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> "The flaws of your position are shown quite well in the "Blind men and the elephant" proverb." Once again, that's quite an assertion you make against me ther

by Udo 7y ago

> "The flaws of your position are shown quite well in the "Blind men and the elephant" proverb." Once again, that's quite an assertion you make against me there. At no point did I argue that we understand everything about nature. My point is just that every single thing in nature has turned out to be eventually accessible to rational modeling and understanding. To carve out a niche for certain areas and argue that these will eventually turn out to not follow that pattern has been a losing strategy throughout the history of science. > To make broad statements like "reality/cells are just machines" based on this tiny portion of information seems pretty foolish. The onus is on you to show me how exactly that is foolish, given the fact that every single scientific observation we have made in this area supports the hypothesis that there is nothing more than physical law involved.

keiferski 7y ago
The onus is not on me, as I am not making broad unscientific claims about the nature of reality or the human mind, simply because we have a small portion of knowledge. It is precisely the Elephant problem that I linked to; you are making assumptions about the fundamental structure of the mind based on our current narrow understanding of it. This is almost by definition unscientific. The justifiable position would be to say, "based on our current understanding of the mind, our metaphorical model X is the best model we have created, but it is merely the best answer up until now, not the ultimate solution."
- Udo 7y ago
  > you are making assumptions about the fundamental structure of the mind based on our current narrow understanding of it I'm trying to think of a way that would not have us go in circles ad infinitum. So I'll try one last time to convince you that this is a misrepresentation. My assumptions are indeed, given the body of data we have gathered so far, that what lies ahead will fit into what we already know - as opposed to being something extraordinary that invalidates most of our current understanding. Whenever there are unknowns in our scientific understanding (and I'm sure we'll have more than enough of those for aeons to come), it has so far not been fruitful to offer magical external influences as the explanation. It has so far always turned out that natural forces were at work, forces we can reason about rationally. From my perspective, there is nothing unusualy going on with minds in particular that would warrant a different approach. Our current understanding may be narrow by your standards, but it doesn't follow that people just get to make up whatever lies outside and then insist on those doubting them being unscientific. > "based on our current understanding of the mind, our metaphorical model X is the best model we have created, but it is merely the best answer up until now, not the ultimate solution." That we can agree on. What we don't seem to agree on is the amount of credibility we should assign to claims that lie far outside of our physical expectations. Just because there are unknowns doesn't make it reasonable to assign extraordinary values to those unknowns. > The onus is not on me, as I am not making broad unscientific claims If you make a claim, especially one that falls widely outside of extrapolated scientific understanding, the burden of proof does indeed fall on you. By contrast I am making the claim that whatever gaps we have in our theory about minds will eventually turn out to be an extension of what we already know, as opposed to some revolutionary but as of yet unseen aspect of the universe. My claim is small, yours is quite large and also seems vague to me.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    > My assumptions are indeed, given the body of data we have gathered so far, that what lies ahead will fit into what we already know - as opposed to being something extraordinary that invalidates most of our current understanding. Would this describe the world of physics prior to Einstein and Quantum Mechanics? I'm not a physicist, but my impressions is that it absolutely was "something extraordinary that invalidates most of our current understanding." > Whenever there are unknowns in our scientific understanding (and I'm sure we'll have more than enough of those for aeons to come), it has so far not been fruitful to offer magical external influences as the explanation. Sure, offering magical solutions is not any better, and explanations based on current scientific understanding are likely more correct than magical explanation, but - that doesn't mean that the scientific explanation is the truth, but rather that it's simply a more useful theory. This is also not mentioning the problem of induction, which is an entirely different and deeper conversation. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ > By contrast I am making the claim that whatever gaps we have in our theory about minds will eventually turn out to be an extension of what we already know, as opposed to some revolutionary but as of yet unseen aspect of the universe. My claim is small, yours is quite large and also seems vague to me. Again, the history of science would show otherwise. Did anyone in 1800 predict quantum mechanics? It seems naive to assume that science will never upend our fundamental view of the world. My claim is simply that of the scientific method itself: observational knowledge is useful for constructing our current best view of the world, but it is simply that: our current best. Extrapolating that into statements about reality itself is a non-scientific act and is only common because agnosticism is such a nebulous difficult position for humans to hold.
    - mannykannot 7y ago
      Neither Lucas' argument here, nor any other anti-materialist argument, has offered any hint of what is missing from the materialist position, so the absence of adequate knowledge is at best symmetrical. It is not unscientific to speculate on how things may be - without that, there would be no hypotheses. Lucas's argument claims that materialism is false, so Udo is within his logical rights to assume otherwise -- it would be begging the question to insist he cannot do that. None of this makes any progress on the question of whether Lucas' argument is valid and sound.
Brain_Thief 7y ago
> At no point did I argue that we understand everything about nature. My point is just that every single thing in nature has turned out to be eventually accessible to rational modeling and understanding. I'm having a hard time following this explanation / statement - it seems to contradict itself and yet is used to justify your subsequent point: > To carve out a niche for certain areas and argue that these will eventually turn out to not follow that pattern has been a losing strategy throughout the history of science. However, we have the obvious examples of pre-big bang ontology, as well as the origins of life and the evolutionary process, as "things in nature" that arose and yet do not appear accessible to our methods of understanding. The observation "if you don't know how to do it, then you don't know how to do it with a computer" comes to mind here. I've yet to see any research indicating that we have or are on the verge of having a theory that describes a consciousness-generating mechanized process; assertions to the contrary seem to rely upon enlarging the definition of the word "machine" to a scale of abstraction that renders it unintelligible.

by Udo 7y ago

keiferski 7y ago

The onus is not on me, as I am not making broad unscientific claims about the nature of reality or the human mind, simply because we have a small portion of knowledge. It is precisely the Elephant problem that I linked to; you are making assumptions about the fundamental structure of the mind based on our current narrow understanding of it. This is almost by definition unscientific. The justifiable position would be to say, "based on our current understanding of the mind, our metaphorical model X is the best model we have created, but it is merely the best answer up until now, not the ultimate solution."

Udo 7y ago
> you are making assumptions about the fundamental structure of the mind based on our current narrow understanding of it I'm trying to think of a way that would not have us go in circles ad infinitum. So I'll try one last time to convince you that this is a misrepresentation. My assumptions are indeed, given the body of data we have gathered so far, that what lies ahead will fit into what we already know - as opposed to being something extraordinary that invalidates most of our current understanding. Whenever there are unknowns in our scientific understanding (and I'm sure we'll have more than enough of those for aeons to come), it has so far not been fruitful to offer magical external influences as the explanation. It has so far always turned out that natural forces were at work, forces we can reason about rationally. From my perspective, there is nothing unusualy going on with minds in particular that would warrant a different approach. Our current understanding may be narrow by your standards, but it doesn't follow that people just get to make up whatever lies outside and then insist on those doubting them being unscientific. > "based on our current understanding of the mind, our metaphorical model X is the best model we have created, but it is merely the best answer up until now, not the ultimate solution." That we can agree on. What we don't seem to agree on is the amount of credibility we should assign to claims that lie far outside of our physical expectations. Just because there are unknowns doesn't make it reasonable to assign extraordinary values to those unknowns. > The onus is not on me, as I am not making broad unscientific claims If you make a claim, especially one that falls widely outside of extrapolated scientific understanding, the burden of proof does indeed fall on you. By contrast I am making the claim that whatever gaps we have in our theory about minds will eventually turn out to be an extension of what we already know, as opposed to some revolutionary but as of yet unseen aspect of the universe. My claim is small, yours is quite large and also seems vague to me.
- keiferski 7y ago
  > My assumptions are indeed, given the body of data we have gathered so far, that what lies ahead will fit into what we already know - as opposed to being something extraordinary that invalidates most of our current understanding. Would this describe the world of physics prior to Einstein and Quantum Mechanics? I'm not a physicist, but my impressions is that it absolutely was "something extraordinary that invalidates most of our current understanding." > Whenever there are unknowns in our scientific understanding (and I'm sure we'll have more than enough of those for aeons to come), it has so far not been fruitful to offer magical external influences as the explanation. Sure, offering magical solutions is not any better, and explanations based on current scientific understanding are likely more correct than magical explanation, but - that doesn't mean that the scientific explanation is the truth, but rather that it's simply a more useful theory. This is also not mentioning the problem of induction, which is an entirely different and deeper conversation. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ > By contrast I am making the claim that whatever gaps we have in our theory about minds will eventually turn out to be an extension of what we already know, as opposed to some revolutionary but as of yet unseen aspect of the universe. My claim is small, yours is quite large and also seems vague to me. Again, the history of science would show otherwise. Did anyone in 1800 predict quantum mechanics? It seems naive to assume that science will never upend our fundamental view of the world. My claim is simply that of the scientific method itself: observational knowledge is useful for constructing our current best view of the world, but it is simply that: our current best. Extrapolating that into statements about reality itself is a non-scientific act and is only common because agnosticism is such a nebulous difficult position for humans to hold.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    Neither Lucas' argument here, nor any other anti-materialist argument, has offered any hint of what is missing from the materialist position, so the absence of adequate knowledge is at best symmetrical. It is not unscientific to speculate on how things may be - without that, there would be no hypotheses. Lucas's argument claims that materialism is false, so Udo is within his logical rights to assume otherwise -- it would be begging the question to insist he cannot do that. None of this makes any progress on the question of whether Lucas' argument is valid and sound.

Brain_Thief 7y ago

> At no point did I argue that we understand everything about nature. My point is just that every single thing in nature has turned out to be eventually accessible to rational modeling and understanding. I'm having a hard time following this explanation / statement - it seems to contradict itself and yet is used to justify your subsequent point: > To carve out a niche for certain areas and argue that these will eventually turn out to not follow that pattern has been a losing strategy throughout the history of science. However, we have the obvious examples of pre-big bang ontology, as well as the origins of life and the evolutionary process, as "things in nature" that arose and yet do not appear accessible to our methods of understanding. The observation "if you don't know how to do it, then you don't know how to do it with a computer" comes to mind here. I've yet to see any research indicating that we have or are on the verge of having a theory that describes a consciousness-generating mechanized process; assertions to the contrary seem to rely upon enlarging the definition of the word "machine" to a scale of abstraction that renders it unintelligible.