> the idea that our moral beliefs are imperfect perceptions of moral truth. That requires the existence of a moral reality separate from physical reality. The existence of something not explainable as part of physical reality makes that belief more plausible.
I would think that moral beliefs may not be 'real' the same way physical reality is, and therefore do not provide reason to postulate some parallel meta world, but that does not mean that the model of moral perception approximating moral truth, at least as briefly sketched here, is illegitimate. One can think of moral beliefs as being perspectives on physical reality. Perspectives may be part of an internally significant system, but they do not require some shadow realm to exist.
E.g. since you gave the example of preferences of chocolate vs. vanilla, I think that taste is actually a good example, although the *example* chocolate vs. vanilla is trivial, so it obfuscates the point.
Taste is a perspective on physical phenomena, but that is therefore not as "real" as the phenomena themselves, but it hardly arbitrary.
Considering the respective taste of chocolate and poop may be instructive. Although not as objective as say, the charge of an electron, the bad taste of poop does need to be an individual axiom - it fits logically within a larger web of deeper preferences, and could probably be deduced from them, just as the properties of a physical object could be deduced from the rules governing physical reality.
It may not be 'wrong' to murder someone the same way it is wrong that an apple falling off a tree will fly off into space instead of towards the ground, but murder could still be wrong the same way poop, or corpse flower are untasty. This is perfectly meaningful to a person interacting with reality, even if it is not as 'real' as reality itself.
More to the point though, I don't see why the mystery of consciousness should necessarily affect the "mystery of morality." Even if there exists an ethereal consciousness divorced from the physical world, why should relate to a model of moral realism?
As you yourself note in that post, even positing a god, which could be an ethereal consciousness divorced from the physical world, does not preclude the need for independent moral axioms - even if the god instructs them, you still need an axiom that states that the divine should be obeyed.
>It seems likely that the mind depends on the brain and dies when the body dies. The effect on the mind of things happening to the brain short of dying — alcohol or other drugs in the bloodstream or a blow to the skull — supports that conjecture. I know of no positive evidence against it. But as long as the nature of consciousness is a mystery to me, I cannot be certain.
More trivially, one could say that as long as anything remains unknown in the universe, that we cannot be certain of anything, since that unknown thing in the universe might affect anything. But this is trivially true about anything and therefore does not reflect any actual uncertainty with a given proposition.
Regarding the specific proposition at hand, I don't see why the existence of questions about consciousness in general should be a reason to consider the proposition that consciousness is not dependent on physical hardware and processes, given the stated evidence that it is.
This seems equivalent to saying "It seems likely that Tylenol depends on physically interacting with the body to work, so one person taking a Tylenol could not cure a different person's headache. I know of no positive evidence against it. But as long as the mechanism of action of Tylenol is a mystery to me, I cannot be certain." [Note that this is about *my knowledge of the MOA of Tylenol - it is not dependent on someone else knowing the MOA.]
Am I missing some reason why the point about consciousness is different?
Having *conscious* control over our actions makes no sense. Thoughts necessarily must think themselves. There's no logical alternative. If you think we consciously control our thoughts or actions, that would require you to think about something before you've thought about it, resulting in infinite regress. Thoughts, desires, intentions all simply enter our consciousness from deeper level non-consciously experienced cognitive processes, and the illusion of free will results from the (usually) very high correspondance between our consciously experienced intentions and our behaviors, this congruence not requiring in any way the existence of free will.
Sam Harris has excellent lessons (both in his podcast feed and through the Waking Up app) that can show, with just a little introspection, that we are actually not the thinker of thoughts. There and can be no free will, given that the laws of physics (quantum physics included) are running the show. It is very useful, IMO, to do the mindful work to recognize this. I write about that in various chapters in my latest.
Your point about determinism and belief in determinism seems mistaken to me. I don't think that "I am merely a spectator" follows from "my behavior is deterministic."
Consider a simple thermostat, one that turns on a heat pump to cool a room when the temperature rises above 72°F, and turns it off when it falls lower. It's macroscopic enough so that questions of quantum mechanical indeterminacy can be disregarded; that is, we can treat it as a deterministic system. And the same is true of the heating and cooling of the room. So we could write a deterministic model of the thermostat's behavior. But does that mean that the thermostat is merely a passive sensor of the room's heating and cooling? Not at all! The causal sequence that gives rise to that history includes the behavior of the thermostat itself; were it not there there would be a different history. The thermostat controls the temperature, within certain limits.
I am able, through the use of language and conceptual thought, to form an image of the probable future outcome of my actions. Since I can do so now, before the actions take place, if that image is unattractive, my forming it can disrupt my performance of those actions, and lead me to envision a different set of actions with different consequences. And that process can continue till it converges on a set of actions whose consequences I find acceptable, or least unacceptable. My own thoughts about the future are part of the causal sequence that creates the future.
In fact, this ability to describe the future creates a form of self-referentiality that invites paradoxes. I think that the assumption that my future is completely predictable and I am only a passive spectator is one that it would be paradoxical for me to make. Alan Turing showed that an ideal computer cannot predict its own future behavior—and neither can I. But Turing's argument did not require the assumption that the computer was indeterministic.
Im not sure if youve engaged with Aristotle-Thomistic philosophers on these topics before but I have seen little overlap between the libertarians, atheists, critical rationalists (not necessarily linked) and that school of thought but they are very much in the logic/rational end of theology and I dont think most current atheists seriously address their arguments.
Moral intuition cannot be tied to fitness in the same way eating or sex drive can. Else slavery would have won evolution, as the winners of genetic passing on.
What if you saw and clearly understood a mechanism by which your conscious experience could arise? I.e., an explanation that allowed you to build an entity that you would expect to be conscious, and which exhibits all the hallmarks, and which, when varied in certain ways, varies its conscious-like behavior just as the explanation would predict. Would that dissolve the mystery of consciousness? (It certainly wouldn't dissolve the mystery of induction, of the universe's apparent regularity. That's a different question.)
Sent response by accident. Personally, I find that the best way to discover spirituality is to practice it. I had a student who did not understand why Rashi commentary would be important. After 6 months of learning the weekly portion with Rashi, she was amazed at how brilliant he is.
Similarly, spirituality is indeed perceivable by human beings. The problem is, it requires a different sort of sight. I believe that anyone can access this. You see the people in India access it.
I conflate spirituality with consciousness, because I believe that that is the missing piece.
Just as I believe that God created the world and that answers the fundamental how of existence.
Also, I am a humble mortal fallible human being, I am not infinitely intelligent, and ultimately the real truth is always in humility. You don't know what you don't know.
The fact that I am certain consciousness exists but cannot fit it into my scientific world view reduces my confidence in the picture of the world linked to that view. It opens a crack in the painting through which other possible worlds can be seen.
> Since I do not believe that I am smarter than all of them, I should assign some probability to their being right
This seems to overstate the significance of intelligence in knowing the truth about something. This is most apparent when comparing to the beliefs of people in the past.
A hypothetical person with an IQ of 200 or some other number much higher than my own, living millennia ago might have thought, not without reason, that various physical phenomena like earthquakes were activity of gods, but meager IQ me can look up 'earthquake' on Wikipedia and have a view of reality that is much closer to the truth than theirs.
Even when comparing to people in the present, how much should one really update their priors in favor of religion on the basis of smart religious people? Are there not an even greater number of very smart not-religious people?
Or alternatively, are not very smart people more likely to leave religion than to adopt it?
But more significantly, intelligence is a tool that *could* be used to search for truth, but most people don't systematically honestly search for truth in the first place, let alone apply all their cognitive abilities to the task, so we would not expect a large correspondence between the veracity of beliefs and the intelligence of those who hold them.
In the case of religion in particular, we don't need to rely on pure heuristics based on the intelligence of those who hold given beliefs - we can look at the actual arguments put forth in favor of religion and see how compelling they seem...
You may not find the evidence convincing (I do), but there is positive evidence of consciousness operating separately from the physical body. If you do not find the UVA body of evidence persuasive, then you have to ask yourself what evidence you would find persuasive. Standard science cannot deal with the problem of consciousness, so if you require evidence coming out of, say, a physics department that adheres to the ground rules and paradigms of said department before giving more credence to the possibility of consciousness after death of the body, then you’ve created an impenetrable fortress of unfalsifiability, haven’t you?
Cryonics is worth considering, also the more interesting the person the greater chance of future creatures emulating your mind is and creating duplicates, perhaps this is a argument for living a more interesting life with the hope that your mind is emulated granting you immortality and or signalling to future creatures your worth simulating. If we are say sophisticated NPCs in some sort of game or history sim or fiction or something my guess is that players and or the main character is either a Elon Musk type or some 20th century dictator type or some sort of serial killer or other "bad guy", playing as someone who makes money to donate it all to the AMF to save NPC children seems boring. A ultra realistic version of essentially GTA where you can harm simulated minds however sounds like it would be a best seller, assuming future creatures share our instincts.
If we discover that there is a separate part of reality that we sense through moral intuition, wouldn’t physicists start theorizing about it and trying to observe it? It would be a part of reality not described by their existing theories and abstractions in a specific way.
But the idea of separate realities is incoherent. That which is real is part of reality. No one thinks that light and sound are parts of separate realities, although ordinarily we don’t hear light or see sound, much less taste them. Having two realities doesn’t make sense. It would mean something was real in one realm and unreal in the other.
Dividing reality into the parts we sort of understand and those we don’t makes sense, but it doesn’t establish that they are incapable of interacting, separate. Even if we convince ourselves that there is no connection, for “reality” to make sense, there can only be one.
This seems like a purely terminological issue to me. What are the observations we are trying to explain or predict?
OTOH, if moral intuition is an evolutionary strategy rather than a way of sensing reality directly, then the reality we are sensing is not separate.
It seems like there ought to be a way to test this empirically, but it is not occurring to me.
> the idea that our moral beliefs are imperfect perceptions of moral truth. That requires the existence of a moral reality separate from physical reality. The existence of something not explainable as part of physical reality makes that belief more plausible.
I would think that moral beliefs may not be 'real' the same way physical reality is, and therefore do not provide reason to postulate some parallel meta world, but that does not mean that the model of moral perception approximating moral truth, at least as briefly sketched here, is illegitimate. One can think of moral beliefs as being perspectives on physical reality. Perspectives may be part of an internally significant system, but they do not require some shadow realm to exist.
E.g. since you gave the example of preferences of chocolate vs. vanilla, I think that taste is actually a good example, although the *example* chocolate vs. vanilla is trivial, so it obfuscates the point.
Taste is a perspective on physical phenomena, but that is therefore not as "real" as the phenomena themselves, but it hardly arbitrary.
Considering the respective taste of chocolate and poop may be instructive. Although not as objective as say, the charge of an electron, the bad taste of poop does need to be an individual axiom - it fits logically within a larger web of deeper preferences, and could probably be deduced from them, just as the properties of a physical object could be deduced from the rules governing physical reality.
It may not be 'wrong' to murder someone the same way it is wrong that an apple falling off a tree will fly off into space instead of towards the ground, but murder could still be wrong the same way poop, or corpse flower are untasty. This is perfectly meaningful to a person interacting with reality, even if it is not as 'real' as reality itself.
More to the point though, I don't see why the mystery of consciousness should necessarily affect the "mystery of morality." Even if there exists an ethereal consciousness divorced from the physical world, why should relate to a model of moral realism?
As you yourself note in that post, even positing a god, which could be an ethereal consciousness divorced from the physical world, does not preclude the need for independent moral axioms - even if the god instructs them, you still need an axiom that states that the divine should be obeyed.
>It seems likely that the mind depends on the brain and dies when the body dies. The effect on the mind of things happening to the brain short of dying — alcohol or other drugs in the bloodstream or a blow to the skull — supports that conjecture. I know of no positive evidence against it. But as long as the nature of consciousness is a mystery to me, I cannot be certain.
More trivially, one could say that as long as anything remains unknown in the universe, that we cannot be certain of anything, since that unknown thing in the universe might affect anything. But this is trivially true about anything and therefore does not reflect any actual uncertainty with a given proposition.
Regarding the specific proposition at hand, I don't see why the existence of questions about consciousness in general should be a reason to consider the proposition that consciousness is not dependent on physical hardware and processes, given the stated evidence that it is.
This seems equivalent to saying "It seems likely that Tylenol depends on physically interacting with the body to work, so one person taking a Tylenol could not cure a different person's headache. I know of no positive evidence against it. But as long as the mechanism of action of Tylenol is a mystery to me, I cannot be certain." [Note that this is about *my knowledge of the MOA of Tylenol - it is not dependent on someone else knowing the MOA.]
Am I missing some reason why the point about consciousness is different?
Having *conscious* control over our actions makes no sense. Thoughts necessarily must think themselves. There's no logical alternative. If you think we consciously control our thoughts or actions, that would require you to think about something before you've thought about it, resulting in infinite regress. Thoughts, desires, intentions all simply enter our consciousness from deeper level non-consciously experienced cognitive processes, and the illusion of free will results from the (usually) very high correspondance between our consciously experienced intentions and our behaviors, this congruence not requiring in any way the existence of free will.
Sam Harris has excellent lessons (both in his podcast feed and through the Waking Up app) that can show, with just a little introspection, that we are actually not the thinker of thoughts. There and can be no free will, given that the laws of physics (quantum physics included) are running the show. It is very useful, IMO, to do the mindful work to recognize this. I write about that in various chapters in my latest.
https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Religions-half-failed-airplanes-basketball-ebook/dp/B0BGJGC5D3/
Thanks for this post. One of my fav topics (and probably one of, in not the most important question).
Your point about determinism and belief in determinism seems mistaken to me. I don't think that "I am merely a spectator" follows from "my behavior is deterministic."
Consider a simple thermostat, one that turns on a heat pump to cool a room when the temperature rises above 72°F, and turns it off when it falls lower. It's macroscopic enough so that questions of quantum mechanical indeterminacy can be disregarded; that is, we can treat it as a deterministic system. And the same is true of the heating and cooling of the room. So we could write a deterministic model of the thermostat's behavior. But does that mean that the thermostat is merely a passive sensor of the room's heating and cooling? Not at all! The causal sequence that gives rise to that history includes the behavior of the thermostat itself; were it not there there would be a different history. The thermostat controls the temperature, within certain limits.
I am able, through the use of language and conceptual thought, to form an image of the probable future outcome of my actions. Since I can do so now, before the actions take place, if that image is unattractive, my forming it can disrupt my performance of those actions, and lead me to envision a different set of actions with different consequences. And that process can continue till it converges on a set of actions whose consequences I find acceptable, or least unacceptable. My own thoughts about the future are part of the causal sequence that creates the future.
In fact, this ability to describe the future creates a form of self-referentiality that invites paradoxes. I think that the assumption that my future is completely predictable and I am only a passive spectator is one that it would be paradoxical for me to make. Alan Turing showed that an ideal computer cannot predict its own future behavior—and neither can I. But Turing's argument did not require the assumption that the computer was indeterministic.
Im not sure if youve engaged with Aristotle-Thomistic philosophers on these topics before but I have seen little overlap between the libertarians, atheists, critical rationalists (not necessarily linked) and that school of thought but they are very much in the logic/rational end of theology and I dont think most current atheists seriously address their arguments.
It isnt easy going but Edward Feser seems to be a very popular gateway into it all. http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/road-from-atheism.html
As a biased observer I love both sides but find there is much talking past each other and little good faith front on discussion between the two.
Moral intuition cannot be tied to fitness in the same way eating or sex drive can. Else slavery would have won evolution, as the winners of genetic passing on.
What if you saw and clearly understood a mechanism by which your conscious experience could arise? I.e., an explanation that allowed you to build an entity that you would expect to be conscious, and which exhibits all the hallmarks, and which, when varied in certain ways, varies its conscious-like behavior just as the explanation would predict. Would that dissolve the mystery of consciousness? (It certainly wouldn't dissolve the mystery of induction, of the universe's apparent regularity. That's a different question.)
David Friedman - Calvinists believe that everything is predetermined.
Sent response by accident. Personally, I find that the best way to discover spirituality is to practice it. I had a student who did not understand why Rashi commentary would be important. After 6 months of learning the weekly portion with Rashi, she was amazed at how brilliant he is.
Similarly, spirituality is indeed perceivable by human beings. The problem is, it requires a different sort of sight. I believe that anyone can access this. You see the people in India access it.
I conflate spirituality with consciousness, because I believe that that is the missing piece.
Just as I believe that God created the world and that answers the fundamental how of existence.
Also, I am a humble mortal fallible human being, I am not infinitely intelligent, and ultimately the real truth is always in humility. You don't know what you don't know.
The fact that I am certain consciousness exists but cannot fit it into my scientific world view reduces my confidence in the picture of the world linked to that view. It opens a crack in the painting through which other possible worlds can be seen.
I absolutely loved this quote.
> Since I do not believe that I am smarter than all of them, I should assign some probability to their being right
This seems to overstate the significance of intelligence in knowing the truth about something. This is most apparent when comparing to the beliefs of people in the past.
A hypothetical person with an IQ of 200 or some other number much higher than my own, living millennia ago might have thought, not without reason, that various physical phenomena like earthquakes were activity of gods, but meager IQ me can look up 'earthquake' on Wikipedia and have a view of reality that is much closer to the truth than theirs.
Even when comparing to people in the present, how much should one really update their priors in favor of religion on the basis of smart religious people? Are there not an even greater number of very smart not-religious people?
Or alternatively, are not very smart people more likely to leave religion than to adopt it?
But more significantly, intelligence is a tool that *could* be used to search for truth, but most people don't systematically honestly search for truth in the first place, let alone apply all their cognitive abilities to the task, so we would not expect a large correspondence between the veracity of beliefs and the intelligence of those who hold them.
In the case of religion in particular, we don't need to rely on pure heuristics based on the intelligence of those who hold given beliefs - we can look at the actual arguments put forth in favor of religion and see how compelling they seem...
It seems to me there are at least two things, then, that theists can account for that you cannot -- consciousness and a grounded belief in induction.
“I know of no positive evidence against it.”
Are you familiar with the work of the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies? https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/
You may not find the evidence convincing (I do), but there is positive evidence of consciousness operating separately from the physical body. If you do not find the UVA body of evidence persuasive, then you have to ask yourself what evidence you would find persuasive. Standard science cannot deal with the problem of consciousness, so if you require evidence coming out of, say, a physics department that adheres to the ground rules and paradigms of said department before giving more credence to the possibility of consciousness after death of the body, then you’ve created an impenetrable fortress of unfalsifiability, haven’t you?
Cryonics is worth considering, also the more interesting the person the greater chance of future creatures emulating your mind is and creating duplicates, perhaps this is a argument for living a more interesting life with the hope that your mind is emulated granting you immortality and or signalling to future creatures your worth simulating. If we are say sophisticated NPCs in some sort of game or history sim or fiction or something my guess is that players and or the main character is either a Elon Musk type or some 20th century dictator type or some sort of serial killer or other "bad guy", playing as someone who makes money to donate it all to the AMF to save NPC children seems boring. A ultra realistic version of essentially GTA where you can harm simulated minds however sounds like it would be a best seller, assuming future creatures share our instincts.
If we discover that there is a separate part of reality that we sense through moral intuition, wouldn’t physicists start theorizing about it and trying to observe it? It would be a part of reality not described by their existing theories and abstractions in a specific way.
But the idea of separate realities is incoherent. That which is real is part of reality. No one thinks that light and sound are parts of separate realities, although ordinarily we don’t hear light or see sound, much less taste them. Having two realities doesn’t make sense. It would mean something was real in one realm and unreal in the other.
Dividing reality into the parts we sort of understand and those we don’t makes sense, but it doesn’t establish that they are incapable of interacting, separate. Even if we convince ourselves that there is no connection, for “reality” to make sense, there can only be one.
This seems like a purely terminological issue to me. What are the observations we are trying to explain or predict?
OTOH, if moral intuition is an evolutionary strategy rather than a way of sensing reality directly, then the reality we are sensing is not separate.
It seems like there ought to be a way to test this empirically, but it is not occurring to me.