I’m claiming that the difference is that the materialist world view does not justify reason as theism does. It would like to follow the same process, and is certainly ‘allowed’ to, but the results are different. Following a materialist understanding of the universe leads to doubt in reason, through things like the Common Narrative that I described. The only attempt to save reason in that sort of universe that I can think of is a proposed link between survival-of-the-fittest, and the production of true belief. I find this link both thin and doubtful; many creatures exhibit the right behavior without having any beliefs as far as we can tell, and we can easily think of false beliefs that would lead to right behavior in any given situation. That’s a general argument against naturalism that we can (and already have, I think) explored, but what I’m interested in this time is that many of the apparently-neutral reasons for skepticism are essentially atheistic at root- the idea of knowledge as interloper. The whole reason why the nature of knowledge is problematic doesn’t even need to happen for a theist.
Xunzian already took issue with your characterization of the materialist worldview, and you objected to his alternative by saying that it relied on reason, on “eating is eating”. I believe my point stands that this objection of radical doubt applies equally well to the theist or anyone else for that matter. Once we lose our faith in reason, it cannot be used to support or deny any worldview. So what we need to do now is reconsider Xunzian’s (and my) actual materialist worldview with the knowledge that radical doubt is moot. We will be arguing for our worldviews from the assumption that reason works, to figure out if those worldviews justify such an assumption. (I stand by my earlier argument that all our reasoning can’t justify reason in any pragmatic sense – but not all truth is practical. I’m more of an Aristotelian than a pragmatist on truth, as you’ll see below.)
My version of the materialist narrative about knowledge/truth is as follows. Aristotle said that truth is when what is said is what is the case. Let’s unpack this formula. “What is said” refers to language – a set of symbols together with certain organizational rules (grammar). The symbols represent things in the world (things, actions, feelings, etc) and the rules dictate how they can interact. The use of language is truthful, according to Aristotle, if it symbolically “mirrors” what happens out there in the real world. So language is a complex system of symbols whose function is to mirror the world, and thus create an abstract world where we can evaluate possible courses of action. We also observe that language is a physical system, which exists as patterns of sound and brain activity. We experience it also as an abstract symbolic pattern, or internal dialogue, but the physical system is clearly an essential part of what language is.
Now when we look at the life around us, we do sometimes find complex physical systems that aren’t really functional – those blind fish eyes, human appendices, etc. But we know those things aren’t functional because they’re not being used. Conversely, we can infer from our observations of life that complex, highly active systems within an organism are probably very important to its survival. Moreover, we can usually figure out what that function is by scientific inquiry. Now we apply that principle to our own system of language. Since language is so complex and so active in human life, it probably does something important, Moreover, what it does is probably what we think it does, as suggested by our observations so far. And by my lights, we by and large have concluded that Aristotle was right about what language does.
Now if we ask why these complex active systems in living things are usually doing something useful, evolution can provide some insight; natural selection, adaptation, you know the drill. I can’t offer an estimate of how likely it is that evolution could produce the neural systems necessary for language, but evolution is so well justified on other grounds that I think it more than fair to suggest that humans and human brains evolved through natural selection.
Summary:
-We access truth via the tool of language
-Language is a complex, highly active physical (i.e. sonic and neuronal) system that symbolically mirrors what’s out there so we can weigh the possibilities
-Such systems generally do something important in living things, which can usually be determined via scientific inquiry
-So language is probably what we think it is
-Evolution can explain why complex active systems generally do important tasks in living things, so it all comes down to matter and physics
The critical difference between this narrative and your materalist narrative is that knowing and truth here are phenomena in a physical system, not separate from it. Since truth is a natural phenomenon, we can use natural science to determine if its appearance makes sense, as I’ve argued here.
Now let’s consider your objections. First, it’s irrelevant that many creatures exhibit adaptive behavior without having beliefs. Our argument is not that knowledge is necessary to be adaptive, just that it helps enough to be selected if it appears. On your second objection, I’ll agree that we can imagine many situations where a wrong belief could lead to adaptive behavior. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. But being right twice a day isn’t good enough in nature. You need to have adaptive behavior consistently. And to imagine a situation where wrong beliefs are constantly leading to right behavior is much more difficult. We begin to get into Matrix scenarios and the like; but as I’ve pointed out, such radical doubts undermine the theist’s argument just as well as the materialist’s.
Moreover, even if you could imagine someone with crazy beliefs but consistently adaptive behavior, in reality we can typically tell the difference between sane and insane people easily. We rarely meet people who are doing pretty well but whose basic perceptions and beliefs are radically different from our own (except perhaps on religion, which in my opinion is a big point against theism – but we can tackle that elsewhere). The rare ones who do, like Oliver Sacks’ man who mistook his wife for a hat, have found extraordinarily lucky ways to cope. They are exceptions that prove the rule. In general there is a strong correlation between how relevant a belief is to survival and how universal it is. People will differ on gay marriage, but not on whether a truck is coming towards them. We can explain this by noting that natural selection weeds out the loonies where selection pressure is greatest. All of this is direct evidence for what I would have thought was obvious to anyone but Plantinga – that knowledge is power, a power extremely useful for surviving.
EDIT: here’s an essay that covers the Plantinga argument, which I haven’t read. it covers basically the same ground I have here: dougshaver.com/philos/planatural.html
Thanks for the response, aporia. I do agree that your model is more solid than the one I proposed on the atheist’s behalf, though of course mine is intended to be only semi-conscious- I’m trying to put into words what I see as an intuitive fear people have about the difference between their minds and reality. I think by exploring that fear, we see it relies on a materialistic context, and isn’t universal.
Now, let me address your model more directly. I agree with you that once we have radical doubt about reason, no worldview is preferable. But the point certainly isn’t moot if some belief systems are subject to this radical doubt more than others. That goes to what I meant when I made my poorly-worded comment about assuming that ‘eating is eating’.
I'm not saying I have any problem with analytic truths. What I'm saying is that rationality can be as rational as it wants, but it's not enough for knowledge unless it corresponds to something. You seem like you would agree from the way you read Aristotle. But Xunzian was trying to say that because we see the importance of eating and negotiating obstacles, we can assume that knowing truths is likely thing to evolve. What I'm saying is that he's still relying on the assumption that when he sees a monkey eating a banana, that there really is something like a monkey, something like eating, and something like a banana. That's presuming the very thing we're out to discuss- which I also think is a mistake made in yours and Doug's rebuttal to Plantinga's argument, though I'll get to that later.
So when I point out that we assume ‘eating is eating’, what I’m saying is that rationality isn’t enough, when there’s no reason to believe that the premises you are plugging in actually relate to anything real. If reason is how we use those premises, then reason could be the perfect, undoubted best way to think, and still be totally worthless in getting us to the truth of things.
It’s that connection between experience and reality that is in question, and so empiricism cannot help us. The difference with theism that I’m trying to point out is that this never need become a question in the first place- at least not nearly as serious of one as it is for the materialist. The materialist needs a not-empirical answer to bridge between knowledege and the world. They have no metaphysics to offer, so all that’s left is epistemology, and I don’t think any of the standard answers there suffice. Without justification, they can just assume it, which is fine, except that our understanding of evolution and induction provides defeaters for it, as I’ll argue below. To outline my point, let me refer to this quote of yours:
I’m reminded of the question “What’s it like to be a bat?” The materialist must certainly assert that knowing and truth are phenomena in a physical system, since that’s the only kind of existence they admit to. However, they only knowledge any of us ever witness is our own, since it’s experiential. You do not observe other creatures knowing, or observe the apprehension of truth. You know, and you take things to be true. That establishes that separation rationally even if you aren’t a dualist. You cannot say “There is a bat knowing about a moth”. The best you can do is say “There is a bat behaving how I would imagine myself to behave if I were a bat knowing about a moth”. If that sounds terribly unscientific, that’s because it is, and that’s my point- once you bring the alleged experiences of things other than you into play, that’s how it’s going to look.
So you are completely cut off from any and all acts of knowing other than your own, and you have access to this knowing directly, and not as a result of any empirical observation. That’s the problem with trying to explain it empirically. It may well have such an explanation, but you first have to ignore the question the skeptics are trying to ask, which is “Why suppose so?”
So let’s look at survival of the fittest and truth.
I think we’re mostly in agreement here, except about the relevance. That the connection isn’t necessary is exactly what I wanted to point out- what we’re talking about now is a matter of likelihood. We seem to agree on that, so I’ll move on.
Well, your reference to the Matrix points out exactly the error that you and Doug are making about Plantinga’s argument, as I see it. What it sounds like you’re trying to imagine is creatures surviving in a world like ours with mostly false beliefs. The problem of course is that by presuming a world like ours, you presume what you’re trying to investigate- the ability of creatures (you in this case) to know about the world around them, if indeed there is one. If belief isn’t connected to truth, then not only might creatures have false beliefs that still allow for survival, but they might be living in a world much more permissive of their falsehoods than we take the world to be.
But let’s permit the assumption of the conclusion at least this far. The world is basically like we take it to be, and so what would the creature’s in it need to have for beliefs in order to survive? The problem has nothing to do with our ability to imagine scenarios, though this can be a useful aid. It goes directly to an obvious truth I pointed out in the original post:
For any body of evidence, no matter how complete, there are an infinite number of conclusions that satisfy it.
That means that even if creatures are perceiving the world around them correctly, there is an infinite number of beliefs that can result- not just result wrongly or crazily, mind you. An infinite number of beliefs that can result that actually follow from the evidence. That’s exactly why Occam’s Razor exists.
From this it’s simply math to conclude that there are an infinite number of beliefs that not only follow from the evidence, but also produce survival-benefit behavior. What you would need to show is that of those infinite, survival-producing beliefs that follow from the evidence, nature has any way of selecting for the true ones to appear often enough in creatures for our brains to be considered reliable. I think I’ve shown here that the true beliefs have no inherent survival-benefit over an infinite number of false alternatives, so I don’t think you could possibly do that.
One last note, which is neither here nor there, but I felt I had to stick it in (apologies):
And which sort of belief do you take materialism to be?
I think that this thread hits on many of the subjects that I am discussing here.
Though I will say that a creature that perceived completely unnecessary and artifactual experiences would be less ‘fit’ then a creature who hones those experiences out. What we need to see of the monkey to survive is there, what we don’t, we don’t.
Jeez, you had me all freaked out for a second, I was worried the stuff I was saying there wasn’t going to jive with what I said here. I think I just squeaked under the bar with consistency- If we want to say that a brain is ‘for’ knowing, the we have to be a theist. If we want to say that a brain is for surviving, then we can be a materialist, but then it’s ability to know is suspect.
Which is why I suggested the biosemiotics. Whether the brain truly ‘knows’ or not is ultimately irrelevant because it ‘creates’ an understanding of reality that it essentially lays over our perception. Whether or not it is ‘real’, per se, doesn’t really matter as long as it is ‘real’ enough. And that is the level of perception that we need in order to survive.
It just so happens that because the human brain is so effective at interpreting patterns that we can apply this trait to experiences outside of raw survival experiences and discover new patterns that had previously been unseen by us.
To posit ‘knowing’ first seems ahistorical to me. After all, we don’t start with complex thoughts, we merely start with the potential to have thoughts as infants. As experiences are finally woven together, we are able to create thoughts based on our reservoir of experiences – otherwise we’d all be in a Humean slide-show of reality.
And this doesn’t just happen on the individual level either. Pre-Neolithic revolution, there seems to have been very little thought going on and while that point can be argued either way due to lack of evidence, other primates have a weaker ability to ‘know’ as I understand how you mean it. Indeed, as we go away from humans (who represent an extreme-form of experience-based survival) towards creatures with differently specialized forms of survival, we see reduced ability to ‘know’ but there is still the ability to recognize, understand, and meaningfully interact with the environment. Even a bacterium can interact with its environment.
So to me, it makes less sense to take ‘knowing’ first. I would start with experience and understand ‘knowing’ to be a synthesis between experience and interaction that naturally arises because those creatures with a better understanding of that relationship will be better able to survive.
The reverse seems to me like you are starting out with a knower who knows, and then a verrry loong time in absolute darkness, devoid of any knowing, but from this darkness, eventually other knowers burst forth because of the initial knower. If it happened as your model suggests, that long gap seems very strange, as well as the production of creatures with a very limited basis for knowledge.
And that’s pretty much my problem with pragmatism in a nutshell, is that it’s put forward as an answer to questions that it doesn’t really address. If I asked someone if they believed in God, and they said “Yes, I believe the Sun is God,” that might be a good answer. But suppose I press them for information, and they reveal that they don’t think the Sun thinks, or answers prayer, or loves them, or created anything. They don’t believe anything about the Sun that I don’t believe- they just call it God. So, I have a conception of the Sun, and a conception of God. When they say “I think the Sun is God,” my only answer is, “Yes, but I’m not talking about that.”
So, I have a conception of correspondence, and I have a conception of what works. I can see them both, I can think of examples of both. I can see areas in which they would overlap, and areas in which they would not. What I don’t see is any reason why one would be a substitute or replacement for the other. So, when you talk about ‘what works’, I have to say “Yes, but I’m not talking about that.” If you’re saying that evolution creates in us beliefs that help us to survive, and whether or not they correspond as we hope they do is irrelevant to that process, then I don’t think we have any disagreement.
I do agree with you that the gap in time between the knower and us seems very strange- it seems that even if being known is an aspect of the universe, it’s not the only important one. It’s curious, but not problematic as I see it. The reason I put the knower at the beginning is to give it sufficient influence over the nature of matter to ensure that it’s knowable. Any knower that was a product of matter would be stuck in the same problem.
My problem is that I’m not entirely sure what it is you are talking about. I do think it is akin to “The Sun is God”-type conversation. There isn’t necessarily any disagreement on the nature of the Sun, with the notable exception of the added quality of it being divine or not-divine.
But to me, you’re version of ‘knowledge’ is like asking what color an x-ray is. It is a wavelength of light, and colors are nothing aside from our perception of a specific wavelength of light, so it follows that x-rays do indeed have a color. However, we lack cones that could see those colors – indeed, I know of no creature that does have those cones (except, perhaps, Kryptonians). Now, we can’t just not see what colors x-rays would produce, but we actually cannot conceive what they would look like. By all accounts, if we had those cones, it would add two colors, two completely new colors, to our vision, and we cannot, literally cannot, even imagine what they would look like.
To me, your version of ‘knowing’ involves access to that sort of thing. For my money, I am fine saying that x-rays don’t produce colors when they reflect off things. For color to be a meaningful word beyond ‘wavelength of light’ there needs to be a human, subjective, element.
The metaphysical is the foundation of all rationality and logic with religion having all of it’s essence on metaphysics.
So in a way I can see rationality being a extension of religion but ironically rationality has divorced itself away from religion the entity who used to be it’s handmaiden as Nietzsche would say.
The only people who don’t believe in this is your scientifical realists but even their vague form of realism has it’s flaws and attributes owed to theology.
I myself am under the impression that all of rationality is a curse with it being an extension of theology only reaffirms such a belief.
What you’re forgetting here is that the materialist worldview proposes a model of knowledge which removes the disconnect between the subjective and objective – what we see and what’s really out there. Knowledge is a physical system inside an organism that mirrors the structure and dynamics of another physical system. Our subjective experience of knowledge comes directly from the physical working of the brain and nowhere else. When I see a cat and come to know the cat is there, “coming to know” means that there is something happening in my brain which is in turn mirroring the cat’s physical location.
According to materialism, there is no separation between experience and reality, so empiricism is the only thing that can help us.
When you state your theist worldview, you make an entirely similar move. You say that knowledge is something which is imparted from a universal Knower who set the world up so that the imparted knowledge would correspond to the world he made. The additional information about the nature of knowledge that your worldview provides tells you why knowledge is what you think it is.
The form of both our arguments is “by my worldview, all knowledge is of the type X, and therefore by additional reasoning Y corresponds to the real world.” For the materialist, X is physical, and Y is the evolution/adaptation argument. For you, X is imparted-by-God, and Y states all the characteristics of God which ensure that what he imparts is what you say it is. An important difference is that for the materialist, Y has independent support from science, while for you Y is just the assumptions you must make to carry your argument through. So on this count, at least, the materialist has a more interesting and coherent theory.
In my view, anyone who wants to have a sane theory of knowledge must offer some metaphysics. It’s just hard to see what metaphysics the materialist is offering, because his metaphysics is in some sense physics itself. A critical assertion of the materialist that is genuinely metaphysical, however, is this mysterious correspondence between subjective experience and the physical system of the brain. This correspondence, I admit, is something we probably cannot understand or explain.* But the world is mysterious, so any genuine view of it will have some mysterious components. (As a side note, I certainly do not object to theism like some silly people do, because some aspects of it are mysterious. No theory can explain everything.)
I acknowledge that the subjective experience of knowledge, and knowledge as a physical system are distinct concepts. But according to materialism (my materialism anyway) they are directly metaphysically connected, mysterious as that may be, so there is no separation in fact.
I can say (at least with scientific tentativeness) “there is a bat knowing about a moth” because knowledge is a physical system. To do so, I begin with your second quoted statement as my initial observation. Then I hypothesize that the connection between knowledge and behavior is basically the same for all life, that animals reason like we do. This is at least possible, because the physical system of knowledge can exist anywhere, even in other animals. Finally, I tentatively conclude that “there is a bat knowing about a moth.” That’s the scientific method.
The above answers your first objection to my critique of Plantinga, so let’s move to the second one.
Here I must be pedantic to make my point properly, so please forgive me. From a materialist’s point of view there may be infinitely many conclusions (depending on whether you think the universe is discrete or continuous, finite or infinite), but only finitely many states of the universe that would be sufficiently different to warrant being counted separately. Animals only know anything about a finite amount of their surroundings, and that only to a limited precision. If you specify the position and velocity of everything to within a micrometer, you’ve done more than enough for any conceivable practical purposes. So, for the purposes of adaptive behavior, nature only has a huge, but finite number of alternatives to choose from.
To get adaptive behavior you also need to take into account many other factors besides just logical consistency. You need to think about which consistent belief is most likely, which ones you can do something about, etc. It may be that only a few beliefs out of the large (but finite) number are likely or actionable. And perhaps only one system of principles can consistently produce those probable beliefs.
I believe I’ve shown here that the problem is more complicated than you have set it up to be.
Please note that I have no intention of showing that evolution and natural selection would likely produce brains that apprehend knowledge as we’ve defined it. My intuition is that only brains which imitate what’s going on out there could efficiently produce adaptive behavior. But I can’t back that up; it’s a tremendous scientific problem requiring insight from almost every discipline I could imagine. It may be something we pursue forever but never quite reach, another mystery. But like I said, worldviews are allowed to have mysteries. Theism certainly has more than its fair share.
Obviously history tells us that materialism is not worth a gnat’s ass in terms of survival benefit. But like I said, I’m not entirely a pragmatist.
*There is even a reason for why this should be the case. Godel proved that any system sufficient to represent addition and multiplication must never be able to fully represent itself within itself. The brain certainly qualifies as such a system, so I expect this sort of understanding is something we can never achieve. Even even a simple mathematical system cannot fully “understand” itself from inside itself – how much more so for the human brain!
Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, I think that’s the thing we’re discussing. Materialism may assert this, but the only mechanism it’s provided is survival of the fittest, which I’m arguing doesn’t get the job done very well. The other problem here is that you’re presupposition goes back further than what you’re saying- materialism can’t presuppose the mechanism you describe without also presupposing materialism- the only experience I have of ‘knowing’ is a completely internal thing, abstracted from empiricism. To decide to even look for a mechanical explanation for it is to suppose that that’s the kind of explanation available to me, and that’s another metaphysical assumption.
Nah. If materialism really claimed that, it would be too naive to bother responding to. The separation between experience and reality is as obvious as a bent spoon in a glass of water, or the inaccessible nature of other minds. I say this as a direct realist, too- I actually do think that when we see a tree, we see an external object and not an object in our minds. But to say there’s no separation between experience and reality goes further than what I would try to defend.
Sure, and the other difference is that the materialist explanation actually fails, because there’s no connection between survival and knowledge, other than a string of unguessable probabilities. It serves only to outline the problem that much more clearly- in a materialistic universe, there is no possible direct connection between what it is to know something, and what it is to be that thing.
I don’t have a problem with that- as I’m sure you’ve noticed, my theory doesn’t explain the nature of that correspondence either. It probably will be mysterious for a good long time, if not forever. The crucial difference as I see it between theism and materialism is that theism actually provides a good reason why we should expect that correspondence, even if we don’t understand it. All materialism seems to offer is the presumption of it, on the basis that we can’t get along with out it. Even that might be enough, except that survival of the fittest, the existence of dreams, and many other things actually do throw the connection between experience and reality into doubt- it’s not an arbitrary question that needs no answer. Pragmatism is all that’s left, and I’d argue that pragmatism properly understood isn’t reasonable.
That’s the reason why I brought up that ‘common narrative’- to show that the reasons why people become skeptics and nihilists and such is rooted in materialistic assumptions.
Well, the problem there is that such is not a proper scientific hypothesis, because you cannot test it. You will never find anything empirically that confirms or contradicts the presupposition that there are other minds like your own. Obviously I don’t disagree with that presupposition, but I don’t think it can escape the metaphysical in the way you describe.
You are quite correct. Instead of infinite, let us say “an unguessably large number” from here on.
I agree with you that these considerations winnow down the choices, but I see this fact as working against your overall conclusions, not towards it. Beliefs that are most likely, that something can be done about, and so on are not necessarily the true ones, and seem to have no connection to truth either way, so the truth is as likely as not to be selected out as we narrow the eligible beliefs in the way you describe above. That is, there's no reason to suppose that the 'few' actionable and likely beliefs include the truth.
Ok, it seems we basically agree on this, then. I think your intuition about which kinds of brains would survive would have some appeal (not enough for me, but some interesting degree) if we presume the world is basically like we experience it to be (full of organic creatures trying to survive through competition), but of course that’s completely circular since we’re using an alleged brain to have these experiences.
“Now consider this: If there were nothing but silence, it wouldn’t exist for you; wouldn’t know what it is. Only when sound appears does silence come into being. Similarly, if there were only space without any objects in space, it wouldn’t exist for you. Imagine yourself as a point of consciousness floating in the vastness of space --- no stars, no galaxies, just emptiness. Suddenly space wouln’t be vast any more; it would not be ther eat all. There would be no speed, no movement from here to there. At least two points of reference are needed for distance and space to come into being. Space comes into being the moment the One becomes two, and as the two become the “ten thousand things,†as Lao Tse calls the manifested world, space becomes more and more vast. So world and space arise simultaneously.
Nothing could be without space, yet space is nothing. Before theâ€big bang,†if you like, there wasn’t a vast empty space waiting to be filled. There was no space, as there was no thing. There was only the Unmanifested — the One. When the One became “the ten thousand things’†suddenly space seemed to be there and enabled the many to be. Where did it come from? Was it created by God to accommodate the universe? Of course not. Space is no-thing, so it was never created.
Go out on a clear night and look up at the sky. The thousands of stars you can see with the naked eye are no more than an infinitesimal fraction of what is there. Over 100 billion galaxies can already be detected with the most powerful telescopes, each galaxy an “island universe†with billions of stars. Yet what is even more awe-inspiring is the infinity of space itself, the depth and stillness that allows all of that magnificence to be. Nothing could be more awe-inspiring than the inconceivable vastness and stillness of space, and yet what is it? Emptiness, vast emptiness.
What appears to us as space in our universe perceived through the mind and the senses is the Unmanifested itself, externalized. It is the “body†of God. And the greatest miracle is this: That stillness and vastness that enables the universe to be is not just out there in space — it is also within you. When you are utterly and totally present, you encounter it as the still inner space of no-mind. Within you it is vast in depth, not in extension. Spacial extension is ultimately a misperception of infinite depth — an attribute of the one transcendental reality.â€
According to Einstein, space and time are not separate. I don’t really understand it, but I think he is saying that time is the fourth dimension of space. He calls it the “space-time continuum.â€
“Yes, what you perceive externally as space and time are ultimately illusory, but they contain a core of truth. They are the two essential attributes of God, infinity and eternity, perceived as if they had an external existence outside you. Within you, both space and time have an inner equivalent that reveals their true nature, as well as your own. Whereas space is the still, infinitely deep realm of no-mind, the inner equivalent of time is presence, awareness of the eternal Now…â€
There are two parts to our discussion that need to be distinguished. First, both of us would like to explain why we choose our worldview over other worldviews. At that stage of the game we are both assuming that the world is what it is, because we have to. There’s no other way to proceed. Second, once we have finished defending why we take that view of the world, we can go about explaining why that worldview implies that the ordinary model of knowledge and reason is justified.
It seemed to me from your opening essay that you were interested in focusing on the second part of the discussion. You haven’t explained why anyone should believe in theism; you’ve only argued that, once believed, theism justifies the ordinary model of knowledge better than materialism. (Perhaps “ordinary model of knowledge” could be a good technical term for the model of knowledge we seem to agree upon.)
But this–
suggests we aren’t on the same page. Of course I am presupposing knowledge is a physical system which is in turn presupposing materialism. As I said before, you are doing the same thing with your worldview. Theism can’t presuppose the concept of knowledge as God-given without presupposing theism. The game is for us to step into both of these worldviews and see what can be explained given them.
Before I go writing for hours to no purpose, let’s have some agreement on this. Are we doing both parts of the discussion I mentioned above or just the second? Are we just talking about whether a given worldview can justify the ordinary model of knowledge, or are we also going to argue for why that worldview should be embraced?
Yeah, you’re right- let’s keep it to the validity of materialism after all the facts are in, and not the initial set up of assumptions that gets us to one or the other.
Uccisore,
I’m having a hard time figuring out what I want to say here at this point. I just don’t see a serious problem here for materialism. Not that my intuition implies there must not be one, I just don’t know what I need to defend here.
I can at least comment on this:
The likely beliefs are, by definition, merely likely to be true, not certainly true. But so it is with knowledge. Everything we say we know, we do not know with complete certainty, but with some degree of probability. Your expectation that there be a “reason” that the likely beliefs will include the truth is asking too much. They likely contain the truth, and that is the best we can do.
