u/Training-Promotion71

The notion that the actual world could still be a natural world if God created it is, to me, incoherent. The coexistence of God and a natural world is possible only if God did not create the natural world. If God created the world, then it is, by definition, an artifact rather than a natural object. In that sense, supernaturalism is incompatible with creationism. If creationism is true, the world is artificial, not natural. Consequently, naturalism is not more parsimonious than theism simply because it posits "the natural world" whereas theism posits "the natural world plus God." If theism is true, reality is not a natural world plus God but a created artifact whose existence depends on God. There are no brute artifacts.

JD Vance said that the occupants of UFOs are biblical demons. According to the Bible, one of the occupants of a UFO is Yahweh. Surely the Vice President does not deny the credibility of the relevant portions of the Bible. Therefore, JD Vance is committed to the view that Yahweh is a biblical demon.

Eleonore Stump argues that personhood is fundamentally relational. She thinks that persons are not defined solely by rationality and autonomy but also by their capacity for meaningful interpersonal relationships. Drawing on Aquinas' conception of a person as being endowed with intellect and will, she extends Martin Buber's I-Thou framework by arguing that persons are naturally oriented toward second-person relationships with one another and, ultimately, with God.

It strikes me as obvious that we also stand in an I-Thou relation to ourselves. The clearest examples are primarily motivational: we encourage ourselves, exhort ourselves, reproach ourselves, curse or rebuke ourselves, make promises to ourselves, and forgive ourselves. These forms of inner dialogue seem to suggest that second-personal relations are not exclusively interpersonal but also intrapersonal, and it seems to me that they are, at least, as much as intrapersonal as interpersonal.

The idea of the second-person perspective is that one relates to oneself as someone who one can address. Namely, one addresses oneself as you, taking oneself as the addressee instead of as the subject I or the object he, she, or it. The narrative modes of first-, second-, and third-person perspectives are derived from the grammatical categories of person: first person (I, we), second person (you), and third person (he, she, it). Maybe this is how Trinitarians should model their God.

Some philosophers, (e.g., Akeel Bilgrami), believe that at least first- and third-person perspective are not merely grammatical categories. As per Stump's account, relationality is metaphysical. It is not merely social, since it belongs to the very nature of personhood. One of the empirical considerations she discusses concerns the capacity of neonates for what is sometimes described as "mind-reading". Even newborns display an intuitive sensitivity to the mental states of others, for example, by imitating actions such as tongue protrusion. The significance of these findings is not merely that infants imitate behaviour but that they appear predisposed from the outset to engage in relational interaction. Human beings seem naturally equipped to understand, respond to and form bonds with other persons. What about Elon?

Stump also argues that emotional contagion is not confined to members of the same species. As an example, she cites contagious yawning between humans and dogs as evidence that certain affective responses can cross species boundaries. She extends this discussion to animal altruism, noting cases in which dolphins have been reported to rescue humans as well as other dolphins. Likewise, she points to studies of rats exhibiting empathetic behaviour toward one another, findings that, only a few decades ago, many researchers would have dismissed as implausible or even nonsensical. Together, these examples support the idea that relational and empathetic capacities are more widespread in the animal kingdom than was once believed.

Stump has theological motivations for taking the expression of personhood to involve not only the possession of intellect and will, but also the capacity for intentional, second-personal engagement, since on her view, our relationships with other persons prepare us for our ultimate relationship with God, who is the paradigmatic person.

I think that one could reinterpret this framework without appealing to God. If God were instead reinterpreted as the unconscious mind, and if the I-Thou relation were taken to include intrapersonal as well as interpersonal relations, then Stump's relational account could be developed in a more naturalistic direction. That is my own speculative suggestion.

Paraphrasing: "If you have free will and you are against killing living beings, why you don't go vegan? Eating meat proves to me you have no free will, just as billions of other people who eat meat don't."

The “meat” billions of people eat every day isn’t meat at all. Those factory farms where animals are supposedly suffering are totally fake, man. Those tales of suffering are but a most elaborste jest. I give you my gentleman’s word, I do hereby proclaim with the utmost sincerity and responsibility that no beast hath ever suffered nor hath any creature ever been slain for the feast of mankind. Verily, it was all but a prank and we were all deceived.

Randy Gallistel said that in contemporary IT, all information is stored and transmitted by bit patterns. Bit patterns are numbers and the machinery that performs the foundational computational operations is designed and optimized for numerical processing. He demands justification for assuming that the brain is different.

Here's one: brains aren't artificial objects, they are natural objects. In other words, they aren't devices designed and optimized for any purposes, a fortiori, for specific purposes. If, for the sake of argument, we ignore Gallistel's potential commitment to creationism, he at least has to show that these artificial objects or systems can plausibly arise in nature.

Is there a reason to believe that we are conscious? What's the reason? That we are conscious? If we're going to cite the fact that we are conscious as the reason for believing that we are conscious, then we can likewise cite the fact that we have free will as the reason for believing that we have free will. After all, it is among our most immediate experiences, viz., among the things that are most obviously true. So it would make no sense to deny its reality without a reason stronger than the reason for believing something that is most obviously true. But there can't be any such reason. Nothing is more obviously true than what's most obviously true.

We are more certain that there is free will than that there is an external world. Denialists cite physics as the reason for rejecting the reality of free will, but physics requires the reality of an external world and the reality of an external world is less certain than the reality of free will. Worse, if there is no free will, there is no physics. If denialists cite physics, there is physics. Therefore, there is free will.

The Old Testament is not a collection of books about God, for a very simple reason, namely, there is no notion of God in Biblical Hebrew. Iow, there is no term corresponding to “God” in the Old Testament. But Christian theists are committed to the God of the Old Testament, so if Christian theism is true, there is God in the Old Testament. But there is no God in the Old Testament. Therefore, Christian theism is false.

Another problem for Christian theists is that even if we grant that the Old Testament should be interpreted in theological terms, it straightforwardly supports polytheism rather than monotheism.

I take strong scientific realism to be the proposition that every object essential to the construction or employment of our best scientific theories is an object that appears in the ontological inventory, in other words, every such object, if abstract, exists, or if concrete, has at least one instance.
In conjunction with the principle that we should endeavour to hold all and only true beliefs, strong scientific realism commits us to the soundness of indispensability arguments, that is arguments concluding that if positing x is essential to our best science, x exists.

Non-Euclidean geometries play an essential part in GPS navigation, so, by an indispensability argument, one of the things that a strong scientific realist is committed to is that space is non-Euclidean, however, liquids or gasses in equilibrium entail the Pythagorean theorem, and the Pythagorean theorem is equivalent to the parallel postulate. As the first law of thermodynamics ensures, on pain of perpetual motion machines, that liquids and gases have a state of equilibrium, the strong scientific realist is also committed to the stance that space is Euclidean.
Here we have a choice, we can appeal to the principle of non-contradiction and hold that as strong scientific realism, in conjunction with the principle that we should endeavour to hold all and only true beliefs, commits us to the belief that space both is and is not Euclidean, strong scientific realism is false. Alternatively, if we accept ontological pluralism, that space both is Euclidean and is not Euclidean, we can preserve strong scientific realism.

But this latter move has an interesting consequence. As Euclidean and non-Euclidean metrics are distinct, an ontologically pluralistic world, of this type, does not have a definite description, and if a world is determined, then, at all times, that world has a definite global description. So, strong scientific realism, in conjunction with the principle that we should endeavour to hold all and only true beliefs, commits us to the stance that determinism is false.

Natural objects are objects that exist or come into being without intelligent intervention, they are undesignable. You cannot design an undesignable thing. Artificial objects (i.e., artifacts) require intelligent intervention, they have to be designed, at least by things that are already designed. A thing that has to be designed cannot be undesignable. To say that a natural object is possibly an artifact is to say that an undesignable object may be designed, which is nonsense. But the above implies that if theism is true, the world is artificial. We cannot say that, for example, celestial bodies are both natural objects and created by God. There are no natural objects if theism is true.

This morning, I debated Adelstein (Bentham's Bulldog) on God's omnipotence, but something else he said partially inspired this short post, namely, that God is not bound by physical laws because he created them. We surely don't want to say that Isaac Newton is God. Physical laws are statements made by scientists. They supposedly approximate the apparently actual laws of nature. But laws of nature imply naturalism, so theists are committed to rejecting them.

Determinists on this sub are not advancing arguments that would persuade non-determinists to accept determinism. No exception. Nor are they offering arguments that would persuade people who are merely undecided.

What would such arguments be like? Here's one way they would be, they would be valid arguments whose premises are acceptable to their intended audience. If the audience consists of committed non-determinists, the premises have to be ones they already accept and the conclusion would have to establish or entail determinism. Unsurprisingly, if the audience consist of undecided non-determinists, the premises have to be acceptable to them and support the same conclusion.

If determinists on this sub are not doing that, then what are they doing?

They are persistently asserting many implausible, unbelievable, inconceivable, absurd, incoherent or plainly false claims while thinking and treating those claims as though they settled the issue or something. When asked to justify these claims, the response is usually just another round of assertions, thus reassertions plus evasions, downvotes or ad hominem remarks rather than an actual defense of the "argument". We have a cycle of repetition and misunderstanding, a total and utter cringe fest.

The more general problem, in my view, is that many members of this sub, certainly not only determinists, appear to not only lack a solid grasp of how philosophical argumentation works, which is relatively easy to fix, but they lack those core intellectual virtues and values like intellectual honesty, sincerity, curiosity and integrity. These are indispensable for any kind of serious constructive and productive discussion.

They also appear to misunderstand the central concepts involved in the free will debate, and topics, particularly the compatibility issue. Many discussions quickly shift to causation, reasons, or "everything having a cause", even though the present dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists is not about causation. This confusion leads many participants to argue against positions that either nobody is actually defending or aren't relevant. They often treat determinism as equivalent to causation, or assume that rejecting determinism requires believing that actions are random or uncaused. Neither assumption is correct. We have people who are completely ignorant about the topic, completely unwilling to learn a thing or two about the topic, but nevertheless, completely convinced that they know what they're talking about, spamming the sub.

In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the entry on arguments for incompatibilism, it is explained that the relevant notion of determinism is not a thesis about causation. Iow, determinism is not defined in terms of causation. It is standardly defined in terms of entailment: at any time, there is a complete description of the state of the world which together with the laws of nature entails a complete description of the state of the world at any other time.

The same misunderstanding extends to, e.g., libertarianism. Libertarianism is not simply the view that people have free will or that some events are uncaused. Libertarianism is the conjunction of free will realism and incompatibilism. Libertarians claim that (1) free will exists, e.g., humans possess free will, and (2) incompatibilism is true, i.e., free will is incompatible with determinism; which entails (3) determinism is false. Libertarians are incompatibilists who believe there is free will and this entails the falsity of determinism. If you want to attack libertarianism, appealing to randomness or appealing to causation does not, by itself, even address the libertarian position or the central compatibility dispute, so this is not the right way to argue against libertarians. Libertarians believe determinism is false because there's free will (since they are incompatibilists), and they don't believe the relevant free behavior is random. Is that clear?

The best explanation for God’s existence is human imagination, viz., God is a byproduct of human imagination. Anticipating objections along the lines that fictional objects do not exist, here's Schaffer’s argument for their existence:

1) Jules Verne created Captain Nemo

2) Therefore, Captain Nemo exists (1)

And here's an interesting objection: there is no reason to suppose that quantification is not ontologically neutral. After all, that there is x doesn't entail that x exists.

Schaffer says that this move is fishy, for consider the fact that denying the entailment commits us to sorts of ridiculous conjunctions such as x doesn't exist and there is x. The way Schaffer defends validity of the inference from (1) to (2) is by pointing out the fact that to create an object is to make it exist.

Can we still make a case for theism? Theists almost universally hold that God is uncreated. But they often say that God works in mysterious ways. It would be surely mysterious that a byproduct of human imagination created the world in which humans didn’t exist until very recently. It’s logically possible that a fictional entity created the world. Omnipotence is a capacity to do whatever is logically possible. Since God is omnipotent he could have done that. Of course, assuming that a fictional entity could be omnipotent. Confusing? Well, almost as confusing as my argument that God is an animal that lives outside the universe. The only two paramotivations I currently see for advancing such ridiculous arguments are (1) to have fun while waiting for boring Sunday dinner, and (2) the idea that reality or truth are far stranger than we assume, even in our wildest dreams. Perhaps this dream is superwild.

Gorgias, who mostly structured his arguments as polylemmatic reductios, argues that if Helen went to Troy, then she did so either by (a) fate or the will of the gods or (b) force or (c) persuasive speech or else (d) love. If she went to Troy because she was determined by fate or the will of the gods, then she is not to be blamed. If she was carried off by force, she's the victim and not the wrongdoer, so she is not to be blamed. If she was persuaded, speech has enormous power over the soul and can compel belief and action, then the persuader is to be blamed, not Helen. If she went to Troy by love, then either love is a god, in which case a human cannot resist it, or love is a disease and weakness of the soul, in which case it calls for pity rather than blame. Gorgias concludes that she cannot be blamed.

Descartes has an interesting counterexample to (c), namely, machines are compelled to act in a certain way, persons aren't. As Chomsky notes, Descartes was interested in the difference between being incited or inclined to do something or say something and being compelled to do so. So, persons as opposed to machines, are only incited or inclined to act in particular ways, but ultimately, the person chooses whether to act appropriately.

"Is there a greatest natural number?" is a yes or no question. The negative answer to this question is almost universally accepted. Presumably, those who answer positively have a serious burden to carry. For consider the famous proof against the existence of the greatest natural number:

1) Assume for reductio that there is a greatest natural number N

2) N+1 is a natural number

3) N+1 > N

4) Therefore, there is a natural number greater than N (2, 3)

5) Contradiction! (1, 4)

6) Therefore, 1 is false, viz., there is no greatest natural number (1-5)

For the sake of this post, those who deny there is a greatest natural number are called negativists, while those who accept that there is a greatest natural number are called positivists. There are ways in which positivists can resist the above proof. We see that the conjunction of 2 and 3 entails the falsity of 1, so positivists can deny one of the two. If either 2 or 3 alone entails the falsity of 1, then the corresponding premise is question-begging, in which case the proof is fallacious.

Suppose for starters that N is the greatest natural number, and let M=N+1. If M is greater than N, then M is not a natural number, otherwise, N is not the greatest natural number. But by assumption, N is the greatest natural number and since there is no natural number greater than the greatest natural number, if M is a natural number, it cannot be greater than N.

As positivists who do not deny both 2 and 3, deny either only 2 or only 3, in any of these cases the argument doesn't go through.

Consider the options available to positivists. If they deny 2, they are denying that N has a successor that is a natural number. Thus, N either has a successor that is not a natural number or it has no successors. In either case, N is a terminal element of the natural numbers. If they deny 3 while retaining 2, then N+1(equiv., M) is a natural number but not greater than N. Hence, N+1 must be either equal to N or less than N, implying that the successor operation is no longer strictly increasing. Finally, if they deny both 2 and 3, then they accept that N has no natural-number successor, and the claim that N+1 or M is greater than N never gets off the ground.

The immediate problem with these moves is that they might collapse as soon as we appeal to, say - Peano's arithmetic. Peano's axioms entail a unique successor for every natural number and that no natural number is its own successor. If M is not greater than N, it must be either equal to N or less than N. It cannot be less, because distinct natural numbers have distinct successors. So it would have to be equal to N, making N=M, hence, N is its own successor, which is impossible as per Peano arithmetic. But it seems to me that this only shows that the classical reductio is persuasive only if one already accepts Peano's axioms or an equivalent characterization of the natural numbers. But philosophers invested in questions such as whether there are numbers or whether there is a greatest counting number are not committed to deferring to mathematicians or their formal systems, for very obvious reasons, namely, mathematicians are not concerned with those issues in the sense philosophers are, and the aforementioned ontological questions do not concern formal systems.

God can apparently assume any form, e.g., the burning bush, a child or crepuscular rays. But God's real form is one of an old white-bearded white man in the sky. That's why humans are God's special creation, they look exactly like God. Well, at least elderly white-bearded white men do. But maybe God is just an individual in the heavenly society of divine men. Since the true form of divine beings is bodily, maybe that's why God places such importance on resurrection. After all, salvation is joining a heavenly community whose members have perfected bodies.

Xenophanes says that mortals opine that gods are born and have clothing, voices and form. If this specific opinion about gods is false, then a vast array of theisms is false. For example, Olympianism, which may be taken as a paradigmatic form of polytheism is thus false. The same goes for Christian theism as a paradigmatic form of monotheism. But then, both Olympianism and Christian theism would be false since gods don't even accidentally acquire those properties.

Suppose we take a stronger claim, namely that any antrophomorphization, or zoomorphization for that matter, of the gods is false. Muslims boast that their religion avoids this problem, but the problem is that the stronger claim rules out Islamic God as well because Islamic God possesses paradigmatically human properties, e.g., the knowledge of Arabic. If the stronger claim is correct, then if there are gods, they are nothing like humans. Generalizing further, they are nothing like animals. Thus, all animal-like gods are ruled out.

Xenophanes' worry was that if this particular mortal opinion about the gods is true, then gods at some time fail to exist. More precisely, the claim that gods are born implies they will die, which in turn implies a time at which the gods fail to exist. I think this conclusion is premature. First, assuming we are talking about propositions, birth doesn't imply death. Second, death doesn't imply birth. Third, death doesn't imply non-existence.

Suppose instead that gods can make themselves mortal. Gods can be born and look and behave exactly like humans. These properties would be accidental, and when they die, they are restored to their essential properties alone. Either gods can't make themselves look and behave exactly like humans or we don't know whether we are gods. After all, we don't know whether Donald Trump is Zeus. Maybe Zeus exists and he turned into Trump. We don't know.

Somebody recently said to me that it is inhuman to reject veganism and that there is no [use of] free will if we're not doing what's right.

First, here's a quick argument against the humanity of vegans:

1) Humans are omnivorous

2) Vegans are not omnivorous

3) Therefore, vegans are not humans (1, 2)

Second, what is this nonsense that free will is a capacity to do only what's right? If that were true, nobody could ever freely do anything wrong. Could there be free will if nobody could do anything wrong? In fact, could there be free will if nothing's right or if nothing's neither right nor wrong?

If reality were to disappear, would it still be true that we once existed?

No.

If reality disappears, there is no past, no present, and no future. There is no truth. There is nothing.

If there is nothing, then there are no facts left to make it true that we once existed.

Likewise, if reality were to disappear, would it still be true that reality disappeared?

No.

Now, it cannot be the case that there is something apart from reality. Hence, reality is either everything there is or nothing at all. But what cannot appear, cannot disappear, so if reality were nothing, then it couldn't disappear because nothing cannot appear. Yet if reality is not nothing, then its disappearance would require the appearance of nothing. Therefore, reality cannot disappear in either case.

Gabriel Markus argues that there is no world because the world is everything and there is no everything. Assuming reality and the world are synonimous terms, we can deploy the following argument:

1) Reality is everything

2) There is no everything

3) Therefore, there is no reality (1, 2)

Here, everything is understood as the absolute totality of existents. Realists about reality must reject either (1) or (2). Suppose the realist rejects (1). If it's not the case that reality is everything, then it is either one thing among many or nothing at all. But it isn't nothing because something appears. And it cannot be one thing among many because nothing exists apart from reality, i.e., reality wouldn't be what it is if something existed apart from it. If realists want to deny that, then they must adopt reality pluralism, viz., there could be many realities.

What about rejecting (2)? If there is everything, then it cannot be the case that there is something apart from everything. But if reality is not everything, there is something apart from reality. That there could be things that are outside reality sounds extremely implausible, if coherent at all.

If there is no external world, then there is no internal world either. There's an internal world only if there's some external world in relation to which the world in question is internal.

Another option is to say that neither an external nor an internal world exist, but rather that there is just the world. Our experience is simply a part of the world just like some foliage.