Why materialism ?

[rain]

Seem to imply under normal intuitive logic. You don't seem very sure.

"Material" doesn't mean "atoms" and "quarks". Material as in "materialism" includes energy and all that is observable.

Otherwise the rest of your post sounds like "I don't understand the physics behind all this, so I'd rather believe differently".

My knowledge of quantum physics is admittedly not that great, but I do make attempts to understand it. Obviously I'm not sure about what quantum physics implies in totality, but that's not a big deal because the scientific community is also not sure. This is why there are so many "quantum interpretations", some of which conclude that that there are parallel universes and others which posit that consciousness itself can cause the collapse of the wave function.

If you know more than me on the subject of physics, why would you make a statement such as this:

"I also think we'd all agree to say that something cannot exist and not exist at the same time, or rather, that something and its opposite cannot both be true simultaneously. The glass is either full or it isn't, the engine is either running or it isn't, and an event is either caused or not. But it can't be both or neither. That's very important because we have to be able to draw definitive conclusions based on observation. Once a proposition is known to be true, it can't be false, and vice-versa."

The possibility of the existence of simultaneous opposing states has been considered an open question of quantum physics for the last 80 years. Although some scientists but not all consider it partially resolved, there is still much unresolved "spookiness" to quantum physics, even in the words of quantum physicists themselves. Since you take for granted that opposing states can not concurrently exist, please feel free to tell us your solution to the famous Schrodinger's Cat thought paradox..

 

[rain]

Yes.

Under this line of reasoning, was the event of the Big Bang caused, random, or impossible? Please give reasons for your answer. Unless you can prove otherwise, whatever answer you choose can be considered an act of faith in my opinion.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Under this line of reasoning, was the event of the Big Bang caused, random, or impossible? Please give reasons for your answer. Unless you can prove otherwise, whatever answer you choose can be considered an act of faith in my opinion.

There is a lot of evidence for the Big Bang, so I don't think it's mere faith to assume it happened. Whether or not it was caused is an open question, no?

~~ Paul

 

[Beth]

Under this line of reasoning, was the event of the Big Bang caused, random, or impossible? Please give reasons for your answer. Unless you can prove otherwise, whatever answer you choose can be considered an act of faith in my opinion.

It was impossible. Therefore we are all figments of no one's imagination.

 

[rain]

There is a lot of evidence for the Big Bang, so I don't think it's mere faith to assume it happened. Whether or not it was caused is an open question, no?

~~ Paul

Absolutely. And I agree that is an open question as to whether or not it was caused or just sort of happened on its own.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that because there are still many open questions such as this regarding the basic fundamental truths of reality, I think being materialist is based more on opinion/guess or possibly faith than anything else.

It took a long time for scientists to get used to the idea of the Big Bang precisely in part because the idea of a finite point of creation did seem to sound more spiritual than scientific at the time. Many scientists would have preferred the idea of a static, unchanging universe because then a transcendental Will could be more easily ruled out. This sense of unease regarding the Big Bang was heightened by the fact that the Theory was introduced by a Catholic priest.

 

[rain]

It was impossible. Therefore we are all figments of no one's imagination.

Basically you just nailed Buddhism on the head. Alternatively, we are the figments of our own collective imaginations, in effect creating ourselves and the past and future universe out of nothing, such as in John Archibald Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle.

 

[Malerin]

Absolutely. And I agree that is an open question as to whether or not it was caused or just sort of happened on its own.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that because there are still many open questions such as this regarding the basic fundamental truths of reality, I think being materialist is based more on opinion/guess or possibly faith than anything else.

Amen, brother.

 

[Belz...]

The possibility of the existence of simultaneous opposing states has been considered an open question of quantum physics for the last 80 years. Although some scientists but not all consider it partially resolved, there is still much unresolved "spookiness" to quantum physics, even in the words of quantum physicists themselves. Since you take for granted that opposing states can not concurrently exist, please feel free to tell us your solution to the famous Schrodinger's Cat thought paradox..

But the cat doesn't exist and not exist at the same time: we just don't know.

 

[Belz...]

Under this line of reasoning, was the event of the Big Bang caused, random, or impossible?

I don't know. Nobody knows. But it's not NOT caused and NOT uncaused, I can tell you that.

My opinion, is that it is probably uncaused. A false vacuum, if you will. And it could pop at any time.

 

[Belz...]

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that because there are still many open questions such as this regarding the basic fundamental truths of reality, I think being materialist is based more on opinion/guess or possibly faith than anything else.

That would be an argument from ignorance. So far, every observation ever made and every theory and conclusion ever reached has been consistent with materialism. Now, it may be wrong, as a bare possibility, but just because we don't know one or two things is no reason to abandon the most successful metaphysics and start going solipsist, for instance.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

It must be a terrible decision for a philosopher in the path of a speeding truck - whether death is worse than committing a naive inductive fallacy.

It might be a terrible decision for an unconscious robot....

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~vaughan/teaching/889/papers/dennett-cognitivewheels.html

Back to the drawing board. `We must teach it the difference between relevant implications and irrelevant implications,' said the designers, `and teach it to ignore the irrelevant ones.' So they developed a method of tagging implications as either relevant or irrelevant to the project at hand, and installed the method in their next model, the robot-relevant-deducer, or R2D1 for short. When they subjected R2D1 to the test that had so unequivocally selected its ancestors for extinction, they were surprised to see it sitting, Hamlet-like, outside the room containing the ticking bomb, the native hue of its resolution sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, as Shakespeare (and more recently Fodor) has aptly put it. `Do something!' they yelled at it. 'I am,' it retorted. `I'm busily ignoring some thousands of implications I have determined to be irrelevant. Just as soon as I find an irrelevant implication, I put it on the list of those I must ignore, and...' the bomb went off.

 

[rain]

But the cat doesn't exist and not exist at the same time: we just don't know.

By overlooking possibilities, you are revealing your own particular biases again. Using "normal" logic, I would agree that it seems that an object that is both living and dead seems impossible. But you apparently don't know enough about quantum physics to realize that, although a controversial topic, it may be possible for simultaneous contradictory states to exist even on the macroscopic level.

There is a news article from a few month back entitled "How to Build 'Living Dead' Quantum Objects: Schrodinger's Cat may Soon be Possible" that you might want to google since I can't yet post links. But I will paste the first few lines from it:

"Following important advancements in the field of quantum physics and energy, scientists are currently working on a way to create Schrodinger's cat, a macroscopic object that is both dead and alive at the same time. It takes advantage of oddities recorded in quantum mechanics for electrons and molecules, which researchers say could translate to large objects as well.

However, the potential maximum sizes these hypothetical objects could reach is not yet clearly determined, but experts from the University of Arizona in Tucson took the first steps towards proving that a system of two objects can act as a whole, or as two different components working independently from each other."

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that because there are still many open questions such as this regarding the basic fundamental truths of reality, I think being materialist is based more on opinion/guess or possibly faith than anything else.

I don't think most scientists care much about metaphysics.

~~ Paul

 

[rain]

That would be an argument from ignorance. So far, every observation ever made and every theory and conclusion ever reached has been consistent with materialism. Now, it may be wrong, as a bare possibility, but just because we don't know one or two things is no reason to abandon the most successful metaphysics and start going solipsist, for instance.

I wouldn't say there are just one or two things we don't know. And some of the things we don't know are so pervasive and fundamental that in certain respects, it is actually quite embarrassing for many physicists to the point where they often now ignore the unobservable phenomena that connects their findings by labeling it unprovable "philosophy." In quantum physics, there are more new questions being raised than solid answers being found on a continuous basis. And to this day, no scientist has adequately solved the problem of what exactly allows for the nonlocal effects of quantum entanglement. This is what Einstein once called "spooky action at a distance." Two entangled particles could be separated by a space of billions of miles, and yet when an action is performed on one particle, the other particle would also respond. To me and most scientists, this signifies a HUGE gap in our understanding. It could allude to a vast, perhaps all-encompassing and unobservable backstage field of connectivity.

To put it simply, our sense of observable materialism may be like a small frame inside a much greater unobservable field that does not play by our "normal" rules. To use a crude analogy, if you had a character in a video game who could magically become sentient, how could he ever prove that there is a world outside of his limited frame of reference even though there might be clues but no solid evidence of a greater force? This is much the case with string theory which is also itself not based on observable evidence but rather on conveniently tying loose ends together.

 

[rain]

I don't think most scientists care much about metaphysics.

~~ Paul

Again I agree. And when the scientists are unable to connect the two fundamental systems of physics even after 80 years, they eventually just give up by calling the problem "philosophical in nature" allowing them to ignore it, or they make up fanciful and fundamentally untestable "theories" such as String Theory so they can sleep more soundly at night.

 

[dlorde]

Quite the opposite. Free will is the freedom to make choices. Making choices means weighing options in a manner flavored with your personality and your current context vis-a-vis external reality.

Free will can thus only be a deterministic process. Of course you can throw in a few true, quantum-random particles from time to time to scramble it a bit, but that doesn't really affect the core nature of free will.

This is how I see it too. When alternative courses of action are possible (in principle), 'free will' is the label we give to the conscious awareness of the process of selecting the course that most closely matches our 'preferences' (projected preferred state) at some moment - those preferences being a weighed sum of various internal biases compared against the projected results of the alternative actions (or the memory of previous similar projections). It's all deterministic, but, with self-referential processing involved, potentially unpredictable - like the weather, periods of relative predictability may be interspersed with chaotic periods of unpredictability. ISTM that all that matters for 'free will' is that we are aware of weighing the options and acting on the result, and are not aware of undue constraints or coercions. On one level, it is illusory because the process is deterministic, on another level it's quite valid as an experiental phenomenon - the action that is the choice is the result of complex processing that is unique to the individual and the individual is aware of that.

 

[rain]

This is how I see it too. When alternative courses of action are possible (in principle), 'free will' is the label we give to the conscious awareness of the process of selecting the course that most closely matches our 'preferences' (projected preferred state) at some moment - those preferences being a weighed sum of various internal biases compared against the projected results of the alternative actions (or the memory of previous similar projections). It's all deterministic, but, with self-referential processing involved, potentially unpredictable - like the weather, periods of relative predictability may be interspersed with chaotic periods of unpredictability. ISTM that all that matters for 'free will' is that we are aware of weighing the options and acting on the result, and are not aware of undue constraints or coercions. On one level, it is illusory because the process is deterministic, on another level it's quite valid as an experiental phenomenon - the action that is the choice is the result of complex processing that is unique to the individual and the individual is aware of that.

One problem with this is how does true randomness creep into a deterministic system of choices made by living beings? Studies in entomology have shown that insects, even when the environment is very limited and variables strictly accounted for, will still move in individualistic, unpredictable patterns. You could argue that they are wired for randomness through deterministic means, but this is a bit of a paradox I think if the process of how the randomness occurs cannot be accounted for.... Where is the virtual dice and thrower that makes one cockroach zig while another zags?

As for free will in more complicated beings like humans, I think you have to take things like cognitive dissonance into account. You make it sound as though a person's mind will constantly weigh out biases and information and come to a singular choice of absolute resolve, but I think you are oversimplifying it. For example, the conscious mind often has a very different view of a given situation than the unconscious mind. Sometimes I make decisions I absolutely hate, knowing full well that I should not choose a given path even as I am making the decision, but yet I allow myself to cave to my unconscious fears. These unconscious fears are not just simply biases or prejudices; they are things my conscious mind absolutely 100 percent knows are no big deal and yet I sometimes allow them to have power over me. How can all decisions be described as a deterministic weighing-out process if there exists more than one part of the mind capable of making decisions? If you say that one side of the mind will always triumph over the other, what causes the success in light of the fact that on another day with a similar mindset, the other path may have been equally likely to occur? Sure, it could be a complex illusion to believe that both paths are equally likely to occur especially given so many variables in human life, but I don't see why if it is an illusion, the illusion should exist in the first place. If free will wasn't real, why would the mind need to create unpleasantness as a side effect for a decision we know we probably shouldn't have made? In this case, we should just be philosophical zombies who would experience emotions as mere attachment with no sense of "qualia." From an evolutionary standpoint, we don't need to have such feelings of dissonance to function and be successful so they should simply not exist because they actually get in the way of our pursuits. As another example, if I had a nightmare last night or even daydream that I found extremely unpleasant, what allowed my unconscious mind to allow for something that my conscious mind would have vetoed?

 

[Lord Emsworth]

One problem with this is how does true randomness creep into a deterministic system of choices made by living beings? Studies in entomology have shown that insects, even when the environment is very limited and variables strictly accounted for, will still move in individualistic, unpredictable patterns. You could argue that they are wired for randomness through deterministic means, but this is a bit of a paradox I think if the process of how the randomness occurs cannot be accounted for.... Where is the virtual dice and thrower that makes one cockroach zig while another zags?

I hope you are not being serious here. Getting different results from, if even yet so slightly different starting conditions is not very surprising. Test it out with a pRNG if you like.

And a study on bugs, even if exceptionally well done, can hardly control all factors involved. Cockroach A is not Cockroach B for a start. Some unpredictability in the observed behaviour bugs is a far cry from objective (or true) randomness.

 

[pchams]

Isn't free will what will be done in the absence of empathy?

 

[pchams]

...and isn't absence of empathy an antisocial mental condition?