The
“Ask Philosophers” website (www.askphilosophers.org) is a site
that consists of questions submitted by the public, with answers
given by philosophers. No doubt there is much wisdom to be found at
this site, although I found quite a few answers that were poor or
illogical – such as the ones listed in my previous post. Below are some more examples.
Question 464 is an excellent and concise question: “Is it more probable that a
universe that looks designed is created by a designer than by random
natural forces?” In reply to this question, Stanford philosopher
Mark Crimmins gives a long answer that is poor indeed. He tries to
argue that it is hard to exactly calculate just precisely how
improbable it might be that a universe was designed, no matter what
characteristics it had. Using the term “designy-ness” to
apparently mean “resembling something designed,”
Crimmins then states, “the mere 'designy-ness' of our universe is
not by itself a good reason for confidence that it was designed.”
This
doesn't make sense. If we find ourselves in a garden that appears
to be designed, with 50 neat, even rows of flowers, that certainly is
a good reason for confidence that the garden was designed. If we find
ourselves in a structure that appears to be designed, with nice even
walls, nice even floors and a nice convenient roof, that certainly is
a good reason for confidence that such a structure was designed. And
if we find ourselves against enormous odds in a universe with many laws
favoring our existence, and with many fundamental constants that have
just the right values allowing us to exist, this “designy-ness"
would seem to be a good reason for confidence that such a universe
was designed. If you wish to escape such a conclusion, your only hope
would be to somehow specify some plausible theory as to how a
universe might accidentally have such favorable characteristics by
chance or by natural factors. It is illogical to argue, as Crimmins has, that the appearance of design in a universe is no basis for confidence that it is designed. I may note that confidence (which may be defined as thinking something is likely true) has lower evidence requirements than certainty.
As
for his “it's too hard to make an exact calculation of the
probability” type of reasoning, anyone can defeat that by giving
some simple examples. If I come to your backyard, and see a house of
cards on the back porch, I can have great confidence that such a
thing is the product of design rather than chance, even though I
cannot calculate precisely how unlikely it might be that someone
might throw a deck of cards into the air, and for a house of cards to
then appear. And if I see a log cabin house in the woods, I can have
very great confidence that such a thing is a product of design, even
though I cannot exactly calculate how improbable it might be that
falling trees in the woods would randomly form into a log cabin.
In question 24743, someone asks the question, “How can a certain bunch
of atoms be more self aware than another bunch?” The question is a
very good one. We can imagine a shoe box that has exactly the same
element abundances of the human brain, with the same number of grams
of carbon, the same number of grams of oxygen, and so forth. How
could a human brain with the same abundances of elements produce
consciousness, when the atoms in the shoe box do not? We can't
plausibly answer the question by saying that there is some particular
arrangement of the atoms that produces self-awareness.
Let
us imagine some machine that rearranges every 10 minutes the element
abundances in the human brain, producing a different combination of
positions for these atoms every ten minutes. It seems to make no
sense to think that the machine might run for a million years and not
produce any self-awareness, and that suddenly some particular
combination of these atoms would suddenly produce self-awareness.
The
answer to this question given by philosopher Stephen Maitzen is a
poor one. He merely says, “There's good evidence that the answer
has to do with whether a given bunch of atoms composes a being that
possesses a complex network of neurons.” There is no such evidence.
No one has the slightest idea of how neurons or a network of neurons
could produce self-awareness. If you try to suggest that somehow the
fact of all of the atoms being connected produces self-awareness, we
can point out that according to such reasoning the connected atoms in
a crystal lattice should be self-aware, or the densely packed and
connected vines in the Amazon forest should be self-aware.
A
good answer to question 24743 is to say that there is no obvious
reason why one set of atoms in a brain would be more self-aware than
any other set of atoms with the same abundances of elements, and that
such a thing is one of many reasons for thinking that our
self-awareness does not come from our brains, but from some deeper
reality, probably a spiritual reality.
In
question 4922, someone asks about the anthropic principle, asking
whether it is a tautology, or “is there something more substantive
behind it.” The anthropic principle (sometimes defined as the
principle that the universe must have characteristics that allow
observers to exist in it) is a principle that was evoked after
scientists discovered more and more cases of cosmic fine-tuning,
cases in which our universe has immensely improbable characteristics
necessary for living beings to exist in it. You can find many
examples of these cases of cosmic fine-tuning by doing a Google
search using either the phrase “anthropic principle” or “cosmic
fine-tuning,” or reading this post or this post.
The
answer given to question 4922 by philosopher Nicholas D. Smith is a
poor one. Smith says the anthropic principle “strikes me as neither
a tautology nor as something that has anything 'more substantive
behind it.' " Whether we can derive any principle like the
anthropic principle from the many cases of cosmic fine-tuning is
debatable, but clearly there is something enormously substantive that
has triggered discussions of the anthropic principle. That something
is the fact of cosmic fine-tuning. If our universe has many cases of
having just the right characteristics, characteristics fantastically
unlikely for a random universe to have, that philosophically is a
very big deal, and one of the most important things scientists have
ever discovered – not something that can be dismissed as lacking in
substance.
Against all odds, our universe got many "royal flushes"
In question 40, someone asks a classic philosophical question: “Why
does anything exist?” The questioner says, “Wouldn't it be more
believable if nothing existed?” The answer to this question given
by philosopher Jay L. Garfield is a poor one. After suggesting that
the questioner read a book by Wittgenstein (the last thing anyone
should do for insight on such a matter), Garfield merely suggests
that the question “might not really be a real question at all.”
That's hardly a decent answer to such a question.
An
intelligent response to the question of “why is there something
rather than nothing” would be one that acknowledged why the
question is an extremely natural one and a very substantive question
indeed. It is indeed baffling why anything exists. Imagining a
counter-factual, we can imagine a universe with no matter, no energy,
no minds, and no God. In fact, such a state of existence would be the
simplest possible state of existence. And we are tempted to regard
such a simplest-possible state of existence as being the most
plausible state of existence imaginable, for if there were eternal
nothingness there would be zero problems of explaining why reality is
the way it is. We can kind of get a hint as to a possible solution to
the problem of existence, that it might be solved by supposing an
ultimate reality the existence of which was necessary rather than
contingent. But with our limited minds, we probably cannot figure out
a full and final answer as to why there is something rather than
nothing. We have strong reason to suspect, however, that if you
fully understood why there is something rather than nothing, you
would have the answer to many other age-old questions.
In question 3363, a person very intelligently states the following:
When
I think about the organic lump of brain in my head understanding the
universe, or anything at all, it seems absurdly unlikely. That lump
of tissue seems to me more like a pancreas than a super-computer, and
I have a hard time understanding how organic tissue is able to reach
conclusions about the universe or existence.
We
get an answer from philosopher Allen Stairs, but only a poor one.
Stairs claims, “Neuroscientists will be able to tell you in a good
deal of detail why the brain is better suited to computing than the
pancreas is.” This statement implies that neuroscientists have
some idea of how it is than a brain can think or create ideas or
generate understanding of abstract concepts. They have no such
thing. As discussed here, no neuroscientist has ever given a remotely persuasive
explanation as to how a brain could understand anything or generate an idea or engage in abstract reasoning. A good answer to question
3363 would have commended the person raising the question, saying
that he has raised a very good point that has still not been
answered, and has at least brought attention to an important
shortcoming of modern neuroscience. Philosophically the point raised
by question 3363 is a very important one. The lack of any coherent
understanding as to how neurons could produce mental phenomena such as consciousness, understanding and ideas is one of the major reasons for rejecting the idea that the mind is
purely or mainly the product of the brain. Many other reasons are
discussed at this site.
In
question 4165 a person raises the topic of near-death experiences,
and asks whether philosophy has an opinion on this type of
experience. The answer we get from Allen Stairs is a poor one. He
attempts to argue that “it's not clear that it would do much to
support the idea that the mind is separate from the body,” even if
someone reported floating out of his body and seeing some
information that was taped to the top of a tall object, information
he should have been unable to see from an operating table. This
opinion makes no sense. Such evidence would indeed do much to support
the idea that the mind is separate from the body. This type of
evidence has already been gathered; see here for some dramatic cases similar to what the questioner discussed (verified information that someone acquired during a near-death experience, even though it should have been impossible for him to have acquired such information through normal sensory experience).
Stairs
states the following to try and support his strange claim that people
repeatedly reporting floating out of their bodies does not support
the idea that the mind is separate from the brain:
Stairs
seems to be appealing here to a kind of principle that something
isn't an explanation if it raises unanswered questions. That is not a
sound principle at all, and in general in the history of science we
find that important explanations usually raise many unanswered
questions. For example, if we were to explain the rotation speeds of
stars around the center of the galaxy by the explanation of dark matter, as many
astrophysicists like to do, that raises quite a few unanswered
questions, such as what type of particle dark matter is made up of, and
how dark matter interacts with ordinary matter.
As
for Stair's insinuation that postulating a mind or soul separate from
the body is “not much of an explanation at all,” that's not at
all true. By postulating such a thing, it would seem that we can
explain many things all at once. By postulating a soul as a
repository of our memories, we can explain why people are able to
remember things for 50 years, despite the very rapid protein turnover in
synapses which should prevent brains from storing memories for longer
than a few weeks. By postulating a soul as a repository of our
memories, we can explain why humans are able to instantly recall old
and obscure memories, something that cannot be plausibly explained
with the idea that memories are stored in brains (which creates a
most severe “how could a brain instantly find a needle in a
haystack” problem discussed here). By postulating a soul as the
source of our intelligence, we can explain the fact (discussed here) that epileptic
children who have hemispherectomy operations (the surgical removal of half of their brains) suffer only slight decreases in IQ, or none at
all. By postulating a soul, we can explain how humans score at a 32 percent accuracy on ganzfeld ESP tests in which the expected chance result is only 25 percent (ESP being quite compatible with the idea of a soul). And by postulating a soul apart from our body, we can explain
why so many people have near-death experiences in which they report
their consciousness moving out of their bodies. So far from being
“not much of an explanation at all” as Stairs suggests, by
postulating a soul separate from the body, it would seem that we can explain quite a few things in one
fell swoop.
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