Friday, December 14, 2012

Nagel and his critics, Part V


Our look at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos brings us now to philosopher of science John Dupré, whose review of the book appeared in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  The review is pretty harsh.  At his kindest Dupré says he found the book “frustrating and unconvincing.”  Less kind is the remark that “as far as an attack that might concern evolutionists, they will feel, to borrow the fine phrase of former British minister, Dennis Healey, as if they had been savaged by a sheep.”

The remark is not only unkind but unjust.  At the beginning of his review, Dupré gives the impression that Nagel is attacking neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology per se.  Dupré writes: 

Darwinism, neo- or otherwise, is an account of the relations between living things past and present and of their ultimate origins, full of fascinating problems in detail, but beyond any serious doubt in general outline.  This lack of doubt derives not, as Nagel sometimes insinuates, from a prior commitment to a metaphysical view -- there are theistic Darwinists as well as atheistic, naturalists and supernaturalists -- but from overwhelming evidence from a variety of sources: biogeography, the fossil record, comparative physiology and genomics, and so on.  Nagel offers no arguments against any of this, and indeed states explicitly that he is not competent to do so.  His complaint is that there are some explanatory tasks that he thinks evolution should perform that he thinks it can't.

The unwary reader might conclude from this that Nagel is claiming that neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is in general wrong, that he thinks he can show this on the basis of a few problem cases, and that he doesn’t think he needs to bother with empirical evidence of the sort Dupré cites in order to show it.  But that is a grave distortion of Nagel’s position.  In fact Nagel does not say that neo-Darwinian explanations are in general wrong; he merely thinks that that sort of explanation cannot account for every single aspect of the biological realm.  And when Nagel criticizes neo-Darwinians for their metaphysical commitments, he is not saying that Darwinian explanations in general lack grounding in empirical evidence; rather, he is claiming that the view that neo-Darwinism can account for every single aspect of the biological realm is based in metaphysics rather than science -- specifically, in a materialist metaphysics. 

Indeed, it is this conjunction of neo-Darwinism with materialism that is the target of Nagel’s attack in the book -- not neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory per se and certainly not evolution more generally.  Nagel does not want to abandon evolutionary explanations, and he does not deny that many such explanations have empirical evidence in their favor.  Rather, he wants to situate evolutionary theory within a different, non-materialist metaphysics.

As Dupré acknowledges, in Nagel’s view the main obstacles to a completely materialistic-cum-Darwinian account of the world are consciousness, rationality, and moral value.  And Dupré seems to allow that whether these phenomena can be accounted for in materialist neo-Darwinian terms is indeed at least in part a philosophical (as opposed to purely biological) question, and that even philosophers committed to naturalism are divided on the question.  Hence while Nagel’s proposed alternative to materialism (a kind of neo-Aristotelian but non-theistic teleology) is certainly a minority view, that it is an attempt to deal with a real problem is something even many of Dupré’s fellow naturalists will concede.  So why all the scorn (as opposed to mere disagreement) on Dupré’s part?

In part the reason is that Dupré thinks Nagel is attacking a straw man insofar as Nagel characterizes materialism as inherently reductionistic.  For in fact (and as other reviewers have rightly pointed out, as we’ve seen in earlier posts) reductionism has largely been abandoned by contemporary philosophers of science.  (Dupré, an important and interesting anti-reductionist philosopher of science, deserves part of the credit for this.)  Dupré writes: 

Nagel expresses a view that was popular among philosophers of science half a century ago, and has been in decline ever since.  It is a view that is perhaps still common among philosophers of mind (David Chalmers much discussed book The Conscious Mind (1996), for example, bases its argument for dualism on a similar view of materialism), but reductionism has been almost entirely rejected by philosophers actually engaged with the physical and biological sciences: it simply has no interesting relation to the diversity of things that scientists actually do. 

But while Dupré is right about reductionism in philosophy of science, there are two problems with his remarks considered as a criticism of Nagel.  First of all, Dupré himself allows that a reductionist construal of materialism is at least still operative in much work within the philosophy of mind.  Yet as Dupré realizes, Nagel’s criticisms of materialism largely concern precisely this philosophical sub-discipline, insofar as he puts so much emphasis on the impossibility of a reductionist account of consciousness and rationality.  So, if reductionism is still a live issue in the philosophy of mind, Nagel can at least to that extent hardly be accused of attacking a straw man.

But secondly and more importantly, even if reductionism were no longer an issue even in the philosophy of mind, Dupré’s complaint would not really be a serious objection to Nagel.  For it is no good merely to point out that reductionism is no longer in fashion among naturalists.  The question is whether they can reject reductionism consistent with maintaining a position that can in any interesting sense be called “naturalistic.”   In particular, non-reductionistic versions of materialism have a tendency to collapse into either property dualism -- the sort of view defended by Chalmers -- or a quasi-Aristotelian commitment to formal and final causes -- which (as I noted in my own review of Nagel) is essentially what Nagel is defending.  So, if one rejects both Chalmers’ and Nagel’s views (as, of course, Dupré does) it is no good to note that most naturalists are no longer reductionists, and leave it at that.  One needs to show that this anti-reductionism doesn’t effectively put these naturalists precisely into either Chalmers’ camp or Nagel’s; and Dupré does nothing to show this.

As we saw in the previous post in this series, another critic of Nagel, Alva Noë, recognizes that there is a real problem here.  Noë writes: 

Some reviewers… seem glad to dismiss Nagel's call to arms. This may be because they find it implausible that either philosophy or the practice of science is committed today to… [the] idea that, theoretically at least, reality is physical and that physics therefore is the fundamental science of reality.  Very few thinkers today seek to reduce neuroscience to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry in its turn to physics. In practice, these are recognized to be autonomous domains.

This is right, but it is a superficial and unsatisfying observation.  For there is no stable or deeply understood account of how these autonomous domains fit together.  The fact that we are getting along with business as if there were such an account is, well, a political or sociological fact about us that should do little to reassure.  And anyway, as Nagel urges, the fact remains that where mind is concerned, not to mention society and economics, we lack sciences that are well-established, well-grounded and successful, loud pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding.  We haven't explained life and mind. 

End quote.  Now to this sort of criticism, it seems that Dupré would reply that whatever difficulties face materialistic accounts of consciousness, rationality, etc., they are outweighed by the considerations in favor of a broadly materialistic-cum-Darwinian view of the world.  Dupré writes: 

What seems to me beyond any serious question is that the results and insights gained by the vast quantities of philosophical and quasi-philosophical work on consciousness in the last few decades is hardly comparable with the successes that stand to the credit of evolution. 

and 

But here I will only repeat that we have surely not been offered anything harder to deny than the general truth of evolution. 

But there are two problems with such a retort.  First of all, the success of existing Darwinian explanations simply does nothing by itself to show that they are likely to be sufficient explanations of all biological phenomena, including consciousness and rationality.  Here Dupré seems to be making a mistake which so many naturalists (including some of Nagel’s other critics) make -- namely, fallaciously drawing a metaphysical conclusion from a methodological premise.  The success of metal detectors does not by itself give us any reason to think that everything in the natural world must be the sort of thing metal detectors detect (e.g. coins, nails, etc.).  And the success of materialistic-cum-Darwinian methods of explanation does not by itself give us any reason to think that everything in the biological realm must be the sort of thing of which a materialistic-cum-Darwinian explanation can be given.

Of course, we already have independent reason for thinking that non-metallic objects exist.  But then, we also have independent reason for thinking that there are biological phenomena -- such as consciousness and rationality -- which cannot be given a materialistic-cum-Darwinian explanation.  Indeed, as we have seen in the previous posts in this series, Nagel has in previous works (his book The Last Word, his article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and elsewhere) developed important lines of argument (only summarized in the new book) which imply that it is impossible in principle to account for consciousness and rationality in materialistic-cum-Darwinian terms.

And that brings us to the second problem with Dupré’s retort.  If someone gives you an argument which purports to demonstrate that there cannot possibly be an explanation of X in terms of Y, it is no response at all merely to assert that the general success of Y-explanations indicates that X must after all be explainable in terms of Y.  To borrow an example from my post on Noë, it would be absurd for a critic of Gödel to suggest that the general success of our methods of proof shows that Gödel's incompleteness theorems must be mistaken.  No one would take such a critic seriously for a moment unless he somehow showed, directly and without a hand-waving appeal to the general success of our formal methods, that the arguments for Gödel's theorems contained some heretofore unknown flaws.  For unless he does so, such a critic would simply be missing the point or begging the question.  Similarly, unless Dupré gives us some direct refutation of Nagel’s arguments against the possibility in principle of a materialistic-cum-Darwinian explanation of consciousness and rationality, his appeal to the general success of evolutionary explanations also merely misses the point or begs the question.  And yet Dupré gives us no such refutation.  He says that “this is not the place to pursue” Nagel’s arguments about consciousness, and that the issues Nagel raises about rationality are “deep waters, no doubt” which cannot be plumbed in the scope of a review.  Hence he rests his case on a mere appeal to the general success of evolution -- as if this did anything mere than merely reassert the very claim Nagel has argued against, rather than answering Nagel’s arguments! 

Similarly question-begging are Dupré’s remarks about probabilities and about the content of a non-reductionist form of materialism.  On the former subject Dupré writes: 

Nagel constantly asserts that to explain the existence of consciousness, etc., evolution must not just show that they are possible, but also that they are likely, or to be expected.  This is, I suppose, a further expression of his rationalism, the expectation of a certain kind of intelligibility.  But still it seems to me poorly motivated.  At the time of my birth it was very unlikely that I would several decades later be reviewing a book by a famous philosopher; but it is not mysterious that this eventually came about. The improbability has been declining rapidly for the last few decades.  Just so with evolution.  The evolution of reason may well be very unlikely indeed on a young, hot planet.  It's a great deal more likely by the time there are highly social, if not yet rational, multicellular organisms with very complex nervous systems. 

End quote.  The problem with this, as we saw in earlier posts in this series (since some of Nagel’s other critics make similar claims), is that the reason consciousness and rationality are in Nagel’s view unlikely on a purely materialistic-cum-Darwinian picture of nature is not the same kind of reason that it is unlikely that a newborn Dupré would grow up to review a book by a famous philosopher.  The latter scenario is improbable but not impossible.  But if Nagel’s arguments concerning consciousness and rationality are correct, then it is in principle impossible to get consciousness and rationality out of nothing more than materialistic-cum-Darwinian processes.  You might as well say (once again to borrow an example from the earlier posts) that you can get a true circle out of a polygon if you add enough sides.

On the question of what an anti-reductionistic materialism would look like, Dupré writes: 

A more sensible materialism goes no further than the rejection of spooky stuff: whatever kinds of stuff there may turn out to be and whatever they turn out to do, they are, as long as this turning out is empirically grounded, ipso facto not spooky.  Such a materialism is quite untouched by Nagel's arguments. 

But surely the problem with this is obvious.  This characterization of non-reductionistic materialism is completely unhelpful unless we have some non-question-begging explanation of what counts as “spooky.”  And that is something Dupré does not give us.  In particular (and to repeat a point made above) Dupré does not tell us how a non-reductionistic materialism differs from either property dualism or neo-Aristotelianism.  Perhaps he would say that materialism differs from these other views in not being committed to paradigmatically “spooky” entities like ectoplasm, vital spirits, gods-of-the-gaps, and the like.  But if so, then he would be attacking a caricature, since (as I noted earlier in this series of posts) neither the Cartesian nor the Aristotelian is actually committed to these hoary straw men.

Perhaps Dupré would say instead that while the property dualist’s immaterial properties, the Aristotelian’s formal and final causes, and the like are not “spooky” in the way these other entities are, they are nevertheless not empirically grounded.  But that is false.  The property dualist would say that the existence of qualia is in fact as empirically grounded as anything could be, since we know them from introspection.  It is true that the arguments for their immateriality appeal to further theoretical considerations, but (as philosophers of science have been emphasizing now for decades) that is true of all empirically-based arguments.

Aristotelian notions like the theory of act and potency, hylemorphism, and the like are also empirically grounded.  To be sure, they are not empirically grounded in the same way that theories in physics, chemistry, and the like are empirically grounded, insofar as they are not subject to falsification of the sort the latter theories are.  The reason is that they are claims about issues in the philosophy of nature rather than in empirical science -- that is to say, claims about what any possible empirical world has to be like if we are to have scientific knowledge of it, whereas physics, chemistry, etc. concern the specific sort of empirical world that actually exists.  (I have explained the relationship between the philosophy of nature and empirical science in an earlier post.)  Still, insofar as they start from the most general features of empirical reality as we know it from experience (such as the fact of change), they are empirically grounded.

(It is this generality that makes the difference between the disciplines.  We know from experience that change exists.  But the existence of change is nevertheless not empirically falsifiable in the same way that theories in physics and chemistry are, because any experience or set of experiences that could be put forward to falsify it would themselves be instances of change.  Thus, if you are going to try to defend a radically non-Aristotelian philosophy of nature -- for example, one that denies change altogether -- you are going to have to do so on the basis of considerations that go beyond anything physics, chemistry, etc. or experience in general can tell you.  That is to say, if you are going to falsify Aristotelianism, you are not going to be able to do it on observational or experimental grounds, but only on competing philosophical grounds.)

So, merely to say that a “sensible materialism” would reject “spooky” entities, in the sense of entities belief in which has no empirical grounding, is not yet to explain how a sensible materialism differs from either property dualism or Aristotelianism.  If Dupré at this point were simply to stipulate that entities of the sort the property dualist or Aristotelian would allow don’t count, his position would be entirely ad hoc.   And if he has some principled reason for excluding them, he doesn’t tell us what it is (at least not in his review).

So, bluster notwithstanding, Dupré has not actually presented any criticisms of Nagel that are not either aimed at caricatures, or question-begging, or ungrounded or beside the point.  And it is ironic in the first place that he is as critical of Nagel as he is, since Dupré’s important work in defense of a non-reductionistic philosophy of science only bolsters the neo-Aristotelian position -- and thus, indirectly, Nagel’s position.

223 comments:

  1. Oh the confusion to differentiate all of you Anons XD.

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  2. @grodrigues,
    "If the series converges (the function is analytic) the higher order terms *are* small and you can control the error term."

    It's small as long as the independent variable is also small. It isn't bounded or anything. You control the error by staying close to home. Go far away and you might need a new theory.

    I'm not saying that the method is invalid, just that it is an approximation and we should never expect to arrive at completely general laws of nature this way.

    Everything has its energy scale.

    @Eduardo,
    "we gotta analyse a physics book, especially one of mathematical physics to know what they are up to."

    It would be great to threadjack Feser's combox with a critical review of a textbook on mathematical physics. Which one are you using Eduardo? And is it available for the Kindle?

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  3. I haven't taken mathematical physics yet, I have really bad mathematical abilities XD so I have no idea which book they use but I just have to look at the university site to know which book they use XD, so is no big deal.


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  4. If you are planning to visit India, so don't forget to visit their capital New Delhi, and book Delhi escorts while your tour in capital. India is known for beautiful girls everywhere in all regions specially in Delhi

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  5. @reighley:

    "It's small as long as the independent variable is also small. It isn't bounded or anything. You control the error by staying close to home. Go far away and you might need a new theory."

    Yes, that is correct, you can perform the construction only locally. What you *can* do is either prove that all the local constructions "glue" to a global construction or if they do not, classify the obstructions to do the patching up. To not threadjck the thread any further, the relevant buzzwords here are sheaf theory and sheaf cohomology.

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  6. Thanks Grodrigues, this makes things easier XD.

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  7. @grodrigues,

    I'm with Eduardo on this one: XD!
    I mention a little high school calculus and out comes the cohomology! I draw the line at homology. Er. Not line. Geodesic? One dimensional simplex? That one. I draw the 1-simplex at homology.

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  8. So you are saying they are supernatural? If not, what are you saying?

    I am saying (and I am quoting myself here):

    They (qualia, intentionality, free will) are not naturalistic because naturalism simply cannot account for them.

    The thesis that not only myself but many others (including materialists - hence eliminativism) is that naturalism cannot account for them. Period. Whether you call them "supernatural", "pixie dust" or "potato salad" makes no difference.

    So, if you think that naturalism can account for them (without being dishonest, committing equivocation fallacies and or appealing to Aristotelian principles) then show us how.

    Learn to read, my original statement was quite precise.

    I read you statement just fine. It was nonsensical and so I parodied your claims by referencing unicorns and Cartesian demons.

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  9. They (qualia, intentionality, free will) are not naturalistic because naturalism simply cannot account for them.

    You must work in the Department of Tautology.

    I read you statement just fine.

    Obviously you didn't, or you were deliberately distorting it.

    There seem to be the following possibilities:

    - intentionality (or any of the other things that you feel are mysterious) is a perfectly natural phenomenon like any other.

    - intentionality does not exist.

    - intentionality exists but is supernatural or in some other way not natural.

    So pick one already, or if there's another alternative, tell me what it is. Saying that "naturalism can't account for x" doesn't tell me what you think CAN account for x.

    In my opinion, intentionality and qualia are perfectly natural, and free will can be split into a couple of different concepts some of which are nonexistent and others which are natural.

    More fundamentally, these are all what I call broken concepts. They are notions that are perfectly alright for everyday use (or are slightly tarted-up versions of everyday notions) but are clearly inadequate to a rigorous understanding of the mind. The supposedly intractable problems are a side-effect of employing technical rigor to concepts that are inherently not capable of technically rigorous definition.

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  10. I think what he's trying to say is that intentionality, qualia, etc are all natural, if we take "natural" to mean "part of our observed world." But he is also saying that mainstream metaphysical naturalism (which operates purely using material and efficient causes) cannot account for them. Ironically, they are "natural" things which create explanatory problems for naturalism. Perhaps we could just give the Dennett treatment to these concepts.

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  11. You know I think you two agree with each other is just a matter of terminology that you disagree.

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  12. You must work in the Department of Tautology.

    It’s not my fault you don’t know enough to understand what I’m telling you.


    The irony, which is inherent in your stupidity, is all too loud when you equivocate natural with naturalistic. While intentionality is perfectly natural in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysic, it is certainly not naturalistic. That is the distinction you’re are either incapable of grasping or simply refuse to do so. As another anon pointed out:

    But he is also saying that mainstream metaphysical naturalism (which operates purely using material and efficient causes) cannot account for them. Ironically, they are "natural" things which create explanatory problems for naturalism.

    To that I would also add that it operates on reductionism and nominalism, which exacerbate the problem, making it impossible for naturalism to account for them.


    Saying that "naturalism can't account for x" doesn't tell me what you think CAN account for x.

    You have it all ass-ends backwards. It’s YOU that needs to tell US what accounts for intentionality given naturalism/materialism. You simply can’t do it, otherwise you would have already done it. Trying to play with words like natural vs supernatural like an amateur isn’t going to cut it. Do you think that it’s a “lucky” coincidence that the few naturalists (Theists too) that take the metaphysic to its logical conclusion end up with some form of eliminativism?

    In my opinion, intentionality and qualia are perfectly natural, and free will can be split into a couple of different concepts some of which are nonexistent and others which are natural.

    Smacking a label on them doesn’t do anything for you. I think I already parodied this failed attempt by mentioning potato salad, did I not?

    What I want from you is to start from materialism and the assumptions it makes about the nature of reality and show me how this reality can account for intentionality, qualia and free will.

    More fundamentally, these are all what I call broken concepts. They are notions that are perfectly alright for everyday use (or are slightly tarted-up versions of everyday notions) but are clearly inadequate to a rigorous understanding of the mind. The supposedly intractable problems are a side-effect of employing technical rigor to concepts that are inherently not capable of technically rigorous definition.

    The only thing broken is materialism. It’s materialism that is inadequate to account for them. These concepts are too rich and too big to fit in the narrow-minded view of materialism. You honestly have no idea what you’re talking about if you truly believe that last paragraph you typed up.

    To claim that free will, intentionality and qualia are inadequate to an understanding of the mind (rigorous or otherwise) is nothing short of denying the very thing in question, the mind. So like I said, you either have no idea of what you’re talking about or implicitly have accepted eliminativism and evidently have denied the existence of the mind.

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  13. Correction:

    that take the metaphysic *of naturalism

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  14. You have it all ass-ends backwards. It’s YOU that needs to tell US what accounts for intentionality given naturalism/materialism

    Who in the world makes up these rules? Why should I have to “account for” something whereas you seem to be excused from that requirement?

    To claim that free will, intentionality and qualia are inadequate to an understanding of the mind (rigorous or otherwise) is nothing short of denying the very thing in question, the mind.

    To claim that phlogiston is inadequate to an understanding of matter is nothing short of denying the very thing in question.
    To claim that luminferous aether is inadequate to an understanding of light is nothing short of denying the very thing in question.
    To claim that the four humors are inadequate to an understanding of physiology is nothing short of denying the very thing in question.


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  15. Who in the world makes up these rules? Why should I have to “account for” something whereas you seem to be excused from that requirement?

    You are required to account for intentionality/free will/qualia because all three are in violent contradiction with your belief in metaphysical materialism. As I already told you, Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics do a fine job of accounting for such realities for the simple reason that their framework is more comprehensive and rational. I'm not here to educate you, so if you want to know more about the A-T treatment of these concept, pick up a book and learn.

    You on the other hand have not and are incapable of providing us with an account for these three given materialism. To those of us that understand the questions at hand, this is no surprise since materialism essentially eschews these things as unreal.

    In addition, you fail to comment on practically everything I said. Again, that is no coincidence. You really don't know what you're talking about, hence the irrelevant and quite frankly simplistic remarks and protests.

    To let me put it simply to you. If you think intentionality, qualia and free will can be accounted for in your materialistic belief system, then show us how. If you don't know how then simply appeal to ignorance. If you don't think it can be done (like I do) then stop wasting our time. It's that simple.

    To claim that phlogiston is inadequate to an understanding of matter is nothing short of denying the very thing in question.

    First of all, you need to explain to us what this thing called "matter" is. I asked you before and you still have not provided us with an answer.

    The problem is that free will, intentionality and qualia are essential and indispensable aspects the mind. What your silly parody (it's self-defeating by the way and I will show you how) does is treat them as unreal. What you are indirectly claiming is that one can reject all three and still have a coherent view of mind, which is not only false but laughable. If you don't have intentionality then your thoughts simply have no aboutness in relation to the world, and that would render them (thoughts) incoherent (that is known as a reductio ad absurdum btw). But the grave irony here is that once I pushed you into the corner, you've resorted to embrace eliminativism, which is precisely the point I was trying to make. So not only did you fall flat on your face, you actually proved my point for me! ;-)

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  16. As I already told you, Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics do a fine job of accounting for such realities for the simple reason that their framework is more comprehensive and rational.

    In other words, you can’t or won’t account for them at all, you are just waving your flag and evading the question, just like you evaded my request that you specify how your account is not natural.

    If you give me an account in your supernatural or unnatural metaphysics of how qualia etc work, I’ll do the same in mine. Fair is fair.

    The problem is that free will, intentionality and qualia are essential and indispensable aspects the mind. What your silly parody (it's self-defeating by the way and I will show you how) does is treat them as unreal.

    Your lack of ability to process a simple analogy is not a very good advertisement for your philosophy.

    Phlogiston was a substance posited to explain the phenomenon of combustion. Phlogisticated substances were those capable of burning. When the theory was dropped in favor of a more accurate theory (oxidation), the people who dropped it were not thereby eliminativists on the topic of fire. They still were quite capable of talking about fire, and about differing capabalities of different substances to combust. They just had a better conceptual vocabulary for doing so. I suppose you could accuse them of being “eliminativists” about phlogiston, and no doubt people did, but who cares?

    Similarly, nobody here is eliminating the mind or its capacity to represent the external world. But “intentionality”, at least in the way the term is deployed by people like you, smells like another kind phlogiston, a quaintly semi-magical substance posited to explain a phenomenon that is mysterious to a pre-scientific sensibility. It is in the process of being replaced by genuine understanding.

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  17. In other words, you can’t or won’t account for them at all, you are just waving your flag and evading the question, just like you evaded my request that you specify how your account is not natural.

    With each subsequent response you are making yourself even more stupid. It has already been noted by myself and at least one other that according to A-T philosophy intentionality is natural. I have also made the distinction between natural and naturalistic, something you obviously do not understand.

    Like I said, I am not here to educate you so if you want an exposition of intentionality in A-T terms you will need to do the work yourself. There are also several other non-naturalistic explanations of intentionality that you can explore as well. The difference is, no one in the right mind would contest that A-T for example does not provide an account of intentionality since teleology (final causality) is a fundamental aspect of reality. For materialism this is not the case, since materialism is devoid of final causality. So the very fact that you are hinting that a metaphysic, which is holistic and teleological cannot provide and account of intentionality (which is teleological) is nothing short of stupid and ignorant.

    I am also inclined to believe after reading your posts that you don’t even know/understand your own beliefs, which is quite pathetic.

    So evidently you’re getting desperate and trying to shift the burden of proof.

    Again, you cannot provide a materialistic account of any of the three, so you fail miserably at making your beliefs even intelligible.

    Your lack of ability to process a simple analogy is not a very good advertisement for your philosophy.

    Your analogy is simply wrong and inapplicable. There is really nothing to understand. And this is where you analogy fails:

    They still were quite capable of talking about fire, and about differing capabalities of different substances to combust.

    As I said earlier, free will, intentionality and qualia are essential aspects of the mind. To talk about mind without subjective experience, intentionality and semantic meaning and a free will which underscores our intellectual apparatus is to simply talk nonsense or talk about a construct of some materialistic, idiotic imagination. Nothing more. You are trying to use alchemy here in order to turn the mind into matter or some sort (still waiting for you to explain to us what this thing called “matter” is btw). You are beyond the point of ridiculous, not only because you’re wrong but because after being corrected repeatedly you still insist on your wrongheadedness.

    But “intentionality”, at least in the way the term is deployed by people like you, smells like another kind phlogiston, a quaintly semi-magical substance

    This is one good example of how after being corrected by two separate posters, you still insist on propagating such mental pollution. Why do you insist on embarrassing yourself like this? A-T philosophy does not treat intentionality like you think it does, so once again your analogy fails. Teleology is a cause not a substance you fool. At this point you need to read about A-T philosophy so you can (a) understand it a little and (b) if you are to criticize it to at least do it properly. Either that, or appeal to ignorance and stop wasting our time.

    Continued...

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  18. a pre-scientific sensibility. It is in the process of being replaced by genuine understanding.

    First off, materialism is a pre-scientific sensibility stemming all the way back to the Ancient Greeks. Did you even know that? Or did you think that materialism magically appeared during the scientific revolution? OR do you think that materialism has anything to do with science? Or do you think that science would even be possible if you existed in a materialistic world?

    Yes, that’s right. If we were living in a materialistic world science would be practically impossible (especially in the realist sense). Learn it and stop trying to hide behind words like science, which have nothing to do with your materialistic beliefs.

    OK, so if intentionality is in the process of being replaced by “genuine understand” (lol, can’t help but laugh at crap like that – it’s called promissory materialism if you ever read Popper, who am I assuming you never did), then show us how materialism does it, with its “genuine understanding”. No more blind materialistic faith, time for you to put some substance behind your claims. Either show us or give it a rest.

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  19. It has already been noted by myself and at least one other that according to A-T philosophy intentionality is natural

    Well, we are in agreement then, and we can drop this tedious non-argument.

    Of course, just saying x is natural does not actually go very far towards “accounting” for x, at least in my universe.

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  20. Let me explain this in a very simple way, imagine a box called universe, inside the box resides a simgle block that moves to the left and only to the left of any given observer. One of the observers believe that for every phenonema there is a simetrical phenomena that must occur in that box.
    This means that there must be something moving to the right, however inside the box there is nothing but this block moving to the left. So this person's metaphysics, or thesis or theory can not account for the movement in the box.

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  21. Well, we are in agreement then, and we can drop this tedious non-argument.

    Of course, just saying x is natural does not actually go very far towards “accounting” for x, at least in my universe.


    If you think that intentionality is "natural" but not naturalistic/materialistic as I said (please to do not quote me out of context) then I suppose we are in agreement.

    Your second paragraph is surprisingly correct but it seems to work against you since all you offered here was a label. In fact, your whole argument is based on a label, namely the label natural. But like I said, you can call it "natural", "pixie dust" or "potato salad" and it wouldn't really make a difference, since it is after all just a label.

    What needs to be done in order to account for intentionality in a materialistic world (or your universe if you want to call it that) is an explication of how you get from a random, mindless, non-teleological reality to the existence of intentionality (and that is just the first step).

    That has not been done.

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  22. I apologize if this is out of place, but would anybody here care to address this: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/why-am-i-doing-this/ ?
    I've
    grown to enjoy your collective dialogue.

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  23. The Bodhisattva WarriorMarch 26, 2013 at 12:34 AM

    Lol!

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