If
(A) 1 person in 10,000 has Syndrome Y, and
(B) a doctor gives you a test for Syndrome Y that is known to be 99.9% accurate (both positive and negative). and
(C) The test says you have Syndrome Y...
What are the odds that you have Syndrome Y?
10:1 against. In 10K people who take the test, on average...10 will be wrongly tested positive for Syndrome Y, while only 1 will actually have the Syndrome.
Bayes Theorem -- what we know before an experiment matters.
If there is
(a) a 1 in 1 Billion chance of a rock floating in the air naturally... (light rock, magnetism, air currents, etc.)
(a2) a 1 in 100,000 chance of not knowing about some natural feature of reality that might make rocks float under rare conditions.
(b) a 1 in 1 million chance that you are misperceiving something as per refraction through water.
(c) a 1 in 10,000 chance that someone is tricking you on purpose
(d) a 1 in 10 chance of remembering it at least noticeably wrong
...
Should we expect there to have been a miracle, if we were to see a rock floating in the air, then think about it the next day?
I have 4.5 other natural, but unlikely explanations. ONLY the prior probability one assigns to God's activity could lead one to assign some likelihood to it's being a miracle. I think it's also fairly obvious that we should AT LEAST rank misperception and misunderstanding natural law as having a greater likelihood than divine intervention. If misperception is more likely than miracles for all perceptions...one is stuck awful close to the position of having no capability to believe in miracles.
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56 comments:
CS Lewis wrote that one should distrust each particular report of a miracle yet keep open the possibility that miracles happen.
As in a spy scare during wartime (he wrote during WW2) , one should distrust each report of a spy but still there are spies.
And you are far too individualistic: one needs to account of why 99% of all men including many of its most intelligent believed in miracles.
You also ignore logical arguments such as Aquinas' Five Ways and the Argument from Reason, the argument from Moral Order that show that something exists beyond the material reality.
All these arguments have a part in the rational process though they may not becomputable.
Thanks for the medical example. It was illuminating.
Gyan:
There are 4 intellectual breakthroughs which made belief in God unnecessary.
1. The Calculus, developed by 2 religious men, allowed humans to calculate with infinities.
2. Hume. He disposed of all prior rational arguments for the existence of God.
3. Evolution. It is only after there was a plausible competing explanation that most folks could decide not to believe, even though Hume answered all the positive arguments for God.
4. Reverend Bayes. So many difficulties vanish if you start by reasoning probabilistically.
Before Newton, Hume, and Darwin... belief in God was not a bad idea. Before Bayes, we could reason in absolutes rather than in probabilities. Most folks who are unfamiliar with Bayes still do.
Aquinas's 5 ways are 1st answered by Hume...and the first two at least are of the form: Nothing can do A (begin something). Therefore we need to posit that something can do A. Therefore God. Not very strong arguments.
Lewis's argument from reason (Wik summary) smuggles in a belief in God in premise #2.
Kant's argument for Moral order fails on most premises, as far as I can tell. The easiest to dispute is:
God is the only possible source of Moral order. Nonsense and hogwash. How many other choices did he consider? Surely he recognizes spontaneous, evolved orders? Except he didn't because he was pre-Darwinian.
If 99% of people disbelieve quantum mechanics...and quantum theory underlies the working of the computer...that actually works...then the 99% of people are wrong (p < 1 but high).
If 99% of people disbelieve evolution, and evolutionary theory is used to discover and test all of modern medicine...then the 99% of people are wrong (p < 1, but high).
As before, that many people have believed in God is the strongest argument for God. But it's massively tempered by the as many or more people (from Asia, Africa, etc.) who have believed otherwise.
1. There is an ex nihilo rule.
2. Where did the ex nihilo rule come from?
A creator exists because before there was a universe, the creator had to obey the rule framework we're familiar with.
I'm sure that'll work out.
"Before Newton, Hume, and Darwin... belief in God was not a bad idea."
This is a standard story, therefore, I am very skeptical. It rings like an enlightenment morality tale to me.
Even at least some Roman emperors were atheists, cynically abusing their mythology to control the population. The stuff's a lot older than four centuries.
I accept only that evolution provides a substitute for ye olde Six-Packed Joseph.
Especially as, logically speaking, there's multiple ways to reconcile Jesus and Darwin. (Though this is because Jesus can't be disproven, and so is reconcilable with anything.)
Okay that's the third subject on which I can do better than Hume.
(After writing about it, I can summarize: miracles are empirical, and can be tested. So, do. Don't forget that non-empirical beliefs have no consequences and thus it is harmless to hold them.)
Assume a miracle in fact occurs - a heavier than air rock floats.
It is either caused or uncaused. (Spontaneous.)
If it is caused, miraculous as it may be, it is also natural. If God exists, it is perfectly natural for him to do so. The causes can be investigated and floaty rocks predicted. (I guess what makes it a miracle is that we can't ever technology this? It's caused by God, not physics, and we can only work with physics. But basically this would look like a back door program.)
If it is uncaused, then the analysis depends on whether it is repeated.
If it isn't: "Whoa, a miracle! Who cares?" Forget all about it and go on with life. (I learn some new things about this below.)
If it is, then the essentially physics-defying nature of the event will become obvious. Floaty rock experiments/observations will falsify themselves, let alone energy conservation and so forth.
In cases 1 and 3, miracles can be investigated; the miracle hypothesis makes falsifiable predictions.
I'm interested to just now discover that the theists are right that scientific empiricism cannot deal with miracles as commonly conceived. Case 2: one-off spontaneous events.
No matter how many miracles occur, as they are by definition non-reproducible, science will never admit to them.
Then I thought about it some more and proved myself wrong. If a miracle can be recorded, then its very non-reproducibility is the evidence that it is a miracle.
Therefore, the miracle theory in all cases produces empirical predictions, and thus can be falsified.
Even if miracles consciously, intentionally, and effectively dodged reliable recordings...well, the hypothesis that miracles intentionally stymie inquiry is also testable.
"one is stuck awful close to the position of having no capability to believe in miracles."
Therefore, this sentence expresses an anti-empiricist stance. Miracles are supposed to require faith but that doesn't mean they do.
Rationalist anti-empiricism always amuses me.
Finally, I can prove that miracles are impossible by noting that contradicting physics is always equivalent to dividing by zero in reality - but first I have to accept that physics is made of math.
Alrenous,
1. That some folks would find belief in God epistemologically sound is not equivalent to that all folks would find it so.
2. The ability to reconcile God with Darwin does not remove the fact that in the West, post-Roman times, the choices as presented were believe in a God, or have no belief at all...which is next to impossible for a sub-genius.
3. I think you really ought to read Hume...the argument is FAR better than you're giving it credit for. What happens when the frequency of a Miracle (generally short-duration phenomena) is lower than the failure rate on sense perception? Then it's unlikely to be recorded, and it's more likely that sense-failure happened than that the miracle as observed in the moment occurred. Responses to second-hand complex arguments are frequently weaker than the original argument. While I'd agree that most folks aren't worth reading...I maintain that Hume is at least the best thinker among his friends (Most of the English/French/Scottish Enlightenment).
4. What I see doesn't determine what to believe. What I see, factored by prior probability does...and those things are very different. My (and Hume's pre-Bayes) argument is that your empiricism is assuming some prior probabilities that only hold under non-miracle conditions.
A strict empirical attitude renders normal operations of Sciences impossible.
Consider astronomy: the ancients and medievals believed that sublunary and superlunary spheres operate under different laws. Now we dont but what empirical observation has told us that same physical laws hold at the surface of Sirius as hold in my bedroom?
Answer: None.
Newton, assuming a law of gravitation that holds universally was able to reproduce the observed orbits of certain planets. Pls understand that he posited this universal law. It is on rational grounds, a certain preference for mathematical symmetry etc and is extra-empirical in character.
Ever more harder is Geology: under the assumption of uniformity in time over billions of years, the rocks are dated. This assumption is again extra-empirical.
Cosmology: The qunatum mechanics was first devised for microscopic objects, under experimental conditions. The postulation of a wave function for the entire universe is an act of gigantic faith, nothing to do with empiricism.
These examples may ne multiplied indefinitely.
Aretae,
Lewis's argument from reason (Wik summary) smuggles in a belief in God in premise #2.
Are you referring to this:
No merely physical material or combination of merely physical materials constitute a rational source.
(Wikipedia, Argument from Reason).
How it is smuggling in a belief in God?
Aretae,
Have you understood Aquinas's Five Ways as understood by medievals?
Then have you considered rejoinders to Hume etc by later theist philosophers?
These proofs and counter-proofs are subtle and tricky. I dont understand myself. Particularly the metaphysical assumptions vary across the centuries.
Eg the word "soul" (Latin-anima).
For Descartes and later, it may connote a substance interacting with body. But for medievals, it is just form of a organism. Thus any organism has a soul by definition.
Gyan:
Re: Argument from Reason -- Yes. He asserted Cartesian Duality ... the existence of a Soul ... and the impossibility of Artificial Intelligence (all of which I reject) in one premise.
The point I am making is not that all these proofs are correct but even if they are wrong, they are not insanely wrong.
For if a belief in miracles is insane, then you have to account for 99% of humanity being insane.
Your analogy to 99% of humans not knowing or believing in QM does not work since nobody calls them insane for not knowing QM.
Re: soul.
1. That's hardly a fair description of the anima, as understood by Midievals.
2. I'm mostly not citing Hume here. This is simple logic by Aretae. Aristotle's first mover argument is wrong. Aquinas's line in each of his 5 ways is founded on fallacious rationalism.
In la Wik,
Way 1, point 7 is false.
Way 2, point 6 is false.
Way 3, tricky logic sleight of hand between steps 3 and 5...plus the same false assumption as Way1/2
Way 4, point 2 is false.
Way 5, point 1 requires argument by design, false.
I do understand them. SOmeone says: X must be true. And then 10 minutes later, someone else says...that doesn't follow.
Aretare,
Regarding argument from reason, do not go by Wikepedia but read the original in the book Miracles.
CS Lewis is far easier to read than Hume.
AI does not exist, neither do mechanistic theories of mind. All of them smuggle in what they purport to explain at some point or another.
Weasel words: representations, internal model, self-model, self-referential.
Aretae,
Could you give a link to the pointwise demonstration of the Five Ways.
I have only en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinque_viae#The_Five_Ways
and it does not give in the pointwise way.
Gyan,
Ok...we found the disagreement.
I don't think 99% of humanity is insane.
I think those people who believe that reason can prove God given modern knowledge are insane. And I think that proportion is near zero. Indeed, I think that a careful (non-social) empiricism doesn't even give room for the option to believe in God.
HOWEVER...I think that the proportion of people who put empirical reason above ALL other methods of knowing also approaches zero. And IF one places Faith higher than reason...my arguments are immaterial.
ALSO, I think that it is meta-rational for >50% of people to prefer social epistemology to empirical epistemology. They are correct to believe in God EVEN THOUGH the methodical empiricist trying to do the same thing would be classified as nuts.
Context matters.
You can believe in a God for faith reasons, and I as an empiricist am reduced to muttering...but I don't think you should elevate faith over observation and logic.
I do think that the platonic (Pythagorean/Cartesian/etc.) rationalist has no leg to stand on. He is logically, internally inconsistent. And it is Bayesian Reasoning acting as the stake to the heart of that undead position. But that's a modern rationalist. In Descartes' day...the position was not yet clear...and indeed, it wasn't popularly available until the last 20(? 30? 15?) years. Folks before then might have been contextually correct (they could rationally see no better arguments), though completely unconvincing to a modern empiricist.
So my assault (insanity claim) is on a VERY narrow band of folks. Moderns who base their belief in God on reason, rather than on faith, or social epistemology. That position is crazy. Others...not so much.
5 ways:
http://www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/aquinasFiveWays_ArgumentAnalysis.htm
They all assume infinities away, by assuming an infinite God.
1. We are at a difference. Dualism is silly. Mechanistic explanations are the only ones that make any sense at all.
2. AI as defined by the folks in the 60s is already here. The goalposts keep moving, though. But even more impressively...I'd like the proof that Lewis was using...because his premise implies that it CANNOT exist, which is so far from obvious as to be mind-boggling. Contrarily, I assume that Human level AI will be done in the next ~30 years...so at least one of us is likely to see the evidence that Lewis was wrong in fact.
3. I've read a lot of Lewis. But not too many of his arguments on God. Hume is indeed hard to read...he is among the deepest thinkers of the past 500 years. His "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" I recollect as far easier than his "Enquiry concerning Human Understanding".
Interestingly, I am exactly that person who believes in God for reason.
And the strongest of my reason is that that reason can only be explained on the basis of ultimate reality being mind-like. That is the Argument from Reason.
I do not understand other proofs well enough.
Till well into thirties I was dogmatically anti-miracle and anti-theist
I shall try to understand your arguments again.
I need to get hold of that Socrates and Hume book too.
CS lewis does not use premises as in a logical demonstration. You are relying on thw Wikipedia version.
The original is better. It is not easy to better him by re-phrasing.
Indeed there is no such premise, since it is exactly what he seeks to demonstrate.
You must have heard the story as how this Argument from Reason was criticized by Oxford (or Cambridge?) philosophers and then he revised it to meet the objections. So it is not likely that such a basic mistake would be made.
Gyan,
Now I am moving to inquiry.
I don't understand the term "ultimate reality". What in our sense experience can we relate this to? Do we need an "ultimate reality" at all? Why? I seem to be doing just fine without one.
"Then it's unlikely to be recorded"
Then it doesn't matter whether you believe it was a miracle. In either case, you're not expecting it to happen again.
(Well, "I saw a miracle once, God exists!" The problem is not the belief, the problem is illogic. You could 'cure' the belief but they'll just end up elsewhere in la-la land.)
"Unlikely' is not 'impossible.' You'll get the evidence eventually. Patience.
"your empiricism is assuming some prior probabilities that only hold under non-miracle conditions."
Indeed. Then, I assume the opposite and see how the world would look different. Then, I go with the one that matches the observed world.
Have I missed an assumption for reversal?
Well, let me work out what a 'miracle' is exactly... I'll return to the floating rock.
Either it is floating in obedience to conservation of energy etc, or it isn't.
If not obedient, then it's obviously a miracle. Then, repetition/lucky capture, depending.
If obedient, then the forces on it are balanced, but they in turn must be caused by non-physical factors.
If the rock would float by physical factors caused by other physical factors, it would just be a normal physical phenomenon. It would know it's supposed to float anyway. To be miraculous, it must be different.
So there's something of a mistake I made: miracles can't be caused, ultimately. Either the rock floats by miracle or else it floats on magnetic fields generated by miracle.
So, if a miracle can be caused and predicted, it isn't a miracle. (Though longer chains could be recognized early, despite being spontaneous overall.)
Ergo 'miracle' can be precisely defined as an uncaused physical phenomenon, inconsistent with physical laws.
I can't see any relevant assumptions that I've missed.
The problem with all miracles is that physics is densely interlinked. If you violate conservation, you violate every law. It's hard to see how you can generate a magnetic field, or a current generating same, without obeying the laws of EM and thus all laws and thus not being miraculous.
Plus...how can you both violate causality and also cause a rock to float? If you change causality to allow it, you'll change everything that's consistent with causality, too.
(Though I'm eager to note I've found a way around this.)
But it doesn't really matter what I think. Miracles are highly recognizable. If you see one, we can worry then about how it manages to not destroy the entire universe instantaneously. By, you know, looking.
Alrenous...you and your marvelous proofs in that the margins are too small to hold...
2. You are addressing a different question than Hume.
The Humean question is basically: Suppose you recollect witnessing a miracle last night...or that your friend recounts witnessing a miracle. "I loudly demanded of the night sky proof that God existed, and the rock floated up...stayed there for 10 seconds, and did 2 somersaults before floating back down".
What OUGHT you to believe? You should believe that it was NOT a miracle, because all other events are more likely. FULL STOP.
Tight coupling of physical law is a good point, but one beyond the epistemological requirement to disbelieve.
So you should disbelieve yourself and do so dogmatically.
How come Hume held so fast to the regularities observed in nature?
What is the basis for assuming tomorrow the sun would rise in east at a particular angle?.
Is it mere probability that it has arisen so for past 5000 times I have observed it so?.
Or do men intuit a certain order in the nature?
How would you empirically go on settling this point?
Is science inspired by search for probabilities or a sense of a hidden order?
The science explains a familiar phenomenon by means of unfamiliar.
Planetary motions are explained on basis of a mysterious force of gravitation.
Well physicists seem to talk about the ultimate reality all the time.
For some, a Theory of Everything would be the ultimate reality.
You may also understand it as the totality of the facts or all the phenomena.
It looks like I'm addressing a different question? Well, okay.
About this rock, you can believe whatever you like, because nothing logically follows from either belief. It's future-decision-irrelevant, unless you expect the rock to do it again.
If you expect a rock to do the same thing tomorrow night you can go and just look.
If expect a rock to do the same thing without being asked, you can carry a camera around.
Else: whatever, it doesn't matter. Beliefs without empirical content are not constrained by empirical considerations.
Similarly, "Miracles used to happen." Decision-irrelevant, unless the model has specific predictions about archaeology.
Gyan,
I normally argue the point the Alrenous is arguing in the other thread of discussion.
There is no ultimate reality accessible to people. We should stop discussion such silly questions. Science is entirely a question of how well you can predict the future.
Science does not explain the world...it tells you how to predict the world. If it ain't a prediction, (more carefully, a method for making predictions) it ain't science. Gravity is a word that we use to describe a predictive regularity.
Also, it turns out that Hume is himself the master of the argument about why one should (not) believe the sun should rise tomorrow. The argument you're using is his, from the Enquiry. Hume has no answer to the question, and concludes that you cannot rationally assume it.
Aretae's Bayesian empiricism disagrees, on the grounds that logic itself is a tool derived from observing the regularities of the natural world.
Alrenous,
We agree, except for 1 item:
It has no future consequences. If you believe that a rock indeed floated... The ghost of Bayes demands that you downgrade your estimation of your understanding of physics, or your estimation of nature's regularity, or at least of the bundle of those two probabilities.
Aretae,
IS that so?. Did Darwin make any predictions in his books?
Are geological or astronomical or zoological research papers filled with predictions?
Predictability is just a bonus from understanding.
It is entirely rational to expect sun to arise tomorrow. I do not claim otherwise.
My claim is intuitive perception of underlying order in the universe is rational, whatever a misplaced skepticism may say.
On AI and moving goalposts:
Has Turing Test been passed?
To me, it is the Goedel Theorem that is telling against AI.
Gödel set out to demonstrate we cannot prove with formal logic everything that we know to be true in mathematics. The nub of his Incompleteness Theorems is that there are things that we can define to be true in a mathematical system, but which we cannot capture in a formal proof. If we concede that mathematical objects are in some way real, Gödel requires us to concede as well the existence of some higher source for the intuition which sees a mathematical truth that transcends formal logic.
(David Goldman at First Things).
1. Yes, zoology papers publish predictions, and more importantly, statistical confirmations and disconfirmations of theory all the time. As do astronomy papers. And Geology. And those that don't are making implicit predictions...or else collecting datasets that one can mine for predictive capability.
2. Darwin made a claim about how animals were related to one another...that was subject to experiment. The finches on the G Islands, he claimed, had a common ancestor. Modern techniques can measure the extent to which that is true. Testable claim.
3. I'm with Bayes and you on sun in the morning, and against Hume.
4. I'm highly unimpressed by Godel's applicability to anything beyond abstract mathematics. I'd read Godel as saying: Starting rationalistically doesn't work. Start empirically. Maybe that's my math degree talking.
The historical evidence on the death of Jesus is that he was crucified, died, his body disappeared, and various disciples claimed to have seen him.
Therefore either he was resurrected, or the disciples stole his body.
Which is more likely, that a man would rise from the dead, or that men who would die for their beliefs, would also lie for their beliefs?
Problem the first:
If he was resurrected, why should that make me believe in the Bible?
The event and the document are entirely unrelated.
The correct thing to do is verify the Bible independently, which has various severe problems.
Problem the second:
People lie.
They claimed to see a resurrection? Good for them. That is very, very different from observing a resurrection.
James,
Welcome, and well said.
Aretae,
Though Five Ways are really not my cup of tea, I wonder if you would care to discuss your curt dismissal of just one, Take the First -Argument by Motion.
You say that #7 is false.
7. The sequence of motion cannot extend ad infinitum.
I dont get your curt dismissal as it is self-evidently false.
Could you elaborate?
The Argument from Reason is not an argument for Existence of a personal God. Instead it argues for that immateriality of the mind and proceeds from the incompatibility of the physical causation and logical
ground/consequent relationship.
It seeks to prove that mental activities involved in reasoning can not be reduced to physical operations of the brain.
And how would you deal with Haldane's paradox:
"If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of [physical materials] in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of [physical materials]."
How does your Bayesian reasoning deal with the Monism (of Hindu Advaita or Hegelian variety)?
It seems that you consider only two options: either a fully personal Theist God or full-blown materialism. But the history of thought give many more viable options. A priori, can you eliminate these?
Gyan:
1. 5 ways #1...point #7.
Either something goes back indefinitely or it doesn't.
We have NO/ZERO evidence to suggest it doesn't go back indefinitely except a failure of imagination.
Worse...the argument reads like this:
Suppose something cannot go back indefinitely. Let us posit god, which does go back indefinitely, to solve that problem.
Either something can go back indefinitely, in which case, I don't need the explanation of God...or else nothing can go back indefinitely, in which case God can't either.
The argument is HORRID.
Argument from reason:
1. I had no intention of bringing personal god into the discussion.
That minds must be immaterial is the premise that is doubtful. I flat out deny it...and claim that we'll have proof (either way...and by either way, I mean proof that I'm right) within 20-40 years. Turing-passing computers are likely inside 10 years for one-time interactions. The duration will then grow.
Haldane's paradox troubled me greatly from 1990 to about 1999. I'm very happy with the Compatibilist solution. Read Dennett for a complete explanation.
Gyan,
You're stuck in a notion of reason that I find completely bass-ackwards.
Here's how reason works:
I see lightning. Bob has previously claimed to be able to tell the distance at which lightning strikes, by counting seconds, and computing. Bob counts seconds, and says that the lightning struck 3 miles away. On the evening news, they say that lightning struck 3.2 miles from where I was. Bob's method appears to have worked once. My probability of it's being true goes from low (10%...I don't see how that would work) to moderate (60%). After he does it 5 more times over the next year, my belief that this method works increases to 98%.
Logic itself has 99.9999% trust, with a 3% chance of screwing up implementations on even simple real-world applications...because of how many times it's worked in the past.
The ONLY measure we have of how well any theory works...the ONLY method we have of determining truth is testing predictivity. And all interesting features of the world have so many variables as to be only predictable statistically.
For instance, if you're not rich (top 5%? 1%?), and you divorce after having kids, you screw up your life, your ex-spouse's life, and your kids lives substantially for the next many years ... with about a 90% likelihood. (Super rich seem to be able to buy their way out of some of the costs.)
The difference we are running into is that you want to start with theory and truths, and move to application...I want to start with predictions, and experiments and conclude probability of truth.
If you're not making measurable predictions, I'm inclined to suspect that your words don't mean anything at all. "Green dreams sleep furiously" sounds like it should mean something.
So tell me where your theory (God, Monism, Monadism, Berkelian Idealism, Buddhist reincarnation, Animism, Crystal Magic, Faeries, Klingons, or 47-dimensional omnipotent invisible blue bananas) makes predictions at odds with the single coherent set of positions that is materialism. IF your position predicts results inconsistent with materialism...then we can measure the difference. If not? Then I have trouble seeing why to care.
That minds must be immaterial is no premise, rather this is the thing that The Argument from Reason seeks to demonstrate.
The wikipedia misleads if it says otherwise.
I supposed that the correct Bayesian procedure is to consider the best evidence right now. What we may or may not expect in 10 or 20 or 40 years should be irrelevant to a thoroughgoing Bayesian.
Tell me one scientific prediction that Darwin made, successful or otherwise.
That about the finches is just an explanation.
A prediction must refer to a future event.
A thoroughgoing empiricism can not work. If you have no theory to begin with, you wont even know what to observe. People do not just record observations, they do so for a reason.
The physics experiments, have you ever considered how constrained and artificial they are?.
1. Darwin was an odd case. He set out an explanation for a set of facts that existed. It was a good-sounding explanation. And it wasn't evaluable as true or false, probable or not, until after folks said: If Chuck is right, then we'll find a fossil of a half-man, half-ape someday...and then they did.
2. Physics Experiments? Yes...I hated physics lab in college, and my Ph.D. Physics friends have told me all kinds of fun experiments they do...very narrow, constrained. That's why I was a rationalist math/philsophy guy for 15 years.
3. Recording observations is a formal procedure established to regularize the process. The goal is to predict the future and kids start doing this before they can talk. Eye motion tracking suggests they're doing it within hours of birth. See Child development/ psychology here. I'd start with Montessori and her explanations of how kids learn basic concepts...or with Piaget, and how they learn some basic building blocks of logic: They want to be able to predict what happens next.
On the other hand, I appreciate that at least someone else acknowledges that intent precedes observation.
Dostoevsky, based upon this Christian world-view, predicted (or prophesied) a lot of things that came into pass 40-50 years after
his death such as Communist revolutions followed by their collapse and revivals of Christianity in those countries.
These predictions are there in the Grand Inquisitors chapter of Karamazov Brothers.
Futurists of materialist orientation such as HG Wells--none of their social predictions came anywhere near realization. In fact, they were astoundingly wrong.
How would a thoroughgoing Bayesian
react to this fact, which of course you may dispute.
1. Socialism is insane, and predicated on the big myth: People, especially central planners, can be sure of stuff. Complete Hooey. Orson Welles had that problem.
2. There are LOTS of folks who have successfully predicted some things. See, for instance, folks who opposed the introduction of the income tax in the USA.
3. What science requires to operate on, is not just a prediction, but a method for predicting stuff. Part of why physics is so easy to run experiments on (mostly) is that their predictions are mathy, and methodical.
4. Did Dostoyevsky use a method for predicting stuff? My wife is insanely insightful in predicting peoples' behavior many months or years out. Divorce predictions 3 years ahead of time, after walking past folks, and not talking to them. And that's standard...not unusual. She can't tell you how she does it...I say it's a phenomenally well-trained eye. But that ain't a method and it ain't science. OTOH, it is a good predictor.
Does that help? Science is about predicting with replicable method?
Is there an empirical evidence for the kinds of things socio-biologists believe in.
Such as "
Most human behavioral characteristics were already in place by the time humans learned to domesticate plants and animals."
from www.psywww.com/intropsych/ch08_animals/human_ancestral_environment.htm
Question: if you do believe such kind of stuff, do you believe
1) Because you think empirical evidence supports
2) You regard socio-biologists as Truth-tellers.
In other words, as an authority.
I have a relatively high probability (75%) for the basic sociobiology hypothesis. As far as I've been able to tell, domestication of animals is traced to near 10K years ago, near the time when folks moved from foraging to farming. (Note: these statements can all be turned into hypotheses, and should be taken as such. Hypothesis re: 10K years ago. We will not find any evidence suggesting strongly that animals were domesticated before 10Kya).
On the other hand, it depends what you mean by behavioral characteristics. I think acceptance of authority of one man over another is a feature of agricultural man, that didn't exist before 10Kya. I personally suspect (p=~.30%) that marriage (long-term monogamy) is an institution designed for agricultural life, not for hunter-gatherer life, and that long-term monogamy should be rare in the pre-10Kya era.
I don't believe in truth-tellers. I "believe in" testable hypotheses.
. I personally suspect (p=~.30%) that marriage (long-term monogamy) is an institution designed for agricultural life, not for hunter-gatherer life, and that long-term monogamy should be rare in the pre-10Kya era.
How are these "testable"?
Dont Eskimos or Australian Aborigines have marriages?
Gyan,
1. Testable...When we find archeological evidence of historical HG tribes, if we can find markers indicating lifetime number of sexual partners, it should be well >1.
2. Eskimos and Australian Bushmen are modern Hunter Gatherers...but they've been pushed into environments (Very unforgiving) that lead to results like those of Hunter Gatherers. I don't think one can generalize from the two examples you gave. 20Kya, we'd suspect some/many humans to live in fertile areas, rather than the highly marginal areas they currently tend to live in...and that should make a difference in the economics of marriage.
Werent there a lot of HGs encountered in New Guinea a hundred years ago?
Also Pygmies, and Bushman and Andamanese.
Surely something could be generalized
from such world-wide examples.
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."When we find archeological evidence of historical HG tribes, if we can find markers indicating lifetime number of sexual partners, it should be well >1."
I dont get it. What sort of markers indicate this number.
It seems a funny marker-like a hypothesized stain on soul that gets marked whenever one sins!
Forming Man out of Dust--
Edward Feser
Forming a man from the dust of the ground involves causing the prime matter which had the substantial form of dust to take on instead the substantial form of a man. There's no sequence involved (nor any super-engineering -- God is above such trivia). It's just God "saying," as it were: "Dust, become a man." And boom, you've got your man.
(For the New Atheist types out there, no, this isn't "magic." Rather, it's something perfectly rationally intelligible in itself and at least partially intelligible to our finite minds once we do some metaphysics. It's just something that only that in which essence and existence are identical, that which is pure actuality, etc. is capable of, and we aren't. We have to work through other pre-existing material substances and thus have to do engineering and the like in order to make things. God, who is immaterial, the source of all causal power, etc. doesn't need to do that and indeed cannot intelligibly be said to do it.)
"Either something goes back indefinitely or it doesn't.
We have NO/ZERO evidence to suggest it doesn't go back indefinitely except a failure of imagination"
I dont get it. What is that something you are writing about that goes back?.
Who goes where?. In time?
Gyan,
Yes, time.
But this is not what the First Way is about. The example given by Aquinas himself is of a leaf being moved by a stone that is being moved by a stick that is being moved by a hand.
The cause and the effect are simultaneous. The point is that the secondary causes are merely instrumental. Thats why, one needs a First Mover.
Gyan,
Why can the billiard balls moving one another extend ad infinitum?
Leaf, stone, stick, hand is one model.
leaf, rain, flow to the ocean, evaporation, snow, rain, flow to the ocean....is a different model.
The assumption being made is that it could not have gone on forever, causeless. Why not? Unsupported, intuitive, wrong.
Indeed, the Hindu cosmology suggests precisely that there is an infinite cycle, with no prime mover. Circular motion as the default, not stationary motion. Why does Acquinas ASSUME this is impossible in premise 7. (Still Wikipedia). If you'd like me to reference a different text to point at the sentence/paragraph that is wrong, I'm happy to.
I can refer you to the Thomist philosopher Edward Feser's blog for the point you make:
edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/08/edwards-on-infinite-causal-series.html
excerpt:
, it wouldn’t change things in the least if we granted for the sake of argument that a series of causes ordered per se might loop around back on itself in a circle, or even that it might extend forward and backward infinitely. For the point is that as long as the members of such a circular or infinite chain of causes have no independent causal power of their own, there will have to be something outside the series which imparts to them their causal efficacy. (As the Thomist A. D. Sertillanges once put it, a paint brush can’t move itself even if it has a very long handle. And it still couldn’t move itself even if it had an infinitely long handle.) Moreover, if that which imparts causal power to the members of the circular or infinitely long series itself had no independent causal power, then it too would of necessity also require a principal cause of its own, relative to which it is an instrument. This explanatory regress cannot possibly terminate in anything other than something which has absolutely independent causal power, which can cause or “actualize” without itself having to be actualized in any way, and only what is purely actual can fit the bill.
That is the way in which it is “first” – first in the sense of being metaphysically ultimate or fundamental, and not (necessarily) in the sense of standing at the head of some (temporal or even non-temporal) queue. That is also why, contrary to what Edwards and so many other atheists suppose, it makes no sense to ask why fundamental physical particles or the like might not be the first cause. Particles and other “naturalistic” candidates for the ground floor level of reality are all compounds of act and potency, form and matter, essence and existence; accordingly, they are in need of actualization and are therefore necessarily less than the “pure act” or Subsistent Being Itself which alone could, even in principle, be that which causes without in any way being caused (or, as I would prefer to say, which actualizes potency without itself being actualized).
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The Aquinas' philosophy makes a subtle distinction between causal series per se and causal series per accidens. The First Way is concerned with per se only.
Naturally, there exist futher detractions and counter-detractions to Feser but the point is First Way is not trivially brushed off.
Causal power sounds fishy. Does it mean something?
More, that doesn't address the Hindu cosmology question. Infinite cycle forward and backwards in time, without purpose, without cause. Aquinas says this is impossible? Can we support that? Or are we just hoping that the universe is more like the paintbrush than the water cycle?
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