Dymanic said:
You may be able to persuade me that this is the case. Here is my present position:
Where fundamental limits to knowledge exist, we stand to gain, not lose, from identifying them. Heisenberg uncertainty and Gödelian incompleteness are two examples of specific descriptions of such limits. There may be others yet unidentified. The proper application of these tools is something which must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis; their mere possession does not constitute prima facie evidence of intent to use them to argue from ignorance.
The last sentence is the one where I see the problem again. First of all, I diid not assert anything about the "mere possession ot the 'tools.' The set up certainly is not the knowledge that there are things we don't yet know or even that there are things that we think we cannot know. The set up is to begin to argue for just about anything as a conclusion of that ignorance.ample:
If you were to say "we don't know whether we descended from Neanderthals or not, therefore we should invest more research funds on the issue," you would be making a reasonable and rational case.
Likewise, if you were to say "we don't know whether we descended from Neanderthals or not, and we have already spent $27m trying to find out, therefore we should not throw any more research funds down this black hole," you might also be making a reasonable and rational case.
If, on the other hand, you were to say "we don't know whether we descended from Neanderthals or not, therefore we must teach our children that the Old Testament's explanation is a viable, scientific one," you're engaging in the "Goddidit" thinking so often seen in Creationists. ("Goddidit" is nothing but the argument from ignorance.)
Transfer this to consciousness now, and say "we don't know how it is we are conscious, therefore there must be something immaterial involved." Why? There is no logic here. There is no epistemology here. Have we really exhausted material possibilities? One can hardly make a case for that. Is there any other real evidence in any other field of inquiry that supports such a conclusion? No. None. In fact, every line of inquiry in science for hundreds of years has continued to support a material universe. But suddenly we are to take this bizarre leap of faith and return to an anima/animus type of explanation? There's no support for it other than the beginning assertion: we don't know.
I don't know that you aren't actually George Bush. Wouldn't you and every reader of this forum mock the conclusion that you are? Why? You could be. The problem is, we know from everything else that we know we know that this is a highly unlikely conclusion. If we were totally ignorant of George Bush, but somewhat informed about basic probility and the earth's population, we must also laugh at that conclusion. There's no basis for it; it simply tries to leverage off ignorance.
So back to your previous post:
How many currently widely held conclusions were without evidence fifty or a hundred years ago?
Regardless of how many there may be, there were far far more wrong hypotheses that had to be tested before we could reach those new conclusions. Nearly each one was proposed tentatively. Most, nearly privately. Each with basis in fact, combined with some creative insight.
Let's take the biphospholipid basis of the cell's membrane. It was a bold hypothesis that would explain much that was then unknown about how cell walls worked. Was the original hypothesis based on bizarre speculation? No, it was based on a careful piecing together of research over time. It began in the thirties, when phospholipid behavior on water was first tested. We knew then that phospholipids were in the membrane and it was a natural test to se whether or not they could hold together a membrane. It worked. One problem: the surface tension was way too high. In the 50s biphosopholipid model was proposed. The research supported the model except that electron micrographs showed spaces that the model wouldn't predict. Back to the grind, and that grinding revealed embedded proteins, which would explain the spaces that the simpler model wouldn't explain.
Each step was painstakingly slow, with years in between steps. Each step was built by a small "what if" based on solid knowledge and a small part of the question. Each "what if" was based on knowledge from another area and asking if that operated here.
Simply jumping from "we don't know" to "therefore" gets nowhere. This is the fallacy; there is no basis for the therefore. And this is distinctly different from what happens in science. In science, we look at the materials we know that are in the body and ask "what combination, what processes, what interconnections are we missing in our quest to uncover the secrets of consciousness." Not "well, we don't know, so its a hard problem, so its probably fallen angels."
What evidence do we have that there is nothing that is fundamentally beyond our grasp?
