not to establish something as definitely true but merely plausible. I don't think anyone should feel certain of a conclusion which rests on a premise which seems plausible to them if other intelligent individuals find its negation plausible.

This comment of mine is nothing more than semantics though - our significant point of disagreement is on the claim that the existence of an actual infinite leads to an absurdity. (And I suppose on what I consider to be the spurious distinction between strict and broad logic).

I think that Craig's main goal in these debates is to make his view seem more plausible to the person who is not following the debate very closely and is not very familiar with the topic (i.e. the large majority of the audience). Detailed and sophisticated arguments are difficult to follow, especially when presented orally and in a short amount of time. Thus, Craig relies a lot on the intuitions of his audience as shortcuts for argument. He'll make some claim about causation or morality that seems plausible to people who've not thought deeply about the subject and then show how this premise results in his conclusions. Sometimes his reasoning is abbreviated, but I imagine this is usually in cases where he think stronger reasons are available, just not in a short debate.

As for whether it bothers Craig that he uses fallacies--I doubt that he would agree with you that his arguments are fallacious, or if he does, he probably thinks that he has other arguments which are not fallacious supporting his view.

You are of course correct in your first sentence here. However, not to reopen the poker/theist thread, but I didn't forget to reply to your last post: I took it that by the end we were in basic agreement. You said in that post:

Since my goal in that thread was not to convince you that Christian theology itself was rational, but rather that some common forms of Christian theology (whether or not those theologies are themselves rational) are compatible with playing 2p2 poker, I didn't really have anything else to say.

I'll admit that I find the KCA pretty boring as an argument for theism. As noted by batair, all it really gets us is Aristotle's First Mover, but more importantly, if there is anything that modern science, philosophy, and math have taught us, it is that our intuitions about the nature of time and causation are not reliable. So I don't want to say that the premises of the argument are false, just that it is foolish to accept them on the basis of our pre-theoretical intuitions, which is what Craig encourages us to do.

In his popular work, as I've already indicated, Craig uses the simplified KCA. I'm sure he's satisfied to make the case for a first cause at that level. After all, if one doesn't agree to the plausibility of the first cause what purpose would it serve to give the argument that the first cause is the Christian God? He does do that in some places, just not everywhere.

Either an actual infinite is possible or it isn't. What Craig does with this and other premises that involve some reliance on intuition, is simply ask you whether you think an AI is plausible or not. If you say you have no intuition that an AI is implausible does that mean you have an intuition that it is? To say that going with one's intuition is necessarily foolish is to promote total inaction, for what real decision do we ever make that doesn't involve some intuition at some level? We are finite beings with a very limited time here, most people don't have the resources or time to spend achieving a Ph.D. level of philosophical understanding, so I hardly think it's foolish to argue on the basis of concepts which have plausibility. I would also point out that Craig doesn't rely on intuition alone. The point of the Hilbert's Hotel illustration is to show how an AI would result in absurdities - this isn't mathematical proof but certainly encompasses much more than bare intuition.

I'm near 100% certain he doesn't think any of his arguments are fallacious. I challenge anyone who thinks they are to send him a question on his website detailing his error. He's very receptive to criticism and will often take that kind of question and give thorough answers. Go for it.

Can anybody explain the main difference between KCA and the regular CA? I am having a hard time seeing it.

This premise doesnt rely on intuition - it relies on understanding the properties of an actual infinite. You claim some distinction between infinity and infinite which eludes me, however until that is made explicit why not defer to the experts (ie the mathematicians)?

I've been looking quite far, though haven't yet found Hilbert's initial reference to his hotel - so far, nobody other than Craig and those citing him make the following claim:
As I mentioned earlier, this isn't the point of Hilbert's hotel. Do you have any reference which doesn't involve someone ultimately citing Craig? Mathematical textbooks, and mathematicians don't support this claimed purpose. (I've done three separate maths courses where Hilbert's Hotel was discussed - needless to say none of them were remotely concerned with an 'actual infinite'.

The purpose of Hilbert's Hotel is to point out that our finite intuitions fail when trying to comprehend infinite sets, the lesson being to rely on definitions, theorems and proofs - not on what "seems reasonable". This, in fact, undermines any argument along the lines of "doesn't this consequence of an actual infinite strike you as absurd?" since the point is to illustrate that our intuitions are decidely fallible when it comes to infinite sets.

Kalam uses the idea of begin to exist. Standard CA simply says "everything has a cause".

I should have said that the point of using Hilbert's hotel is to illustrate the absurdity of the AI. I don't know what Hilbert himself intended. I did give you quotes from both Hilbert and Cantor that indicated they didn't think an AI exists.

The distinction I'm making between the AI and infinity is that infinity is a mathematical concept. So are imaginary numbers. They are useful for math operations but the question is do they exist in the real world.

I don't see the point of attacking intuition by citing failure of intuition in some cases. We use intuition all the time. And our thinking ability often fails, we make errors - so should we stop using reason? Our senses often misguide us. So should we keep our eyes closed? The question is whether there is an actual contradiction between our intuition, reason or sense impression and some other source of knowledge. We should take into account all the information available to us. I don't think God will hold anyone responsible for anything more than that.

I still don't see a difference beyond the choice of words used in the argument. It's trivial: if something never began to exist, it's irrelevant to talk about its cause, so the standard CA kind of implies "begin to exist", doesn't it?