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Author
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Topic: Defining extranatural
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yersinia
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Member # 324
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posted 06. April 2003 22:12
Over on the now-frayed immune system evolutionthread, the following dialog with Micah occurred:
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yersinia: Most IDists seem to advocate extranatural mechanisms.
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Micah: Before making this claim, it would be good of you to tell us exactly what an extranatural mechanism is, and then give us an example of an IDist who advocates such a mechanism.
As far as I can tell, human design occurs within a fully constrained natural domain. I see no reason to suspect that intelligent design of any kind requires some "extranatural mechanism." Indeed, the only design that we are readily familiar with occurs within the natural order of events, so why would anyone suspect otherwise?
In what way is intelligent causation non-natural?
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Gedanken:
[I'm losing formatting but oh well]
Micah, I’ll leave the interpretation of this paper to others. I present it for inspection to see if it is a response to your question. In all cases emphasis is mine:
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FALSIFIABILITY: Is intelligent design falsifiable? Is Darwinism falsifiable? Yes to the first question, no to the second. Intelligent design is eminently falsifiable. Specified complexity in general and irreducible complexity in biology are within the theory of intelligent design the key markers of intelligent agency. If it could be shown that biological systems like the bacterial flagellum that are wonderfully complex, elegant, and integrated could have been formed by a gradual Darwinian process (which by definition is non-telic), then intelligent design would be falsified on the general grounds that one doesn't invoke intelligent causes when purely natural causes will do. In that case Occam's razor finishes off intelligent design quite nicely.
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Ah, but we have experience with radio transmitters. At least with extraterrestrial intelligences we can guess what might have happened. But we don't have any experience with unembodied designers, and that's clearly what we're dealing with when it comes to design in biology. Actually, if an unembodied designer is responsible for biological complexity, then we do have quite a bit of experience with such a designer through the designed objects (not least ourselves) that confront us all the time. On the other hand, it is true that we possess very little insight at this time into how such a designer acted to bring about the complex biological systems that have emerged over the course of natural history.
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It is no objection at all that we don't at this time know how an unembodied designer produced a biological system that exhibits specified complexity. We know that specified complexity is reliably correlated with the effects of intelligence. The only reason to insist on looking for non-telic explanations to explain the complex specified structures in biology is because of prior commitment to naturalism that perforce excludes unembodied designers. It is illegitimate, scientifically and rationally, to claim on a priori grounds that such entities do not exist, or if they do exist that they can have no conceivable relevance to what happens in the world. Do such entities exist? Can they have empirical consequences? Are they relevant to what happens in the world? Such questions cannot be prejudged except on metaphysical grounds. To prejudge these questions the way Eugenie Scott does is therefore to make certain metaphysical commitments about what there is and what has the capacity to influence events in the world. Such commitments are utterly gratuitous to the practice of science. Specified complexity confirms design regardless whether the designer responsible for it is embodied or unembodied.
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-- William A. Dembski, Is Intelligent Design Testable? (originally from Metaviews January 24, 2001)
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The International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) is a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism. …
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-- The International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design opening web page.
(Just a quick note on Dr. Dembski’s third paragraph quoted above, what Eugenie Scott actually says is that science cannot deal with that which is beyond natural due to problems with testability. Dembski acknowledges same in his article. Of course his claim is that ID is testable. But his defense is based precisely on the claim that science restricts to natural causes. How can this be relevant without some “extranatural mechanism,” as would be defined by Dembski? But my main point re that paragraph is that Scott’s point are that science cannot deal with that beyond natural, not that “such entities do not exist”. This accusation is precisely what Eugenie Scott is saying science does not do, and I think that Dembski is making a false and misleading statement there. Unfortunately I don’t have the source at the moment, but her words are “If science is limited to explaining the natural world through natural processes, we are then constrained from making pronouncements about the supernatural world. We can neither say there is, nor say that there is not, a God or any other omnipotent power. Statements about whether God exists, or interferes in the world, are just plain outside of our job description as scientists, regardless of our personal theistic or nontheistic views.” A link to a similar statement can be found here.)
In order to claim the above, yersina needs to take a clear position on the nature of mental causation. The position is this: mental causes are indistinguishable from other sorts of causes and thus not empirically detectable or analyzable.
I'm glad that this belief was able to so clearly "poof" (no argument seen) into your brain. It actually is quite a strong claim, and really says that a whole lot of philosophers and computer scientists are barking up the wrong tree or wasting their time.
[/quote]
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Micah:
Gedanken,
Language limitations. All causation that I know of takes place in the natural world and is thus natural. I'm not sure that I can even conceive of non-natural causation (indeed, my mind can not wrap itself around such a notion).
When Dembski and ISCID use the terms *naturalism* and *natural mechanism* and *natural causes* could it be that they are merely referring to the scientific methodology of reductive science? This methodology, as a matter of fact, is a quite constrained notion of what constitutes "nature" or "what there is." The naturalism that ISCID and Dembski probably see as limiting in nature, is the naturalism that eliminates intelligent causation from the natural order. It is a naturalism that seeks to reduce our ontology and in doing so, eliminates certain explanatory devices from our scientific toolkit.
My point stands. When one is talking about extra-natural causes, I have no idea what one is talking about. My mind hasn't come across such a thing. All causation that I know of takes place in the natural world. This notion of the natural world stands in sharp contrast to the limited notion of "nature" which eliminates or reduces teleology and intelligent causation from its ontology.
ISCID is interested in what I've called an expanded natural ontology which makes room for teleology and takes intelligent causation as a first-class citizen of that ontology.
Still, I'm unclear as to what an "extra-natural thing" is. Almost by definition, it is "that which does not exist." Certainly, the ID theorists are not interested in investigating "that which does not exist."
So there is a distinction to be made:
1. Nature: the ontology available to modern science
2. Nature: that which exists and takes place in the universe
The only way I can make sense of what Nic was saying is to assume that he means "extra-modern-day-physics" causation. Sure, if that is what he means, that intelligent design posits an extra-natural cause. However, if one includes intelligent causation as a part of one's ontology, then there is no reason to suppose that an intelligent cause is extra-natural. Rather, it is perfectly natural.
That is why I've started my thread on "Towards Teleology." I think that differences in ontology, methodology and/or axiology cause a great deal of confusion in these discussions. When the differences are acknowledged and made clear, then the conversation will probably be able to proceed more productively. Until then, we'll continue to see participants in various paradigms demanding that other participants work from within the same ontology, methodology and/or axiology.
The important question, then, is this: "Is intelligent causation natural or extra-natural?" The answer will certainly depend on the ontology from within which you operate.
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yersinia
It's quite clear really. By "extranatural" I mean "poof", "theDesignerdidit" and other such infinitely vague just-so stories. Supernatural events would be a subclass of extranatural, as would design events by completely uncharacterized aliens, internal forces, etc. Such vague notions constitute the vast majority of ID "hypotheses".
Until a proposed design event is empirically distinguishable from "poof" then IMO it belongs in the extranatural category.
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Micah: In order to claim the above, yersina needs to take a clear position on the nature of mental causation. The position is this: mental causes are indistinguishable from other sorts of causes and thus not empirically detectable or analyzable.
I'm glad that this belief was able to so clearly "poof" (no argument seen) into your brain. It actually is quite a strong claim, and really says that a whole lot of philosophers and computer scientists are barking up the wrong tree or wasting their time.
Phew, that was a pain. Now, my reply.
Micah asserts that my view implies that "mental causes are indistinguishable from other sorts of causes and thus not empirically detectable or analyzable".
He misunderstands me. What I am arguing is that detail-free mental causes are indistinguishable from "supernatural" causes, vaguely specified, unknown "forces", etc. What all of these entities have in common is that they place no constraints on what we expect from reality because they are essentially hopelessly vague hypotheses.
I was using the term "extranatural" to refer to this class of causes. I am not particularly committed to the term however so if there is a better suggestion I will consider it.
Mental causes are of course "distinguishable from other sorts of causes" but only if our model of the putative mental cause has enough detail to constain our expectations of reality in some way. E.g. with humans, we know that build things like Mount Rushmore, we have a general idea of the kinds of tools they use, their capabilities, etc.
E.g. with SETI, we know jack squat about the designers, but for the purposes of doing science and having a non-vacuous research program we hypothesize certain specific things about the designers, so that we have something to look for. If we find the signal, great, we get a Nobel prize, if we don't, then shucks, but at least a specific hypothesis has been tested and weakened. IDists however usually refuse to take the step of making an explicit hypothesis.
What prompted my initial comment about "extranatural" was that Nelson was saying that Lateral Gene Transfer was evidence of ID. IMO this is like picking some radio signal from space with a reasonably well-understood natural cause and saying "well, a designer could be working through that natural signal, so it is evidence of ID".
[ 06. April 2003, 22:12: Message edited by: yersinia ]
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yersinia
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posted 06. April 2003 22:15
Hmm, the middle comment by Micah is misformatted and edit won't let me fix it. Here it is again:
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Micah: In order to claim the above, yersina needs to take a clear position on the nature of mental causation. The position is this: mental causes are indistinguishable from other sorts of causes and thus not empirically detectable or analyzable.
I'm glad that this belief was able to so clearly "poof" (no argument seen) into your brain. It actually is quite a strong claim, and really says that a whole lot of philosophers and computer scientists are barking up the wrong tree or wasting their time.
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gedanken
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posted 06. April 2003 22:40
Yersinia, here is my long post from the other thread. If you edit the above to simply refer to my post below for that part, the formatting will be preserved in my post and your's will be smaller so as to allow you to more easily edit it.
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Micah, I’ll leave the interpretation of this paper to others. I present it for inspection to see if it is a response to your question. In all cases emphasis is mine:
quote:
FALSIFIABILITY: Is intelligent design falsifiable? Is Darwinism falsifiable? Yes to the first question, no to the second. Intelligent design is eminently falsifiable. Specified complexity in general and irreducible complexity in biology are within the theory of intelligent design the key markers of intelligent agency. If it could be shown that biological systems like the bacterial flagellum that are wonderfully complex, elegant, and integrated could have been formed by a gradual Darwinian process (which by definition is non-telic), then intelligent design would be falsified on the general grounds that one doesn't invoke intelligent causes when purely natural causes will do. In that case Occam's razor finishes off intelligent design quite nicely.
quote:
Ah, but we have experience with radio transmitters. At least with extraterrestrial intelligences we can guess what might have happened. But we don't have any experience with unembodied designers, and that's clearly what we're dealing with when it comes to design in biology. Actually, if an unembodied designer is responsible for biological complexity, then we do have quite a bit of experience with such a designer through the designed objects (not least ourselves) that confront us all the time. On the other hand, it is true that we possess very little insight at this time into how such a designer acted to bring about the complex biological systems that have emerged over the course of natural history.
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It is no objection at all that we don't at this time know how an unembodied designer produced a biological system that exhibits specified complexity. We know that specified complexity is reliably correlated with the effects of intelligence. The only reason to insist on looking for non-telic explanations to explain the complex specified structures in biology is because of prior commitment to naturalism that perforce excludes unembodied designers. It is illegitimate, scientifically and rationally, to claim on a priori grounds that such entities do not exist, or if they do exist that they can have no conceivable relevance to what happens in the world. Do such entities exist? Can they have empirical consequences? Are they relevant to what happens in the world? Such questions cannot be prejudged except on metaphysical grounds. To prejudge these questions the way Eugenie Scott does is therefore to make certain metaphysical commitments about what there is and what has the capacity to influence events in the world. Such commitments are utterly gratuitous to the practice of science. Specified complexity confirms design regardless whether the designer responsible for it is embodied or unembodied.
-- William A. Dembski, Is Intelligent Design Testable? (originally from Metaviews January 24, 2001)
quote:
The International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) is a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism. …
-- The International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design opening web page.
(Just a quick note on Dr. Dembski’s third paragraph quoted above, what Eugenie Scott actually says is that science cannot deal with that which is beyond natural due to problems with testability. Dembski acknowledges same in his article. Of course his claim is that ID is testable. But his defense is based precisely on the claim that science restricts to natural causes. How can this be relevant without some “extranatural mechanism,” as would be defined by Dembski? But my main point re that paragraph is that Scott’s point are that science cannot deal with that beyond natural, not that “such entities do not exist”. This accusation is precisely what Eugenie Scott is saying science does not do, and I think that Dembski is making a false and misleading statement there. Unfortunately I don’t have the source at the moment, but her words are “If science is limited to explaining the natural world through natural processes, we are then constrained from making pronouncements about the supernatural world. We can neither say there is, nor say that there is not, a God or any other omnipotent power. Statements about whether God exists, or interferes in the world, are just plain outside of our job description as scientists, regardless of our personal theistic or nontheistic views.” A link to a similar statement can be found here.)
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gedanken
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posted 06. April 2003 22:45
I think that it is important to distinguish "natural" in the sense of non-man-made vs. "natural" as in terms of processes of this 'natural' world. We clearly see man(woman) working to make things in this natural world, so per se "man made" is not outside of the natural world.
So elsewhere I have advocated weird dashed terminology like:
natural-non-supernatural /
supernatural
natural-non-intelligent-cause /
intelligent-cause
etc.
This may not be very appropriate in most discussions. But I think that many ID presentations (like the one I quoted from by Dembski) confuse and in fact conflate these definitions. This is not helpful, and making a distinction would be useful for all parties.
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gedanken
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posted 07. April 2003 00:08
Please see comments in Frances's new thread "Intelligent design is not a mechanistic theory".
Some of us (myself, Alonso) were hoping that a thread could be developed that would include issues of IC, issues of ID being mechanistic, and issues of "extranatural" claims or aspects of ID. (I'm not claiming that I have the correct balance or combination of aspects such that others agree, rather we agree on a desire for a combination of aspects.)
Just arguing over definition won't really encompas the varying topics, or if it does the focus could be too loose.
So could we look at all the threads that have been started as continuation of '...using GA vs built by GA (??)' thread and see if we can come up with a single topic that encompases a greater cominality to the original topic, yet allows these sub-threads to continue in one place?
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yersinia
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posted 07. April 2003 03:31
Thanks for the repost gedanken. Unfortunately when I hit "edit" on the first post it truncates the text after a few paragraphs so I still can't edit so I think we're stuck with it.
Certainly the immune system thread was unmanagable. I don't think that there is going to be any one common thing to focus on out of it, I was just continuing my little side-debate with Micah.
It sounds like Nelson is going to start a thread to summarize what he was trying to get at in the immune system thread, probably that will be the natural "continuation".
Regarding "-natural" terms, my brainstorm:
I agree that hyphenated definitions or some such would be necessary for maximum clarity (although not brevity). Perhaps we could do a taxonomy of causes in this thread and then group them by testability etc.
Here's a start of a list, Things That Can Possibly Cause Things. I.e., possible explanations (hypotheses) for phenomena.
Hmm, actually the list is too complicated. Instead let's set up axes along which explanatory causes can vary:
e.g. Axis 1:
Unintelligent ----> Intelligent causes
Axis 2:
Completely vague ----> Very detailed
(in terms of producing empirical expectations)
Axis 3:
Stochastic ---> Regular
...etc.
[ 07. April 2003, 03:31: Message edited by: yersinia ]
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gedanken
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posted 07. April 2003 11:21
(Minor technicality, this was continuation of "Organisms using GAs vs. Organisms being built by GAs" thread. Link is correct, just name differs.)
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Nel
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posted 07. April 2003 18:51
This is a reply to the various quotes posted over at the Organism GA thread by Dembski attempting to show that ID is necessarily supernatural. It is quite obvious that Dembski does not think that ID is necessarily supernatural. I had the pleasure of seeing him debate in New York City at the Museum of Natural History where he stated this quite explicitely that although intelligent design does not exclude supernatural causation, it is not necessarily supernatural. An essay over at ARN puts it this way:
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From an ID perspective, the natural-vs.-supernatural distinction is irrelevant. The real contrast is not between natural laws and miracles, but between undirected natural causes and intelligent ones.
Mathematician and philosopher of science William Dembski puts it this way: "Whether an intelligent cause is located within or outside nature (i.e., is respectively natural or supernatural) is a separate question from whether an intelligent cause has operated."
Human actions are a case in point: "Just as humans do not perform miracles every time they act as intelligent agents, so there is no reason to assume that for a designer to act as an intelligent agent requires a violation of natural laws."
On the other hand, even if an object were miraculously created, it could still be studied. Take the flagellum, for example. No matter what its origins, a flagellum is a flagellum. We can take it apart, we can examine its components, we can modify it, we can figure out how it works. And we can do that whether it evolved over eons or popped into existence two seconds ago.
In the world of human technology, this is called reverse engineering. But the same process is also used in biology.
"That’s basically what everybody at the bench is doing," said Scott Minnich, a microbiologist at the University of Idaho. "We don’t have the blueprints in the true sense. We have the DNA code for a lot of organisms, but in terms of the assembly of these molecular machines, it’s a matter of breaking them apart and trying to put them back together to figure out how they function."
A lateral gene transfer event that I referred to as a mechanism of design is exactly analgous to extra-terrestrials using a machine to get the message to us, that would be picked up by SETI. This is intelligent design, and it's not supernatural.
[ 08. April 2003, 21:38: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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gedanken
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posted 07. April 2003 22:33
quote:
yersinia
It's quite clear really. By "extranatural" I mean "poof", "theDesignerdidit" and other such infinitely vague just-so stories. Supernatural events would be a subclass of extranatural, as would design events by completely uncharacterized aliens, internal forces, etc. Such vague notions constitute the vast majority of ID "hypotheses".
It's clear in his opening post that Yersinia did not mean that the subject was necessarily "supernatural" either. (Supernatural was only an option within "extra-natural".) The issue is whether it is subject to empirical method.
There is a basic problem with making an argument wherein a cause can do arbitrary actions. If there is no limitation whatsoever on what possible actions the cause considered can do, there is no way to distinguish that the cause did not do that action by observation. This is why scientific “evidence” for God is considered to be so difficult, not because science makes any claim that God does not exist, but rather because the subject of science is God’s creation itself (if you believe in God) or simply all of existence itself otherwise. But within that assuming God has the power to make any combination happen (that being the assumption, whether or not one “believes” in God), there is not distinction between one of God’s results and another -- especially since all of the natural world is the result of God’s will and creative capacity in such assumption.
Agents that have unspecified abilities are not quite so extreme in this regard -- because we don’t regard all actions as having been a result of the agent’s will by default. But there is a long history of humans ascribing unknown aspects of how things they observed to unspecified powers of agents. When we did not understand the workings of gravity, humans ascribed the stars and planets’ motion to actions of the hand of God(s). (In fact different actions were in some cases ascribed to different gods, thus one does not have the “default” assumption that all events are God’s will in that view.) But science learned that there are understandable relationships in nature -- that there are “natural” causes. That in no way has denied that nature itself is God’s creation (or creation of multiple gods, for that matter). It simply means that we have learned that we can understand local principles of how the world and parts of the universe around us works.
When one ascribes an action to arbitrary and unspecified agents, one has not described any limitation or understanding of the action of the working of the natural world around us.
Now ascribing a cause to “intelligence” is indeed a differentiation. It makes a distinction. But it is a distinction with very very little predictive capacity. For one to find any increase in narrowing the scope of what could happen, to increase the predictability of the natural world, one needs to find greater specificity in the relationships. Even incompletely specifying relationships can be narrowing in their constraints, and can give considerable improvement in the predictability of the natural world -- so long as there is understandable aspects of the constraining relationships that can be studied.
This is where there is a problem with “extranatural” agency. There is no limitation placed on the capacity of such agency. As such the empirical method has little value in distinguishing such cases.
I understand that there have been attempts at making limitations on the “extranatural” capacity of such agents. For example Dembski has proposed limitations on how “unembodied” agents could effect design -- for example by limiting such design actions to below the noise floor of quantum indeterminacy. But there are problems with that approach. For example such imparting of “information” limited to action within the noise floor of quantum indeterminacy forces one to accept all of descent with modification. (I’m not refering to the combination of QM indeterminacy with ET actions now, I’m referring to breaking out the cases to considering one or the other -- and breaking out cases into different classes is a venerable ID technique so I think this is perfectly reasonable to consider now. My points with respect to QM indeterminacy are now meant to mean that we are assuming that is the type of level of influence of the “unembodied” designer being considered at the moment.) But with that assumption, such things as IC structures would still have to occur by jumps on the macroscopic level of system interaction. In essence those jumps could not be too large -- as too large a jump would not fall within the noise floor of QM indeterminacy because it would require a macroscopic change far beyond that QM noise floor!
So case analysis can be performed on agency, and then by breaking down the individual cases one can examine them individually. This is no longer allowing for unspecified designer action, rather it is partitioning such designer action into classes and examining the cases individually. The net union of all possible such designer action scenarios is surely equivalent to the unspecified case -- but the analysis can proceed with the breakdown on a class by class basis. This would be a technique to go beyond “extranatural” events and deal with them in an at least slightly more scientific manner.
So if the hypothesis is that a large number of “IC” structures over millions of years developed by a certain class of agent action, then we can examine that class, or subdivide that class for analysis. But if the agency is considered to be able to “poof” without limitation, it is difficult to see how the analysis can be considered scientific.
Now as to the issue of “It is quite obvious that Dembski does not think that ID is necessarily supernatural.” Let’s consider a class of agency means of acting. That class could be limited, for example to action by local physical agency. Or it could be limited to only supernatural agency -- going beyond all natural relationships that are normally observable by humans. The union of those two subclasses could be considered “not necessarily supernatural”. All that is needed to further analyze the cases is to subdivide the cases into “not supernatural” and “supernatural”. The argument can be evaluated for the cases broken out as sub-cases -- just as well as it can be evaluated with the union of the cases of agency action in consideration. But broken out, we can also investigate relationships that depend on the sub-classes, and make the analysis somewhat more scientific. Trying to lump “not necessarily supernatural” all together into a single analysis leads to wild conclusions that will not be very convincing. Subdividing the classes allows the individual cases to be analyzed more completely and more convincingly.
I suggest that in the future we don’t just accept that designers are “not necessarily supernatural”. Rather we demand that the sub-cases be analyzed for cogency by breaking them down into “supernatural” and “physically realizable”.
Then within the “physically realizable” we still need subclasses. Do we consider all possible science fiction occurrences of aliens, ET’s, etc., acting in this area of the universe at any time whatever? That is one possibility. Another is that we limit to phenomenon that has some independently verifiable properties. These can be used as sub-dividing characteristics, just as effectively as the division between “supernatural” and “physically realizable”. So the “physically realizable” agency case should be subdivided as well in the ID analysis. I hope that in the future we will see such analysis of ID argument cases. (But of course if that should be counterproductive to the aims of ID advocates, then I suspect they will object to such logically reasonable analysis.)
[ 07. April 2003, 23:22: Message edited by: gedanken ]
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RBH
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posted 07. April 2003 23:13
Nelson - Pullleeeze edit that URL. It's stretching the page way out of sight. Thanks!
RBH
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yersinia
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posted 08. April 2003 02:57
quote:
This is a reply to the various quotes posted over at the Organism GA thread by Dembski attempting to show that ID is necessarily supernatural. It is quite obvious that Dembski does not think that ID is necessarily supernatural.
No, the quotes were posted to show that:
quote:
Most IDists seem to advocate extranatural mechanisms.
Whether or not its "supernatural", unembodied designers certainly are extranatural. And in the context of biology, frankly most IDists do invoke unembodied designers or the equivalent -- "poof" in various forms. Sure, they accept natural designers, e.g. humans, in other contexts.
The reason I think they go for extranatural designers for biology is that if you invoke natural designers like aliens then you're just moving the problem backwards, because then you have to explain where alien biology came from, and by your own ID arguments, they must have been designed as well. An a unembodied designer is supposed to escape this although things get very murky here as not even the laws of physics give us any guidance anymore.
Nelson also writes,
quote:
A lateral gene transfer event that I referred to as a mechanism of design is exactly analgous to extra-terrestrials using a machine to get the message to us, that would be picked up by SETI. This is intelligent design, and it's not supernatural.
No, it's exactly analogous to seeing evidence of a rainfall event in the geologic record and saying "hey, this is evidence of ID because humans make it rain by seeding clouds, and further advanced technology would allow even greater control over rain".
The severe problem with Nelson's kind of reasoning is that in science we don't conjure up extra, flagrantly unparsimonious explanations when the simple one, namely "known natural process X did it" works as well or better.
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Stephen Wright
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posted 08. April 2003 09:18
Yersina wrote:
quote:
“What I am arguing is that detail-free mental causes are indistinguishable from "supernatural" causes, vaguely specified, unknown "forces", etc. What all of these entities have in common is that they place no constraints on what we expect from reality because they are essentially hopelessly vague hypotheses.
I was using the term "extranatural" to refer to this class of causes. I am not particularly committed to the term however so if there is a better suggestion I will consider it.”
Mental causes seem to be natural enough, where a mind intentionally chooses to implement a conceptualized plan into action and physical manifestation. Please, correct me if I misunderstand the meaning of “detail-free mental causes”, but are you are excluding causes that don’t derive reality from a physical based phenomenon? If there exist effects from mental causes that do not cause a physical change, just a change in information, would that be extranatural?
I suggest that information has a real and substantial nature. When a living organism conceives an answer to a problem, but before taking action, a change in the state of the information characterizing the answer occurs. The facts of the circumstances are bound into a new informational unit, which the organism can leverage. That new combination, consisting of separate facts from the existence of the agent and facts from its environment, are appended together into a single idea. The energy spent on the thought process is balanced by this non-physical change of complexity in the environment.
This informational change is seen as abstract and not real. However, it now has a higher potential to occur after cognition by a living organism animated with intent. There is no physical body or energy that has been altered; yet the environment has been effected. The available information to the agent has been substantively altered. I am aware that information having real and substantive existence is not within the scope of today’s paradigm of science. I suggest it is a considered possibility.
I am not so fond of Platonic forms as expressed through history, as they are not dynamic enough to meet the rigors of the mathematics coming from Information and Communication Theory. Yet, they may be a one-dimensional hint to a new conceptualization of events that occur, which are not measurable through physical or energetic devises. Information events occurring without a physical substantiation may be explanatory of much that blocks scientific progress.
I would further assert that they are not hopelessly vague events because they obey what we understand as math and logic formalisms. We just believe them to be abstract, and not actual, whereas, their processes maybe very corresponding to the structuring rules of physical events.
An example I would suggest for your criticism would be the discovery of the “bucky ball”. Mental energy was spent in creating a model of carbon 60. That information was “abstract” - meaning not real physically. Didn’t the fact that it was now a design, lead to its creation and detection? So was C 60 real information: a) always - as a potential form, b) when predicted from creative research or c) when realized physically? Or, was the information structure merely changing state under the influence of being observed and considered with intent.
[ 09. April 2003, 08:55: Message edited by: Stephen Wright ]
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gedanken
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posted 08. April 2003 15:53
quote:
An example I would suggest for your criticism would be the discovery of the “bucky ball”. Mental energy was spent in creating a model of carbon12. That information was “abstract” - meaning not real physically. Didn’t the fact that it was now a design, lead to its creation and detection? So was C12 real information: a) always - as a potential form, b) when predicted from creative research or c) when realized physically? Or, was the information structure merely changing state under the influence of being observed and considered with intent.
If a tree falls in the forest…
Of course it does not matter whether “Buckey Balls” or new elements with high atomic number existed previously. They are inherent configurations that can take place as a relationship of physics and physical properties. This is consistent, if one creates the conditions, the events occur (construction of the structure). That construction will occur whether the conditions occur naturally, or by “design”.
The form was always a potential form -- e.g. a copy of the physical form subsequently identified.
But the description didn’t exist until it was created by an intelligence. This is the case for every description of every object, past, present, and future. (And considering a “description” as a creation of “intelligence” by definition -- not meant to imply any limitation on the type of intelligence but rather a statement of the nature of language.)
Now descriptions become more accurate when new information is gained. Something is not “information” in a language sense until is it described in language. But language is a means of constructing a mental model. So the mental model did not exist until it was constructed -- independently of the physical configuration of a portion of the real world which existed at the moment it existed. It becomes “information” when it is interpreted by some system (e.g. an intelligent agent) which by whatever definition of “information” is being used at the moment is a system that processes or utilizes “information”.
Objects in rotation around the Earth -- what about them? We created “abstract” models of motion of objects in a gravitational field. Then we observed that there are objects that obey that model, and even created our own artificial satellites that move according to those models. Didn’t the fact that Newtonian theory of orbiting objects became “a design” lead to its creation and to its detection?
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Rex Kerr
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posted 08. April 2003 18:09
Buckyballs (Buckminsterfullerene) are C60, not C12.
Also, many computer processor cycles were consumed modeling C60, but we don't have any trouble saying that this is a physical process. Why are we justified in assuming an extra immaterial component of our thoughts?
[ 08. April 2003, 18:14: Message edited by: Rex Kerr ]
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Micah Sparacio
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posted 08. April 2003 20:16
Rex, you asked:
quote:
Why are we justified in assuming an extra immaterial component of our thoughts?
First of all, this questions is loaded metaphysically. Are causes material? Are events material? Are abstract concepts material?
Second, immaterial gives the impression that mental realists assume some sort substance dualism. Rather, we can merely note that certain mental features (content, consciousness, intention, experience, goal-oriented causation) require an expanded physical ontology: our current conception of the physical world may not be the whole story, and these mental anomalies give us reason to suspect such. That is all. The mental is perfectly natural. The critical question is whether the physical world of modern science is robust enough to handle certain mental anomalies. I'm not the only one who think not.
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