It's the Strongest Argument for God in History (SCCC pt 7)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ค. 2024
- In this video, I lay out the argument from Psychophysical Harmony, and respond to its major objections.
Here's a link to a published article on the argument: philarchive.org/rec/CUTPHA
![fellow fellow - Proud [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9uZF7BlUQPE/mqdefault.jpg)
![[LIVE] ใครคุยเรื่องบอล "พ่องตาย" #คุยให้เด็กมันฟัง EP.43 (13/7/67)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/8bHYL8RuBqs/mqdefault.jpg)
Here's a discussion I had on this argument with Adherent Apologetics: th-cam.com/video/1M-SpOgElZA/w-d-xo.html
Also, bonus points to whoever finds my typo in this video. :)
Pysical
Supposing that, in a hypothetical parallel earth, instead of pain, another sensation is triggered whenever creatures get injured as they tend to do in dangerous situations. This sensation isn't pain, perhaps it's not even like anything else we know of today. But anyway, this sensation is what gets triggered when nerves get damaged or stimulated, exactly the same way pain does today. It's not pain mind you, it's another sensation altogether.
Since this sensation is what gets transmitted on injury, and injury is what commonly occurs together with danger, this then forms a means that, while not perfect, is sufficient for creatures who experience this sensation to identify and associate with danger. And as we can still see even today with pain, such a combination of sensations with the physical reaction of danger avoidance results in a better means of survival.
This trait of this new sensation (let's just call it kebunded) that is associated with danger avoidance, then gets passed down through natural selection by merit of it providing a means of increased survival through danger detection and avoidance. Kebunded eventually gets passed down this way to a species that, for all intents and purposes, we'll call homo sapiens. One day a member of this species named Mercano Uberzitz began to ruminate on just how rational it is for the sensation of kebunded and danger avoidance to fit together, why it's simply a match made in heaven. because of this he then thinks that it can't be simply mere coincidence that the sensation of kebunded is matched so well together with danger avoidence, and it works too! The sensation of kebunded does indeed help people avoid danger.
Mercano then begins to wonder that if somehow the sensation of kebunded was replaced by something else, such as a sensation of static that you might see on your TV screen or even some other unimagined sensation like "pain", and he finds that that's just very disharmonious, it wouldn't make sense, it's as if though we had steering wheels in cars where if you turn it left, the wheels would swing right and if you turn it right, the wheels would swing left. It's as if though we had joystick controls where if you push the stick forward or "up" the nose of the plane would dip down and if you pull it back, or "down" the nose of the plane would be raised up! So unintuitive! Almost like having a keyboard with rows of letters that are grouped so unintuitively together like "qwertyuiop", so inefficient and difficult to use!
Given that the probability that the combination of kebunded and danger avoidance could have easily been any other unintuitive combinations like the unintuitive keyboards and joysticks mentioned above, or even, (God forbid!) PAIN and danger avoidance. Mercano concludes through this reasoning that the probability that kebunded and danger avoidance would actually be paired together is infinitesimally low. So low in fact that it would require divine intervention in order for such an outcome to even come to pass. Hence he surmises that because such an outcome came to pass, there MUST be a divine designer somewhere that made this happen, and it was all part of that designer's perfect design because that designer of course intended to design things exactly according to what Mercano considers rational(how coincidental!)
Mercano doesn't know if such a designer actually does share the same sense of rationality as him, let alone whether or not such a designer actually designed everything around that sense of rationality. But to heck with it, it all fits and makes sense and such an answer is better than no answer at all therefore he concludes that Thor must have created and fine tuned and designed EVERYTHING!
And so it was that Mercano successfully brought into being the divine designer of all things, Thor, and with that he lived happily knowing he had the answer to all things. The end!
@@DeludedOne In the paper by Cutter and Crummett that Squared is drawing from here, they respond to this kind of objection.
@@MatthewDickau So what do you think was their response? I know the paper said something about how "even if evolution were true, our paper still holds". But I just explained how evolution accounts for the pain/danger avoidance scenario perfectly without God AND how their analysis which leads to God (it doesn't but to them, a seeming coincidence they can't explain has got to be God and nothing else) is flawed the same way as all similar arguments from designed, that simply because we're used to how things are right now, that's somehow objectively "rational", never mind the fact that this "rationality" is relative based on the outcome of the present that could have gone differently (though I did explain why it is the way it is through natural selection), and if it somehow had, THAT different outcome would be what we would be considering as "rational"!
Given that the entire premise of design relies on this "coincidental rational combination of mental and physical states", revealing that the standard of rationality they upheld as objective should actually have been considered from a subjective standpoint instead underminds this premise entirely.
If kebunded instead of pain was the sensation that actually aided in danger detection and avoidance from the very beginning, then the paper's example would have had kebunded instead of pain as their example and considered it as an objective rational "coincidence" of "harmony" between mental and physical states.
@@DeludedOne See pages 10-12 of their paper for the relevant responses to type of objection you raised, and then pages 13-17 for another category of examples of psychophysical harmony which is immune to this type of objection.
Also, the introduction and section 2.4 of the paper addresses your "god of the gaps" charge.
Ooh finally, the next video! Can't wait to watch it, I'm sure it'll be great. I'd love to see you cover some more arguments about mathematics or mathematics-adjacent topics - I'm taking symbolic logic next semester with Christopher Menzel which should be super fun.
Wow! Lucky! :)
It’s going to be a banger of a class. Many aspiring apologists
Apologetics Squared, please feel free to copy and paste your responses to my comment from the other video. But I wanted to comment these criticisms in case they help people think about a skeptical take on the argument.
Some criticisms:
Firstly, The argument assumes the principle of indifference. However there are quite powerful objections to this principle and it is regarded as very suspect in philosophy of probability. Of course, the guest goes on to talk about weighting the probability toward simple laws and argues that this helps the argument. But that's not the only possible weighting; perhaps there are probabilistic weightings toward harmony itself. The argument needs to give us some reason to think there isn't/shouldn't be such probabilistic weighting, and yet it does no such thing.
Secondly, The guest says that psychophysical harmony is very highly probable on theism. This is extremely implausible. It's not even clear why we should expect God to create anything at all under theism. God is perfectly fulfilled, perfectly self-sufficient even in a world where he doesn't create. That world has an utterly unparalleled purity, elegance, simplicity, and many other goods that can't be found in any other world. Why wouldn't God strongly desire not to create, then? Whence cometh your insight into God's psychology? And even if God chooses to create, there may very well be lots of goods that are only possible if theres psychophysical disharmony. Maybe God is super interested in that; maybe he gets great pleasure from it; maybe it's more interesting than a harmonious world; maybe disharmony for physical creatures is a necessary condition for significant harmony in and significant goods accruing to non-physical angelic beings; maybe an extended duration of disharmony is a precondition for greater goods (perhaps even greater harmony) down the line, just as evil is a precondition for greater goods or divine hiddenness is a precondition for greater relationship goods down the line; perhaps God would prefer to actualize only non-physical creatures to whom psychophysical harmony doesn't even apply; etc. Theism doesn't predict psychophysical harmony; it's compatible with basically all the disharmonious combinations of psychophysical laws (or *no such laws to begin with*) the guest speaks of.
Thirdly, Many atheistic hypotheses predict the data just as well as, if not better than, theism - eg natural teleology, atheistic axiarchism, Draper's aesthetic deism, Atheistic Platonic Form of the Good views (like Eric Steinhardt), etc. These are hardly 'theism adjacent'; they're incompatible with theism. They share only one salient feature with theism, namely , some tendency on the part of something fundamental toward, minimally, harmony (and perhaps goodness as well). (Of course, assuming that theism does deliver this tendency. I'm skeptical that it does, as explained above.)
Fourthly, The argument makes the problem of evil nigh insoluble. Pain and suffering are intrinsically bad. God shouldn't actualize them. The theist response is that, while they're intrinsically bad, they're extrinsically good insofar as they're able to bring about greater goods down the line. But if - per the argument from psychophysical harmony - we're working with epistemic possibilities or conceivable scenarios where the 'phenomenal feel' associated with a causal profile can be different than it actually is, then we can easily imagine scenarios in which the causal profile of actual pain/suffering remains intact (and so you get all the same extrinsic goods) but in which the phenomenal feeling associated with that causal profile is neutral or even pleasurable. It would be atrociously, viciously evil to actualize pain/suffering-filled worlds when there are worlds that are identical (with all the same extrinsic goods) except for those phenomenal experiences of pain/suffering. We would thus expect God with near certainty to actualize one of those worlds. Lo and behold, God didn't.
Fifthly, The guest's response to the 'revenge problem' is not plausible. Firstly, The psychophysical laws describing God's mental states are going to be far more complicated than the guest says. There are connections between God’s first- and second- and third-order desires; there are connections between God’s emotional states (eg happiness and sadness) and potential goings-on in the world (eg, Gods emotional state is rejoicing when a sinner repents or converts; it’s grief when atrocities happen; etc); there are connections between God’s desires and his intentions; there are connections between his intentions and his actions; there are connections between his actions and their effects; there are connections between his response behaviors to prayer input, and these are exceedingly fine-tuned to the kind of prayer, the person praying, their circumstances, the number of people praying, whether those prayer requests are compatible, etc; there are connections between his beliefs and states of the world; and so on ad nauseam. This is extremely complex; far more complex than the guest lets on, and it requires far more to state than the few (quite uninformative and underdetermining) laws/connections the guest cites. Secondly, Perfection doesn’t entail harmony, against what the guest claims. Remember, the argument allows us to conceive of different metaphysically necessary sets of laws. Thus, we can imagine alternative sets of divine psychological laws that are metaphysically necessary. In this imagined scenario, it’s no mark against God’s perfection that he isn’t fully psychologically harmonious, since the laws are necessary - it’s literally impossible for God to be fully psychologically harmonious. Plausibly, then, perfection doesn’t entail harmony. Impossibilities cannot be perfections that God lacks. And so it doesn’t count against God’s perfection in these imagined scenarios with different, not-fully-harmonious necessary divine psychological laws. Thirdly, Even if perfection entails harmony, we still have the revenge problem as a challenge to the intrinsic probability of perfect being theism (as opposed to other, similar theisms). Given the massive complexity of these divine psychological connections, there will be bajillions upon bajillions of alternative theisms that are slightly (and, in some cases, majorly) disharmonious in their psychology and/or its connections to the world. It’s not at all clear why we shouldn’t be indifferent among these bajillions of hypotheses just as we’re indifferent among the different sets of psychophysical laws. Thus, theism gets an exceedingly low prior probability that’s probably similar to the inverse of the evidential confirmation it allegedly garners from psychophysical harmony. In other words, the evidence is only purchased at the cost of intrinsic improbability.
Sixthly, The naturalist could co-opt Malpass’ stalking horse objection to the fine tuning argument for this argument. Just posit some natural thing with the disposition towards producing harmony in minded beings. Yes this adds complexity to naturalism, but it’s at least as plausible as a supernatural mind that also tends toward goodness (and hence harmony in minded beings) that theism posits. You might then complain that it’s super intrinsically unlikely that it would be disposed to harmony as opposed to any of the disharmonious scenarios. But the same can be said of God. You might reply that harmony is good whereas disharmony isn’t, and so God is more likely to actualize harmony. But as explained earlier, disharmony may itself be good if God gets pleasure from it, or is interested in it, or it may be extrinsically good in its connection with outweighing goods either accruing to other creatures (eg angels) or to those disharmoniously-minded physical beings later on in their existence (when, perhaps, they’re more harmonious for a short time to reap those benefits).
Seventhly, The naturalist may very well accept a priori physicalism. Crummett and Cutter themselves admit that this is a way to entirely circumvent the argument. And this thesis isn’t nearly as implausible as the dualists Crummett, Cutter, and Emerson Green let on. Many philosophers are sympathetic with it, it’s defensible, and it isn’t at all fringe, as shown by the fact that - per the PhilPapers survey - 17% of philosophers think that philosophical zombies (and the phenomenal-physical inversions/disharmony that it implies) aren’t even conceivable. For reference, that’s about the number of philosophers who accept libertarian free will. It’s a sizable number. Moreover, the argument requires not only a denial of a priori physicalism; it also requires a denial of the claim that the characteristic causal profiles of phenomenal states are a priori knowable. But that claim is even more plausible than a priori physicalism, and denying it is at least contestable.
Sure!
Part 1:
// Firstly, The argument assumes the principle of indifference. However there are quite powerful objections to this principle and it is regarded as very suspect in philosophy of probability. //
Agreed. I myself do not endorse it except in a select few contexts.
// Of course, the guest goes on to talk about weighting the probability toward simple laws and argues that this helps the argument. But that's not the only possible weighting; perhaps there are probabilistic weightings toward harmony itself. //
In any context where a proponent of some theory proclaims "My theory correctly predicts such and such data!" a detractor could always say, "perhaps there are probabilistic weightings towards that data itself" to defuse the evidence. However, absent some external reason for such a weighting, it would be ad hoc to posit it.
// The argument needs to give us some reason to think there isn't/shouldn't be such probabilistic weighting, and yet it does no such thing. //
It seems all I can do in response to this (seemingly odd) challenge is point to the standard criteria for assessing prior probabilities, like simplicity, intuition, fit with background knowledge, etc., and show how none of these help the naturalist. (For these three: I already covered simplicity; no set of laws has more intuitions supporting it than any other; and this argument updates on data epistemically prior to most of our knowledge, so there is barely any background knowledge for these laws to cohere with!)
// Secondly, The guest says that psychophysical harmony is very highly probable on theism. This is extremely implausible. It's not even clear why we should expect God to create anything at all under theism. //
Theism predicts that there is a Being with maximum goodness. If X creates more good things than Y, X is more good than Y, all else being equal. So, I would expect God to create lots of good things. This intuition seems crystal clear to me.
// God is perfectly fulfilled, perfectly self-sufficient even in a world where he doesn't create. That world has an utterly unparalleled purity, elegance, simplicity, and many other goods that can't be found in any other world. Why wouldn't God strongly desire not to create, then? Whence cometh your insight into God's psychology? //
I think we're both looking into God's psychology the same way: by using our axiological intuitions to try and make predictions about what God would do. I think that the intuitions you are appealing to are significantly less clear than the one I am appealing to, but even if they're equally powerful, this means that we have another argument rooted in a conflict of intuitions. Such an argument by its very nature is going to be orders of magnitude weaker than a fine-tuning style argument such as the PHA.
// And even if God chooses to create, there may very well be lots of goods that are only possible if theres psychophysical disharmony. Maybe God is super interested in that; maybe he gets great pleasure from it; maybe it's more interesting than a harmonious world; maybe disharmony for physical creatures is a necessary condition for significant harmony in and significant goods accruing to non-physical angelic beings; maybe an extended duration of disharmony is a precondition for greater goods (perhaps even greater harmony) down the line, //
Maybe. For any X, it is the case that, "Maybe X brings about greater goods such that God would instantiate X." However, the predictions of theism are nonetheless going to be weighted in accordance with our axiological intuitions. Otherwise theism has no predictions at all (which you obviously don't agree with, since you just argued that you think theism predicts that there would be no world at all; failed predictions are predictions!).
// just as evil is a precondition for greater goods or divine hiddenness is a precondition for greater relationship goods down the line; //
I think suffering and hiddenness are far, far better candidates for vehicles of bringing about greater goods than psychophysical disharmony, because an agent who undergoes psychophysical disharmony has no psychological continuity. This makes it impossible for disharmony to contribute to soul-building or greater relationships.
// perhaps God would prefer to actualize only non-physical creatures to whom psychophysical harmony doesn't even apply; etc. //
I think there are good reasons to predict that the agents God would create would be embodied, but that discussion would take us to far afield of the topic at hand.
// Theism doesn't predict psychophysical harmony; it's compatible with basically all the disharmonious combinations of psychophysical laws (or *no such laws to begin with*) the guest speaks of. //
There are two claims here. 1) Theism is compatible with disharmony, and 2) theism doesn't predict harmony. I think (1) is plausible. Even though I think the probability is miniscule, I don't think the conjunction "theism is true and psychophysical disharmony obtains" is internally contradictory. Yet this in no way entails the second claim. The second claim is wrong, because theism predicts that God would make good things and PH is a good thing.
// Thirdly, Many atheistic hypotheses predict the data just as well as, if not better than, theism - eg natural teleology, atheistic axiarchism, Draper's aesthetic deism, Atheistic Platonic Form of the Good views (like Eric Steinhardt), etc. //
I don't see how these could predict PH better than theism. Take Atheistic Platonism for example. I'm admittedly unfamilliar with Steinhardt's views, but if the Form of the Good is an abstract object, then it seems completely unable to explain PH.
Broadly speaking, however, I'm sympathetic to this point. I think in the end the strongest rivals to theism are going to be the views which are closest to it. These views have a strong theistic aftertaste, so they're going to be the least harmed by the PHA.
// These are hardly 'theism adjacent'; they're incompatible with theism. //
I don't understand. If a view is adjacent to theism, then it is not theism. Therefore, a precondition of a view's being theism adjacent is its incompatibility with theism.
// They share only one salient feature with theism, namely , some tendency on the part of something fundamental toward, minimally, harmony (and perhaps goodness as well). (Of course, assuming that theism does deliver this tendency. I'm skeptical that it does, as explained above.) //
Do you reject that theism entails a tendency towards goodness? Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying here, but if we disagree on this point we need to discuss some more basic epistemological points. (And also running problems of evil and hiddenness becomes impossible if theism does not predict a tendency away from suffering and hiddenness!)
//Forthly, //
Aha! Typo! By the rules of the internet, I am therefore the winner of this debate. I expect your conversion promptly. :)
Good comments, some quick responses:
1. the argument doesn’t need to assume that. in fact, in this video A^2 gives reasons why probability weighting would actually help this argument rather than hurt it.
2. This is a general objection which applies to all teleological arguments. It’s an interesting discussion, but it is an objection to the theoretical framework of doing these teleological arguments simpliciter, rather than just objecting to this argument
3. These views are pretty radical compared to the kind of naturalism’s most people like to advocate for. This argument would be very successesful if it shifted the philosophy of religion dialectic in a way that naturalists must give up value neutral naturalism. That would be a major price to pay for many naturalists, and some have paid that price (such as Emerson)
4. Many theodicies argue that the phenomenal feeling of suffering and pain are necessary: not just the behaviors associated with it. These would apply here also. This again seems like a more general objection to theism rather than this specific argument.
5. I don’t see how any of these things are that complicated. You only need the assumption that God is perfect, than him being capable of hearing prayers, and wanting to answer them just becomes a trivial entailment. I don’t see any way for a perfect being to have different kinds of psycho physical laws that connect his desires to answer prayer to his answering them: he simply does what his perfection entails. That’s it.
6. the stalking horse objection, as you say, makes naturalism more complicated. Furthermore, it’s an ad hoc postulation that’s not expected given a broad definition of naturalism. Thus, these kinds of naturalism’s take the posterior observations and add them to the prior probability, making this hypothesis much more arbitrary and ad hoc compared to theism.
7. This is true, but adopting a priori physicalism to circumvent this argument might be costly for many objectors
Part 2:
// The argument makes the problem of evil nigh insoluble. Pain and suffering are intrinsically bad. God shouldn't actualize them. The theist response is that, while they're intrinsically bad, they're extrinsically good insofar as they're able to bring about greater goods down the line. But if - per the argument from psychophysical harmony - we're working with epistemic possibilities or conceivable scenarios where the 'phenomenal feel' associated with a causal profile can be different than it actually is, then we can easily imagine scenarios in which the causal profile of actual pain/suffering remains intact (and so you get all the same extrinsic goods) but in which the phenomenal feeling associated with that causal profile is neutral or even pleasurable. It would be atrociously, viciously evil to actualize pain/suffering-filled worlds when there are worlds that are identical (with all the same extrinsic goods) except for those phenomenal experiences of pain/suffering. We would thus expect God with near certainty to actualize one of those worlds. Lo and behold, God didn't. //
Here's a response I personally don't endorse, but is nonetheless worth considering: We have no data that contradicts the hypothesis you just outlined. If some form of pleasure was given the same causal profile of pain, then when I tried to remember what pain feels like, the same memory would come to mind in both the pain-filled world and the no-pain world. Even if an individual is currently in pain, their immediate introspection wouldn't be trustworthy in the no-pain world, because the "fake pain" would lead the agent engaging in introspection to all the same conclusions that real pain does. We don't have a single piece of data that can allow us to distinguish which world we're in. So, from a Bayesian perspective, you have offered absolutely no data which we can update on!
Here's a response which I do endorse: The phenomenal experience of pain can itself be necessary for greater goods. For example, the good of "forgiving someone who accidentally hurt you" is impossible if the agent accidentally inflicted pleasure on you.
But that's just a counterexample to demonstrate logical possibility. A more plausible example is that soul-building probably wouldn't be nearly as effective if we get to Heaven and learn that our experiences of pain were all illusory.
// Fifthly, The guest's response to the 'revenge problem' is not plausible. Firstly, The psychophysical laws describing God's mental states are going to be far more complicated than the guest says. There are connections between God’s first- and second- and third-order desires; there are connections between God’s emotional states (eg happiness and sadness) and potential goings-on in the world (eg, Gods emotional state is rejoicing when a sinner repents or converts; it’s grief when atrocities happen; etc); //
I think we can borrow all these from the realm of the axiological facts. There are already first-order and second-order axiological facts, axiological facts about what emotions are best in response to goings-on, etc.
// there are connections between God’s desires and his intentions; //
Well, I'm a Libertarian, so I think that this is going to be an irreducibly free choice, rather than law-governed. If I'm wrong and compatibilism is true, then this connection flows from axiology again.
//there are connections between his intentions and his actions; there are connections between his actions and their effects;//
I don't think we need to be this fancy. When God intends something, it happens. Why do we need to subdivide this into actions and effects?
// there are connections between his response behaviors to prayer input, and these are exceedingly fine-tuned to the kind of prayer, the person praying, their circumstances, the number of people praying, whether those prayer requests are compatible, etc; //
Again, God's behavior is going to flow from the axiological facts.
// there are connections between his beliefs and states of the world; //
I mentioned that one in the video.
// and so on ad nauseam. This is extremely complex; far more complex than the guest lets on, and it requires far more to state than the few (quite uninformative and underdetermining) laws/connections the guest cites. //
I remain unconvinced of this. It seems every example you mentioned was reducible to one of the three laws I gave.
// Secondly, Perfection doesn’t entail harmony, against what the guest claims. Remember, the argument allows us to conceive of different metaphysically necessary sets of laws. Thus, we can imagine alternative sets of divine psychological laws that are metaphysically necessary. In this imagined scenario, it’s no mark against God’s perfection that he isn’t fully psychologically harmonious, since the laws are necessary - it’s literally impossible for God to be fully psychologically harmonious. Plausibly, then, perfection doesn’t entail harmony. Impossibilities cannot be perfections that God lacks. And so it doesn’t count against God’s perfection in these imagined scenarios with different, not-fully-harmonious necessary divine psychological laws. //
This is clever, but I don't think it succeeds. Let's say G1 denotes God in epistemically possible world W1, and G2 denotes God in epistemically possible world W2. Now, even though G1 is as good as any being could be in W1, and G2 is as good as any being could be in W2, it can still nonetheless be true that G1 is better than G2. If W2 included a necessary law of the form "all agents will constantly torture at least a googolplex creatures," it would be no mark against G2 that He spent all His time torturing countless lives, because it's impossible for Him not to. However, G2 is not as good as G1 who does not torture countless lives! G2 is as good as He can be relative to W2, and G1 is as good as He can be relative to W1, but G1 is better than G2 relative to the axiological facts that obtain in the actual world. So, the thesis that there is a maximally good Being (relative to the actual axiological facts that obtain) is going to inform what things are possible and what things are not (i.e. it's going to entail that G2 is not actual). A very important note here is that the theist is perfectly allowed to conclude that their axiological intuitions have gone awry. This prevents from opening the floodgates to allow every whim of our axiological intuitions to have radical implications on our metaphysics. But at the end of the day, really solid axiological intuitions like "love is good" or "chaotic minds are worse than orderly minds" can influence the theist's probabilistic weightings to different epistemically possible Gods.
//Thirdly, Even if perfection entails harmony, we still have the revenge problem as a challenge to the intrinsic probability of perfect being theism (as opposed to other, similar theisms). Given the massive complexity of these divine psychological connections, //
Again, I dispute there is massive complexity.
// there will be bajillions upon bajillions of alternative theisms that are slightly (and, in some cases, majorly) disharmonious in their psychology and/or its connections to the world. It’s not at all clear why we shouldn’t be indifferent among these bajillions of hypotheses just as we’re indifferent among the different sets of psychophysical laws. //
Well, I actually can use simplicity here, even though it can't be used in the PH case. "There is a God with a perfect mind" is a simpler hypothesis than "there is a God with a mind that is perfect in every way except that He is insufficiently empathetic towards stubbed toes."
//Thus, theism gets an exceedingly low prior probability that’s probably similar to the inverse of the evidential confirmation it allegedly garners from psychophysical harmony. In other words, the evidence is only purchased at the cost of intrinsic improbability. //
Why think that the low prior is similar to the inverse of the evidential confirmation? I don't see why someone couldn't grant everything you've said, but still conclude that probabilistic strength of the PHA overcomes the low prior.
Part 3:
// Sixthly, The naturalist could co-opt Malpass’ stalking horse objection to the fine tuning argument for this argument. Just posit some natural thing with the disposition towards producing harmony in minded beings. Yes this adds complexity to naturalism, but it’s at least as plausible as a supernatural mind that also tends toward goodness (and hence harmony in minded beings) that theism posits. You might then complain that it’s super intrinsically unlikely that it would be disposed to harmony as opposed to any of the disharmonious scenarios. //
Why yes! I was just about to complain about that. :)
// But the same can be said of God. You might reply that harmony is good whereas disharmony isn’t, and so God is more likely to actualize harmony. //
Why yes! I was just about to reply with that. :)
// But as explained earlier, disharmony may itself be good if God gets pleasure from it, or is interested in it, or it may be extrinsically good in its connection with outweighing goods either accruing to other creatures (eg angels) or to those disharmoniously-minded physical beings later on in their existence (when, perhaps, they’re more harmonious for a short time to reap those benefits). //
Even though this is epistemically possible, it it is very improbable that these specific things are necessary for greater goods. Again, the things that we would expect God to most probably do are those things which our axiological intuitions endorse. The stalking horse has no such structure to it; you need to build PH into it, which is no better than building PH into naturalism.
// Seventhly, The naturalist may very well accept a priori physicalism. Crummett and Cutter themselves admit that this is a way to entirely circumvent the argument. //
It is very very important to note that the thesis that "physicalism is knowable a priori" is not sufficient to defuse the argument. You need to be able to know the specific psychophysical laws a priori. The thesis that you are able to know a priori that something with the physical structure of, say, a c-fiber, would be connected with the phenomenal experience of pain strikes me as absurd. Now, if Crummet and Cutter use "a priori physicalism" to simply refer to the thesis that physicalism is discoverable a priori, I actually think they're wrong, and I would argue their argument is stronger than they suspect. For, a naturalist who can deduce the truth of physicalism a priori still wouldn't be able to discover the psychophysical laws, and would still expect disharmony overwhelmingly.
// And this thesis isn’t nearly as implausible as the dualists Crummett, Cutter, and Emerson Green let on. Many philosophers are sympathetic with it, it’s defensible, and it isn’t at all fringe, as shown by the fact that - per the PhilPapers survey - 17% of philosophers think that philosophical zombies (and the phenomenal-physical inversions/disharmony that it implies) aren’t even conceivable. //
That parenthetical is extrapolation. The survey just mentions p-zombies.
//For reference, that’s about the number of philosophers who accept libertarian free will. It’s a sizable number. //
I don't think you can draw a line from the number of people who reject the conceivability of p-zombies to the number of people who think the psychophysical laws are discoverable a priori.
// Moreover, the argument requires not only a denial of a priori physicalism; it also requires a denial of the claim that the characteristic causal profiles of phenomenal states are a priori knowable. But that claim is even more plausible than a priori physicalism, and denying it is at least contestable. //
How so? It seems to me that we don't actually know the causal profiles of any phenomenal states. How could we know what physical effects the phenomenal experience of pain has, a priori?
Anyways, thank you for the thorough response!
@@ApologeticsSquared *-"However, the predictions of theism are nonetheless going to be weighted in accordance with our axiological intuitions."*
If that is the case, doesn't it make PHA or FTA vulnerable against the anthropic principle ?
You did a better job explaining the argument than the author of the argument did when explaining it on Capturing Christianity. Amazing argument.
He actually did nothing too convince me that your fake god is real.....
I have just found out your channel! It is great to have a library of arguments for and against God!
Really enjoy your videos!
- Agnostic Atheist
OMG I will try to bring this argument to the Spanish-speaking community, ¡excelent job with this video squared!
Awesome video, Squared
Hey bro, you should make a tier list of all the arguments for the existence of God
(It would be an entertaining video, you are one of the apologists who knows a wide variety of arguments)
I thought about that, but since I’m assigning “scores” to the arguments, I’m indirectly ranking them already.
Tier lists are hard since there are so many variations of the same argument that are either great or garbage. It’s better to just make tier lists that are about 1 family of arguments
@@ApologeticsSquared GOOD ANSWER, no ranking, the next step is to show the PROPER or SUFFICIENT psychophysical harmony is in CHRIST and we know that from the resurrection. That's to say that the organization of the complexity depends on the control and ability to reverse entropy and Jesus predictions of his own resurrection by his own power is the proof, but do we have evidence? Yes, in the shroud of Turin because the body on the shroud defies gravity and therefore is outside of general relativity and as such a radiating body is the equivalent of shroedingers cat and must have the correct control over CQG correct quantum gravity to cause the effect. The final step is to show that the effect as a SINGULARITY proper is the cause, an EPR Einstein Podovlsky Rosen bridge, or wormhole directly identical to all swartzchild radius fields and indentical to the "big bang" in the PLANCK EPOCH which had to be teleological to produce the psychophysical harmony in the man on the shroud. Back to the future, the shroud man bootstraps the universe into existence by his psychophysical harmony, i.e he is God.
Great presentation of Dustin Crummett's argument from Psychophysical harmony. I think it is one of the strongest arguments for the existence of God, and provides a great, if not overwhelming amount of evidence for theism. That being said, there is technically a "flaw". The argument technically understates the evidence. For the most part, our universe has harmonious psychophysical laws which would be highly unexpected given naturalism, but expected given theism. However, there are some cases of psychophysical disharmony in our universe which we wouldn't expect given theism, but would be unsurprising given naturalism. This can be found in the form of severe mental illnesses and certain environmental conditions which seem to go against the typical normative and semantic harmony found in our universe. Emerson Green gave this objection so credits to him.
To be fair, even with this evidential chip in favor of naturalism, it probably doesn't even come close to offsetting the evidential weight provided by psychophysical harmony. Our world seems to be more psychophysically harmonious than disharmonious.
Well that is really interesting argument.
The one thing I'm not sure how to respond to is critique in lines of:
Given any set of psychophysical connections, we cannot say if those would or wouldn't be psychophysically harmonious. If we had different psychophysical laws, we would just make sense of the universe in accordance to those laws. It isn't necessarily true that most psychophysical connections different from our own would be incoherent mess. It would be for us now, as we would compare it to our own psychophysical laws that are here, but if someone of the different reality looked into our world, it would seem equally incoherent. For instance, the thing we experience as pain, in different reality could instead be experienced as pleasure from our perspective. We say that effect is psychophysically disharmonious, but we can say it only if we have our own psychophysical laws as a point of reference. If our point of reference was a different set of laws, then our own universe is not psychophysically harmonious. Unless there is meta-psychophysical law that states that there's only few psychophysical sets of laws which are truly harmonious, we cannot declare our own psychophysical reality as something remarkable and special.
Maybe I don't fully grasp the argument yet, but I think this wasn't addressed on the video.
*-"Unless there is meta-psychophysical law that states that there's only few psychophysical sets of laws which are truly harmonious, we cannot declare our own psychophysical reality as something remarkable and special."*
That is correct, and this is why the argument fails.
I recommend the "twin earth thought experiment" from Putnam. It addresses exactly your point.
I don't fully grasp the argument as well and I might be wrong but...
we don't need a point of reference to know that it is harmonious. That is the beauty of the argument. Say we call a negative mental state as "pain" and a positive mental state as "pleasure". Then, we say that it is harmonious because for an objectively negative physical reality, there is a corresponding negative mental response, which results to a negative experience. There is harmony, or in other words, it makes sense.
In your scenario, if in a different reality, they experience our concept of pain as pleasure, that is, a positive mental state, then there is incoherence because for an OBJECTIVELY NEGATIVE physical reality, there is a corresponding POSITIVE mental response or a positive experience. It would be "normal" for them since that is their psychophysical laws, but it won't be harmonious. It doesn't make sense.
If a person is hit by a car and had a negative mental state (brain fired pain signals), which results to a negative experience (he doesn't want it to happen again), then there is harmony.
If in the same situation, he had positive mental state (he had pleasure), which results to a negative experience (he doesn't want it to happen again), there is disharmony. It won't make sense why he would want it to happen again since it is an objectively negative reality. But it would also not make sense why he doesn't want it to happen again since there is a positive mental state.
If again, same situation, he had a negative mental state, but resulted to a positive experience (wants to do it again), there is still disharmony.
The fact that the matter, mental and experience in our reality all lines up, is remarkable and cannot be explained, other than the existence of God.
@@create51 i disagree 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 in my example.
This argument backfires by making the problem of evil much worse. If qualia and behavior can come apart, then God could have eliminated suffering while keeping our behavior the same.
Let’s say I take a magic potion that rewires my brain and makes me brave. Now consider someone who suffers a great deal, but despite this, they overcome their fears and become brave. Whose bravery is more valuable? Arguably the latter individual’s. Now, it seems to me that if God wanted to give us virtues like charity, bravery, love, etc. with no suffering via the manipulation of psychophysical laws, it would be akin to the first example, where virtues are just “zapped” into our brains. So, I think soul-building theodicies are relatively safe.
@@ApologeticsSquared Perhaps, but the psychophysical harmony argument does constrain the kinds of theodicies you can employ quite a bit, which counts as Bayesian evidence against theism or the argument or both. I think the problem is worst for nonhuman animal suffering, where the soul-building theodicy is highly implausible. For example Trent Horn tends to give a "functionalist" theodicy here where he says animals have to suffer in order to have the appropriate avoidance behavior. But this doesn't work if qualia can come apart from behavior.
This presupposes suffering in and of itself is evil
@@Thedisciplemike Are you really prepared to deny that gratuitous suffering is evil? I'm specifically arguing that if qualia and behavior can come apart, suffering is gratuitous, especially nonhuman suffering.
@norabelrose198 in your materialist worldview, you have to concede good and evil are purely subjective. You claiming suffering is evil is nonsensical
I am not sure I understood all the details. But I tend to doubt that epistemic possibility/probability helps at all or put differently, that it is abused here. It seems too easy to argue for all kinds or crazy stuff along similar lines. It seems to me one could make a very similar, simpler argument for the existence of physical laws demanding theism. Because starting with a humean mosaique, i.e. some distribution D property instantiated at each point of space (or initial values on points of some cauchy-surface) at t0 there could be any other distribution D1 of property instances at t1, and another D2 at t2, etc. So there would be gazillions of "laws", i.e. sequences of patterns Dx of property instances, most of which would be totally chaotic (i.e. no way like laws in the standard sense). Without adding more structure/restrictions to the patterns and sequences the epistemic possibilities would be immense and any additional structure (to get to laws as we know them) could be contested in some way. So we should expect total chaos because there are so many more possibilities for chaos ("pseudolaws" in the sense above) than for order. But not with God who creates order, ergo T far more probable than non-T, because we have order, not chaos.
The argument is circular - reality is coherent because reality is coherent. Which means it's really just saying coherent reality = God. But that's a sneaky substitution - coherent reality only equals coherent reality, and one can imagine an infinite number of coherent realities, and they don't have to involve a God. Though I do think it's fair to say that the coherence of reality is *mysterious*, but beyond that point it's just conjecture.
Nice video! I think I'll need another pass at it when I'm less tired though.
I can't help feeling that evolution might be able to select for more psycho-physically harmonious brains.
(Or at least I might if I thought that naturalism could account for anything psycho-physical at all. But then we're getting into "argument from consciousness" territory, and I'm not sure how much they overlap.)
Evolution can select for brains which produce a specific action, not the mental experience itself.
So let’s say that pleasure replaces pain. When we stub our toe, our nerves would send messages to the brain so that it will cause us to nurse the toe. So the brain causes us to nurse the toe. Simultaneously, the brain causes us to experience an incredibly pleasurable experience, rather than pain.
Basically, evolution can select the structure which produces the best actions for survival, but it can’t make that same structure create a harmonious mental experience.
You might be assuming that mental experiences can cause physical effects by thinking “what would I do if I experienced pleasure whenever I stubbed my toes… I would not fix it so that I would continue to experience that pleasure.” That’s assuming that your mental processes and/or experiences can cause what your body does. Under that assumption, you’d have the problem of which physical effect that metal experience causes, like causing the mass of hydrogen to change.
The naturalist is more likely to say that the brain causes what thought you have, so it could just as easily cause your to nurse your toe, even though it’s causing you much pleasure.
Does this make sense?
@@C0smicNINJA If we had a creature that experienced pleasure when it hit its head against a three, it would hit its head against the three again and again to experience more pleasure. Creatures that experienced pleasure when they hurt themselves didn't survive very long and thus didn't pass on their genes.
@@sortehuseyour answer is assuming that mind controls matter, which is directly contrary to what materialists say.
I agree that once you accept consciousness as fundamental, the problem seems to work itself out. But then you are left with other problems that conclude with a mental existence in the mind of God.
I don't understand... isn't 14:24 the defeater to this argument?
If evolution selects for specific combinations of physical Input/Output-pairs, then wouldn't that explain similar reactions to similar inputs? Since evolution is messy, this match wouldn't be perfect across all individuals. There would be some people deriving pleasure from things that should cause pain(masochists) for example, but generally it would still hold true.
Of course, there would be no selection preassure to an actual shared experience, but i see no evidence that we actually share the exact same mental experiences. How would we know, that what i experience as the color red is the same as what other people experience as the color red? Evolution would select for the ability to distinguish and comunicate colors, but how would we know whether or not what i experience as red could be the experience of blue for you? I can't hop into your mind to check whether our experiences match, and evolutionary we would be selected in such a way that our Input/Output-pairs tend to match, so we would both call it red and blue even though our experience of these two colors would be fliped.
In fact, i think there is ample evidence from neurodivergent people, who clearly do not share the same experiences in certain regards, that we can reject the statement that we share mental experiences. We share similar Input-Output responses, but the mental experiences themselves seem to be quite different from person to person.
You just destroyed the "strongest argument for theism"
Everyone is neurodivergent, hence the term is redundant. Which other terms then, are also redundant or out of context?
@@TimberWulfIsHere The term neurodiversity refers to the concept that the human experience is quite diverse. In specific there is generally a differentiation between neurotypical, and neurodivergent, wherein the term neurotypical refers to people whos cognition is closely aligned to the cognition of the mayority of the population. On the other hand, neurodivergent refers to people whos cognition and brain do not match the "norm".
I am quite happy to agree with you, that there is no "norm" for the human experience and everybody is different. This would be an even stronger case against this argument.
@@Finfie Im not sure why you wrote a verbose paragraph just to say "i agree"
@@TimberWulfIsHere I am not a professional neuroscientist, nor a certified psychologist. That means i am not qualified to make that determination. But if you want to, then thank you for agreeing to an even stronger version of my counterargument.
After many, many attempts to understand the argument, I think I am finally reaching the point where I think the argument has cracked my top 5 (so long as you combine it with the additional trivial entailment of the argument that conscious beings exist). I’m growing increasingly weary of anthropic principle issues and other probabilistic concerns (primarily with the FTA), but otherwise great video. In fact, you could probably set the prior probability of Theism as being remarkably low and this argument overwhelm it anyway
i’m not sure how anthropic principle applies here, but it’s an pretty arbitrary principle anyway
@@RadicOmega P(PH|observe) =1 since without PH we wouldn’t be rational. Hence, attempting to find P(ph) by itself becomes incredibly difficult since we have an incomplete understanding of the total probability space.
@@whatsinaname691 That's one way to put it. Another way to put it is that contrary to what is claimed in the video, the attribution of the property "harmonious" to any element of the probability space only justifiable from one's starting point.
In other words, for any psychophysical law, that law is the harmonious one. Harmony is therefore trivially equal among all psychophysical laws, and the bayesian calculation is mute.
It's not a confusing argument, it's just a poor argument that is overly complex.
@@whatsinaname691 So you Don’t like the fta?
This is really good. Thanks for the time you put into it. I wonder in your discussion of God's mind if there is much benefit in using words like "laws" anyway. The Euthyphro dilemma comes to mind here. I think Divine Simplicity is a fine answer to that problem and it solves the issue of God being "governed" by anything. Perhaps I'm missing something. Do you have thoughts on that?
Do you think divine simplicity entails the modal collapse ?
@@MrGustavier I think I'm probably in the minority, but I don't believe that statements about God need to be logically sound. That's not a statement about God, so much as it is to the limits of our conception of Him. Again, I'm sure it's an uncommon position.
I threw a dart. Then I drew a target around the dart. What is the chance that I hit the bullseye?
I really like this argument. One concern I have is that we can't know what the external world is really like so as to compare it to our experiences and see if they're in harmony. All we have are our experiences. I could just be misunderstanding something though.
This argument doesn’t make any sense to me. Pain is bad? Not for a masochist and what about a coma patient harmony apply to them?
Hi Apologetics Squared 👋🏻. Great video! I am wondering though is it possible to avoid this unique argument if a person was to adopt an idealist position (epistemological or metaphysical)? I ask because if one adopts idealism, then this entails that it phenomenal truths are fundamental and physical truths either don’t exist or are grounded in phenomenal truths. Given this is the case, doesn’t this successfully avoid the argument altogether in a similar manner (but inverted) to the way that Type-A physicalists (including analytical functionalism, eliminative materialism/illusionism and certain forms of liberal naturalism) avoid the argument due to P-Zombies not only being impossible, but also inconceivable (phenomenal states/truths are identical to physical functions/behaviors and this can be known a priori). Thanks!
25:48 "I would actually really appreciate it if you the viewer shared this video so that if there is a flaw we can all find it"
The flaw :
In the beginning of the video, you compare the argument to the fine tuning argument. I think that one of the response to the fine tuning argument applies to the psychophysical harmony argument :
In the fine tuning argument, at some point one needs to evaluate the prior probability that the universe exist as it is, given theism. The problem is that there isn't any way to calculate that prior probability. Simply saying "I believe that a theistic god would WANT to create the universe as it is" isn't gonna cut it. This is entirely ad-hoc. One needs to give a separate argument to justify that a theistic god would indeed create the universe as it is. Absent that argument, any universe could be created by a theistic god. In fact, a one to one correspondance can be established between every different combination of physical constant in the naturalist hypothesis, and every different universe that a god could have created in the theistic hypothesis, rendering the argument entirely mute.
The same critique applies to the psychophysical harmony argument.
A separate argument needs to be given to justify that god would indeed want to create psychophysical harmony. Otherwise any difference in the priors would be entirely ad-hoc. And the argument would be mute.
I joked in his fine-tuning argument that he'd just point to a tree and say "therefore god" but it seems like that is the actual method apologist are using now. Point to area, therefore god(would want it that way).
Also, on your point about predicting whether or not a c-fiber would be associated with pain, I don't think we are totally in the dark. For instance, we were able to look at the retinas of other animals and deduce that they can see other wavelengths of light and we can verify this by noticing how they interact with objects lit in specific ways. We might not be able to know what the actual experience of seeing light like a bird is but that's essentially "just" the hard problem of consciousness. Which the hard problem of consciousness is in the end what makes it impossible to actually demonstrate psychophysical harmony or disharmony as I argued in my other comment.
Commenting for the engagement!
Much appreciated! :)
This is hard to grasp as a layman but I do have a few thoughts that may or may not be relevant.
How does programmed cell death fit into this argument? If 50% of neurons die during a normal brain development, how does that not postulate a biologically driven,that is evolutionary driven, process that prevent needless connections like those described as chaotic/disharmonious. This is concerning both each individual as well as in the evolution of the species as a whole?
How perfect does the harmony have to be? The neural firings that I Perceive as licorice could be the taste of cherry in your experience even if we both call it mint. We can have disharmony and not know it as not all of reality is shared.
How do we know that how we experience things are not just learned interpretations of neurological static of varied pitch? I am thinking of cochlear Implants where a person can be relearning how to hear from just electric impulses. With time one can differentiate speech, various sounds etc. If our experiences are fluid and under development then an organised harmonious outcome could result from that change rather than a preset order, no?
As a whole I can not quite see how change fit into this model.
This said Christianity is true.
God bless!
I really like this argument, so I thought about it for a while and I potentially have a good objection. I would love to run it by you if you want
Feel free to shoot me an email! :)
@ApologeticsSquared How would you put this argument in a logical form with premisses and conclusion?
P1 Misunderstanding probability.
P2 Ignore the entire field of Biology
P3 Point to any basic biology fact.
C therefore god.
Honest question - If a set of laws leads to a chaotic mind, and we know our mind is not chaotic, it means the epistemology probability of this set of laws is zero. Basically you said all sets of laws are of equal probability, thus the probability of the sets that make sense is 0 - but not all sets have probability if some of them don't make sense.
Every argument for God is more support for the argument from divine hiddenness.
Also "naturalism" is to my knowledge not a philosophy of mind, so it isn't making claims about mind. You basically equated "naturalism" to a theory where the mental is randomly attached to the physical lol.
What is really being compared in cases like this is the principle of indifference (naturalism) with a purposeful process (theism of various sorts)
Yes it is, Naturalism entails Physicalism. If Substance Dualism or Idealism are true, then Naturalism is false.
So I think that the range of possible mental experiences might be somewhat overstated here. By my lights the naturalist is unlikely to grant that it’s epistemically possible that “the taste of sawdust” is associated with such and such firing, but rather that C-fibers might be involved in “taste,” and perhaps specific instances of taste are determined by relative levels of excitation on some sort of spectrum, etc. But It’s probably fine to leave that.
More importantly, it seems to me that the psycho-divine objection has more force. For one, the objection is granting theism for the sake of argument, so I don’t know if naturalism is the best hypothesis for comparison (obviously N isn’t going to explain God’s psychology, since under N God doesn’t exist). I think the argument is intended to function as a tu quoque along the lines of “if we need to appeal to some ontologically prior causal mechanism with the appropriate dispositions to explain psychophysical harmony, then shouldn’t we require something similar in the case of psychodivine harmony?” In my view this should be the alternative hypothesis (call it T’); then we have:
P(D|T') ~ 1
P(D|T) ~ 0
P(T')/P(T)
Again very interesting argument.
My initial rebuttal however at first glance is that the probability system you are using is subjectively dependent not objectively dependent. As such any probabilistic value you conclude is not going to be objectively true it will only ever be subjective based on whatever your current awareness is of the information.
And what’s the probability that using such a subjectively based probability is going to match with the objective probability?
I would also say that perhaps the psychophysical harmony argument falls victim to special pleading as demonstrated by your response to two objections against this argument
Evolution by process of natural selection is such a way that if it exists any organisms that arise from it will naturally be well adjusted enough to survive their reality. Its a force guiding how the psychophysical harmony will manifest Just like the role you seem to be arguing god would play. So naturally any refutations of this point would also apply to the role god plays hence the psychodivine harmony argument and you don’t need to presuppose naturalism to consider the psychodivine argument and if you treat it as a hypothetical within the framework of theism that’s where its most effective.
And a different variation on this issue of special pleading is that if we take a probability that a universe was designed by a god is equally improbable by this logic.
take for example all possible outcomes where god valued things differently, or a different god existed, or all possible realities where no god exists. You’re still left with an equally astronomically improbable situation to claim that a god exists.
C fibers couldn't be connected to pleasure or certain smells, and the googolth digit of pi has a definite value, just because it seems impossible from the outside view doesn't mean it is once we know the details.
nice video. question: at 6:45, multiplying probabilities is allowed if each event is independent. why assume that psychophysical laws are independent?
Because learning what experience c-fibers are connected to doesn’t tell you what experience, for example, dopamine receptors are connected to. You would still need further experiments.
@@ApologeticsSquared ah, I guess my
dilemma is this: in dealing with epistemic probability, do we
(a) assume in our calculations that psychophysical laws are independent, because they are epistemically independent
(b) not assume in our calculations that psychophysical laws are independent, because it is epistemically open whether or not they are objectively independent
how can I know which one is right?
(my whole reason for asking about this is because plausibly there are causal connections between psychophysical laws that might undermine an independence assumption between all of them)
I think (a) is the way to go, because that’s the way we ought to with the digits of pi case.
@@ApologeticsSquared what probabilities are we multiplying in the digits of pi case?
Well, for example, the probability that digits 1,000,000,000 through 1,000,000,005 is “533721” is 0.1*0.1*0.1*0.1*0.1*0.1.
Psychophysical harmony sounds complex, but in reality, it's very intuitive. I believe that's why it's such a strong argument.
Thats what confirmation bias feels like
@@fentonmulley5895 Why do you think the argument fails?
@@sneakysnake2330 it's asking the same question as the teleological argument - why are things the way they are?
If I rolled a billion dice and all of them rolled 6, we'd call that extraordinarily lucky, not an attribution to a god. That's essentially what this argument and the teleological argument proposes. That with an experimental probability of 1/1, we can then assume that our experimental probability is a result of fine tuning from the theoretical probability.
@@sneakysnake2330 my favorite quick debunk is the puddle analogy. You can go deeper into nick bostroms anthropic bias lectures/papers. That dude is confusing, but not because hes making up nonsense.
@@TheGamingLegendsOfficialactually, if I rolled a billion dice and all of them landed 6, I wouldn’t say “wow, what luck!” I’d say, “hey, I think someone fixed these dice”.
If you went to a poker table and the dealer played a royal flush every single round, wouldn’t you suspect that perhaps there’s something fishy going on?
Quite an amazing argument, to say the least. So the way I understand it, the fact that our mental experiences matches (harmonizes) with physical effects is an argument against Naturalism, with a Bayesian argument. The fact that something if something physical that gives us pain, we will get the correct mental experience of pain. If Naturalism were true, it would be almost certain that our mental experiences are chaotic, chaotic as in they do not recognize something giving pain as something that mentally reflects receiving pain.
I'm wondering if this is an apt analogy.
This argument reminded me of the TH-cam channel 3Blue1Brown's video on developing a neural network (the process that artificial intelligence use to recognize stuff and/or predict stuff). In a neural network, the AI does not recognize patterns the way we recognize patterns. When humans see the number "4", we recognize the whole symbol as the number 4. On the other hand, computers recognize 4 as more like a static image (like television static). Here's the timestamp of the video that gives a picture how an AI recognizes numbers th-cam.com/video/IHZwWFHWa-w/w-d-xo.html. So if we were to put in a static image into the AI to determine what the number it is, the AI would give us a number, when it should have said that no number existed here. In contrast, if humans were to see a static map, we would say that it's not a number at all.
So, if Naturalism were true, our minds should look more like a static map when trying to mentally experience a physical effect, i.e. chaos. However in reality, we have a quite orderly and harmonious mental experience of something physically happening. This argument would be such a large evidence for Theism compared to Naturalism, if true.
As I was writing this I realized that it's not quite the best analogy to describe Psychophysical Harmony, but still interesting nonetheless and could be helpful. My AI analogy is more involved in how we and computers would perceive physical events translate them into mental experiences rather than the existence of the harmony itself.
It sounds like a pretty apt analogy and demonstrates how the argument is flawed. Every AI has a bunch of different internal nodes that seem to be analogous to "the experiences" (just as human brains do). We don't know anything about "experiences" only what we've been trained to say about them. So the fact that "experiences" match our expressions is just because of that training.
From my understanding, this argument start with an assumption, that every physical action and the feeling we have because of that, is closely tied to our survival. Without this we won't reach this stage. But there are many animals lacking backbone, with little neurons that we conclude they don't feel pain. Yet they're still with us today?
I’m still confused on how all other psychophysical laws would be chaotic.
They wouldn't, that's why the argument fails.
@@MrGustavier I have a feeling there is an answer but I think this video wasn’t clear enough about it.
@@Joey34935 I recommend the "twin earth thought experiment" from Putnam.
Conditions like congenital insensitivity to pain and synesthesia seem to indicate to me that psychophysical "laws" vary based on the individual and that natural selection can exert evolutionary pressure to bring about "psychophysical harmony". I put that in quotes because it seems to me you haven't actually demonstrated what psychophysical harmony even is. To illustrate, consider the idea that what we all agree is the color blue, you might actually experience as the color that I experience as green and vice versa. But because we always label colors in the same way we have no way of telling that one of us is experiencing "color disharmony". Returning to the psychophysical harmony argument, how can we tell that what I experience as pain isn't actually what you experience as pleasure. But since both of us label it in the same way and take the same actions to pain stimuli there isn't any disharmony.
To show that there is in fact psychophysical harmony, you would need some way to independently identify mental states from outside the individual, compare mental states across individuals, and most importantly, identify which mental states are harmonious with the physical world. To demonstrate this last point, let's go back to the color example. Suppose half the world experiences red as X and half of the world experiences red as Y. How can you demonstrate that the "correct" experience of red is X or Y? Perhaps the "harmonious" experience of red is actually Z! How can you tell other than saying the experience of red should be red? But then harmony just becomes a circular definition devoid of any real meaning.
That a certain digit of PI is 7 implies that PI and 7 are existing things, already accepted as beings of reality.
Then calculating the probability of a circumstance involving 7 does not require that we first prove that 7 exists. Knowing if the digit is 7 divides the probability between the possible variations in reality (ten different digits).
H2O is a combination of chemical concepts that resulted from our interaction with reality. Oxygen, hydrogen, atoms and molecules are considered existing entities in reality.
In the case of an alarm that, when "B" occurs, is triggered and produces a sound, the various interpretations of reality determine different scenarios:
a) "B", the alarm (sensor, processor and speaker) and the sound occur in the same environment (reality).
b) "B" and the alarm occur in reality and the sound is heard on a plane other than reality.
c) "B", the alarm and the sound occur on a plane other than reality.
Case "a" presents no problems and corresponds to the common interpretation that every person gives to the operation and nature of the alarm.
In case "b" a "plane other than reality" appears and this assumption does not derive from our interaction with reality. If one proposes it, one must justify the necessity of such a proposition. In addition, one must rationally explain the nature and functioning of the interaction between reality and the "plane outside of reality".
In case "c", one should justify how it differs from case "a".
ASquare unreasonably assumes that this scenario distinction is not relevant to the interpretation of the pain mechanism. He doesn't justify his position and since this is determinative, he fails the rest of the way.
ASquare ignores that science has distinguished areas of the brain that correspond to functions. A part of the brain has a different probability of belonging to the vision system, depending on its location. Thus, his assertion that all probabilities are equal is absolutely wrong. If I were ASquare I would not trust my knowledge of Neurobiology if I am not seriously educated in Neurobiology. For example, he is unaware of the existence of synesthesia.
Assuming that pain is an entity and not a state of an entity is another serious misconception.
ASquare fails to understand that the neurological variations that lead to the alarm not warning that "B" occurs reduces the chance of survival and thus, the cases are few and after many generations, only humans with non-dangerous neurological variations are found. There are people, really, who do not feel
pain. These people have very little life expectancy.
Mental states determine our agency. Pain is a state of mind, and this kind of state of mind determines our agency. Reactions to pain (notice of physical damage) do not depend on our rational consideration. They are more basic. Our experience is not chaotic because there are direct relationships between the components of the system. Pain does not depend on our knowledge and probability of certainty.
Now the important part, ASquare writes the word Theism preceding the word Naturalism. What is the probability that the concept theism is true in reality? What justifies ASquare bringing up the concept "theism"? What are the probable factors and why did he consider that this is the most likely to exist?
regardless if physical-->mental or physicalmental, how do you know that anyone who received a chaotic set of qualia-neuron mappings wouldn't think that their specific set of qualias was normal? For instance, if you grew up experiencing the color red as green and vice versa, would you have have idea at all that your perception was different from those around you?
Of course, it sounds weird to think that we wouldn't notice a different sensation in place of pain, but I suppose that just begs the question of, _what exactly causes us think that the qualia of pain is "bad"_ ? Would you really be able to make the deduction that your experience is indeed incoherent if you grew up in a reality where it was normal?
If it WERE true that having any other set of qualia/neuron connections would create a chaotic, nonsensical experience, and our brains would have somehow noticed that those connections were indeed chaotic and nonsensical, then sure, this _would_ make our reality a statistical anomaly. However, it would still only provide evidence against all the explanations _within_ our comprehension. At which point, we are left with all the explanations _beyond_ our comprehension - which there are an infinite amount of. Thus, one could make the argument that there are infinitely more explanations that you could come up with, that are equally as plausible as theism.
13:14 about the point you make here. I don't see why it would be just as likely for pain to cause effect X, than for pleasure to cause effect X, if effect X is "nursing your toe" (after hitting it). Obviously pain is more likely to make you nurse your toe than pleasure. Evolution couldn't possibly select creatures that nurse their toes when hitting them is pleasurable, because such creatures would just stub their toes constantly, seeking pleasure. Am I missing something here? Like, to say that a psychophysical law could be that pleasure caused you to want to stop the source of the pleasure, seems to be like saying that a square circle could exist. If it matters, my view is that the mental *is* physical.
Also, at the end you say that God could make a particle have consciousness, which I think is related to this issue. Consciousness is something that brains (or complicated, brain-like systems) do. I don't understand what it means to say that a single particle has consciousness, or conscious experiences. What does that statement tell us about the particle?
25:48 _"I would actually really appreciate it if you the viewer shared this video so that if there is a flaw we can all find it"_
The flaw :
In the beginning of the video, you compare the argument to the fine tuning argument. I think that one of the response to the fine tuning argument applies to the psychophysical harmony argument :
If one sees a dart in the center of a target, two scenarios can be thought of : the target was there, and the dart reached its center. Or the target was drawn around the dart.
If our universe is the result of a dice throw, which fell on a face, then nothing needs to be explained, as a dice throw necessarily falls on a face. However, if it appears that the dice fell on a red face, and that the dice only possesses a single red face, then arguably, something needs to be explained (especially if the dice has an extremely large number of faces).
But then the same two scenarios apply : either the red face was already there, and the dice fell on it, or the face was painted red after the dice roll.
The same applies to the psychophysical harmony argument.
There is indeed a very large amount of ways to couple physical states and mental experiences, however, pretending that only one is "harmonious" can be interpreted as similar to painting the face red after the dice throw, or drawing the target around the dart. Every association of a physical state and a mental experience could be equally harmonious, since the only thing that changes from one coupling to the next, is the meaning of the words used to describe the mental experience.
The entire argument hinges on pretending that if one stubs one's toe and feels the _"smell of grass"_ then one's _"internal experience of the world would get really crazy"_ (10:32)... But this, of course, needs not be the case. In a universe in which every conscious entity has always described their internal mental experience after stubbing one's toe as _"smell of grass"_ , then attributing the mental state of "pain" to stubbing one's toe would be considered disharmonious !
There needs not be any preferential association of a physical state with a mental state.
I encourage you to read about the "twin earth thought experiment" from Putnam. The only way to argue for a preferential coupling is to argue for "semantic externalism".
This seems to be an enormous weakness of the argument.
Are you saying, in the case of fine tuning, that if the constants had been slightly different, then a different kind of life would have emerged, and neither human life nor this other life could be said by an external observer to be more "special" than the other?
(I appreciate that "special" is a pretty vague term...)
@@MatthewFearnley Not really. What I am saying is that we give value to life because we are alive. We subjectively paint the face on which the dice fell red.
If one rejects that, and claims that there is some objective criterion that allows to give value to life, then a separate argument must be given for that objective criterion.
In the absence of that argument, it seems that the critique holds.
And of course the same holds for the psychophysical harmony argument.
We subjectively value the way mental experiences are coupled with physical observables because we currently have these exact couplings.
A separate argument must be given to attribute objective value, otherwise the bayesian computation gives completely different outcomes.
@@MrGustavier Thanks. I guess my response is that I think we can both subjectively and objectively paint the face on which the dice fell.
One possible way of thinking about the probability space is a set of random pixels, like static on a TV. We landed on a red pixel, and so we think red pixels are special.
But obviously in this case any pixel we landed on, we could view as subjectively special, while an external observer who sees all the pixels would not be able to single ours out as special.
I think a more accurate way to think about the probability space is that it's like a Mandelbrot set, and we are right on the dividing line between two large, very different regions.
This gives us one or two potential sources of special-ness. The first is, that we don't know if either of the two regions support any kind of life. (If they do it would be very different from our life.)
The second, more simply, is that by falling on a thin dividing line, our kind of universe is much less likely than the kind of universes we might find in the other two regions.
@@MatthewFearnley *-"One possible way of thinking about the probability space is a set of random pixels, like static on a TV. We landed on a red pixel, and so we think red pixels are special.*
*But obviously in this case any pixel we landed on, we could view as subjectively special, while an external observer who sees all the pixels would not be able to single ours out as special."*
Exactly, and in that case, the argument fails.
*-"The second, more simply, is that by falling on a thin dividing line, our kind of universe is much less likely than the kind of universes we might find in the other two regions."*
I'm not sure how to interpret this. There is no *"dividing line"* in a Mandelbrot set appart from defined at infinity. This means that you need to bring your Bayesian calculation into infinity... And we all know where that leads...
@@MrGustavierI'm not sure what you mean about lines being defined at infinity, but it doesn't matter.
The Mandelbrot set has an infinitely long line perimeter around it, but that's not a problem for the probabilities.
Anyway, my choosing the Mandelbrot set complicates things needlessly.
We can just suppose a thin line separating two regions of any shape.
(The line is not necessarily straight. The regions are not necessarily uniform, but they are clearly distinct from each other.)
In the case of fine tuning, our universe is situated not in either of the regions, but on the line itself.
We know that universes on the line may permit life. The two regions are not known to have any life-permitting properties.
But even if they do, the fact that our universe landed on the line and not in one of the regions seems very unlikely.
Again, at 18:24-18:36, there's a very obvious slight of hand/confusion. You equate our understanding of the psycho physical laws with the psycho physical laws themselves.
On the a priori epistemic probability, why are we thinking c-fibres would fire as a result of you stubbing your toe? My thinking there is that it seems, similarly, a priori, it doesn't matter which physical states align with the result of you nursing your toe, etc., and living to fight another day, so to speak.
Moreover, when you listed all the possible permeations of psychophysical laws, it seems the epistemic probability is equally likely on the God hypothesis. When you factor in God's omnipotence, etc., so expecting this specific permeation would seem equally improbable.
Finally, it seems there are available non-materialist, non-theist positions that could plausibly account for psychophysical harmony; panpsychism comes to mind. That is to say, if you have independent reasons for thinking God doesn't exist, even if you accept psychophysical harmony is unlikely given materialism, this argument wouldn't hold any weight.
I imagine that a functionalist will push back on the claim that it's epistemically possible that mental states could have caused all ranges of physical states. Of course, functionalism is false, so it ultimately doesn't matter. But physicalists love functionalism so dialectically there may be an issue
That said, assuming functionalism, the argument could be recast in terms, not of mental causing physical, but in terms of the causal connections which exist being such that they are instances of mental-physical causation, since the full range of epistemically possible physical-physical causal connections would yield no mental states in the first place, given functionalism
Yeah, I think the argument can just be recast
@@alistairkentucky-david9344 I don't think this argument works with Dennett's view (Illusionism)
@@mannyfrancis2994 It (probably) doesn’t, but eliminitvism is almost not even worth taking seriously
@@mannyfrancis2994 If I have to deny consciousness in order to be an atheist, then my theism is very very strong
Do you plan to address type A physicalism? The argument doesn't really affect that position.
Can someone explain to me his explanation of why evolution isn't sufficient to explain this? Seems like organisms would slowly evolve over time to make sense of their environments. He says that he explains why this is the case, but it doesn't seem like this is done satisfactorily.
The argument relies on placing arbitrary constraints on your ability to do experiments. (You say pretend you can’t do experiments but never return to what happens if you do the experiments.)
Say you put one more constraint, which is you don’t allow yourself the knowledge that thinking occurs in the brain (which was after all established through empirical,investigation of the body). Then by identical argument we should be astonished that the sensation of purple is not generated by trimming my toenails the state of smelling fish isn’t generated by bumping my left elbow. But a tiny bit of empirical investigation shows that those arrangements are impossible because of the way the physical structures are interconnected. Immediately we see that the application of these flat probability distributions, and multiplying them as though they were independent is absurd and no useful inference results from adopting them.
Great video -- as an atheist, I agree this is orders of magnitude stronger than all arguments for god.
I am uncomfortable with the response to evolution as a sorting mechanism as an argument against. If mechanisms develop as a direct response to stimuli then you would expect them to be associated with that stimuli. If a consciousness's interaction with the world is through stimuli then a mental response appropriate to that stimuli as it relates to survival is expected. It seems to me the argument predicts mechanism first when in reality we see stimuli first followed by adaptation. As a Theist I want the argument to work. Is there something I am missing?
// I am uncomfortable with the response to evolution as a sorting mechanism as an argument against. //
I don't understand this sentence.
// If mechanisms develop as a direct response to stimuli then you would expect them to be associated with that stimuli. //
Depending on what you mean by "stimuli" and "mechanisms," the development is guided by psychophysical laws.
// If a consciousness's interaction with the world is through stimuli then a mental response appropriate to that stimuli as it relates to survival is expected. //
What is an "appropriate" mental response is dictated by the psychophysical laws.
I hope that helps! :)
@@ApologeticsSquared Argument from incredulity anyone? Gimme a break, dude. This is far from a ‘strong’ argument. A strong argument would convince people that don’t aren’t already convinced. This isn’t going to convince anyone.
@@martyfromnebraska1045 I am your supposed ‘god’ thingy!! How dare you address me directly!!!
The evolution part didn’t make sense to me, in a chaotic world we couldn’t reproduce because if you experienced pleasure you wouldn’t want to fix your hurt foot and you’d die so you wouldn’t be here to observe it, the only way you could observe things is if the laws worked out how they currently are or extremely similar.
Could there be something about the nature of C-fibers that requires them to only cause the qualia of pain? Maybe the naturalist could argue that our psychophysical laws necessarily exist by the nature of the structures and thus couldn't be any different? Or am I missing something?
They can indeed say that c-fibers by their nature are necessarily connected to pain. However, there’s no reason prior to observing this to think this is true. Until then, c-fibers having natures that necessarily connect them to pleasure is just as likely.
@@ApologeticsSquared Perhaps I don't fully understand epistemic probability (maybe you could tell me which page of the paper explains it or direct me to another source) but why use epistemic probably here? Doesn't epistemic probability just represent our lack of knowledge and isn't reflective in any way of different possible worlds? In other words, I don't see why the epistemic probability shows that different psychophysical laws could've existed.
@Apologetics Squared so basically you're saying because we lack certain knowledge, fine tuning proves God? Isn't this just God of the gaps?
@@danielboone8256 exactly. It is nonsense
@@danielboone8256 Think of it this way: say we one day look up at the sky and see “I am the way the true and the life anyone who believes in me shall not perish but have ever lasting life” written in the stars in Greek. This is probably very strong epistemic evidence. What good would it do for the naturalist to say that it’s metaphysically necessary that this be written in the stars, and we will one day find the reason why? Of course, that’s all the naturalist *could* say in that instance, but is it really probably that what is metaphysically necessary just so happened to align with that outcome? Epistemically possible outcomes still invite us to consider the probability of assessing whether metaphysical necessity is a good explanation for something. After all, the nature of the mind is not something that we can ever demonstrate to be necessary or contingent just by its very nature. Thus, we are always subject to talking about epistemic possibilities. It’s not a God of the gaps then, because we demonstrate that the probability of this thing being metaphysically necessary is very surprising. Does this make sense?
This is a really good video! However, it has a few flaws:
-Linkage error (5:30):
It doesn't seem necessarily the case that we can ascribe some physical structure with some subjective experience. For the digits of pi example, the probability holds because each digit (1, 2, 3, etc.) is a member of and directly related to the possibility of the true digit. This is not the case in terms of experience, there is no concrete reason why any physical substructure would be intrinsically responsible for said subjective experience. Well, at least not that has been justified; for example, there is nothing intrinsically pleasurable about dopamine while there is intrinsic ‘digitness’ to the Nth place of pi.
- Psychophysical Laws (6:45):
It is not obvious why these are laws; consider the thought experiment of color: "Is my subjective interpretation of the color red the same as yours." Could it be that my interpretation of red light hitting my retina maps closer to another person's own interpretation of another color rather than red? In other words, Is my red your red?
-Super Tiny Number (7:10):
The calculation assumes that each physical substructure of the brain would map one to one with any subjective experience. This is false, experiences take many different paths to be realized. Therefore, any web of connections would considerably increase the product. In fact, there are only so many unique compounds and fibers such as c-fibers and dopamine. Given that this is the only uniqueness inherent to the argument-smaller structures may be created by the brain- it seems possible the number is not small in the first place.
-Chaotic Experiences (11:30):
The argument seems to assume some inertness to experiences without justifying it, why are psychophysical laws real? What is a feeling if not a complex response to reality? If we, assuming psychophysical laws, ascribed some value to both the experience then just like the color example (point 2) the experiences would be expected and thus not chaotic. If this could not be the case then psychophysical laws must be predicated on a supernatural experience, which is unlikely.
-Probability Space (16:30): The space you drew is flawed.
First, the space must correspond to the likelihood of all tenable propositions. This simply means any construction of the world in which there is an interest in keeping one’s internal world without chaos; it only-if it holds- reduces the probability of naturalism. This should relatively improve the chances of theism not prove it, an infinite amount of options is still possible. This includes many simulation hypotheses provided a want of a coherent mind, natural teleology-where there is natural good without god-and endless other conceivable universes.
Second, the probabilities must reflect are priors for each proposition. As I find theism to be extremely unlikely as well as most adjacent propositions the area they are given would be very small. This makes it possible to grant the argument in its totality and still believe that theism is less likely than naturalism.
-Evolution (16:40 & 13:10):
I contend that evolution perfectly explains why we experience what we do. If we don’t assume the existence of psychophysical laws- inherence to experiences (point 4)- it is obvious why we would experience congruence between experience and action. However, if we do assume the law’s existence then we only need assume that congruence would help us evolutionary. If a physical to mental to physical chain exists then the physical output would be able to modify the brain for congruence as this would be advantageous for one’s mental state and thus overall function. Your response to this hinges on the assumption that the output physical effect cannot be changed *and* that it could never modify the chain in the first place. This seems unlikely.
==================
Overall I like this argument yet it leaves me with a number of flaws and unearned assumptions. I would truly appreciate some response to this as I have not considered this argument before and like how compelling it is.
*-"Is my red your red?"*
I recommend the "twin earth thought experiment" from Putnam.
It's worth noting that almost all of this terminology, "psychophysical" is just word salad used in a paper. None of it is properly explained in any detail and just asserted.
So when you're questioning of these "psychophysical laws" are really a thing, they aren't real laws, it's just a way to dress up concepts.
Also YES Evolution and psychology have a lot of explanations for almost all of this, but remember this is done by Christian philosophers who have no obligation to research the last century of this topic and will never be challenged because it's a meaningless paper into the ether for their field.
@@ShouVertica If psychophysical harmony is just “word salad”, I. E. Unintelligible, what exactly is evolution and psychology explaining? This response doesn’t make sense
@@Sugarycaaaaaandygoodness Here is the definition from the paper:
"Psychophysical Harmony: States of consciousness are related to each other, and to
physical states, in strikingly harmonious ways-ways that seem extremely lucky, or
involve many striking apparent coincidences."
It literally uses the word in the definition.
@@ShouVertica Which is not “word salad”
How do you know that every combination of psychophysical relationships is of equal probability?
Is the distinction between naturalism and theism not a false dichotomy? I understand the argumentation that our universe is statistically impossible under naturalism but chalking up the improbability of something as evidence of a divine creator seems like a bit of a cop out, as humans have done this for centuries to explain phenomena that we can’t understand at the time. Is it possible that both can be false but since we are unable to conjure another distinct possibility for the explanation of the universe we’ve only looked at it through assuming that one of these possibilities has to be true?
Great video, Mr. Squared! Is there any way to contact you privately?
You can find my email address on the About section of my channel. :)
@@ApologeticsSquared I'm sorry but I don't think it's there...
@@MattyFriday I can see it. (I am on a desktop browser if that makes a difference.)
@@MatthewFearnley oh maybe that's why because I'm on a phone
Any kind of fine tuning argument makes no sense for christianity because it places the astronomical odds of our reality over god's abilities such that he had to work within them to make us (maybe fine if you have a god idea that is less powerful, not eternal, etc), or god made it look like the odds are small for some reason, while the actual odds of everything we see are 100% because it's just whatever he decides. Then of course, our universe is fine tuned to the universe we have, but this god could easily make other physical laws, psychophysical laws, or matter that could be very different from the universe we have but works just fine to create life or psychophysical harmony or anything. Am I missing something?
Also your argument for why the odds for psychophysical harmony are so astronomical is based on what we don't know. When we know things we don't compare them to all possibilities in the universe. The odds that I have an apple for a snack today could be said to be 1/all possible foods, but when you know that it's the only food in my house then it's just a 50/50 yes or no, maybe increased odds if I'm hungry and have no time to get more food. It would be more honest to say we don't know the odds and leave it at that, than that we can make odds based on what we don't know. Since the argument started there, it seems pretty bad to me
I personally think that this is a good argument. The one major objection I see is that it would be impossible to prove that our universe has psychophysical harmony because either way our body would work to say or prove that it is true. Do you have a good way to solve that?
You can introspect on your own thoughts and experiences and realize that your experience of reading this message is coherent, rather than, say, static noise. As far as I can tell, that’s enough to establish psychophysical harmony.
@@ApologeticsSquared LOL First, you imagine that there must be two things of a different nature that should not have a correspondence, but it is not necessary to define or prove its existence to one of them.
Then, without any rationality, you deduce that something supernatural synchronizes them in an unknown way by unknown means and thus you understand that you have reached a conclusion that has a very high probability of being true in reality.
@@ApologeticsSquared Thank you. That does make sense.
@@ApologeticsSquared *-"You can introspect on your own thoughts and experiences and realize that your experience of reading this message is coherent, rather than, say, static noise. As far as I can tell, that’s enough to establish psychophysical harmony."*
Why wouldn't *"static noise"* be *"coherent"* ?
I haven't finished the video yet but I'm in the part about stubbing your toe and feeling happiness or smelling wood. I don't think this argument works. A big aspect of many qualia is that they're not really reducible to smaller parts. How do you know your experience of the color red is consistent across your life? You don't. Only memory backs it up , but if memory is directly linked to the experience of red, if memory is altered experience could be altered too. This is talked in Quining Qualia by David whatever his name is. Basically Qualia are often irreducible.
So what gives them meaning if they're irreducible? Context. If you stubbed your toe and you felt happiness and you are good food and felt pain, and the physical world is the same, and happiness and paid are irreducible Qualia which are only defined by context, then it sounds like we'd just be in the same world we're currently in. This is a parallel of the Newton's World thought experiment, or something like that, where perception of color gets inverted.
So I think there's a pretty basic level where this argument doesn't work.
You are correct. I recommend the "twin earth thought experiment" from Putnam.
Well, as with all fine-tuning arguments, you failed to consider the prior probabilities of the existence of a god suitable to make the argument work, namely a god that is both capable of bringing about, and desires to bring about, psychophysical harmony. Once you work that into your calculation you will find that something other than such a god is 7 times more likely to be the explanation. Thats before adding all the other features of whatever god you are arguing for, which all just drive the priors down further.
Is “electrons in love” doing anything more than just a kind of “carbon chauvinism” objection, where it’s just positing that some kinds of life might be quite common?
Is there any difference in positing electron-based life over, say, zilliphone-based life?
Not quite. Take a universe devoid of life, and only has particles randomly flying around. God could set up the psychophysical laws so that when a particle is X many meters from another particle, it has experience E1, and when a particle bounces off another particle, it has experience E2, and when a particle curves N degrees, it has experience E3, and so on.
He can fine-tune these laws such that the particles would undergo meaningful lives (or even lives identical to our own) despite no fine-tuning.
@@ApologeticsSquared "or even lives identical to our own"
Does this mean we could be particles floating around and we wouldn't realize?
@@Nickesponja God could actualize that, yes. But I don't find that very probable.
@@ApologeticsSquared Why not? If anything, it'd be more impressive. And presumably, our worth as creatures is due to our experiences, not our material composition. So the probability of that should be at least 50%
@@Nickesponja Idealism kills the intellect.
No. We cannot be conscious particles. Consciousness is an aspect of the processing of information that our sensory systems collect from reality. It would be similar to wanting to do computing operations with just one atom. To process information, complex organs or systems are needed, structured in such a way that different parts fulfill different functions. Even a simple calculator cannot be made up of only one atom. :)
An interaction between elementary particles cannot be considered an experience. It's just an interaction.
I'm a woodworker, so dopamine is definitely connected to the smell of sawdust...
Six minutes in I became a theist. I thought "Dear God, how long is this going to go on?"
I’m glad for you
I'm still a bit confused by your argument that evolution couldn't have produced a clear mental experience that would be useful to the mind. What I mean is, how would you adress the following specific objection: Someone stubbing their toe and feeling pleasure would likely do it again and again as they enjoy feeling that pleasure. Sooner or later, they would brake their toe, leaving them unable to run away from a sabre toothed tiger. But someone experiencing pain would naturaly avoid stubbing their toe again and be more likely to survive and pass on that trait. And similar other traits that would allow an inteligent mind more awareness of their surroundings, thus better ability to make decisions. I'm asking because I'd very much like to see this adressed.
The paper points out a "law" of PPH about pain inputs always produce avoidance actions. However, the existence of sadomasochists that actually seek out pain easily disproves this supposed law. So it's clear that the original authors have not really thought through or tested their hypotheses in the wild. I would suggest chucking this whole thing into the garbage - it's actually worse than the Fine Tuning argument.
Theist here but I think there might be a way out for the atheist if you are willing to bite a few bullets (three are hard one is easy to bite).
1) Take a model of interactionist dualism where it is possible for the soul to have some learning capacity
2) believe evolution occurred (easy)
3) believe a multiverse occurred where there are different psychophysical laws in each world
4) believe that there is a minimum amount of harmony needed to get an observer selection effect (so the multiverse selects life that have a minimum threshold of harmony to count as an observer that can at least ask "why am I here?")
So this would be my story given naturalism:
as a cartoonish picture for the purpose of explanation, imagine a soul as a little person with a control panel with different buttons related to different actions. If the person feels pain in a disharmoneous world, they try and hit the buttons which is incorrectly labeled "avoid" but that ends up doing the opposite. However, they can experiment with the wonky controls and end up learning how to associate the subjective experience of pain with avoidance behavour. For humans, learning how to use the wonky controls could all happen before we form memories, so we might not know if we lived in this world.
Second imagine that in any given world, there are a set of chemicals associated with subjective experiences. So in our world the c fibers give pain, dopamine gives pleasure. In another world, coca cola, cyanide and chlorophyl all give pleasure. Because the soul can adapt to wonky controls, natural selection can the find the set of chemicals associated with pleasure that do the least damage to the organism. Natural selection can work because the soul is capable of mastering at least slightly wonky controls.
For the story to work, you need a plausible explanation for how to produce a multiverse with different psychophysical laws and this particular form of interactionalist dualism probably commits you to an answer in the toxin puzzle case. Finally, you need to argue that a minimally harmonous universe is workable enough that natural selection can occur. Even still, I think the above might be the beginnings of an explanation that is, in my opinion better than the revenge problem and a priori physicalism. Thoughts?
I mean this isn't even an argument for anyone with a elementary understanding of Psychology or Biology. You'd have to be wholly ignorant of what they teach in 101
We don't "experience" pleasure or pain or bath water. We experience neurochemical firings. The fact for many people describe those things the same way is a physical trait and easily selected for.
It's like saying that only a God could produce a world where everyone speaks English. First of all, they don't. And secondly English IS completely arbitrary but not random of chaotic. The fact that there is a word for a concept and physical connection says nothing about the word being "harmonious".
Yeah I think the argument really loses credibility at 15:30ish. The extrapolation of epistemological probability to actual probability feels either slight of hand ish or accidental
Squared does this all the time, it's intentional.
Probability space argument just falls apart when you consider whether it was actually viable that you treat each possibility as being equally probable, whereas it makes more sense to keep the probability as either undecided or 0. With the bayesian reasoning, you cited PI, but you can't use that example because PI actually has evidence of varied digits, whereas there is no evidence for varied universes or psychophysical experiences. Your videos while very well made fall apart once you raise even basic questions about their reasoning.
What about pantheism? Or Thomas Nagel's idea that the universe is teleological and tends towards good things, but nonetheless there's no God? Is this an equally good argument for these theories?
I don’t know about pantheism, but this argument can generally be repurposed for non-God things that tend to bring about good things. However, in this series I’ve been specifically comparing theism to naturalism.
@@ApologeticsSquared ok thanks that's super helpful
@@ApologeticsSquared Also when you bring up the c-fiber part of the video wouldn't this mean God is also the author of all your pain?
called it
I think you underestimate how long of a process evolution by natural selection have been. At least I don't see why evolution by natural selection wouldn't explain all of this. It seems very natural to me. Evolution stated with single cell organism with very few sensory inputs. Over time multi celled organisms developed that has a larger amount of sensory inputs and eventually the brain. It was not like we has a bunch of random sensory inputs and a bunch of random experiences in the brain. We had organisms with sensory inputs and no brain - then some of the organisms developed a brain. Of cause the organisms then developed more sensory inputs but the brain developed along side with those new sensory inputs. The sensory inputs and the brain isn't two separate things it's, two parts of the same nervous system.
You can say the same thing using one word.
ENTROPY
i do appreciate this more "classical" approach to the existence of a God.
And you'd be wrong.
@goldenalt3166 you do realize 99.9% of moderns are neck deep in materialist ideologies. Meaning high fulluton philosophical arguments for God fall flat in their face right?
You also do realize that entropy is the strongest argument for God because it is a physical maninfestation of Goedell Incompleteness theorem. It also disproves evolution.
But you tell me how you're going to prove God to the average science enjoyed, with these arguments which to them are absolute nonsense.
What kind of a reaction has the atheist and agnostic community had to this argument
A few high profile names (Emerson Green and Philip Goff) shifted their worldviews in response, actually. However, this argument is still really new, so it hasn't gotten much attention yet. I really hope that changes. :)
@@ApologeticsSquared have they become theists
@@jadenrobert2447 No. Emerson Green became an axiarchist in response to the argument, which means he added to his worldview a driving force towards goodness that's fundamental to reality, but it's just not God.
@@jadenrobert2447 It by the way is a huge deal to move all the way from a a morally neutral panpsychist naturalism all the way to a teleological panpsychist naturalism from *one* argument.
@@ApologeticsSquared what do you think about tomas bogardus argument about scientific explanation
A couple of worries...
1) Our psycho-physical laws are not nearly as good as they could be, and their sub-optimality leads to a great deal of suffering (think of Draper's argument from the distribution of pleasure and pain, or how the relation between pleasure and dopamine leads to susceptibility to addictions).
2) Not all theories in phil. of mind actually cohere with this argument (I think Dennett's illusionism or the Churchland's eliminativism would undermine it significantly, as they deny either the existence of the mental, or of psychophysical laws in the first place).
Any thoughts?
He doesnt get probability. Its the puddle analogy all over again
@@fentonmulley5895 it really is an argument from incredulity - I can't believe that the laws that exist are the ones that do exist in our universe! How many alternatives have you checked? None? Ah, our experimental probably is 1/1. It doesn't matter what the theoretical is unless me rolling a billion dice and all of them rolling 6 is proof of a god too just because I got exceptionally lucky
Well I'm late, let's see:
So this seems to be the fine-tuning argument but based off of a poor understanding of Psychology, Biology, and Evolution.
Not a whole lot to address with Squared and we know he doesnt read the comments anyway but: there isn't any link to a God. I've said this before but "everything isn't explained " isn't a license to just insert theism and call all prior explanations "theistic."
Although from the descriptions in this video and the paper it's embarrassing how little research was done into the subject and how the conclusion is that "we don't have an explanation" when we do and the part where we don't is much, much, further from that.
I guess you can shift this argument-from-ignorance down the line at any time, but it's just telling that apologist are resorting to THIS instead of evidentiary arguments.
Excellent argument! I really think that there can be some depth to this argument, but I would have to ask about cases of people who are masochists. Some people, like masochists, can equate certain instances of pain as being pleasurable. In these cases where they STILL DO have an experience of Pain but then they equate it it to also being pleasurable, and then have a response to the Pain as IF it were a response to pleasure (rather than drawing away from that source of pain, they actually draw closer to it), how do you think this would operate in the "Psychophysical Laws being ordered" argument?
I feel like, when someone asks this, I could say that this is an instance which has less of an effect on Theism (because we believe in a Will such that one could truly choose to alter their experience of a stimulus even if it goes against biological expectation or natural reaction) than it does on Naturalism since Naturalism would either be:
1. More likely to produce a system of total disorder and chaos of psychophysical laws (in which one would expect nearly everyone to have these same disordered psychophysical laws) that make experiences/mental states of "Pain" as being disordered with the stimulus for almost all experiences (rather than just what we see in a few masochists). So really, one would expect far more homogeneity in that exact instance of a disordered psychophysical state (nearly everyone would experience all pain above a certain threshold and equate it to pleasure such that they draw nearer to it).
2. or More likely to rely on a purely naturalistic understanding of evolution where "pain" is thought to be a mental state which "evolved and became homogenous in populations" because it "triggered the proper physical responses within the animal to draw away from that thing causing pain while those who had mental states of pleasure in response to pain would have been selected against and eventually died/gone extinct because drawing nearer to a source of pain is dangerous and often deadly." Given this assumption, the selection against those with fibers which registered painful stimuli as a mental state of "pleasure" would be STRONGLY selected against such that there would be for the surviving generations only those genetics which would allow individuals to register pain stimuli as "pain" and draw away from it. But then, one would have to ask tons and tons of questions:
a. Why is it that something which would have been so strongly selected against persists in our species?
b. Why is it that these instances of people registering "pain" as "pleasure", if permissible and present in human populations today without any significant selection against those populations, would have been selected against in the past? And why is it not still being selected against in the present?
c. Why are the human experiences to Painful Stimulil not homogenous? Rather than a simple trait with very little selection against it, such a trait as "equating pain to pleasure and thus drawing nearer to the source" could be (and most likely has always been) so detrimental to human survival that it would be a behavior likely connected to the more "conserved" regions of DNA. So what could cause these instances of a behavior likely tied to the more "conserved" regions of DNA to be not present in some individuals? One would expect far more, if not complete homogeneity in such a set of psychophysical laws under Materialistic Determinism as per Naturalism.
d. Why is it that these people STILL register their experience as PAINFUL, but simply also translate painful stimuli as pleasurable? One could easily explain away some registering painful stimuli as SOLELY Pleasurable if it were simply an alteration to the structure of their C-fibers. But instead, they actually STILL register the stimuli as PAINFUL (expected) while also equally registering/experiencing it as PLEASURABLE. The fact that both states exist for the same stimuli and the same nerve fiber is extremely troubling for a Naturalistic system.
e. On that point, how could the same Nerve Fiber (C-fibers) register painful stimuli in two humans as PAIN ((which would be the expectation of our PsychoPhysical laws), yet some would register that same pain as also being separately pleasurable at the same time?
For the theist, I feel like this is much easier to account for on the grounds of Free Will.
In summary:
Great argument with very powerful conclusions for Theism (praise God)!
I feel like any naturalistic objections (specifically those bound by materialism and nontheistic material evolution) would actually make MORE PROBLEMS for Naturalism than for Theism!
@@unapologeticapologetics6953 I have put my *"naturalistic objections"* in the comment section. I'll be happy to hear which *"MORE PROBLEMS"* they cause for naturalism.
So, we’re not even just talking about all physical structures which do produce mental experiences but all epistemically possible physical structures which could produce a mental experience, right? …so we’d be referring to stuff like the physical structure of a water molecule and not only stuff like c-fibers
Yes! I see no way to rule out _a priori_ that a water molecule could produce the experience of pain!
@@ApologeticsSquared dang, that’s a MUCH stronger argument than what I thought the first time I watched this!
@@ApologeticsSquared ok, the best objection I can think of is if someone concedes that yeah, maybe water does provide the feeling of pain, but we’re not water, so we wouldn’t be able to know?
One counter objection could be that maybe water causes US to feel pain like remotely or something.
Bro I thought this was Life Noggin, who this guy.
Your response to the objection from evolution is...not good. You said "there are no restrictions for what the arrows can point at, so evolution is no more prone to promoting one outcome VS another" (paraphrasing).
That's a complete non-sequitor. Firstly, there would not have been the same number of psychophysical connections in the early development of life as we have in modern humans. So it is false that there are no restrictions to where the arrows can point. You're restricted by the number of arrows you can draw between boxes and circles. For all anyone knows, the earliest lifeform capable of experiencing a sensation may very well have ONLY been capable of experiencing that one sensation, and only from one receptor. In which case, your chart would be one box, one arrow, and one circle. One possible connection. I'd call that pretty restricted.
But let's imagine a world in which an ancient lifeform *does* have the same number of possible psychophysical connections as a modern human. Even in this world, natural selection isn't random. It's not a roll of the dice which connection gets passed on. Only the connections most prone to reproduction would be passed on. An organism that imagines the color purple instead of experiencing pain when it gets injured, doesn't pass on its genes.
Or if the "color purple" generates an identical response then you've just renamed the same thing.
You should have credited the creator of this argument in your video.
Some problems with this argument:
1. It assumes dualism. Functionalists will not agree that you can have all the physical facts constant but yet experience something different. If somebody agrees to this, then consciousness is not physical. So for example, if you step your toe on a stone, functionalists would not agree that there exists a possible world where you felt pleasure internally but that your behavior is the same as if you felt pain. But yet this point is essential to this argument you're presenting because it aims to show that our actual world is so improbable.
2. Even if we forgo the above point, this kind of argument will not convince atheist philosophers because there is a sense in which a brute fact could explain the perceived harmony.
It's also based on ignorance of our current understanding of biology, psychology, and Evolution
This argument is neatly elucidated by the creator of this video, but it is a very weak one in my opinion. Basing something as fundamental as the existence of God on probability, even if converging to the infinite, is not conclusive enough.
I would also suggest narrowing the width of the brushstroke, as it is sometime cumbersome to read.
Otherwise a great video. Thank you for publishing these!
To add to the electrons in love objection:
I am not understanding why the electrons in love objection to the FTA is as popular as it is nowadays. All the FTA says is that fine tuning is that the theism hypothesis explains FT better than the naturalism hypothesis, not that FT is expected on theism. Hawthorne and Goff make the same point, even if FT is improbable on theism, as long as it is vastly more improbable on naturalism this objection would not work. And it again assumes that the FTA requires a lot of divine psychology, it doesn't. For eg. if God wanted to create life + quasars + black holes then we would expect FT laws like ours than other metaphysically possible worlds.
It seams that this only makes sense if you ignore the entirety of evolution.
Even worse, it ignores simple logic. If you look at all his drawings, he's just moving boxes around without changing the topography and calling it a chaotic network.
Powerful argument. Strongest teleological argument
If you dont understand evolution
@@martyfromnebraska1045 or is the experience explained by the evolutionary advantage of identity and preservation of it? We even evolved past that into empathy.
@@fentonmulley5895 did you watch the video fam
Why would you quote Acquinas when you are a prot
I think there is a real philisophical mystery in understanding how physical brain states map to qualia but I think your discription of qualia is flawed. Qualia are not a discrete list of things as you have layed out, they emerge through their relations to one another an ultimately through the conuctivity of the brain procsesing information. I can't explain what red is to you but I can explain that it has persistant associations, because of either culture or evolutionary phycology, to other qualia such as heat, pasion, violence etc... which I can't explain either. Why one qualia has the base level "texture" it has is deeply mysteriouse and hard to comprehend. But I think that what we think of as individual qualia are really already large clusters of lower level sub-conciouse "proto-qualia" within the mind. I don't think pleasure and pain are so simple. they are not just associated with a specific brain structure but with the context of how that brain structure networks into the rest of the brain. I think that the feeling of pain is tied to the involuntary action of recoiling from danger and the feeling of pleasure is tied to the involuntary feeling of wanting more of something. I think that the type of phyco-physical disarmoney you are imagining is incoherent, but that is not to say that there is not still real mystery concerning qualia. I agree that we could imagine swaping the base "texture" of the qualia of pain and pleasure but these base textures have no real meaning or association to anything on their own and they only aquire that based on what structures and other qualia they are conected to. Whatever qualia is associated with a physical pain response becomes interpreted by the individual as the "bad" feeling while whatever qualia is associated with a physical pleasure response becomes intepreted by the indivividual as the "good" feeling. I think we can argue that a certain degree of phyco-physical harmoney is nescesitated by the associations themselves because qualia will take on context and meaning only through what physical purpose they serve, the base textures of those qualia a vacant of any intrinsic meaning. So I do think its possible to imagine swaping the abstract base textures of pain and pleasure but I think that I would nesecarily come to interpret them in a way which was cohrent with my involuntary physical responses.
Evolution is promote certain conection.. of course hypoteticly can be different but that doesnt mean that in reality will be different. so evulution is cannot be dissmissed
I'm really not following why survival of the fittest cannot explain why we perceive things the way that we do. If we perceive something as painful, we will seek to avoid that behavior in the future. Organisms that aren't wired correctly to perceive pain accurately would die more easily.
You need to distinguish between the sensory perception of pain, and the physiological process of the correct neurons firing, resulting in the correct response. Evolution can cause the latter to arise by survival of the fittest, but not the former. It's possible that I stub my toe, and the nervous system sends signals to the brain, which then sends signals to my voluntary muscles that make me nurse my toe, but there needs be no pain associated with the process.
@JM but if you stub your toe and there's no pain, you won't be imprinted with the idea to avoid stubbing your toe in the future, you won't see it as a big deal. Pain and pleasure are needed to discourage and encourage different behaviors after encountering them. Doesn't matter if you know how to fix your broken toe, if you keep doing it because you can't feel it, you're wasting valuable resources and will spend more time physically impeded by your broken toe than you have to.
This whole argument seemed to ignore how psychophysical harmony affects one's survival, so natural selection would bring it about. If sex were painful, then most heterosexual creatures would likely go extinct. Some room for chaos might exist, but I also think we observe that with how people's minds are all over the place in regard to trivial things.
By the way, I am a creationist, and this argument still seemed week and flawed to me, because it overlooked the cause and effect aspect of disharmony. Maybe I missed something, but it did seem like you just skipped over this issue by saying evolution can't produce it.
Here's a quote from the paper I found interesting.
"Note that we are not rejecting the standard evolutionary explanation for why we feel pain in
response to harmful stimuli. Given that pain is lawfully linked to avoidance behavior and the
like, it makes perfect evolutionary sense that we would experience pain in response to harmful
stimuli. But this evolutionary explanation presupposes normative harmony; it does not explain it.
There is nothing inappropriate about this presupposition when we are doing evolutionary
biology; it is not the evolutionary biologist’s job to explain the character of the psychophysical
laws.)"
So they are acknowledging the biological reasons for pain but then at the same time saying "well this explanation is this, but it's not a real explanation." and "well biologist can't comment on the character of it"
NO evolution material is cited in this entire paper, ONLY (philosophy) papers critical of evolution from hardline theist.
It's so utterly bizarre that we are in (current year) 2023 and theist are STILL trying to argue against evolution and basing entire 40+ papers and arguments on "well if we just disregard all of evolutionary theory and then say 'well there's no explanation so therefore god' we can appeal to our uneducated base!"
Just wow.
Youre not understanding the argument. The feeling of pain can be accurately measured under a microscope to explain the phenomenon. No one doubts that. The problems arise when we begin to ascribe other mental conditions onto this "feeling" or thise "sense". You can have the identical physical processes, and the identical response to the process, yet have the subjective "pain" feeling be different. This third category can't be explained via physical processes because it can only measure the first two phenomena; 1) the physical process, and 2) the physical response to the process
@Thedisciplemike Let me show you how much I understand and how little you do.
1. The differences in mental states from the same physical interaction is not part of the argument, in fact it goes against the argument because it shows that something is not consistently harmonious.
2. "It can't be explained" is just a straight lie, psychology and neuroscience have done a ton of work on this and have many explanations.
3. What exactly is the theistic mechanism? Let's subtract all "physical" processes, what other explanations are you providing, what evidence are you citing?
I'll wait.
@@ShouVertica 1. There shouldn't be differences in mental states from the same physical interaction in the materialist worldview. All "pain" would be is the firing of certain neurons. The "feeling" of pain, or better yet, "the conscious awareness of pain" would be nothing more than an illusion, since the conscious feeling itself would be the firing of another neuron. Yet, to be conscious of the consciousness of that feeling would itself be another neuron, and so on so forth ad infinitum.
2. Psychologists and neuroscientists do nothing more than observe reactions and measure data. They are nowhere close to solving the mind-body problem. To say they are is living in fantasy land to help you sleep at night with your materialist presuppositions.
3. This assumes the theist is a materialist. All we have to do is demonstrate the errors of materialists. We don't have to give an account of how the mind-body problem is solved -- you do, since you're the one proposing it has been solved via material.
@Thedisciplemike
1. There should given psychology and nature + nurture.
Again, weird objection, but not relevant to the argument.
2. Pain isn't the firing of neurons, it's the brain interpreting signals. Please educate yourself on how pain works, "c fibers cause pain" is wholly ignorant of neuroscience.
3. "To be conscious of the consciousness" you're veering off topic and rambling.
4. "Psychologist and neuroscience have not solved the mind-body problem" according to who, the philosphers who don't do research into the topic, the same as you?
(It's irrelevant to the argument anyway)
5. "All we have to is demonstrate the error of materialist"
Well, I guess Squared, the paper, and I disagree with you, since it being immaterial or material isn't relevant to how the argument works.
I can object to silly errors, like "c fibers cause pain" but if you're going to suggest the immaterial you better back it up with evidence, not ignorance of an answer.
@ShouVertica 1) You're not getting what im saying. Obviously, no two bodies are the same. Im talking about mental phenomemon. The eating of a peanut would trigger the same receptors from the tongue to the brain, and firing the same type of neuron.
2) "its not the firing of neurons, its the brain interpretting signals." How does the brain interpret signals? The firing of neurons. You can't have any mental phenomena in your worldview apart from the firing of neurons. Both the sense data and the interpretation of that sense data is the firing of neurons. Also, i never said C-Fibers cause pain.
3. This is very much on the topic, since its getting to the heart of the madness of your position
4. Thats a bit arrogant and presumptuous to say. You have no idea who I am or who I have read. Psychologists are very open to say the mind-body problem hasn't been solved. Many, like you, put their faith in pure matter, and hope one day it will be solved. But we are far from that day. You can posit the mind = brain, but youd be in the minority of psychologists and neuroscientists.
5. Im talking about overall in addressing your argument, since again, that sits at the heart of your worldview. You start with the presumption that all that exists is material matter and energy.
Here's another interesting quote:
"We’ve seen that there does not appear to be any straightforward evolutionary explanation of normative
harmony"
Note here, the paper does not cite any evolutionary papers or any text from the entire field of biology.
An argument that is entirely based around the anatomy and physiology of our bodies does not have one. single. citation.
Oh but it will cite Chalmers for panpsychism! It will cite many, many citations as forthcoming!(non existent).
This paper even has some pages where the footnote is longer than the entire 2 pages preceding it. These goofballs would have failed a highschool writing assignment. It's such a huge mess.
This is the "best argument ever?" I could come up with a better paper in an afternoon. Christ.
I’m not sure why squared thinks it is. Not even close in my book
@John Smith yeah, even as an atheist I find other arguments much more compelling.
@@ShouVertica Also if you are interested emerson green mentioned on Twitter he is hosting a debate with Dustin vs Philliph Goff on his channel on what psychophysical harmony shows. If a panpsychist swoops in and says hey this actually works better on my view than theism then it shouldn't be the defacto go-to argument for theists.
@John Smith I think I'd br more interested in a debate with a neuro scientist or something along those lines. I realize the core of the argument is faulty with "infinite possibility, one actuality = any actuality unlikely", but since they want to pretend it's actual psychophysical harmony it would be more interesting to see the debate between someone like Sam Harris.
Dude. The brain evolved to organize sense data. No room for god here.
This objection may or may not be known in the literature as the argument from physico-physical harmony.
epistemic probability is not applicable to natural selection - the process is not random. any given organism *may* have [and some do, including modern humans and any other organism!] discordant sensory-to-action experiences, but as populations, harmonious responses are selected for [since they have exhibited greater fitness].
also, it's just not an argument for god, it's an argument for any arbitrary combination of supernatural presuppositions - a christian, for example, would still have all their work ahead of them to validate yahweh, jesus, or the bible
I don't believe this argument applies to the Kantian perspective, which can be interpreted as a theory of mind and operates as follows (according to my understanding): the mind and the rest of reality interact, and in this process, the mind creates an image of the world which may or may not reflect reality. This experience of the world has structure to it which likewise may or may not be reflect reality (examples of this structure include logic and geometry). Since we only have access to these experiences and to these structures, we have cannot reason about the world itself. In this sense, when discussing the physical world, we are merely discussing abstractions of our experiences using the structures of those experiences. Thus, the question of the coherence between the physical and mental becomes trivial: we constructed our understanding of the physical using the mental.
Thus, the only unanswerable question is: why is there harmony among our experiences (for example, why is there a correspondence between pain and a desire to escape that pain?). This is equivalent to asking why the qualia of our experiences matches the structure of our experiences (why does the structure not instantiate a relation between pleasure and a desire to escape that pleasure). However, exemplified by how we cannot know "if my red is your red," we cannot reason about our raw experiences, only the structure of those experiences. Therefore, this question cannot be formally stated in a manor by which its answer can be reasoned out. As such, the argument does not seem to apply.
I think it's even simpler.
The argument is an argument that "because things are X way, therefore god."
"On the other hand, if the basic laws governing X particles gave rise to
X-particle behavior that is distinctly valuable in comparison with what we would get under
alternative laws, this plausibly would be evidence for theism"
If we are looking for an answer as to "why does our body work this way" that's a question for biology, for which biology has an extensive answer already and none of those answers are cited in the paper. Not one. Not any.
What's being done in this argument is posing a question "Why do C-Fibers (or any body process) work the way they do?" and instead of attempting to answer it, it uses the question as an argument from ignorance to conclude a god. It sounds dumb, but I truly don't think Squared or anyone who's making videos on this subject has actually read the paper it's from.
(The paper is mess. It's got an extensive list of improper citations, grammatical issues, citing people randomly on irrelevant tangents, then just brushes through what is the main objections with a sentence or two. The fact that the word "lucky" is even in there should be a huge, huge red flag. It's a PERFECT example of how low theistic philosophy standards are.)
@@ShouVertica In the discussion thread on Squared's channel, where he asks for objections to the arguement so he can make a video addressing them, I got in a discussion with Zsold Nagy on this topic. I don't think the natural selection critique holds, but I am not going to address it twice, so go there to see if you care. He made the first comment and his thumbnail is the schrödinger equation.
@hansonmanfred2928 It's really not about Natural Selection or Evolution, but methodology. Biology topics should reference work in biology. If you're not going to do that then it's an intentional argument from ignorance no matter how you look at it. This paper does not cite biology, does not cite the current model.
Edit: in fact it doesn't even cite works that are existent. A bunch of the citations are on "forthcoming" which means they don't exist.
Also there's the whole "we ruled out naturalism so therefore supernaturalism" being a bad argument but w/e.
I'm a proponent of naturalism+, which is the hypothesis "naturalism is true + there is an unknown, mysterious (natural) mechanism that causes psychophysical harmony". Now, naturalism+ is not as simple as naturalism, so it will have a lower prior, but it predicts psychophysical harmony. So, the score of this argument, when applied to theism vs naturalism+, goes down from a googolplex to 1, which I think is a pretty massive hit.
22:30 I'm curious about this. If God doesn't have a mind, then how can you have a relationship with him? How would that be different from worshipping the sun? And isn't that a negation of the trinity? If Jesus is God, and Jesus is human, and humans have minds, then God has a mind.
It depends on the Religion If god has a mind, cristians belive so, but people that praise the sun are also theists. In many Religions the most devine force ist something like destiny, wich has no mind.
Here are a couple of other views:
Naturalism& = “Naturalism is true and there is an unknown mysterious (natural) mechanism that causes every physical structure to be connected to the qualia of warm bath water.”
Naturalism# = “Naturalism is true and there is an unknown mysterious (natural) mechanism that causes every physical structure to be connected to the qualia of smelling sawdust.”
Naturalism% = “Naturalism is true and there is an unknown mysterious (natural) mechanism that causes every physical structure to be connected to the qualia of tasting cherries.”
Etc.
I can come up with so many of these alternatives to Naturalism+ that they seem to crowd it out in the probability space, and we’re back to square 1 with this argument.
Also, Naturalism+ is pretty ad hoc, isn’t it? And couldn’t I posit some mysterious explanation for any data that doesn’t cohere with my theory?
Regarding a relationship with a non-minded God: I honestly don’t know how that would work. Those kinds of views seem really problematic to me. However, being unable to predict psychophysical harmony is such a big problem that I think these non-minded views of theism still deserve to at least be called an “escape hatch” if they can handle it.
@@ApologeticsSquared Well, those other alternatives are ruled out by the observation of psychophysical harmony, so that's why we should keep only naturalism+. Indeed, the argument presented in the video has a score of a googolplex when used to argue for naturalism+ over, say, naturalism&. And yes, you can of course posit some mysterios explanation for any data that doesn't fit your theory. That is *exactly* my point.
What I mean is that the prior of naturalism+ is low because of all the competing hypotheses, to the point where it doesn’t mitigate the evidential force of the PHA. As an analogy, the prior probability that I would draw a four of clubs from a deck of cards is 1/52. If I then draw a four of clubs and then posit a mysterious disposition in favor of this card, the prior is still 1/52, because there could have just as easily been a disposition to any other card. Similarly, the prior probability of harmony given naturalism is tiny no matter how you slice it.
@@ApologeticsSquared Hmmm yes, I think you're right. This argument seems strong indeed, though I'm still not sure I understand it fully. I'll think about it some more.
What's the epistemic probability that you'll actually mention Jesus in your cumulative case for Christianity?
~1.0
he’s still getting there dawg be patient!!
I'd introduce you to my cat but, instead of doing the obvious where any other existing entity's involved, I'll tell you that cat food exists & that the prior probability of a generic furry domesticated animal is high, blah blah blah...
@@Devious_Dave not everything is like a cat bruh
@@RadicOmega Have you spoken to many 'cat' people?! 🙂
I don't know if I buy this as a strong argument for God. Couldn't a panpsychist like Goff get behind this and say I like it too, but it shows my view and not your God's view.
Shhhh the kalam doesnt either. Theist arent into those types of details
I don’t see how panpsychism helps at all. What part of the chain of reasoning would its adoption undermine?
@@ApologeticsSquared if the mind is at the fundamental level it can decide, just like god, to form life because it’s teleological. I mean it was the fine-tuning argument that made him lean into panpsychism in the first place.
edit: Of course, you can bring up other arguments against panpsychism and why theism is a better option.
@@fentonmulley5895 I feel like only one I have seen as personally strong is the contingency argument formulated by josh Rasmussen or Kenny Pearce because I am not fully sure I buy Oppys account that anything material can be necessary and physicists lean into space time being contingent it could have been otherwise.
I'm not sure why we should have a mind if naturalism is true...even assuming we have a universe, a planet, life, etc.
Where are you having an issue?