Idk Thxks I'll be sure to finish it. (Shrug emoji) does qualia effect physical stuff? Because in your example about evolution that important fact was not stated. If harmony was random in the experiment i predicted that those automatons would not be affected or would evolve to avoid being influence by random harmony. Because what matter about qualia is the effects it has. So what are the effect of the qualia i experience on my brain? Second having false beliefs is globally debunking because if u have a false belief that means u can not always trust ur reasoning. Reason is not decisive or consistent or complete. As long as it possible to have false belief then u can never fully trust ur reasoning, intuitions, axioms.
I haven’t finished watching all videos, but I think this argument won’t work if identity theory or necessary supervenience is true I agree p(PH/naturalism ) will be still low if identity theory is true But p(PH/theism) will also be low since God has no role in deciding PP laws
@@muhammedshanushan3931 Where are you getting "metaphysical impossibility" in this? Basic creationism belief has god designing everything by causality.
These videos are a bit beyond my understanding, but I like them. Sometimes I catch a wee bit that clicks, and then I feel so excited (and kinda smart 🤓) I do like longish videos; your voice is nice to listen to, and long videos are nice when I’m working because I don’t have to get up and change videos.
I think there are three main points wrong with the PHA and assumptions not addressed in this video. 1. "C-Fibers could have produced pleasure." [Biological ignorance] The problem with this statement, that Squared has made countless times now, is that it gets to the heart of what I'll call "biological ignorance" in the argument, and it's important because it explains why this entire argument is just really, really silly. C-Fibers firing are not what produces pain, Squared is just flat wrong about this, but let's say they DO produce pain for the sake of argument. The next step is "what produces pleasure?" Dopamine produces pleasure, not c-fibers. So where does that leave the argument? We have to ASSUME: C-Fibers can give both qualia, so we have to just replace two distinctly different biological processes and structures and say "what if they were flipped?".. This is similar to the proposition: "what if the brain pumps blood and you think with your heart?", which you can see immediately why this would be dumb, but people will humor the PHA due to their ignorance of neuroscience. Wait, but that's an assumption only IF we are involving a totally different world with an entirely different biology structure that we don't know about which leads to: 2. "Apriori epistemic possibility." [The world of imagination...and ignorance.] The biggest problem, probably the lynchpin of the PHA argument, is that "a priori epistemic probability" in a hypothetic means ultimately nothing. The PHA creates an imaginary world, states the person is ignorant, and then states that the "possiblities are equal in ignorance." But that's not special! This same trick can be done for anything, as long as you put the apriori * next to a hypothetical and you specify "you don't know" far enough back, you're always going to have nearly infinite epistemic possibility spreads. The MORE a person knows, the lower that probability spread, the argument works BETTER if your are more ignorant, which leads to: 3. "Axiological intuitions" : [Muh Ignorance] One huge assumption Squared has made and the PHA makes is that the naturalistic explanation doesn't account for harmony, when evolution does just that. What Squared has forgotten and the PHA forgot is that disharmony exist and the PHA doesn't predict it. Now there is a really good reason why and I'll tell you: Theist don't like competition. They don't like competing models, they don't like measurement, and they certainly don't like OBJECTIVITY. The problem Squared runs into for his explanation is his "intuition", because "intuition" in an objective argument is just short for his opinion, people don't share his "axiological intuition" on these topics because they don't hold his opinion. It seems steeped in ignorance, willfully so, and whenever Squared is pressed he's had to resort to his "axiological intuitions" which means: No evidence, no argument, his opinion.
He addressed this? Look. Epistemically possible worlds are by defniton possible. So we can assume the world could been that way. Since a lot of these psychophysical laws make a lot less assumptions they seem more likely than our own. Like a world were C fibers cause the taste of cheese. In fact everything, C fibers, dopamine, etc cause the sensation of tasting cheese. This world does not have the same complex laws as our own so is simpler
@blankspace2891 Well no, Squared has argued the principle of indifference so there is no "more likely" outcome in the argument. You seem to be arguing complexity and occams razor, which isn't relevant to anything in this argument or my objection.
Your argument is ironically from ignorance too lol. Yes, if you watch squares oringinal video the simpler psychophysical laws would be more likely. But your mom thing seems to be that square is ingornet to how biology works. Now, I don’t know squared myself but I don’t think this argument is to be ignorant. The point is that biology would have been the same regardless of the quail experienced. C fibers can fire which can go to the bran and give the experience of pain. But we can imagine the same process giving us pleasure in some possible worlds. Nothing PHYSICALLY changes. The only thing is our subjective experience.
"c-fibers = pain" isn't really the same thing as "Water = H2O". "C-Fibers = pain" is much more analogous to "The Usb cable that is attached to my pc and Camera = Camera-footage shown on my screen". Not only are c-fibers essentially only the transport mechanism from sensors to the brain, it is the brain that will need to interpret that information and turn it into the experience of pain. For the interpretation of that process, your theory of mind is actually quite important if there can be any X so that the statement "X = pain" is true. I think it is still wrong to asume that there are "laws" that define which physical structures correspond to which experiences. As an analogy lets go back to computer science. The difference between "software" and "hardware" isn't capabillity. No matter what procedure you dream up, you could in principle create some structure that could execute that exact procedure. Similarly, no matter the hardware (as long as there is enough space and basic operations available) you could write any procedure as a software-program. The only meaningful difference between "software" and "hardware" is that "hardware" is a structure that can not change and always only does one thing, while "Software" on the other hand can dynamically change what it "does". Our experiences/qualia seem to be procedures carried out by our brain (or soul/transmitted to our soul). If there were psychophysical laws, that would imply our brain is essentially entirely "hardware" and that the brain would be rigid and could not change its behaviour. That seems to be false, over time our experiences change. Our brain notably changes when growing up. Using the analogy of "software" and "hardware", our experiences seem to be caused more by "software" than by "hardware". I would be surprised if even one actual psychophysical law could be defined (not the simplyfication we are using).
The C fibers firing is just a short hand for whatever causes pain. And even if C fibers aren’t exact that wouldn’t matter since this is only talking about why the argument works on physicalism
@@blankspace2891 kinda, my point is that there isn't any particular thing that causes pain, just as in a computer, there isn't any particular place that causes the image of my comment to appear. In case of a computer, we have incomming data, the computer decides which component should handle that data, and (hopefuly) the things you want on screen appear on screen. There simply isn't *any* rigit structure that "causes a youtube comment section to apear on your screen". Just like there isn't one particular thing that "causes pain" or any other experience for that matter. Experiences are largely learnt, with even the hardwired impulses needing to be contextualized (by our parents/our surroundings for example) in order for us to understand.
I think evolution needs steelmanning. I'm not a philosopher or evolutionary biologist, but as this is just a youtube comment, what the heck. If all psychophysical harmony is, is a meaning for events happening in the external world, originating from the organism's nervous system "correlating" to those (external world) events, then the fact that there is "harmony" only reflects a fact that valid meanings can be attained by the organism about what's happening in the external world (which includes, in the case pain, what's happening to its body). All harmony/qualia are, are getting correct meanings from physiological symbols/events (e.g., getting the meaning of the text "cat" is similar, but obviously learned, although some semantic PH may be learned, which would be a way to refute some PHA probability claims). All naturalists ever say about PH is P(life-continuing|valid meaning of its nervous system symbols) >>>>>>> P(life-continuing|invalid meaning), so evolution does, according to its own theory, operates on the form of the qualia (to make them better). So rather than deny that valid meanings can be attained (via evolution) for our physiological symbols (which PHA seems to do), I'd rather (and quite symmetrically) just deny PHA's sense of "psychophysical law" as being, if not incoherent, at least unjustified. For instance, what PHA calls "psychophysical laws" (existing a priori) is just what is described as being "built" by life forms (a posteriori) via evolutionary theory, so how can either side ever hope to convince the other? To say repeatedly, "evolution has to use the psychophysical laws it's been given" (as a mantra), when evolution just says (something like) evolution builds qualia-to-external-world mappings to be useful (as a mantra), is just to say the two POVs accept different axiom sets as being true. So neither PHA, nor evolutionary theory, are really "arguing" then. But even so, I prefer the second axiom set, because it would seem to give more "power" over the universe at large (speaking for my species here). Finally, I don't think an "epiphenomenalism" objection to PHA is ever addressed. I (and evolution, imo) assume non-epiphenomenal qualia. That is, qualia affect behavior directly, and evolution doesn't directly select behavior-- but evolution selects the organism that behaves. However, I'm not sure where PHA (really) stands on qualia epiphenomenalism. I know they say it's irrelevant, but do they really mean it? I can doubt they do, because it seems entailed (imo) that if qualia were non-epiphenomenal they could be selected for (just like feathers and claws), so the fact that PHA keeps saying they can't be selected seems strange, unless they tacitly have to accept epiphenomenalism of qualia.
48:00 of course that definition is implausible. For starters, humans desire plenty of things that God is supposed to hate, and they have plenty of contradictory desires, too. Also, the reasons we create things with the same "desires" that we have seem to be purely pragmatic, and not essential to how designers work, so that's another problem for this idea. And then of course, it runs into the same problem I've been talking about, it's a priori extremely unlikely that God would desire exactly the things that you or I desire. 50:44 if by God you mean a creator and designer of the universe, then I don't see why the star writing would boost our confidence in that. Moving stars is impressive, but it's not remotely the same as creating a universe out of nothing. And indeed, no theist seems to take the lack of such star writing to be a failed prediction of theism.
// For starters, humans desire plenty of things that God is supposed to hate // A lot of objections can be reasoned through by comparing it to the Robot-1 thought experiment. If Robot-2 was malfunctioning, then its desires might not reflect that of Robot-1. For an extreme case, it seems plausible that a murderer has "malfunctioning" desires, in some sense. So we wouldn't infer our Designer's desires from murderers. // they have plenty of contradictory desires, too. // Inconsistent desires are not necessarily problematic. In the trolley problem, I desire to save the one man as well as the five men. These desires cannot both be fulfilled. But they're not problematic because they flow from a more fundamental desire to preserve human life. So, we could plausibly cast "good" in terms of something like fundamental desires. // if by God you mean a creator and designer of the universe, then I don't see why the star writing would boost our confidence in that. // Well, the word "God" usually has those connotations, and that is the word written in the sky, and whoever's doing the star-writing chose to use that word. So, I think it would be quite plausible to raise one's credence in a creator God. // And then of course, it runs into the same problem I've been talking about, it's a priori extremely unlikely that God would desire exactly the things that you or I desire. // Fine, "God prefers beauty" is going to be a priori unlikely given your epistemology. But now we're updating on a posteriori data about our own desires, and this data was itself a priori extremely unlikely. So it can overturn the low prior. // And indeed, no theist seems to take the lack of such star writing to be a failed prediction of theism. // Technically it is, but this is one of those confusing points of Bayesianism. So, let's have T denote theism, and S the star-writing. P(S|T) can be really low. Say, 10^-1000. But, P(S|-T) can be even lower. Say, 10^-1000000. When we update on -S, the probability of theism indeed goes down, but only by a negligible amount. However, if we were to update on S, suddenly the probability of T shoots up. Another case of this is you walk into a house and you want to know if there are any wasps in the house. So you first check a doorknob to see if there are any wasps on the doorknob. Let's say W is the presence of wasps in the house, and D is the presence of wasps on the doorknob. P(D|W) is super low. There are so many places that a wasp could be found, so this specific doorknob having a wasp on it would be improbable. P(D|-W) is also super low (in fact, it's 0). Now, if you update on -D, this will technically lower the probability of W. But only by a miniscule amount. However, updating on D entails the probability of W is 1. Human intuitions about probability don't handle small probabilities very well, so this point is confusing to a lot of people. Because even if the lack of star-writing may technically lower the probability of theism, it's going to be such a small change that it's not worth pondering.
@@ApologeticsSquared The only way it would seem plausible that a murderer has "malfunctioning" desires, is if you assume design, and furthermore you assume that the designer doesn't want us to murder. And isn't the designer supposed to be perfect? If the design is malfunctioning, the designer isn't perfect. Besides, there are desires like lust, pride, greed or even hunger that virtually all humans have and God is supposed not to have. Are nearly all humans malfunctioning? I think I found a good way to explain my objection here. Let's go back to the robot analogy. There are 2 robots, A and B, and they both have a desire to create paperclips. A says: "we have a designer, and they created us to make paperclips". This is a priori extremely unlikely, but you say, well after they update on the fact that they do, in fact, care about making paperclips, this hypothesis becomes more likely. Okay. Now B says "we have no designer, and we just happen to have a desire to make paperclips". This is a priori just as unlikely as what A said, BUT, after they update on the fact that they do care about making paperclips, it becomes just as likely as the design hypothesis. Actually, I'd say the design hypothesis is *less* likely, because 1) it involves an additional entity 2) it requires the extra assumption that designers make things that care about the same things they do (this assumption is dubious at best. We humans design plenty of things specifically to do stuff *we* don't want to do). But yeah, this, I think, is the core problem with design arguments. They work by observing a feature of reality X, that has no explanation under atheism. Then, they explain that feature by appealing to God's desire to bring about X. But that desire is just as unexplained! X here can be something like, "there are humans who care about love", "there is psychophysical harmony", "the constants of physics allow for life in the universe", etc. So this line of reasoning just doesn't do anything for theism. (To be clear, the arguments aren't usually presented like that, but once you get rid of the idea that there's some sort of objective standard of goodness, that's all there is left). This is why, just as well, I don't think the star writing would be a good reason to accept theism (even if it's technically evidence for it). Maybe there is some design hypothesis that would be reasonable to accept given the star writing, but the designer in that hypothesis cannot have its desires be an unexplained brute fact. Because otherwise, it's just as reasonable (read: not reasonable at all) to accept that the star writing itself is an unexplained brute fact. This is a priori extremely unlikely, but hey, the star writing would be evidence for it under bayesianism.
@@Nickesponja // The only way it would seem plausible that a murderer has "malfunctioning" desires, is if you assume design, // We're trying to see what a design hypothesis predicts, so that's fine. We can just be imagining a world where there is design and seeing what follows. // and furthermore you assume that the designer doesn't want us to murder // I think that's a plausible assumption. For example, if someone murders to attain more power, I can explain what went wrong: power is actually a good thing, but we are supposed to value human life above power. What's the alternative? If our designer actually wants us to all be murderers, but we're all malfunctioning, I'm not sure how to explain that. // If the design is malfunctioning, the designer isn't perfect. // This is essentially the Problem of Evil. Which is fine to raise, but I would like to table that topic and focus on the present topic of whether or not we can infer the predictions of a designer. // Besides, there are desires like lust, pride, greed or even hunger that virtually all humans have and God is supposed not to have. Are nearly all humans malfunctioning? // Yes! And we ourselves can tell that we are (like how advanced robots might be able to detect malfunctions). We recognize the flaws in our own desires and desire to desire better things. // There are 2 robots, A and B, and they both have a desire to create paperclips. A says: "we have a designer, and they created us to make paperclips". This is a priori extremely unlikely, but you say, well after they update on the fact that they do, in fact, care about making paperclips, this hypothesis becomes more likely. Okay. Now B says "we have no designer, and we just happen to have a desire to make paperclips". This is a priori just as unlikely as what A said, BUT, after they update on the fact that they do care about making paperclips, it becomes just as likely as the design hypothesis. Actually, I'd say the design hypothesis is less likely// That's fine. The data of their desires is not supposed to raise the probability of the design hypothesis. It's supposed to imbue the design hypothesis with predictive power. So, if A and B walk over a hill and see a sea of paperclips stretching to the horizon, A can say, "Aha! This looks like it was made by our creator! Evidence for my theory rather than B's." // But yeah, this, I think, is the core problem with design arguments. // The problem is much deeper than that! If theism has NO predictive power, then I could pray for an amputee's limbs to regrow in Jesus's name, and this could happen in front of your own eyes, but this doesn't end up raising the probability of theism at all because we have no way to say the prior probability of this event is higher given theism than naturalism! "This argument for Christianity works by observing a feature of reality, namely the regrowing of the limb after prayer in Jesus's name, that has no explanation under atheism. Then, I explain that feature by appealing to God's desire to bring about the healing. But that desire is just as unexplained!" I freely admit that any argument I give in my apologetics career will be a lot less flashy than amputees regrowing limbs in front of you. So, if even *that* can't function as evidence for theism, then it's not clear to me what could! Alternatively, if that *can* function as evidence for theism (or Christianity), then *how* can it?
@@ApologeticsSquared That seems extremely suspicious. You're saying that we can infer the desires of the designer from our own desires... except for those desires that are "malfunctions", of course. Well, depending on what you consider a malfunction, you're gonna end up with wildly different designer profiles, with no objective way to tell which one is correct. This seems to bring us back to the problem of not having an objective standard of goodness. Let's say A and B walk over the hill and find that sea of paperclips. A says: "we have a designer, and they just so happened to put all those paperclips over there". B says: "we have no designer, and there just happen to be a bunch of paperclips over there". These 2 get their probabilities equally raised by the observation of the paperclips. Your example with the amputees is on point. That's not to say it wouldn't be reasonable to look for a unifying explanation (maybe even one involving a powerful agent that calls themselves Jesus!) for the amputees getting healed. But a god whose desires are unexplained brute facts just doesn't solve anything. I also don't think it should be surprising that it ends up being so hard to argue for theism. Theism is a crazy position in the first place! It's *wildly* different from any of the explanations we typically accept, in that, when we propose agency as an explanation in other contexts, the behavior of the agent doesn't come out of nowhere!
Quick note: The Christian story is that humanity was made very good, but has since fallen. This sort of story would allow us to make sense of the relevant data and draw predictions about what a designer would do. // Well, depending on what you consider a malfunction, you're gonna end up with wildly different designer profiles, with no objective way to tell which one is correct. // I think a point that it would be helpful to bring up is that the vast majority of our desires, including the bad ones, are rooted in something good. For some examples off the top of my head: Self-preservation is good. However, if we desire our own self-preservation over helping others, this results in cowardice. Wanting to improve yourself is good. However, if you desire to make yourself *better* than someone else, this results in pride. When we get into the specifics of how our desires are structured, I'm not too worried at the prospects of inferring a Designer's desires. Maybe there will be some grey areas, but the inferences that a designer would prefer stuff like love, beauty, creativity, etc. seems super plausible. Let's stop A and B before they go over the hill and ask them if there's going to be a sea of paper clips beyond. I think A would be more open to that (i.e. assign a higher prior to that proposition) than B, because A already believes in the existence of an agent with the ability to create stuff and a desire to create paperclips, whereas B does not. So, the paperclip see would seem to confirm A's theory over B's. // That's not to say it wouldn't be reasonable to look for a unifying explanation (maybe even one involving a powerful agent that calls themselves Jesus!) for the amputees getting healed. // Okay, please spell this out for me. _How_ does this actually raise the probability of a powerful agent that calls Themselves Jesus? Why not just say, "Well the a priori prior probability of an agent with the specific desire to heal this amputee would be so small that the posterior ends up being small too"? // I also don't think it should be surprising that it ends up being so hard to argue for theism. Theism is a crazy position in the first place! // I disagree that theism is crazy. Big surprise, I know. But let's just say that theism is crazy for a minute. Well, usually you can point to failed predictions of crazy theories! For example, I can show that the proposition that the earth is flat makes failed predictions in regards to the flight times on various commercial airline flights. The proposition that there's a teapot orbiting Jupiter makes failed predictions because the celestial objects we have found are nothing like teapots rendering the occurrence of such an object improbable. And so on. It's hard to argue for crazy theories, and it's easy to argue against them. But if theism has no predictive power, then it has made no failed predictions. So, on your epistemology theism is impossible to argue for, and impossible to argue against. It seems more like your epistemology has gone awry with regards to theism, than theism just being too crazy for there to be arguments for it. (Side note: Some crazy hypotheses, like the universe was made five minutes ago with the appearance of age, build in our available evidence into the theory so there's no evidence against it. Theism isn't like this. The Problem of Evil is actually a problem that theists recognize as problematic and try to explain. You should have an epistemology that can explain why the PoE is a problem for theism (rather than just a problem for theists!).) // It's wildly different from any of the explanations we typically accept, in that, when we propose agency as an explanation in other contexts, the behavior of the agent doesn't come out of nowhere! // Side note: I don't know if we have a clear way of inferring where God's desires come from (I mean, if you're an axiological realist, then maybe you can say that they come from the axiological facts, but you're not a realist so that won't work). But our inability to see where they come from doesn't mean that they're unexplained. I think that at a foundational layer God is unexplained because there is no outside thing He depends on. But God's desire are not God Himself. It's totally possible for God's desires to be explainable in terms of something that we simply do not understand yet. Here's one random theory: Maybe some qualia are more complex than others. And some qualia seem to have causal connections to other qualia. In the far future, we find there's a Complete Theory of Consciousness, where we can apply its equations to qualia and figure out what it would do. Now, God is an immaterial substance who necessarily creates the simplest quale. And as it turns out, when we apply our theory of consciousness to this super simple quale, it iteratively leads to the production of more and more complex qualia, until it results in an infinite mind which desires love, beauty, creativity, etc. Coolio. Now, the only thing unexplained is why that immaterial substance exists (cue Contingency Argument). So, God's desires are all explained. It's easy to come up with a just-so story that leaves none of God's desires unexplained. The important thing is finding the probability that the story is true.
31:30 Assuming that the theory of relativity hasn't been discovered yet, then I would need to run an experiment to validate Einstein's theory of relativity. Otherwise, the risk is that new theories overfit the data rather than provide insight about the next experiment. So I wouldn't change my credences about Newtonian physics until additional data was gained supporting Einstein's theory.
That seems odd to me. I understand putting more weight on future experiments where the results aren't known beforehand, but putting absolutely zero weight on this correct prediction seems weird. Let's say I came up with a theory of physics called Squaredism and we haven't checked whether Squaredism makes any correct predictions, past or future. We literally know nothing about whether Squaredism's predictions have been verified or falsified because no one has applied its equations to any physical system. Then we compare Squaredism to General Relativity, which we're stipulating has only correctly predicted previously known data so far. Obviously, General Relativity should get a higher credence than Squaredism because it has made some correct predictions (all else being equal)!
@@ApologeticsSquared I still have a higher credence in general relativity than squaredism. My credence in general relativity didn't change simply because I became aware of a competing theory, squaredism.
@mesplin3 Well I can explain the reason you're having an issue. See GR didn't just predict that one example and it is a tool that can be used for more predictions. The PHA only predicts harmony, doesn't predict disharmony, and can't be used as a tool elsewhere because it doesn't have any predictive power. Imagine I had an argument that said."apples are red" as the conclusion. Now any time apple's are red, that's great, but green apples? Oranges? Watermelon? The problem with the PHA is that it's an argument that's supposed to prove god, but in total its just pointing out "apples are red".
@@ShouVerticaI think the argument goes like this: 1. Phenomenal states (such as pain, pleasure, and sight) are correlated with physical states and with one another in strikingly fortunate ways. 2. It is highly improbable that this correlation would have arisen by chance. 3. The most likely explanation for this correlation is that a rational being (such as God) designed the physical and mental realms to be harmonious. 4. Therefore, God exists. I'm not sure how this argument compares to "apples are red" argument.
I think this argument also lacks a certain amount of imagination. For example, human tetrachromats are believed to experience yellow light differently from red-green light mixtures (experimental evidence is scarce but there). So at the very least, there are probably some experiences that we are simply unaware of. For all we know, there is a limitless range of different experiences that could be had but we are at present unaware of. Let’s consider just one possible experience, quale A. Perhaps, if we had experienced quale A, we would say “Oh actually this one actually pairs much better with the physical act of stubbing my toe. Now that I know what quale A is like, I think that pain and stubbing my toe are only mildly harmonious and quale A and stubbing my toe would be very harmonious.” And as I’ve thought about this more, it occurs to me that I have been blinded my intuitions as well. Stubbing a toe is really not that serious of an offense. It doesn’t really cause any physical damage. So why does it cause me to hop around on one foot shouting curses? If I were going to choose a quale that is more appropriate for stubbing a toe, I think it should be something like someone grabbing your arm too firmly or an overly firm handshake. Slightly uncomfortable but nothing to cry about. But our intuitions are so wrapped up in how we currently experience the world that it is difficult to objectively evaluate what is actually harmonious. Personally, I would go a step further and say that there isn’t actually any objective way to evaluate what is harmonious.
This all relates to the strength of the PHA which I will be addressing in the future. Briefly: If there are other experiences, this will probably make the argument more powerful. Most qualia we know of would be lousy replacements for pain. If there were more qualia, they would probably be similarly bad replacements for pain, and so we need more fine-tuning to ensure that those experiences aren't correlated with c-fibers.
A rising tide raise. I put this in the category of technically true but unhelpful. What we know is that we have a harmonic universe, that's it. Yes a god would by their nature likely create a harmonic universe, but it still does doesn't explain where the harmony comes from, given that it presupposes that god is harmonious. Yes you could argue that god wouldn't be god if they weren't harmonious, but the that's doesn't explain why god is what they are, instead of something else. The way I see it you have three options. First you could leave God's nature unexplained, in which case why not leave the universe unexplained and cut out the middle man? Secondly you could propose an even greater god to explain God's harmony, and a god for that god, so on forever. It think you see the problem there. Finally you could argue that god must by necessity be god. In which case what's the point of the harmony argument beyond a kind of redundancy? Once I were to be convinced of the necessity of god how much more certain could I get?
The questions of "Why God is thought to be X" always need to start from the definition. God is the maximally great being. This has been shown to imply He is simple (He has no parts). I don't see how something that has no parts can be disharmonius.
@tafazziReadChannelDescription I don't see how being simple is a great making quality, but no matter. Psychological harmony has nothing to do with the amount of parts one has. Being maximally great god has feelings like love. They have desires and the ability to act on that. God has an understanding of the universe they created, and the ability to act upon it in accordance with their will. This requires psychological harmony. It requires a harmony between the mind of God and those things not identical to it.
@@jeremyhansen9197 Love is not a feeling, God is impassible. Love means to will the good of the other. God doesn't experience qualia unless He adds on one of His divine persons a nature that is not impasssible,and can therefore experience qualia The harmony you corrrectly attribute to the mind of God with creation is therefore of a different kind than the harmony that is discussed in this series, it's not about the qualia associated with stimuli.
@tafazziReadChannelDescription To will something is to desire it. That is an emotion. Sure God would be timeless and spaceless, but God is generally considered to be conscious, so God is understood to have experience in some sense, including that of desire, even if that experience is utterly incomprehensible to us mere mortals. I'm aware this series is dressed specifically for our kind of of experience, but the paper it is based is more general. My criticism is geared more towards that. Never the less, at best best you're simply trading one harmony problem for another. You're sending a bird to eat the spider that ate the fly that bothered you in the first place.
@@jeremyhansen9197 no that's false. Desire has many related meanings, it's not a useful category. It is false that to will something implies emotions, it's logically possible to have a will and be impassible at the same time. Next, let's move to how we know that God's knowlege is harmonius with how the world is. God is omniscient, so there is no true statement that is unknown to Him. This necessarily implies that God's knowlege is harmonius with how creation actually is.
Something that cross my mind. if harmony existence when i stub my toe i should feel the qualia of 'stubbing toe' not pain. Pain is harmonious with the goals of the body. Goals of the body being avoidance and self preservation (and other stuff) which part of pain function but the qualia of 'stubbing toe' is a accurate with reality. Which is more harmonious in my example the qualia of 'pain' or qualia of 'toe stubbing'?
I still don't know how mental states are distinct. As an analogy, consider the game rock, paper, scissors and a simplified pokemon game. In Pokemon, fire type beats grass type, grass type beats water type, and water type beats fire type. I'll call rock, paper, scissors the physical world. I'll call the Pokemon type game the mental world. I can map rock to fire, paper to water, and scissors to grass. I could also map rock to water, paper to grass, and scissors to fire. But I can't map rock to fire while mapping paper to grass. This is because while rock loses to paper, fire beats grass which would be inconsistent. In this analogy, mental states are distinct by their relationship with the other mental states. The water mental state is distinct from the grass state because it beats fire and grass doesn't. With mental states, I don't know how one partitions mental states in a consistent manner that is independent of physical states. Behavior can be observed and language can identitied. So when one claims that mental state of pain is distinct from the mental state of pleasure, I want to know how the states differ. I agree that pain feels different than pleasure, but I feel that in order for the argument to be persuasive mental states need to be a little more fully fleshed out. For example, is the mental state of pain distinct from the mental state of dolor (pain in Spanish)?
We examine mental states with introspection. Imagine that as part of an experiment you were in a sensory deprivation chamber. Then, for some reason you couldn't pinpoint, you experienced pain. Then, the pain stops, and you experienced pleasure. Then you leave the chamber and the scientist conducting the experiment asks you whether the pain was felt first, or the pleasure. You tell her that you felt pain first. How do you know? Well, you can just introspect, or look inwardly at your own experiences, and see what mental states you have. Qualia have been defined in terms of "what it's like" to experience something, which can be discovered through introspection.
@@ApologeticsSquared Okay, so I would consider the qualia of pain and qualia of dolor to be distinct. However, not everybody is going do introspection the same way. Some people might consider qualia of pain and the qualia of dolor to be the same. Which party is correct?
@@mesplin3squareds example is just him saying "I intuitively know", he hasn't explained it and this has been a point brought up multiple, multiple times on his video series without response or addressing. Unfortunately Squared has no distinct objective argument for why physicalism and identity theory are not correct and he even admits to relying on an "epistemic gap"(ignorance) to make the argument for his statements. Pay attention to his wording, he admits quite often of using and arguing from ignorance.
To say that evolution cannot produce psychophysical harmony, given physicalism, is *literally* equivalent to saying that brains cannot evolve, and I do mean literally.
Saying “Lois Lane knows Superman can fly” is literally equivalent to saying “Lois Lane knows Clark Kent can fly.” However, Lois Lane might not know Superman’s secret identity, so she’d assign a high probability to the former and a low probability to the latter. How do you cash this out? There are lots of theories. I mention one in the video. However, whatever your theory is of what’s going on, I’ll be able to likewise say that psychophysical harmony evolving is a lot less probable than brains evolving.
I guess I’m failing to understand this analogy. Superman represents pain and Clark Kent represents the brain state caused by c-fibers firing? What mechanism is representing evolution in this analogy?
@@ApologeticsSquared _"However, whatever your theory is of what’s going on, I’ll be able to likewise say that psychophysical harmony evolving is a lot less probable than brains evolving."_ So then are you supposedly Lois Lane not knowing Clar Kent's secret identity or are you simply ignoring the empricial evidence for Biological Evolution by *Natural Selection,* which is the actual thing, which is actually selecting for specific laws of psychophysical harmonies (or rather might be that thing doing that) and which thing is not a mere mortal like yourself are in an _imagined "Game of Life"_ supposedly doing the same exact thing - selecting such rules/laws of Psychophysical Harmony? I guess, that's it's the latter the case rather than the former. And simultaniously you are ignoring those "black swans" in our observable and measurable back yard - those empirical counterexamples against psychophysical harmony or rather special cases of psychophysical disharmony.
@@ApologeticsSquared So one counterexample of Mercury's orbit disproves Newtonian Mechanics as the counterexample of Mercury's orbit itself contradicts the prediction for that made by Newtonian Mechanics. If so, then what does one counterexample of psychophysical disharmony do to your case of theism?!? Or to your pile of a Prosecutor's Fallacy argument for Psychophysical Harmony?!?
@@ApologeticsSquared *"Making A Math Murderer"* by Vsauce2 ( th-cam.com/video/mLEWj-61a4I/w-d-xo.htmlsi=p6Kaf-ej8RqYaZG7 ) *Meadow's Law:* _"One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder until proved otherwise."_ It is a largely discredited legal concept in the field of child protection now, intended to be used to judge cases of multiple cot or crib deaths - Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) - within a single family. You are making basically the same argument and mistake: Since the (prior) probability for [the two children of Sally Clark]-(Psychophysical Harmony) is very low given [SIDS (or some other natural causes of death)]-(natural causes of Psychophysical Harmony) is very low and the probability for that given [murder]-(theism) is not that low, therefore [the two children of Sally Clark]-(Psychophysical Harmony) is evidence for [Sally Clark murdering her children]-(theism) (as it is more probable, that [Sally Clark murdered both of her children]-[theism] being the case than not the case). Maybe it's not THE form of the Prosecutor's fallacy. But it is A form of the Prosecutor's fallacy. It's really that stupid of an argument.
I wonder if a person with congenital insensitivity to pain would agree with you that the sensation of pain and stubbing a toe are in fact harmonious. It’s my understanding that, at least in some cases, CIP is caused by nociceptors failing to send the signal to the brain. So theoretical, you could perform an experiment where you stimulate the pain region of the brain in a patient with CIP and they would in fact experience pain. Would they then be able to say whether it was harmonious with stubbing your toe? Sort of like Molyneux’s problem but for pain. My guess is that they would not think it’s harmonious. To them, stubbing the toe causes the sensation of pressure, and so for them, that is the natural expectation and feeling something different would be unnatural, unexpected, and unharmonious. However, I do think that they might be able to see the evolutionary advantage of experiencing pain. I think that they would dislike the sensation and that they would be able to say “Yeah, I could see how that would help me avoid damaging my body.” But perhaps even that they wouldn’t understand. They might instead say “Yes I can see how that would get me to stop doing something harmful but how am I supposed to know what is going to cause that experience? How does that help me avoid harmful things if I don’t know what’s going to cause that sensation?”
I think your Game of Life example highlights a key problem. If physicalism were true in this scenario, then you cannot apply psychophysical laws from the outside. There are no extra mental things or rules; there are only the cells themselves. You would be unable to start one GoL with one set of psychophysical laws and another GoL with a second set of psychophysical laws. For example, if you created a GoL with an embodied consciousness (embodied here means that it has additional cells within it’s organism that are extra to the “brain” portion) in it then you could interact with the consciousness by hitting the “body” with a glider. The “body” could then signal the “brain” and whatever state the “brain” took on would simply be the experience that it has. You can’t make a rule that says that particular experience is the taste of cheese in one game and the taste of strawberries in another. There is no extra mental thing to swap between versions of the game. In both games, the consciousness would just have the same experience.
43:48 Dualism. What you’ve actually described here is dualism. You’ve even got a neat little dashed line to indicate the difference between the physical and the mental.
You are right that if physicalism is true , then this argument doesn’t work , but this argument shows why physicalism is false P(PPH/naturalism and physicalism will be very low p(PPH/theism and Dualism ) will not be very low Therefore the argument refuted both naturalism and physicalism
@muhammedshanushan3931 The argument should work under identity theory and physicalism, Squared and the PHA authors have said this multiple times. Also neuroscience demonstrates this empirically so....
I assumed dualism for the GoL analogy, because I was supposed to be an agent who was choosing the psychophysical laws (and I can't very well choose what qualia are identical to arrangements of cells!). This was just to illustrate how the independence of the physical laws and the psychophysical laws entails that the no arrangement of physical stuff can ensure psychophysical harmony. However, this assumption can be done away with because other theories of mind won't affect the underlying probabilities.
Good morning friend, I would like you to respond to the video an atheist calling AJ Rodriguez the name "debunking The Christianism", this was a video that almost made me apostatize from the faith and feel very bad
You seem to have conceded elsewhere that unhealthy junk food tasting pleasurable is an example of disharmony (correct me if I'm wrong). But certainly some of the population thinks that junk food is bland or gross. Can you not see how in a million years evolution could favor those of the population that think junk food tastes gross? And then in a million years you could say "See, junk food tastes bad and it's bad for us so we have psychophysical harmony"?
The problem is that you need the mental state of tasting gross to lead to avoidance behavior. IF you have that psychophysical law in place, then evolution will lead to bad stuff tasting gross. But what’s the prior probability that something tasting bad would actually result in avoidance behavior? That’s low.
@@ApologeticsSquared "Garcia discovered that taste aversion is an acquired reaction to the smell or taste that an animal is exposed to before getting sick. He discovered this by giving rats flavored water before exposing them to radiation that made them sick. ..." [I googled: "rats learned to associate taste to radiation sickness"] How is this relevant? It's not that that there is a "psychophysical law" making the (specifically) flavored water taste bad (btw, the flavored water actually tasted "good" as it was sweetened distinctively); the rats learned this aversion. But what does that do to the "probability estimates" for "PH" with respect to taste (for rats or humans). If learning can provide another route to psychophysical harmony and not just "psychophysical laws" (defined a prioristically by PHA), one could argue probability estimates PHA makes regarding harmony do not consider all conceivable paths to harmony. There are other examples of post-birth organism learning being implicated in what qualia an organism can be conscious of in maturity-- e.g. an experiment raised kittens in visual environments that LACKS horizontal lines in one condition, or vertical lines in another. When released to regular visual environments the first set of (now) cats are selectively blind to horizontal stimuli, and the second set are blind to vertical ones. The point that harmony (or apparent qualia) can be learned (or modulated by early life experience) generally increases my "credence" that evolution could achieve the same kind of qualia-tuning via species evolution.
@@ApologeticsSquared Okay, so you admit we have disharmony now. And you admit that in the future, if the population thinks that junk food tastes gross we would at that point have harmony. So how is that not evolution selecting for harmony?
@@ApologeticsSquared It seems like you've moved the goalposts. It's no longer that bad qualia (gross taste or pain) goes with bad physical thing (unhealthy food or physical damage). It's that bad qualia (gross taste or pain) go with avoidance behavior and that's harmonious?
Do you have any examples of PH that don't make sense from an evolutionary perspective? It seems like everything you've claimed is harmonious relies on an evolutionary understanding. Burning your hand is bad for your body so your brain needs to experience something that leads to avoidance behavior and hey pain fits the bill. I think the argument would be much more powerful if you could come up with an example that couldn't be tied to evolutionary thinking. Like seeing light with wavelength 580 nm as yellow is harmonious because ... fill in the blank.
Apparently you are new to this argument, see his playlist on psychophysical Harmony, there is specific video on evolution Long story short , survival only need avoidance behaviour , there is no need of pain qualia for that
// Do you have any examples of PH that don't make sense from an evolutionary perspective? // A world where pain/pleasure inversion occurs is going to be a priori equally probable to our own world. So, pain being connected to avoidance behavior is not something that would follow from an evolutionary perspective. If pain correlating with avoidance behavior seems inherently more evolutiony, then I would chalk that up to us retroactively attribute our knowledge of what would be required for psychophysical harmony to evolution.
@ApologeticsSquared Can you provide citation of this? It seems like you are just outright lying about what evolution states over and over. The PHA doesn't cite evolution, neuroscience, or biology articles, papers, or textbooks. Which seems to be why it's so fundamentally wrong about its factual claims. Saying "evolution doesn't do that" after people are REPEATEDLY telling you it does and how is just...oof.
@@ApologeticsSquared I was asking for examples of harmony that we observe where the harmony isn’t in virtue of its survival advantage. Like the taste of cheddar is clearly harmonious to cheddar and not Brie because…
Let me know what you think about this video format!
Idk Thxks I'll be sure to finish it. (Shrug emoji) does qualia effect physical stuff? Because in your example about evolution that important fact was not stated. If harmony was random in the experiment i predicted that those automatons would not be affected or would evolve to avoid being influence by random harmony. Because what matter about qualia is the effects it has. So what are the effect of the qualia i experience on my brain? Second having false beliefs is globally debunking because if u have a false belief that means u can not always trust ur reasoning. Reason is not decisive or consistent or complete. As long as it possible to have false belief then u can never fully trust ur reasoning, intuitions, axioms.
I haven’t finished watching all videos, but I think this argument won’t work if identity theory or necessary supervenience is true
I agree p(PH/naturalism ) will be still low if identity theory is true
But p(PH/theism) will also be low since God has no role in deciding PP laws
@muhammedshanushan3931 That's not how theism works. If physicalism is true then theism still claims god did it and created reality.
@@ShouVertica nope , if there is necessary supevenience , God has no say in it as God can’t do what is metaphysically impossible
@@muhammedshanushan3931 Where are you getting "metaphysical impossibility" in this? Basic creationism belief has god designing everything by causality.
Just found your channel. Whatever research you're doing, don't stop. Love the videos.
These videos are a bit beyond my understanding, but I like them.
Sometimes I catch a wee bit that clicks, and then I feel so excited (and kinda smart 🤓)
I do like longish videos; your voice is nice to listen to, and long videos are nice when I’m working because I don’t have to get up and change videos.
I think there are three main points wrong with the PHA and assumptions not addressed in this video.
1. "C-Fibers could have produced pleasure." [Biological ignorance]
The problem with this statement, that Squared has made countless times now, is that it gets to the heart of what I'll call "biological ignorance" in the argument, and it's important because it explains why this entire argument is just really, really silly.
C-Fibers firing are not what produces pain, Squared is just flat wrong about this, but let's say they DO produce pain for the sake of argument. The next step is "what produces pleasure?" Dopamine produces pleasure, not c-fibers. So where does that leave the argument?
We have to ASSUME: C-Fibers can give both qualia, so we have to just replace two distinctly different biological processes and structures and say "what if they were flipped?".. This is similar to the proposition: "what if the brain pumps blood and you think with your heart?", which you can see immediately why this would be dumb, but people will humor the PHA due to their ignorance of neuroscience.
Wait, but that's an assumption only IF we are involving a totally different world with an entirely different biology structure that we don't know about which leads to:
2. "Apriori epistemic possibility." [The world of imagination...and ignorance.]
The biggest problem, probably the lynchpin of the PHA argument, is that "a priori epistemic probability" in a hypothetic means ultimately nothing.
The PHA creates an imaginary world, states the person is ignorant, and then states that the "possiblities are equal in ignorance." But that's not special! This same trick can be done for anything, as long as you put the apriori * next to a hypothetical and you specify "you don't know" far enough back, you're always going to have nearly infinite epistemic possibility spreads. The MORE a person knows, the lower that probability spread, the argument works BETTER if your are more ignorant, which leads to:
3. "Axiological intuitions" : [Muh Ignorance]
One huge assumption Squared has made and the PHA makes is that the naturalistic explanation doesn't account for harmony, when evolution does just that. What Squared has forgotten and the PHA forgot is that disharmony exist and the PHA doesn't predict it. Now there is a really good reason why and I'll tell you: Theist don't like competition. They don't like competing models, they don't like measurement, and they certainly don't like OBJECTIVITY.
The problem Squared runs into for his explanation is his "intuition", because "intuition" in an objective argument is just short for his opinion, people don't share his "axiological intuition" on these topics because they don't hold his opinion. It seems steeped in ignorance, willfully so, and whenever Squared is pressed he's had to resort to his "axiological intuitions" which means: No evidence, no argument, his opinion.
Apparently you are ignorant of the argument
@muhammedshanushan3931 Show me where and how, otherwise just a blank comment of salt.
He addressed this? Look. Epistemically possible worlds are by defniton possible. So we can assume the world could been that way. Since a lot of these psychophysical laws make a lot less assumptions they seem more likely than our own. Like a world were C fibers cause the taste of cheese. In fact everything, C fibers, dopamine, etc cause the sensation of tasting cheese. This world does not have the same complex laws as our own so is simpler
@blankspace2891 Well no, Squared has argued the principle of indifference so there is no "more likely" outcome in the argument.
You seem to be arguing complexity and occams razor, which isn't relevant to anything in this argument or my objection.
Your argument is ironically from ignorance too lol. Yes, if you watch squares oringinal video the simpler psychophysical laws would be more likely. But your mom thing seems to be that square is ingornet to how biology works. Now, I don’t know squared myself but I don’t think this argument is to be ignorant. The point is that biology would have been the same regardless of the quail experienced. C fibers can fire which can go to the bran and give the experience of pain. But we can imagine the same process giving us pleasure in some possible worlds. Nothing PHYSICALLY changes. The only thing is our subjective experience.
SO CONVINCING!
Lol 38 premises ed feser
"c-fibers = pain" isn't really the same thing as "Water = H2O". "C-Fibers = pain" is much more analogous to "The Usb cable that is attached to my pc and Camera = Camera-footage shown on my screen". Not only are c-fibers essentially only the transport mechanism from sensors to the brain, it is the brain that will need to interpret that information and turn it into the experience of pain. For the interpretation of that process, your theory of mind is actually quite important if there can be any X so that the statement "X = pain" is true.
I think it is still wrong to asume that there are "laws" that define which physical structures correspond to which experiences. As an analogy lets go back to computer science. The difference between "software" and "hardware" isn't capabillity. No matter what procedure you dream up, you could in principle create some structure that could execute that exact procedure. Similarly, no matter the hardware (as long as there is enough space and basic operations available) you could write any procedure as a software-program. The only meaningful difference between "software" and "hardware" is that "hardware" is a structure that can not change and always only does one thing, while "Software" on the other hand can dynamically change what it "does". Our experiences/qualia seem to be procedures carried out by our brain (or soul/transmitted to our soul). If there were psychophysical laws, that would imply our brain is essentially entirely "hardware" and that the brain would be rigid and could not change its behaviour. That seems to be false, over time our experiences change. Our brain notably changes when growing up. Using the analogy of "software" and "hardware", our experiences seem to be caused more by "software" than by "hardware". I would be surprised if even one actual psychophysical law could be defined (not the simplyfication we are using).
The C fibers firing is just a short hand for whatever causes pain. And even if C fibers aren’t exact that wouldn’t matter since this is only talking about why the argument works on physicalism
@@blankspace2891 kinda, my point is that there isn't any particular thing that causes pain, just as in a computer, there isn't any particular place that causes the image of my comment to appear. In case of a computer, we have incomming data, the computer decides which component should handle that data, and (hopefuly) the things you want on screen appear on screen. There simply isn't *any* rigit structure that "causes a youtube comment section to apear on your screen". Just like there isn't one particular thing that "causes pain" or any other experience for that matter. Experiences are largely learnt, with even the hardwired impulses needing to be contextualized (by our parents/our surroundings for example) in order for us to understand.
I think evolution needs steelmanning. I'm not a philosopher or evolutionary biologist, but as this is just a youtube comment, what the heck.
If all psychophysical harmony is, is a meaning for events happening in the external world, originating from the organism's nervous system "correlating" to those (external world) events, then the fact that there is "harmony" only reflects a fact that valid meanings can be attained by the organism about what's happening in the external world (which includes, in the case pain, what's happening to its body). All harmony/qualia are, are getting correct meanings from physiological symbols/events (e.g., getting the meaning of the text "cat" is similar, but obviously learned, although some semantic PH may be learned, which would be a way to refute some PHA probability claims). All naturalists ever say about PH is P(life-continuing|valid meaning of its nervous system symbols) >>>>>>> P(life-continuing|invalid meaning), so evolution does, according to its own theory, operates on the form of the qualia (to make them better).
So rather than deny that valid meanings can be attained (via evolution) for our physiological symbols (which PHA seems to do), I'd rather (and quite symmetrically) just deny PHA's sense of "psychophysical law" as being, if not incoherent, at least unjustified. For instance, what PHA calls "psychophysical laws" (existing a priori) is just what is described as being "built" by life forms (a posteriori) via evolutionary theory, so how can either side ever hope to convince the other? To say repeatedly, "evolution has to use the psychophysical laws it's been given" (as a mantra), when evolution just says (something like) evolution builds qualia-to-external-world mappings to be useful (as a mantra), is just to say the two POVs accept different axiom sets as being true. So neither PHA, nor evolutionary theory, are really "arguing" then. But even so, I prefer the second axiom set, because it would seem to give more "power" over the universe at large (speaking for my species here).
Finally, I don't think an "epiphenomenalism" objection to PHA is ever addressed. I (and evolution, imo) assume non-epiphenomenal qualia. That is, qualia affect behavior directly, and evolution doesn't directly select behavior-- but evolution selects the organism that behaves. However, I'm not sure where PHA (really) stands on qualia epiphenomenalism. I know they say it's irrelevant, but do they really mean it? I can doubt they do, because it seems entailed (imo) that if qualia were non-epiphenomenal they could be selected for (just like feathers and claws), so the fact that PHA keeps saying they can't be selected seems strange, unless they tacitly have to accept epiphenomenalism of qualia.
48:00 of course that definition is implausible. For starters, humans desire plenty of things that God is supposed to hate, and they have plenty of contradictory desires, too. Also, the reasons we create things with the same "desires" that we have seem to be purely pragmatic, and not essential to how designers work, so that's another problem for this idea. And then of course, it runs into the same problem I've been talking about, it's a priori extremely unlikely that God would desire exactly the things that you or I desire.
50:44 if by God you mean a creator and designer of the universe, then I don't see why the star writing would boost our confidence in that. Moving stars is impressive, but it's not remotely the same as creating a universe out of nothing. And indeed, no theist seems to take the lack of such star writing to be a failed prediction of theism.
// For starters, humans desire plenty of things that God is supposed to hate //
A lot of objections can be reasoned through by comparing it to the Robot-1 thought experiment. If Robot-2 was malfunctioning, then its desires might not reflect that of Robot-1. For an extreme case, it seems plausible that a murderer has "malfunctioning" desires, in some sense. So we wouldn't infer our Designer's desires from murderers.
// they have plenty of contradictory desires, too. //
Inconsistent desires are not necessarily problematic. In the trolley problem, I desire to save the one man as well as the five men. These desires cannot both be fulfilled. But they're not problematic because they flow from a more fundamental desire to preserve human life. So, we could plausibly cast "good" in terms of something like fundamental desires.
// if by God you mean a creator and designer of the universe, then I don't see why the star writing would boost our confidence in that. //
Well, the word "God" usually has those connotations, and that is the word written in the sky, and whoever's doing the star-writing chose to use that word. So, I think it would be quite plausible to raise one's credence in a creator God.
// And then of course, it runs into the same problem I've been talking about, it's a priori extremely unlikely that God would desire exactly the things that you or I desire. //
Fine, "God prefers beauty" is going to be a priori unlikely given your epistemology. But now we're updating on a posteriori data about our own desires, and this data was itself a priori extremely unlikely. So it can overturn the low prior.
// And indeed, no theist seems to take the lack of such star writing to be a failed prediction of theism. //
Technically it is, but this is one of those confusing points of Bayesianism. So, let's have T denote theism, and S the star-writing.
P(S|T) can be really low. Say, 10^-1000. But, P(S|-T) can be even lower. Say, 10^-1000000. When we update on -S, the probability of theism indeed goes down, but only by a negligible amount. However, if we were to update on S, suddenly the probability of T shoots up.
Another case of this is you walk into a house and you want to know if there are any wasps in the house. So you first check a doorknob to see if there are any wasps on the doorknob. Let's say W is the presence of wasps in the house, and D is the presence of wasps on the doorknob.
P(D|W) is super low. There are so many places that a wasp could be found, so this specific doorknob having a wasp on it would be improbable. P(D|-W) is also super low (in fact, it's 0). Now, if you update on -D, this will technically lower the probability of W. But only by a miniscule amount. However, updating on D entails the probability of W is 1.
Human intuitions about probability don't handle small probabilities very well, so this point is confusing to a lot of people. Because even if the lack of star-writing may technically lower the probability of theism, it's going to be such a small change that it's not worth pondering.
@@ApologeticsSquared The only way it would seem plausible that a murderer has "malfunctioning" desires, is if you assume design, and furthermore you assume that the designer doesn't want us to murder. And isn't the designer supposed to be perfect? If the design is malfunctioning, the designer isn't perfect. Besides, there are desires like lust, pride, greed or even hunger that virtually all humans have and God is supposed not to have. Are nearly all humans malfunctioning?
I think I found a good way to explain my objection here. Let's go back to the robot analogy. There are 2 robots, A and B, and they both have a desire to create paperclips. A says: "we have a designer, and they created us to make paperclips". This is a priori extremely unlikely, but you say, well after they update on the fact that they do, in fact, care about making paperclips, this hypothesis becomes more likely. Okay. Now B says "we have no designer, and we just happen to have a desire to make paperclips". This is a priori just as unlikely as what A said, BUT, after they update on the fact that they do care about making paperclips, it becomes just as likely as the design hypothesis. Actually, I'd say the design hypothesis is *less* likely, because
1) it involves an additional entity
2) it requires the extra assumption that designers make things that care about the same things they do (this assumption is dubious at best. We humans design plenty of things specifically to do stuff *we* don't want to do).
But yeah, this, I think, is the core problem with design arguments. They work by observing a feature of reality X, that has no explanation under atheism. Then, they explain that feature by appealing to God's desire to bring about X. But that desire is just as unexplained! X here can be something like, "there are humans who care about love", "there is psychophysical harmony", "the constants of physics allow for life in the universe", etc. So this line of reasoning just doesn't do anything for theism. (To be clear, the arguments aren't usually presented like that, but once you get rid of the idea that there's some sort of objective standard of goodness, that's all there is left).
This is why, just as well, I don't think the star writing would be a good reason to accept theism (even if it's technically evidence for it). Maybe there is some design hypothesis that would be reasonable to accept given the star writing, but the designer in that hypothesis cannot have its desires be an unexplained brute fact. Because otherwise, it's just as reasonable (read: not reasonable at all) to accept that the star writing itself is an unexplained brute fact. This is a priori extremely unlikely, but hey, the star writing would be evidence for it under bayesianism.
@@Nickesponja // The only way it would seem plausible that a murderer has "malfunctioning" desires, is if you assume design, //
We're trying to see what a design hypothesis predicts, so that's fine. We can just be imagining a world where there is design and seeing what follows.
// and furthermore you assume that the designer doesn't want us to murder //
I think that's a plausible assumption. For example, if someone murders to attain more power, I can explain what went wrong: power is actually a good thing, but we are supposed to value human life above power. What's the alternative? If our designer actually wants us to all be murderers, but we're all malfunctioning, I'm not sure how to explain that.
// If the design is malfunctioning, the designer isn't perfect. //
This is essentially the Problem of Evil. Which is fine to raise, but I would like to table that topic and focus on the present topic of whether or not we can infer the predictions of a designer.
// Besides, there are desires like lust, pride, greed or even hunger that virtually all humans have and God is supposed not to have. Are nearly all humans malfunctioning? //
Yes! And we ourselves can tell that we are (like how advanced robots might be able to detect malfunctions). We recognize the flaws in our own desires and desire to desire better things.
// There are 2 robots, A and B, and they both have a desire to create paperclips. A says: "we have a designer, and they created us to make paperclips". This is a priori extremely unlikely, but you say, well after they update on the fact that they do, in fact, care about making paperclips, this hypothesis becomes more likely. Okay. Now B says "we have no designer, and we just happen to have a desire to make paperclips". This is a priori just as unlikely as what A said, BUT, after they update on the fact that they do care about making paperclips, it becomes just as likely as the design hypothesis. Actually, I'd say the design hypothesis is less likely//
That's fine. The data of their desires is not supposed to raise the probability of the design hypothesis. It's supposed to imbue the design hypothesis with predictive power. So, if A and B walk over a hill and see a sea of paperclips stretching to the horizon, A can say, "Aha! This looks like it was made by our creator! Evidence for my theory rather than B's."
// But yeah, this, I think, is the core problem with design arguments. //
The problem is much deeper than that! If theism has NO predictive power, then I could pray for an amputee's limbs to regrow in Jesus's name, and this could happen in front of your own eyes, but this doesn't end up raising the probability of theism at all because we have no way to say the prior probability of this event is higher given theism than naturalism!
"This argument for Christianity works by observing a feature of reality, namely the regrowing of the limb after prayer in Jesus's name, that has no explanation under atheism. Then, I explain that feature by appealing to God's desire to bring about the healing. But that desire is just as unexplained!"
I freely admit that any argument I give in my apologetics career will be a lot less flashy than amputees regrowing limbs in front of you. So, if even *that* can't function as evidence for theism, then it's not clear to me what could! Alternatively, if that *can* function as evidence for theism (or Christianity), then *how* can it?
@@ApologeticsSquared That seems extremely suspicious. You're saying that we can infer the desires of the designer from our own desires... except for those desires that are "malfunctions", of course. Well, depending on what you consider a malfunction, you're gonna end up with wildly different designer profiles, with no objective way to tell which one is correct. This seems to bring us back to the problem of not having an objective standard of goodness.
Let's say A and B walk over the hill and find that sea of paperclips. A says: "we have a designer, and they just so happened to put all those paperclips over there". B says: "we have no designer, and there just happen to be a bunch of paperclips over there". These 2 get their probabilities equally raised by the observation of the paperclips.
Your example with the amputees is on point. That's not to say it wouldn't be reasonable to look for a unifying explanation (maybe even one involving a powerful agent that calls themselves Jesus!) for the amputees getting healed. But a god whose desires are unexplained brute facts just doesn't solve anything. I also don't think it should be surprising that it ends up being so hard to argue for theism. Theism is a crazy position in the first place! It's *wildly* different from any of the explanations we typically accept, in that, when we propose agency as an explanation in other contexts, the behavior of the agent doesn't come out of nowhere!
Quick note: The Christian story is that humanity was made very good, but has since fallen. This sort of story would allow us to make sense of the relevant data and draw predictions about what a designer would do.
// Well, depending on what you consider a malfunction, you're gonna end up with wildly different designer profiles, with no objective way to tell which one is correct. //
I think a point that it would be helpful to bring up is that the vast majority of our desires, including the bad ones, are rooted in something good. For some examples off the top of my head: Self-preservation is good. However, if we desire our own self-preservation over helping others, this results in cowardice. Wanting to improve yourself is good. However, if you desire to make yourself *better* than someone else, this results in pride.
When we get into the specifics of how our desires are structured, I'm not too worried at the prospects of inferring a Designer's desires. Maybe there will be some grey areas, but the inferences that a designer would prefer stuff like love, beauty, creativity, etc. seems super plausible.
Let's stop A and B before they go over the hill and ask them if there's going to be a sea of paper clips beyond. I think A would be more open to that (i.e. assign a higher prior to that proposition) than B, because A already believes in the existence of an agent with the ability to create stuff and a desire to create paperclips, whereas B does not. So, the paperclip see would seem to confirm A's theory over B's.
// That's not to say it wouldn't be reasonable to look for a unifying explanation (maybe even one involving a powerful agent that calls themselves Jesus!) for the amputees getting healed. //
Okay, please spell this out for me. _How_ does this actually raise the probability of a powerful agent that calls Themselves Jesus? Why not just say, "Well the a priori prior probability of an agent with the specific desire to heal this amputee would be so small that the posterior ends up being small too"?
// I also don't think it should be surprising that it ends up being so hard to argue for theism. Theism is a crazy position in the first place! //
I disagree that theism is crazy. Big surprise, I know. But let's just say that theism is crazy for a minute. Well, usually you can point to failed predictions of crazy theories! For example, I can show that the proposition that the earth is flat makes failed predictions in regards to the flight times on various commercial airline flights. The proposition that there's a teapot orbiting Jupiter makes failed predictions because the celestial objects we have found are nothing like teapots rendering the occurrence of such an object improbable. And so on. It's hard to argue for crazy theories, and it's easy to argue against them. But if theism has no predictive power, then it has made no failed predictions. So, on your epistemology theism is impossible to argue for, and impossible to argue against. It seems more like your epistemology has gone awry with regards to theism, than theism just being too crazy for there to be arguments for it.
(Side note: Some crazy hypotheses, like the universe was made five minutes ago with the appearance of age, build in our available evidence into the theory so there's no evidence against it. Theism isn't like this. The Problem of Evil is actually a problem that theists recognize as problematic and try to explain. You should have an epistemology that can explain why the PoE is a problem for theism (rather than just a problem for theists!).)
// It's wildly different from any of the explanations we typically accept, in that, when we propose agency as an explanation in other contexts, the behavior of the agent doesn't come out of nowhere! //
Side note: I don't know if we have a clear way of inferring where God's desires come from (I mean, if you're an axiological realist, then maybe you can say that they come from the axiological facts, but you're not a realist so that won't work). But our inability to see where they come from doesn't mean that they're unexplained. I think that at a foundational layer God is unexplained because there is no outside thing He depends on. But God's desire are not God Himself. It's totally possible for God's desires to be explainable in terms of something that we simply do not understand yet. Here's one random theory: Maybe some qualia are more complex than others. And some qualia seem to have causal connections to other qualia. In the far future, we find there's a Complete Theory of Consciousness, where we can apply its equations to qualia and figure out what it would do. Now, God is an immaterial substance who necessarily creates the simplest quale. And as it turns out, when we apply our theory of consciousness to this super simple quale, it iteratively leads to the production of more and more complex qualia, until it results in an infinite mind which desires love, beauty, creativity, etc. Coolio.
Now, the only thing unexplained is why that immaterial substance exists (cue Contingency Argument). So, God's desires are all explained. It's easy to come up with a just-so story that leaves none of God's desires unexplained. The important thing is finding the probability that the story is true.
48:11 - That robot illustration is pretty interesting.
50:42 - Star rearrangement illustration.
31:30 Assuming that the theory of relativity hasn't been discovered yet, then I would need to run an experiment to validate Einstein's theory of relativity. Otherwise, the risk is that new theories overfit the data rather than provide insight about the next experiment. So I wouldn't change my credences about Newtonian physics until additional data was gained supporting Einstein's theory.
That seems odd to me. I understand putting more weight on future experiments where the results aren't known beforehand, but putting absolutely zero weight on this correct prediction seems weird. Let's say I came up with a theory of physics called Squaredism and we haven't checked whether Squaredism makes any correct predictions, past or future. We literally know nothing about whether Squaredism's predictions have been verified or falsified because no one has applied its equations to any physical system. Then we compare Squaredism to General Relativity, which we're stipulating has only correctly predicted previously known data so far. Obviously, General Relativity should get a higher credence than Squaredism because it has made some correct predictions (all else being equal)!
@@ApologeticsSquared I still have a higher credence in general relativity than squaredism. My credence in general relativity didn't change simply because I became aware of a competing theory, squaredism.
@ApologeticsSquared The problem is you are using a tool with predictive power and PHA has absolutely none.
@mesplin3 Well I can explain the reason you're having an issue. See GR didn't just predict that one example and it is a tool that can be used for more predictions.
The PHA only predicts harmony, doesn't predict disharmony, and can't be used as a tool elsewhere because it doesn't have any predictive power.
Imagine I had an argument that said."apples are red" as the conclusion.
Now any time apple's are red, that's great, but green apples? Oranges? Watermelon?
The problem with the PHA is that it's an argument that's supposed to prove god, but in total its just pointing out "apples are red".
@@ShouVerticaI think the argument goes like this:
1. Phenomenal states (such as pain, pleasure, and sight) are correlated with physical states and with one another in strikingly fortunate ways.
2. It is highly improbable that this correlation would have arisen by chance.
3. The most likely explanation for this correlation is that a rational being (such as God) designed the physical and mental realms to be harmonious.
4. Therefore, God exists.
I'm not sure how this argument compares to "apples are red" argument.
I think this argument also lacks a certain amount of imagination. For example, human tetrachromats are believed to experience yellow light differently from red-green light mixtures (experimental evidence is scarce but there). So at the very least, there are probably some experiences that we are simply unaware of. For all we know, there is a limitless range of different experiences that could be had but we are at present unaware of. Let’s consider just one possible experience, quale A. Perhaps, if we had experienced quale A, we would say “Oh actually this one actually pairs much better with the physical act of stubbing my toe. Now that I know what quale A is like, I think that pain and stubbing my toe are only mildly harmonious and quale A and stubbing my toe would be very harmonious.”
And as I’ve thought about this more, it occurs to me that I have been blinded my intuitions as well. Stubbing a toe is really not that serious of an offense. It doesn’t really cause any physical damage. So why does it cause me to hop around on one foot shouting curses? If I were going to choose a quale that is more appropriate for stubbing a toe, I think it should be something like someone grabbing your arm too firmly or an overly firm handshake. Slightly uncomfortable but nothing to cry about. But our intuitions are so wrapped up in how we currently experience the world that it is difficult to objectively evaluate what is actually harmonious. Personally, I would go a step further and say that there isn’t actually any objective way to evaluate what is harmonious.
This all relates to the strength of the PHA which I will be addressing in the future. Briefly:
If there are other experiences, this will probably make the argument more powerful. Most qualia we know of would be lousy replacements for pain. If there were more qualia, they would probably be similarly bad replacements for pain, and so we need more fine-tuning to ensure that those experiences aren't correlated with c-fibers.
Digital gnosis doing video on this tomorrow
Thanks for the heads up!
@@ApologeticsSquared I actually wonder if he and James will review some of your videos
@@JohnSmith-bq6nf I would guess so, since I am partly responsible for popularizing it.
Maybe I missed it, but could you possibly release the Psychophysical Harmony Playlist as one long vid as well? if not thats also fine
A rising tide raise. I put this in the category of technically true but unhelpful. What we know is that we have a harmonic universe, that's it. Yes a god would by their nature likely create a harmonic universe, but it still does doesn't explain where the harmony comes from, given that it presupposes that god is harmonious. Yes you could argue that god wouldn't be god if they weren't harmonious, but the that's doesn't explain why god is what they are, instead of something else. The way I see it you have three options. First you could leave God's nature unexplained, in which case why not leave the universe unexplained and cut out the middle man? Secondly you could propose an even greater god to explain God's harmony, and a god for that god, so on forever. It think you see the problem there. Finally you could argue that god must by necessity be god. In which case what's the point of the harmony argument beyond a kind of redundancy? Once I were to be convinced of the necessity of god how much more certain could I get?
The questions of "Why God is thought to be X" always need to start from the definition. God is the maximally great being. This has been shown to imply He is simple (He has no parts). I don't see how something that has no parts can be disharmonius.
@tafazziReadChannelDescription I don't see how being simple is a great making quality, but no matter. Psychological harmony has nothing to do with the amount of parts one has. Being maximally great god has feelings like love. They have desires and the ability to act on that. God has an understanding of the universe they created, and the ability to act upon it in accordance with their will. This requires psychological harmony. It requires a harmony between the mind of God and those things not identical to it.
@@jeremyhansen9197 Love is not a feeling, God is impassible. Love means to will the good of the other. God doesn't experience qualia unless He adds on one of His divine persons a nature that is not impasssible,and can therefore experience qualia
The harmony you corrrectly attribute to the mind of God with creation is therefore of a different kind than the harmony that is discussed in this series, it's not about the qualia associated with stimuli.
@tafazziReadChannelDescription To will something is to desire it. That is an emotion. Sure God would be timeless and spaceless, but God is generally considered to be conscious, so God is understood to have experience in some sense, including that of desire, even if that experience is utterly incomprehensible to us mere mortals. I'm aware this series is dressed specifically for our kind of of experience, but the paper it is based is more general. My criticism is geared more towards that.
Never the less, at best best you're simply trading one harmony problem for another. You're sending a bird to eat the spider that ate the fly that bothered you in the first place.
@@jeremyhansen9197 no that's false. Desire has many related meanings, it's not a useful category. It is false that to will something implies emotions, it's logically possible to have a will and be impassible at the same time.
Next, let's move to how we know that God's knowlege is harmonius with how the world is. God is omniscient, so there is no true statement that is unknown to Him. This necessarily implies that God's knowlege is harmonius with how creation actually is.
Something that cross my mind. if harmony existence when i stub my toe i should feel the qualia of 'stubbing toe' not pain. Pain is harmonious with the goals of the body. Goals of the body being avoidance and self preservation (and other stuff) which part of pain function but the qualia of 'stubbing toe' is a accurate with reality. Which is more harmonious in my example the qualia of 'pain' or qualia of 'toe stubbing'?
I still don't know how mental states are distinct.
As an analogy, consider the game rock, paper, scissors and a simplified pokemon game. In Pokemon, fire type beats grass type, grass type beats water type, and water type beats fire type.
I'll call rock, paper, scissors the physical world. I'll call the Pokemon type game the mental world. I can map rock to fire, paper to water, and scissors to grass. I could also map rock to water, paper to grass, and scissors to fire. But I can't map rock to fire while mapping paper to grass. This is because while rock loses to paper, fire beats grass which would be inconsistent.
In this analogy, mental states are distinct by their relationship with the other mental states. The water mental state is distinct from the grass state because it beats fire and grass doesn't.
With mental states, I don't know how one partitions mental states in a consistent manner that is independent of physical states. Behavior can be observed and language can identitied.
So when one claims that mental state of pain is distinct from the mental state of pleasure, I want to know how the states differ. I agree that pain feels different than pleasure, but I feel that in order for the argument to be persuasive mental states need to be a little more fully fleshed out. For example, is the mental state of pain distinct from the mental state of dolor (pain in Spanish)?
We examine mental states with introspection. Imagine that as part of an experiment you were in a sensory deprivation chamber. Then, for some reason you couldn't pinpoint, you experienced pain. Then, the pain stops, and you experienced pleasure. Then you leave the chamber and the scientist conducting the experiment asks you whether the pain was felt first, or the pleasure. You tell her that you felt pain first. How do you know? Well, you can just introspect, or look inwardly at your own experiences, and see what mental states you have.
Qualia have been defined in terms of "what it's like" to experience something, which can be discovered through introspection.
@@ApologeticsSquared Okay, so I would consider the qualia of pain and qualia of dolor to be distinct. However, not everybody is going do introspection the same way. Some people might consider qualia of pain and the qualia of dolor to be the same. Which party is correct?
@@mesplin3"intuitions" LOL
@@ShouVertica Intuitions?
@@mesplin3squareds example is just him saying "I intuitively know", he hasn't explained it and this has been a point brought up multiple, multiple times on his video series without response or addressing.
Unfortunately Squared has no distinct objective argument for why physicalism and identity theory are not correct and he even admits to relying on an "epistemic gap"(ignorance) to make the argument for his statements.
Pay attention to his wording, he admits quite often of using and arguing from ignorance.
To say that evolution cannot produce psychophysical harmony, given physicalism, is *literally* equivalent to saying that brains cannot evolve, and I do mean literally.
Saying “Lois Lane knows Superman can fly” is literally equivalent to saying “Lois Lane knows Clark Kent can fly.” However, Lois Lane might not know Superman’s secret identity, so she’d assign a high probability to the former and a low probability to the latter.
How do you cash this out? There are lots of theories. I mention one in the video.
However, whatever your theory is of what’s going on, I’ll be able to likewise say that psychophysical harmony evolving is a lot less probable than brains evolving.
I guess I’m failing to understand this analogy. Superman represents pain and Clark Kent represents the brain state caused by c-fibers firing? What mechanism is representing evolution in this analogy?
@@ApologeticsSquared _"However, whatever your theory is of what’s going on, I’ll be able to likewise say that psychophysical harmony evolving is a lot less probable than brains evolving."_
So then are you supposedly Lois Lane not knowing Clar Kent's secret identity or are you simply ignoring the empricial evidence for Biological Evolution by *Natural Selection,* which is the actual thing, which is actually selecting for specific laws of psychophysical harmonies (or rather might be that thing doing that) and which thing is not a mere mortal like yourself are in an _imagined "Game of Life"_ supposedly doing the same exact thing - selecting such rules/laws of Psychophysical Harmony?
I guess, that's it's the latter the case rather than the former.
And simultaniously you are ignoring those "black swans" in our observable and measurable back yard - those empirical counterexamples against psychophysical harmony or rather special cases of psychophysical disharmony.
@@ApologeticsSquared So one counterexample of Mercury's orbit disproves Newtonian Mechanics as the counterexample of Mercury's orbit itself contradicts the prediction for that made by Newtonian Mechanics.
If so, then what does one counterexample of psychophysical disharmony do to your case of theism?!?
Or to your pile of a Prosecutor's Fallacy argument for Psychophysical Harmony?!?
@@ApologeticsSquared *"Making A Math Murderer"* by Vsauce2 ( th-cam.com/video/mLEWj-61a4I/w-d-xo.htmlsi=p6Kaf-ej8RqYaZG7 )
*Meadow's Law:*
_"One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder until proved otherwise."_
It is a largely discredited legal concept in the field of child protection now, intended to be used to judge cases of multiple cot or crib deaths - Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) - within a single family.
You are making basically the same argument and mistake:
Since the (prior) probability for [the two children of Sally Clark]-(Psychophysical Harmony) is very low given [SIDS (or some other natural causes of death)]-(natural causes of Psychophysical Harmony) is very low and the probability for that given [murder]-(theism) is not that low, therefore [the two children of Sally Clark]-(Psychophysical Harmony) is evidence for [Sally Clark murdering her children]-(theism) (as it is more probable, that [Sally Clark murdered both of her children]-[theism] being the case than not the case).
Maybe it's not THE form of the Prosecutor's fallacy. But it is A form of the Prosecutor's fallacy.
It's really that stupid of an argument.
I wonder if a person with congenital insensitivity to pain would agree with you that the sensation of pain and stubbing a toe are in fact harmonious. It’s my understanding that, at least in some cases, CIP is caused by nociceptors failing to send the signal to the brain. So theoretical, you could perform an experiment where you stimulate the pain region of the brain in a patient with CIP and they would in fact experience pain. Would they then be able to say whether it was harmonious with stubbing your toe? Sort of like Molyneux’s problem but for pain.
My guess is that they would not think it’s harmonious. To them, stubbing the toe causes the sensation of pressure, and so for them, that is the natural expectation and feeling something different would be unnatural, unexpected, and unharmonious.
However, I do think that they might be able to see the evolutionary advantage of experiencing pain. I think that they would dislike the sensation and that they would be able to say “Yeah, I could see how that would help me avoid damaging my body.” But perhaps even that they wouldn’t understand. They might instead say “Yes I can see how that would get me to stop doing something harmful but how am I supposed to know what is going to cause that experience? How does that help me avoid harmful things if I don’t know what’s going to cause that sensation?”
That’s just the problo Of ev
Evil
I think your Game of Life example highlights a key problem. If physicalism were true in this scenario, then you cannot apply psychophysical laws from the outside. There are no extra mental things or rules; there are only the cells themselves. You would be unable to start one GoL with one set of psychophysical laws and another GoL with a second set of psychophysical laws.
For example, if you created a GoL with an embodied consciousness (embodied here means that it has additional cells within it’s organism that are extra to the “brain” portion) in it then you could interact with the consciousness by hitting the “body” with a glider. The “body” could then signal the “brain” and whatever state the “brain” took on would simply be the experience that it has. You can’t make a rule that says that particular experience is the taste of cheese in one game and the taste of strawberries in another. There is no extra mental thing to swap between versions of the game. In both games, the consciousness would just have the same experience.
43:48 Dualism. What you’ve actually described here is dualism. You’ve even got a neat little dashed line to indicate the difference between the physical and the mental.
You are right that if physicalism is true , then this argument doesn’t work , but this argument shows why physicalism is false
P(PPH/naturalism and physicalism will be very low
p(PPH/theism and Dualism ) will not be very low
Therefore the argument refuted both naturalism and physicalism
@muhammedshanushan3931 The argument should work under identity theory and physicalism, Squared and the PHA authors have said this multiple times.
Also neuroscience demonstrates this empirically so....
I assumed dualism for the GoL analogy, because I was supposed to be an agent who was choosing the psychophysical laws (and I can't very well choose what qualia are identical to arrangements of cells!). This was just to illustrate how the independence of the physical laws and the psychophysical laws entails that the no arrangement of physical stuff can ensure psychophysical harmony. However, this assumption can be done away with because other theories of mind won't affect the underlying probabilities.
@@ApologeticsSquared "this was just to illustrate" but it doesn't work under identity theory, that's the point.
Good morning friend, I would like you to respond to the video an atheist calling AJ Rodriguez the name "debunking The Christianism", this was a video that almost made me apostatize from the faith and feel very bad
If you can't respond on video, could you at least read some of the allegations he makes and explain? I will write them here😊
You seem to have conceded elsewhere that unhealthy junk food tasting pleasurable is an example of disharmony (correct me if I'm wrong). But certainly some of the population thinks that junk food is bland or gross. Can you not see how in a million years evolution could favor those of the population that think junk food tastes gross? And then in a million years you could say "See, junk food tastes bad and it's bad for us so we have psychophysical harmony"?
I don’t think you fully watched the video the evolution thing is addressed
The problem is that you need the mental state of tasting gross to lead to avoidance behavior. IF you have that psychophysical law in place, then evolution will lead to bad stuff tasting gross.
But what’s the prior probability that something tasting bad would actually result in avoidance behavior? That’s low.
@@ApologeticsSquared "Garcia discovered that taste aversion is an acquired reaction to the smell or taste that an animal is exposed to before getting sick. He discovered this by giving rats flavored water before exposing them to radiation that made them sick. ..." [I googled: "rats learned to associate taste to radiation sickness"]
How is this relevant? It's not that that there is a "psychophysical law" making the (specifically) flavored water taste bad (btw, the flavored water actually tasted "good" as it was sweetened distinctively); the rats learned this aversion. But what does that do to the "probability estimates" for "PH" with respect to taste (for rats or humans). If learning can provide another route to psychophysical harmony and not just "psychophysical laws" (defined a prioristically by PHA), one could argue probability estimates PHA makes regarding harmony do not consider all conceivable paths to harmony. There are other examples of post-birth organism learning being implicated in what qualia an organism can be conscious of in maturity-- e.g. an experiment raised kittens in visual environments that LACKS horizontal lines in one condition, or vertical lines in another. When released to regular visual environments the first set of (now) cats are selectively blind to horizontal stimuli, and the second set are blind to vertical ones. The point that harmony (or apparent qualia) can be learned (or modulated by early life experience) generally increases my "credence" that evolution could achieve the same kind of qualia-tuning via species evolution.
@@ApologeticsSquared Okay, so you admit we have disharmony now. And you admit that in the future, if the population thinks that junk food tastes gross we would at that point have harmony. So how is that not evolution selecting for harmony?
@@ApologeticsSquared It seems like you've moved the goalposts. It's no longer that bad qualia (gross taste or pain) goes with bad physical thing (unhealthy food or physical damage). It's that bad qualia (gross taste or pain) go with avoidance behavior and that's harmonious?
Do you have any examples of PH that don't make sense from an evolutionary perspective? It seems like everything you've claimed is harmonious relies on an evolutionary understanding. Burning your hand is bad for your body so your brain needs to experience something that leads to avoidance behavior and hey pain fits the bill. I think the argument would be much more powerful if you could come up with an example that couldn't be tied to evolutionary thinking. Like seeing light with wavelength 580 nm as yellow is harmonious because ... fill in the blank.
Apparently you are new to this argument, see his playlist on psychophysical Harmony, there is specific video on evolution
Long story short , survival only need avoidance behaviour , there is no need of pain qualia for that
// Do you have any examples of PH that don't make sense from an evolutionary perspective? //
A world where pain/pleasure inversion occurs is going to be a priori equally probable to our own world. So, pain being connected to avoidance behavior is not something that would follow from an evolutionary perspective. If pain correlating with avoidance behavior seems inherently more evolutiony, then I would chalk that up to us retroactively attribute our knowledge of what would be required for psychophysical harmony to evolution.
@ApologeticsSquared Can you provide citation of this? It seems like you are just outright lying about what evolution states over and over.
The PHA doesn't cite evolution, neuroscience, or biology articles, papers, or textbooks. Which seems to be why it's so fundamentally wrong about its factual claims.
Saying "evolution doesn't do that" after people are REPEATEDLY telling you it does and how is just...oof.
@@ApologeticsSquared I was asking for examples of harmony that we observe where the harmony isn’t in virtue of its survival advantage. Like the taste of cheddar is clearly harmonious to cheddar and not Brie because…
The actual biology doesn’t matter since physcophysical laws don’t effect biology