Sounds great. You would probably have better luck in RGT being that they get a little butt hurt over in SMP when anything remotely resembling discussion about theism comes up.

You wrote 5 paragraphs of material, and then you concluded with this:

Translation: I'm not actually going to address the issues you raised because I'm just assuming it all works out.

If you think my exposition wasn't cogent, that's fine. Say so. Say it doesn't make sense. Tell me where I can be more clear. What was incoherent about it? Don't ramble for five paragraphs and then tell me that you're just assuming the conclusion!

We accept as reality the fact that we are having this conversation, so that humans have the capacity for abstract mental content. I explained why I think that materialist evolution doesn't provide a sufficiently robust account of it. What is your response? "I am assuming we can and did evolve to our current state [on a materialistic evolutionary basis]."

The WHOLE ARTICLE is about Plantiga's argument that the materialist evolutionary view is not sufficient to account for the mental processes we are using. Nagel agrees. What are you doing ITT if you're just assuming your conclusion?

[And the fact that you STILL don't even know what a goddidit argument is...]

Nope, you missed the point. Try and read the garbage rambling again. Remember, you didn't say my post was not cogent, you said it was rambling garbage. If you cannot constrain your tendency towards unrelenting condescension, I have no interest in discussing things with you, especially when you miss the point.

This suggests quite strongly that you failed to make a cogent point.

Lol. Oh you got me good, I did miss a "just" in that statement. You didn't JUST say my post was not cogent, you also said it was rambling, and then, garbage. Which is, of course, the point that, as the other threads amply demonstrated, you simply cannot find it within you, despite me repeatedly asking you, to drop the condescension. Talk about the issues, not how much you think my posts are garbage because - believe me - I am very much returning that particular favour. In this case, you have not talked about the actual issues I raised in that rambling garbage post of mine, with the exception of very briefly in the above which demonstrates you entirely missed the point, which is perhaps why you thought it was garbage.

I don't know why you bother.

One is tempted to say something like this with is remarkably apt, in response to your unwillingness to actually address the post that you called garbage rambling:
Except that would be insufferably rude. Not that this stopped you.

From the article Now now we have a new cognitive function that is obviously never explained, but whose function the philosopher knows is malfunctioning or blocked in atheists (Why? Why would a God who wants our sense perception to orient towards truth block or make this malfunction? ). Also, whose function seems to be pointing fully half the current world's population away from Christianity but also seems to be dividing Christians into more and more sects who claim to have the truth.

This a completely incoherent framework.

1) Numbers are immaterial.
2) Immaterial objects do not exist to the materialist.
3) You are using a reality-correspondence definition of truth.
4) Non-existent objects cannot correspond to reality, so statements about such objects cannot be true.
5) Under your framework, you cannot say that "There exist infinitely many primes" is a true statement.

If these things do not exist, then you cannot have a meaninful epistemology because of the truth-correspondence definition you are trying to apply. It's simply meaningless. You require some sort of "consistency" framework or *SOMETHING* in order for you to advance your position. But if you use a "consistency" framework, you lose reality-correspondence. Either way, you don't have a meaningful position and the end result is that you have a bunch of words that don't mean anything at all.

The problems you have run so deep that you basically need to sit in a room for a while and just think about what you're trying to say for a long time. The issues being raised are deep, not superficial. You're approaching it at a superficial level, so it's clear why you aren't making sense of the actual issues being raised.

You really cannot do it, can you? When I directly and repeatedly ask you to PLEASE drop the unrelenting condescension, the only thing you follow with is yet more condescension.

Perhaps, perhaps, such unrelenting condescension would be sufferable if you were fully internalizing my posts and responding to them cogently. However, it seems you have (yet again) entirely missed the point of my garbage ramble. For example, you didn't even notice that the following is exactly a point I made n three separate occasion in my garbage ramble, for example in literally the next sentence after what you quoted.
Not to mention asserting that I was espousing some framework here while missing what I was doing was delineating the different issues going on in YOUR framework, not mine.

My suggestion to you is to do the following:

You may think it's condescending, and that's fine with me. I'm telling you that you're wrong about your understanding of the entire conversation. Not only are you wrong, but you're upside down and backwards wrong. Not only that, but you show an unwillingness to take the time to get it right. So if you feel condescended because I'm calling you out on gibberish posts, so be it.

You are trying to appeal to too many different themes at the same time, and it's simply become completely incoherent.

No. I repeat myself:

MY framework is not and has never been the point of discussion (and if you think it is and has been, you're even more lost than you realize). It is in no need of defense. It holds to internal consistency and allows for the meaningful interpretation of immaterial truth claims, and a reasonable expectation as to why immaterial truth claims are sensible and our cognitive abilities are trustworthy. (The "strongest" criticism of MY framework that you've put forth is attempting to frame it as a goddidit, which was rejected by myself and Original Position as being a mis-application of the criticism.)

Indeed, consider the following:

This was from a DEFENSE of the materialist framework by you. You were defending the claim that truth-aptness of material claims would somehow suggest that we have truth-aptness of immaterial claims.

You think that one paragraph from Nagel is a criticism of the theistic framework? Read it again:

This is a criticism of Plantiga's ARGUMENT, not his framework. The framework being defended is the naturalist viewpoint. Nagel is talking about how Plantiga's ARGUMENT falls short in certain ways.

You have no clue what you're talking about, and you're just chattering incoherently. If you don't want to be told you're being incoherent, stop being incoherent.

Take the time to figure out what you're really trying to argue, and start over again. I suggest you come up with a short statement of the position you're actually trying to put forth. My position can be summarized by the following:

A materialistic evolutionary framework alone is insufficiently robust to account for the applicability of immaterial truth claims to the universe; in particular, one should not expect that materilistic evolutionary pressures should successfully select immaterial truth-apt cognitive processes which hold deep consistency and make successful predictions for beliefs about reality which are far removed from evolutionary advantages.

Everything else is a detail about that position. It's an expansion of detail of a certain element of that, or a discussion of a certain perspective within the broader framework, or an extension of that position applied to something else. (It doesn't touch upon the secondary argument that one should expect these things from a theistic framework as put forth by Plantiga, but that's not necessary and nobody has really raised meaningful criticism against that view.)

Lol, you really can't stop can you? Do comments like these make you feel all superior and holier-than-thou or something? I don't know how much clearer I can be: if you want a serious conversation, then please - PLEASE - find it within yourself to drop the unrelenting condescension. And I don't mean drop it for a few posts only to pull it back full stop a few posts later. Actually stop. Discuss the issues, and keep the thoughts about my garbage, rambling, incoherent, poorly thought through gibberish to your own ****ing self.

Btw, I am amused you conveniently didn't respond to this:

If Christianity is true we can expect humans senses are truth atuned. How do we determine if Christianity is true? Though our senses of course, which we can't trust unless we assume Christianity is true. Weeeeeeeee!!!

Yes, that clears up a lot. Thank you.

There is no evolutionary pressure to tell 3 from 2?

From earlier:

Right so the question is how did we go from number sense to mathematics. It's not that the materialistic arithmetic ( number sense or counting by a logarithmic scale) like humans are born innate to do can't account for immaterial numbers, but how can we account from the leap from a number sense to a base 5,10,20 etc. scale? Or is it how do we account for human beings being able to deal with large numbers?

There are several different problems floating around. There is a question of what is the ontological status of mathematical entities in a materialist universe. There is a question of whether we can reasonably expect evolution to account for our ability to conceive of such mathematical entities, given the assumption that these entities do exist in some sense. And there is an epistemological question of whether we can reliably trust mathematical answers that our mental faculties deduce, given the assumption of their evolutionary origins. There is a relationship between these three questions in that if there is no accounting for mathematical entities in a materialist universe then both the second and third questions are trivially negative, and likewise if just the second is negative, the third is trivially negative. The above picture is further complicated by the fact that there could be a dichotomy where perhaps "simple" concepts might be said to exist, and the ability to conceive them might have evolved, and they might be reliable but that "complicated" concepts might not in any of these senses. There seems to be a bit of a debate where, if at all, the line between these simple and complicated things are, of which a first answer was "material/immaterial" was the line but as seen above that isn't quite right because of overlaps.

Sorry for my slowness in replying--some other writing deadlines took precedence. Anyway, the conversation has moved beyond where I last posted, so I'll start by summarizing what I think the challenge is here.

I take it we're moving beyond Plantinga's original argument, that claimed that a global skepticism resulted from naturalism plus evolution to the claim that with regards to specific domains of knowledge--beliefs about immaterial objects, with mathematical beliefs being the primary example--that the naturalist (materialist?) cannot justify the claim that their cognitive processes are truth-apt.

I'll start by acknowledging that I am not very comfortable with my position here. Mathematics has long been one of the most difficult cases of knowledge for hardcore empiricists like myself to explain, and I haven't really settled on a view that I find particularly satisfactory. So the reply I give to your challenge below is offered more as a way to advance the conversation than as describing my own views on the topic.

Anyway, here are a couple of places where I would attack your claim. First, you've referred to an "immaterial...cognitive process" and "immaterial truth claim." As I previously stated, I'm assuming a materialistic mental content (if we aren't, then we don't need to bother with this argument). Thus, your statement would be understood as a materialist mental content about an immaterial reality. In other words, you are assuming some version of mathematical Platonism. While some naturalists are mathematical Platonists, lots of them reject Platonism. Thus, insofar as your argument relies on this assumption, it can be challenged by these naturalists. My guess is that you'll still object, but you'll have to reframe your objection within a materialistic ontology.

Second, the naturalists that do accept platonism tend to be holists about epistemic confirmation. What this means is that they do regard the truth of mathematical systems--even immaterial mathematical systems, to be a result of empirical scientific investigation. The indispensibility arguments attempt to show that mathematical objects exist by pointing out that they are posits of our best scientific theories and in accepting those theories we accept all of the consequences--includiing the existence of abstract objects.

The relevance this has to your claim is around the assumptions you are making about when the truth of a belief is relevant to its survival value. While you haven't explicitly spelled this out, it seems that you are using as a criterion whether the belief has any empirical implications. I assume this is because the elements of a proposition that doesn't have any empirical implications would not causally interact with our experience of the world and so would not have an effect one way or the other on our evolutionary success.

However, under an holistic model of empiricism, such as Quine proposed, this argument would fail. The elements of an empirically confirmed system, even if those elements are immaterial would be justified as a whole. Thus, even though the abstract objects of math would not themselves causally interact with human experience, the rest of our experience, which relies in part on assuming the existence of these abstract objects would constitute indirect empirical proof of their existence.

But this doesn't really answer the question of whether the cognitive processes that underlie our judgements about which theories have the best holistic empirical support are really truth-apt. Perhaps only the elements of these processes that apply directly to our experience are truth-apt and the rest are not.

Here are two responses: First, insofar as that is the case, the indispensability arguments would seem to then fail in proving mathematical platonism--which means we are back where we started. Second, here the cognitive process in question is not really some direct intuition or perception of the mathematical abstract objects, but rather some kind of inference or induction from our general understanding of a world to an ontology, and then an empirical testing of that overall understanding. But it is not clear to me that the inference to the existence of material objects like the electron, the heart, or even of predators back on the savannah is different in kind from the inference to the existence of an abstract object. Sure, some of these cases are much more complex or explicit than others, but it is in the same category of reasoning. Thus, I'm not sure that even if the subject matter of a proposition is an immaterial object that its truth is not open to empirical investigation and hence, presumably, to some connection to evolutionary advantage or disadvantage.

Anyway, that's long enough for now.

Completely understandable. I hope your writing is going well.

I agree with this. I do not think that naturalism plus evolution produces global skepticism.

Okay.

Sure, we can go back to straight materialism. I would need at least a little clarification of how the materialist attempts to conceptualize mathematics, even if such a clarification ends up being lacking somehow. For example, how might one attempt to discuss the truth value of a claim such as "There exist infinitely many primes" in a reality-correspondence sense. Is the problem turned into some sort of internal-language-game-coherence concept? It seems that this would be the only direction of resolution, but I could be wrong. (The materialist is could not talking about true in the "reality" sense as in the platonists do, so it seems like it *MUST* refer to language. But then what does "true" correspond to? Something about the language itself, and not reality. At least, it seems that way to me.)

Beyond that, I think my position has been laid out:

So there are two arguments:

1) The materialist must somehow provide an account of numbers and mathematical theories as being material (those things that the platonist would deem "immaterial") while maintaining a reality-correspondence concept of truth (as a language consistency/coherence concept of truth does not get one to reality correspondence).

2) The materialist must also argue that evolutionary pressures can select cognitive processes that can reasonably be successful in discerning the truth value of mathematical claims that are far removed from simple arithmetic. We should grant that evolution does not pick the "right" answer immediately, but that it goes through multiple iterations ("trial and error") before it finds one that works. We have evolutionary pressures selecting processes that are valid for things like "1+1=2" (because these are the things that have evolutionary advantages), and we can start to see why these processes may pick out (eventually) processes that lead to the valid parsing of "1000+1000=2000." However, I think that there's a significant jump from arithmetic-type claims to claims involving things such as prime-ness, the real line, linear algebra, and whatever mathematical theories are used to determine the existence of things such as the Higgs boson. That's a huge tower built upon a small foundation, and it seems that some sort of argument is necessary to suggest the reliability of that foundation relative to the height of the tower. (See "reverse implications" below.)

I hesitate somewhat at the characterization of "empirical implications." Saying that "1+1=2" has empirical implications is reasonable since it means that "1 tiger + 1 tiger = 2 tigers." But I'm not sure that the other direction follows. That is, since "1 tiger + 1 tiger = 2 tigers" does it follow that "1+1=2"? That would mean that the two statements are logically equivalent, which I don't think is true.

So the belief that "1+1=2" surely has empirical implications, but I don't think this implies that evolutionary pressures would drive all arithmetic beliefs similarly. We can expect evolutionary pressures to select for something like "1+1=2" but not "1000+1000=2000." While the latter has empirical implications, it does not appear to be an evolutionarily advantageous belief.

I want to restate this to make sure I understand the claim. You're saying here that if holistic empiricism is successful, it denies mathematical platonism. I think I can go with that for a little while. I can grant it success in the areas of mathematics which interact with the physical world (those areas which can be applied to physics somehow). But I'm not sure that this extends to those corners of mathematics which have no physical implications. Since you're doing an indirect inference (we are not verifying the abstract object directly, but merely consequences of the existence of the abstract object), we are building a very long chain of basically "backwards" implications that I'm not sure can be purported to be reliable. That is, we empirically observe A which provides indirect evidence of B, and we indirectly observe B as evidence of C, and indirectly indirectly observe C as evidence of D... It seems like a very sketchy path to follow.

Are you suggesting that if something is open to empirical investigation that it therefore provides an evolutionary advantage? I don't agree with this. I think the example of 2000+2000 is a counter-example to this. The question is open to investigation, but I don't think that it can be argued that this belief has an evolutionary advantage. This brings us back to the objection raised above, that I don't think "empirical implication" implies "evolutionary advantage."

So i was reading a critique of plantinga (naturalism, evolution, and true belief by law, currently paywalled but presumably accessible to those with university access), that was useful in talking about the evolution of plantinga's argument.

Earlier iterations of the evolutionary argument against naturalism did not assume reductive materialism, only evolution and naturalism. Plantinga made the distinction where we might have various structures (presumably in brain) which can have neurophysical properties and semantic properties. It is easy to see how the physical properties affect behaviour, but the argument is that the semantic content (things like "truth" of a statement) can be swapped out willy nilly if the neurophysical properties remain the same (and hence the behaviour remaining the same).

There are several objections to this. But one such objection was to also assume reductive materialism. Because in this case, semantic properties ARE material in some way, and thus in the domain of things that can affect behaviour. As such, Plantinga had to come up with a new version of the argument where he accepts all three of naturalism, materialism, and evolution. So he accepts in this version that semantic properties like being true can affect behaviour, but is instead arguing that it is unlikely that evolution favours beliefs that are true. Which gets us to where we are in the thread, where I think everyone agrees that for certain domains of questions there IS a correspondence between the truth of beliefs and evolutionary advantageous, but there is a question as to whether this remains true in the domain of questions are removed from evolutionary pressures.

Anyways, I say this firstly because this historical development might not be known and might be interesting. But secondly, it underscores the point that the question of the argument is an epistemological one that assumes materialism, and if one has ontological questions regarding materialism by itself that might be interesting but isn't our subject of discussion; indeed, materialism far from being a weakness of the argument is assumed in an attempt to bolster the argument.

Yeah, it is. Thanks.