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eddiep Posts: 5 Joined: May 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 04 2007,09:43    I hope it's ok to start a new topic even if you've only been a lurker for a long time. If not, sorry! Over on Pharyngula, Sastra posted:   Quote A clumsy, childlike understanding of "materialism" argues that anything which is not clearly made of matter and energy can't be accounted for. Thus, a "materialist" can't believe in abstractions, concepts, numbers, feelings, processes, thoughts, minds -- anything which can't be easily measured,weighed, and carried around in a hand. If he or she does, they're presumably contradicting themselves. ( Pharyngula, comment 31) I hope I don't come off as a concern troll, this is just an issue I've been interested in for a long time. I'm interested in your opinions. I've gained a lot of respect for the regulars here, and and professional or even amateur opinions on this topic are welcome. Specifically, how do we account for those things that are not made up of matter and energy? Or does that questions contain an incorrect premise in the first place? Anyone who cares to offer an opinion, I appreciate it. BTW, I hope this is not off topic for ATBC. With all the incoherent screaming the IDers do about materialism, I hope it's relevant. Ed P

Louis Posts: 6436 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 04 2007,10:18    Emergent phenomena? Name something not made out of matter and energy. Louis P.S. I'm not hostile at all to the idea of "abstracts" but I like to know what people mean by them. P.P.S. Added in edit: AFAIK anyone can start new topics, it's certainly an interesting one you've started, so welcome! I'd give it my insignificant "on-topic" vote as I reckon (as you say) it is part of the unpicking of the assumptions held by IDCists and others. Have a beer on me! -------------- Bye.

eddiep Posts: 5 Joined: May 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 04 2007,13:07    Hi, Louis. How about the number 5, or the rules of logical inference? It's not that I think there's any sort of Platonic 5 up there in heaven. It's an argument I don't think I have a good answer for, to be honest. And thanks for the welcome.

Mr_Christopher Posts: 1238 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 04 2007,13:30    Quote (eddiep @ April 04 2007,13:07) Hi, Louis. How about the number 5, or the rules of logical inference? It's not that I think there's any sort of Platonic 5 up there in heaven. It's an argument I don't think I have a good answer for, to be honest. And thanks for the welcome. Previously you asked "Specifically, how do we account for those things that are not made up of matter and energy? " Um, the number 5 follows the number 4 and come right before number 6. And I am not familiar with the "rules of logical inference" Can you tell us what those rules are? -------------- Uncommon Descent is a moral cesspool, a festering intellectual ghetto that intoxicates and degrades its inhabitants - Stephen Matheson

stephenWells Posts: 127 Joined: April 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 04 2007,15:30    Quote (eddiep @ April 04 2007,09:43) I hope it's ok to start a new topic even if you've only been a lurker for a long time. If not, sorry! Over on Pharyngula, Sastra posted:   Quote A clumsy, childlike understanding of "materialism" argues that anything which is not clearly made of matter and energy can't be accounted for. Thus, a "materialist" can't believe in abstractions, concepts, numbers, feelings, processes, thoughts, minds -- anything which can't be easily measured,weighed, and carried around in a hand. If he or she does, they're presumably contradicting themselves. ( Pharyngula, comment 31) I hope I don't come off as a concern troll, this is just an issue I've been interested in for a long time. I'm interested in your opinions. I've gained a lot of respect for the regulars here, and and professional or even amateur opinions on this topic are welcome. Specifically, how do we account for those things that are not made up of matter and energy? Or does that questions contain an incorrect premise in the first place? Consider Poincare's comment that "Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science." His point was that it's not only ingredients that matter, but also the relationship between them I think the same idea is how we deal with abstract concepts. Materialism- though I would prefer to call it naturalism, or realism- allows for not only matter and energy, but also relationships between entities made of matter and energy. Digression- I should note that the "matter and energy" card is a straw man anyway- time, space, charge, spin etc. are perfectly realistic and are not matter/energy. Anyway- once you allow relationships between "material" things then you get the semi-abstract ideas of length, duration etc. All of our ideas, even the most abstract, are ultimately patterns of brain activity, and perfectly physical/natural as far as we can tell, so our ideas are physically instantiated. Concepts like truth, in turn, I think are about the relationship between statements and reality, which in turn is about congruence between a mental model of the world and an observation of the world, which again comes down to brain activity. Anyway, materialism/naturalism for me is simply the idea that the real world is in fact real and not haunted by leprechauns. If you meet a real leprechaun then he gets to be part of the real world too :)

qetzal Posts: 311 Joined: Feb. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 04 2007,15:53    Quote (eddiep @ April 04 2007,09:43) I hope I don't come off as a concern troll, this is just an issue I've been interested in for a long time.... Specifically, how do we account for those things that are not made up of matter and energy? The question is interesting, but I don't see why it should be a concern. At least, not in the sense of being incompatible with naturalism, if that's what worries you. We can't really account for things that are made up of matter and energy either. We simply observe that they exist.

Kristine Posts: 3061 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 04 2007,15:53    Indeed. How can there be a supernatural, anyway? If angels and devils exist, aren’t they natural? (Just a rhetorical question – I really don’t care about angels and devils.) I differentiate between reality, which is the world of phenomena, and truth, which is a mental model of reality. Reality is “out there,” but truth is a human value. Attaining “truth” is more ideal than method – it means to have our model of reality square with reality. Numbers are our models of relationships that we see in the behaviors of real things. Numbers don’t exist “out there” in any Pythagorean sense, but matter behaves in ways that allow us to conceive of these behaviors in terms of numbers. One cell splits into two daughter cells. You can assign whatever name or symbol to the result, but the result is a material fact and remains so. You can argue that 2 + 2 = 5 all you want, but if you have chromosomes that fuse or certain kinds of gene duplication, you may not end up with a brain to argue with in the first place. The universe does not think – it just acts. We think about how it acts (hopefully). To have the software of the mind, one must first have the hardware – and the software can propose ideas that contradict the reality of the hardware. Frankly, I don’t think consciousness is all it’s cracked up to be. We’re screwing up the planet because of our idea of being the lords of creation. Ideas are more real to too many people than life itself, than in living life now. Especially in the West we’re obsessed with reducing everything to words and symbols. Holy scripture is what is truly reductionist in my opinion, not science, because at least science is a way of doing. -------------- Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip? AtBC Poet Laureate "I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive "Damn you. This means a trip to the library. Again." -- fnxtr

"Rev Dr" Lenny Flank Posts: 2560 Joined: Feb. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: April 04 2007,19:40    Quote (Kristine @ April 04 2007,15:53) The universe does not think – it just acts. We think about how it acts My, that is very Taoist of you. -------------- Editor, Red and Black Publishers www.RedandBlackPublishers.com

eddiep Posts: 5 Joined: May 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 05 2007,07:56    Thanks for all of the replies. They're very helpful. I didn't think the issue I raised was a problem for naturalism. It may even be more of a linguistic issue. But it's easy to see, for me at least, where the tendency to think this way comes from. How could I know that the 5 I think about and the 5 you think about are the same 5, unless 5 exists independently of us? And if it does, what is it made of? And so on and so on. What I love about science (as a layman), is that it cuts through these sorts of issues, by working via a method that allows practitioners to predict the results of investigations. Saying you can do something, and then doing it, and doing it in a way that allows others to reliably do it as well, is pretty powerful. But these more philosophical issues continue to interest me as well, thus the question. And again, thanks for the replies. After all these years I should know a lot better than to simply accept the premise of a challenge, rather than examining it.

Louis Posts: 6436 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 05 2007,08:33    Hi Eddie, Ah the old "is the purple you see the purple I see" question! It's a doozy. To the best of my knowledge we can say nothing about the ultimate expression of this question. What we can say is that the frequencies of light that I recognise as purple are the same that you recognise as purple and that the bits of my brain and eye that trigger when I see a purple object are the same bits of your brain that trigger when you see the same purple object. Does the colour purple I see in my brain look the same to you? I can never know. In a sense it's a meaningless question. As an aside however I did once think that everyone's favourite colour was the same and it was just the processing of our brains that made us claim different colours. So whilst out brains respond the same way to the same stimulus (for the sake of example) what I see as blue is what you see as red. You claim your favourite colour is red, I claim mine is blue, but actually they are the same "colour". Again it's an unknowable. With 5 it's an easier question. We have a universally agreed on definition of "5". The word is almost meaningless in this sense, it is a token we use to exchange ideas and concepts which we have in common. Before someone else does it I'll mention the limits of science, of reason and observation. We can never know something to 100% accuracy. That initially seems like a problem, but it really isn't. We can however know something to 99.99999999999% accuracy (see quantum electrodynamics for example, theory agrees with observation to an 11 decimal place accuracy, not fricking bad! ) which is so similar to 100% that it makes no difference. When we finally have a Theory of Everything, a set of mathematical expressions which can predict the outcome of every physical phenomenon and full descriptions  of every phenomenon observed by all humans ever, we will only have our first model, our first approximation. That doesn't mean it's a BAD approximation though! So while I cannot know if your purple is my purple we can do something very useful. We can interact on the basis of a mutually agreed definition of something as purple and work from that basis. Yes it's potentially an incorrect or shifting basis, but then who said the universe was going to be all beer and peanuts and firmly anchored? One doesn't find the ONE TRUE ANCHOR, one finds the best anchor one can. As for abstracts as emergent phenomena, one of the serial joys of the universe is that relatively simple systems undergoing relatively simple interactions can produce very complex systems. Things like the logical rules of inference are just simple ways of expressing how we see things interact and how we can extract useful (i.e. predictive) information from those interactions. They're like a shorthand. Louis -------------- Bye.

Kristine Posts: 3061 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 05 2007,19:09    Louis, you just touched on something very important, that "relatively simple systems undergoing relatively simple interactions can produce very complex systems." I think this is what sticks in the creo-ID craw. They assume that complexity cannot arise from simplicity. They cannot even imagine it and they're stuck. All one needs to demonstrate how easy it is to create complexity is to swing a metal pendulum between two magnets, and then add a third magnet and try to predict the pendulum's behavior. But it's almost gospel with people that simple rules lead to simple results. I think this is a very common misconception. Hence the call for a "simple morality," etc. (Doesn't obeying one of the Ten Commandments ever present a situation in which a strict moralist must disobey another, for example?) -------------- Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip? AtBC Poet Laureate "I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive "Damn you. This means a trip to the library. Again." -- fnxtr

Louis Posts: 6436 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 06 2007,05:22    Kristine, TYVM! Getting a serious and thoughtful answer is even more satisfying than a shimmy ;-) (Re-reading that sentence I see it could be interpreted in many ways. I mean it in the best sense, so pick that one and take it in that vein! ) Emergent phenomena are big whoop at the moment, everything is going "Systems". One of my favourites is the phonon (actually named after the guy who posts here at ATBC, no really....ok maybe not). Rather than me retype a whole slew of stuff, for those who don't already know about them, here's a good intro: Phonon Emergent phenomena As always you make an excellent point, but obviously you realise that adding a third magnet is perversion and the work of the devil! ;-) You raise something I find interesting, with so many IDCists and YECs being engineers and mathsy types what I don't get is HOW they can have "overlooked" the phenomenon of complexity and emergence (in the sense mentioned above). The pendulum experiment you mention is a classic and a brilliant illustration of simple in =/= simple out. But as with many things I encounter with the IDCists of this universe, the mind simply boggles at their capacity for doublethink and dissonance. Oh and to briefly stray back onto topic, I think that a lot of linguistic abstracts and concepts are emergent properties of the means we have to convey ideas and communicate. But I might be wrong about that. Louis -------------- Bye.

Steviepinhead Posts: 532 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 06 2007,19:51    And here I always thought that "abs' tracks" were those grooves in between my six-pack muscles... :(

stephenWells Posts: 127 Joined: April 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 06 2007,19:59    Quote (eddiep @ April 05 2007,07:56) How could I know that the 5 I think about and the 5 you think about are the same 5, unless 5 exists independently of us? And if it does, what is it made of? Again, so long as we're counting the same pebbles, we have the same number in mind when we say 5. It doesn't have to be made of anything. What is distance made of?

qetzal Posts: 311 Joined: Feb. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 06 2007,20:38    Quote (Louis @ April 05 2007,08:33) Hi Eddie, Ah the old "is the purple you see the purple I see" question! It's a doozy. To the best of my knowledge we can say nothing about the ultimate expression of this question. What we can say is that the frequencies of light that I recognise as purple are the same that you recognise as purple and that the bits of my brain and eye that trigger when I see a purple object are the same bits of your brain that trigger when you see the same purple object. Does the colour purple I see in my brain look the same to you? I can never know. In a sense it's a meaningless question. I think the only reasonable answer is yes, we do see the same thing. We're all receiving light of the same wavelengths. Our brains process the signals from our retinas, and have learned to label that particular set of signals "purple." We don't really see purple in our brains, and it doesn't matter if the exact neural pathways are non-identical between you and me. We're still responding to the same wavelengths of light, and labeling them the same way. That's the only meaningful sense in which we "see" any color. It's not really different than the example of "5" except of course that there's more room for individuals to disagree on the boundaries of "purple."

ofro Posts: 19 Joined: Jan. 2007 (Permalink) Posted: April 06 2007,21:48    Quote (qetzal @ April 06 2007,20:38)   Quote (Louis @ April 05 2007,08:33) Hi Eddie, Ah the old "is the purple you see the purple I see" question! It's a doozy. To the best of my knowledge we can say nothing about the ultimate expression of this question. What we can say is that the frequencies of light that I recognise as purple are the same that you recognise as purple and that the bits of my brain and eye that trigger when I see a purple object are the same bits of your brain that trigger when you see the same purple object. Does the colour purple I see in my brain look the same to you? I can never know. In a sense it's a meaningless question. I think the only reasonable answer is yes, we do see the same thing. We're all receiving light of the same wavelengths. Our brains process the signals from our retinas, and have learned to label that particular set of signals "purple." We don't really see purple in our brains, and it doesn't matter if the exact neural pathways are non-identical between you and me. We're still responding to the same wavelengths of light, and labeling them the same way. That's the only meaningful sense in which we "see" any color. It's not really different than the example of "5" except of course that there's more room for individuals to disagree on the boundaries of "purple." Be careful:  We don’t even necessarily see the same thing. Answering the question about “5” is probably easy since, as Louis said, we can come up with a reasonable definition for it, and all we have to do is stick to this definition.  I think we are on similar safe grounds when we work through the logic and rules of mathematics. Anything that involves the human brain for physical observation, however, is much less certain.  There is no guarantee that a physical sensation made by one individual’s body’s sensors/receptors is processed and perceived is the same as that by another individuals.  In fact, there can be significant differences among different individuals.   An extreme case to make it obvious:  the ultimate color perception of a “normal” and a red/green colorblind individual.  The physical input (light of a certain wavelength) is the same, but the primary light-detecting machinery (the set of color-sensitive cones of the retina with their color-specific opsins) differs between normal and color blind individuals. Things also differ in the neural processing machinery of a signal.  For example, there is a condition called synesthesia .  Just to mess up the “5” example a bit, in grapheme-color synesthesia, an individual actually senses a color when seeing a number. The solution?  Use your senses as a “first approximation”, but rely on physical instruments to measure a quantity.  Provided the measuring instruments are properly set up, physical measurements are reality.

qetzal Posts: 311 Joined: Feb. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 07 2007,11:57    Quote (ofro @ April 06 2007,21:48) Anything that involves the human brain for physical observation, however, is much less certain.  There is no guarantee that a physical sensation made by one individual’s body’s sensors/receptors is processed and perceived is the same as that by another individuals.  In fact, there can be significant differences among different individuals.   An extreme case to make it obvious:  the ultimate color perception of a “normal” and a red/green colorblind individual.  The physical input (light of a certain wavelength) is the same, but the primary light-detecting machinery (the set of color-sensitive cones of the retina with their color-specific opsins) differs between normal and color blind individuals. Things also differ in the neural processing machinery of a signal.  For example, there is a condition called synesthesia .  Just to mess up the “5” example a bit, in grapheme-color synesthesia, an individual actually senses a color when seeing a number. I agree color perception is more complicated, and I purposely ignored colorblindness, synesthesia, etc. for simplicity. My basic point is just this: if you and I agree which things are purple and which are not, I think we are "seeing" the same color by definition. I think the idea that purple might somehow "look" yellow to me, even though I call it purple, is meaningless.

Reciprocating Bill Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 07 2007,12:18    (Such a huge topic)... A short think prompts me to state that abstraction is first a cognitive tool, one that operates over experiences and observations to build more general representations of the phenomena observed. Some of those representations are public and highly formalized (mathematics, scientific theories). Many phenomena can be detected and manipulated only by means of the tools and techniques of abstract representation. It doesn't follow from this that there is a Platonic realm where these abstractions exist, reified, apart from the cognitive, community activity of abstraction and the experiences and observations over which those abstractions operate. The question that is of real interest is something more like, "is it the case that all phenomena ultimately supervene upon physics and physical description?" Or, more accurately, "are the theoretical structures that explain phenomena at these high levels of abstraction ultimately amenable, at least in principle, to formal reduction to the theoretical, experimental, and mathematical apparatus of physics? If they are, is that worth doing?" It is tempting to respond "yes" in an unqualified way (as did E.O. Wilson in "Consilience"), but cashing that out in real terms isn't so easy, and often may not be worth the effort. Does the application of game theory within cognitive science supervene upon quantum physics, in the sense that the behavior of organisms predicted by game theory is reducible to physical description? Is there a causal account of the aesthetics of musical composition that can be reduced in the same way? Can empirical economics be reduced to physical explanation? Would access to the complete physical causal account of the contest we call "a game of chess" enable one to play chess more skillfully, or design a more powerful chess playing computer program? As a practical matter, probably not. It doesn't follow either that music and economic activity and chess don't exist, OR that they exist within their own metaphysical realms that are independent of the biology, chemistry, and physics of the organisms that pursue such activities. What is apparent is that the mathematical and physical apparatus of physics provides often unwieldy and inappropriate tools for application in those other domains, and theory and investigation at a higher level of abstraction is worth retaining.   When expressed in terms of intertheoretic reduction, rather than actual supervenience "in reality," some questions become a little less urgent. For example, the problem of consciousness and subjective 'qualia' ("is consciouness really just physics and chemistry?) becomes a bit less urgent: we don't have much in the way of a theory of consciousness and subjectivity, qua phenomenology, in the first place, much less one that may (or may not) be amenable to formal reduction. We mostly have folk psychology and some head scratching speculation. See Jerry Fodor's amusing take on E.O. Wilson's Consilience for more on this, here. -------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be. "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace "Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington

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