More Poor Answers at the "Ask Philosophers" Site

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:

How would that work? Does the bodiless mind have eyes? How did the interaction between whatever was up there on top of that tall object and the disembodied mind work? How did the information get stored? How did the mind reconnect with the patient's brain? The point isn't that the mind must be embodied. The point is that a case like this would only amount to good evidence for minds separate from bodies if that idea gave us a good explanation for the case. As it stands, it's not clear that it gives us much of an explanation at all, let the best one.

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.