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Throughout history, people have always avoided naturalism, almost at any cost. I think that this in part has to do with the crude reality it implies, it a very

Throughout history, people have always avoided naturalism, almost at any cost. I think that this in part has to do with the crude reality it implies, it a very hard pill to swallow to anyone who understands it well. However, time and again, what has been attributed to non-natural, magical entities, has turn out false. If I wanted to avoid becoming the next sun-worshipping, cow-worshipping idolatrous, I would be very wary of any supernatural claim.

BobbyJo 5y ago
(since you are juxtaposing naturalism and magic, I'm assuming by naturalism you mean materialism. If that is incorrect, ignore me.) Yes, but also no. Materialism is a way of looking at the world that itself encompasses the scientific method. Saying that the scientific method always proves materialism correct is a tautology. I think what's different this time around is that we are saying materialism is likely incomplete, as opposed to 'wrong', which seems like a safe bet given our advancing understanding of the universe. Give the materialists that which is theirs.
- Layke1123 5y ago
  What? If anything, over time, science has increasingly shown that a material view of the world is far more accurate. Just because we don't have a complete theory of the universe yet, that does not mean it is likely incomplete. We've only been seriously at this for about 200 years. It took us 50 from the first flight to land on the moon. Why would you think it's more likely to reverse trend suddenly?
- Dudeman112 5y ago
  >Saying that the scientific method always proves materialism correct is a tautology If, on a hypothetical example, we could come up with an experiment where you removed half of 100 people's nervous system and most of them kept acting like normal then the scientific method would "prove" that materialism isn't correct (unless, of course, someone came and found out that what actually makes people behave like they do isn't their nervous system). There is nothing making the scientific method unable ascertain whether there is more to the universe than the physical things in it. The scientific method just fails again and again at reaching the opposite stance.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    > If, on a hypothetical example, we could come up with an experiment where you removed half of 100 people's nervous system and most of them kept acting like normal then the scientific method would "prove" that materialism isn't correct Ah, you yourself are falling into the old failings of combating materialism: Using materialist methods and materialist measures. Trying to prove materialism wrong with materialist frameworks is a fools errand. Like mentioned above: it has failed time and time again, and I'm fairly confident it would fail in your example.
    - jacobr1 5y ago
      > Trying to prove materialism wrong with materialist frameworks is a fools errand ... it has failed time and time again Howso? What alternative is there that still uses logical, if albeit not materialist methods?
      - BobbyJo 5y ago
        There are none. Non-materialist sciences are horribly underdeveloped. We have two options for exploring solutions to problems we may suspect non-materialist answers to: 1) Try materialism over and over again anyway hoping it will eventually solve the problem. 2) Develop a new discipline starting with the axioms of the problem at hand. Number 1 has been so successful and provided so much work for scientists that any problem it doesn't work for mostly gets ignored. I'm not saying materialism is necessarily wrong or bad BTW, just that it has a limit. It starts and ends at the perimeter of shared *human* experience.
    - Dudeman112 5y ago
      What method exactly are you going to use? If the argument is "X isn't encapsulated in the material" then surely removing the material should leave X intact. The other option is experimenting on what actually encapsulates X, but non materialists have a tendency to say what actually encapsulates X cannot be interacted with nor observed. Yet they somehow claim that the non interactable non observable stuff is the actual mechanism by which things work. Which begs the question of how they reached that answer to begin with... since it's non interactable and non observable Unless you got good reason to believe that there is more to it, you don't attach additional meta proprieties that no one can investigate, even from first principles (and this part is important, because it could be that the investigation methods simply haven't got there yet)
plutonorm 5y ago
Examine your own experience. Pinch yourself. Attempt to deny the salience of that experience. Now attempt to explain that subjective experience arising from pure matter.
- simiones 5y ago
  This has largely been solved by computation, for me and many others. In this interpretation, the brain is a computing machine that decodes signals from the outside world into various internal forms, akin to, say, the in-memory representation of a data structure representing an image being observed by an image sensor. Subjective feelings are then the result of a certain part of the brain analyzing other parts of the brain. All of the various quibbles about "qualia" and "p-zombies" and such seem to just be conceptions that beg the question. Sure, we can imagine or conceive of a being which reacts to stimuli and reasons without having internal feelings, but there is no reason to actually assert that such a being is actually possible. It is very possible that feelings/"qualia" are a necessary component/by-product of a computing system capable of general intelligence and self-reflection. In the Mary's Room thought experiment, it's quite possible that if Mary knows everything that there is to know about the physics of light and the neuroscience of color perception, she can literally cause herself to imagine the color red, or ultra-violet, so that she will not be at all surprised when she encounters actual red for the first time. In the Chinese Room thought experiment, the Room (homunculus + books) quite possibly understands Chinese in the same sense as a Chinese-speaking human does, even if the homunculus inside doesn't.
  - huetius 5y ago
    I’ve always found it amusing that in the Chinese Room, we are expected to uphold as reality the perspective of the guy being duped.
    - simiones 5y ago
      Are you referring to the person sending its question to the Chinese Room as "the guy being duped"? If so, if they pose a question in Chinese and obtain a meaningful answer in Chinese, in what way are they "being duped"? You would only call them "being duped" if you believe that the answer is somehow meaningfully different from what a real Chinese-speaking human would have given, which I and many others do not accept.
monktastic1 5y ago
Perhaps the greatest trick that materialism has pulled off is conflating "natural" with "material." To the idealist, mind -- this experiential fabric that is directly and unmistakably apprehensible -- is perfectly natural, and so idealism is "naturalism." The in-principle-unobservable abstraction called "matter" is what's spooky and unnecessary. Struggling hard to avoid a particular outcome ("*-worshipping") makes it harder to be completely unbiased and look where the raw data is pointing. That's why the Enlightenment, in setting itself in direct opposition to the Church, ended up with materialism (though it first made a foray into Cartesian dualism).
bobthechef 5y ago
This is a terrible argument. The bit about the supernatural is also non sequitur in this context. The OP was talking about materialism specifically, and naturalists are materialists, but the emphasis where materialism is concerned is metaphysical, namely, the thesis that that all that exists is matter and that matter is essentially extension in space, devoid of all those things any sane person acknowledges (qualia like color and intentional states like desires). Materialism, as have been shown time and again, is incoherent. It cannot explain something like color even as an illusion, because it cannot account for color even in principle in any way. At least the Cartesian, crippled by his own set of problems, could relegate things like that to the res cogitans. Trying to explain these things using only the res extensa is like trying to build the color blue out of triangles. It also does not follow that any non-materialist position automatically accepts "magical" things (though you weren't specific about what you meant by "magical" or even "non-natural"). No one thinks of qualia or intentionality as "non-natural" or "magical". It is the nature of human beings to have desires and beliefs. It is the nature of matter to have color. But more to the point, I'm not sure how you leapt naturalism-qua-materialism to what is essentially God-of-the-gaps. (Mind you, the traditional understanding of God, in Catholicism and reaching all the way back to Moses, is that God is self-subsisting being whose nature it is to exist and that by which all things exist. Things cannot account for their own existence because existence is prior to things; if it were a property, it would be posterior which is absurd, and if it were identical with things, then plurality would be impossible, though this, too, is absurd). Materialism is insinuated by the scientistic strains in our culture which creates a kind of bad mental habit of rejecting anything that cannot be pigeonholed into the straightjacket of materialist presuppositions and a compulsion to rephrase reality in terms of those presuppositions. But these aren't explanations. These are redefinitions.
inter_netuser 5y ago
Read some Steiner.

BobbyJo 5y ago

(since you are juxtaposing naturalism and magic, I'm assuming by naturalism you mean materialism. If that is incorrect, ignore me.) Yes, but also no. Materialism is a way of looking at the world that itself encompasses the scientific method. Saying that the scientific method always proves materialism correct is a tautology. I think what's different this time around is that we are saying materialism is likely incomplete, as opposed to 'wrong', which seems like a safe bet given our advancing understanding of the universe. Give the materialists that which is theirs.

Layke1123 5y ago
What? If anything, over time, science has increasingly shown that a material view of the world is far more accurate. Just because we don't have a complete theory of the universe yet, that does not mean it is likely incomplete. We've only been seriously at this for about 200 years. It took us 50 from the first flight to land on the moon. Why would you think it's more likely to reverse trend suddenly?
Dudeman112 5y ago
>Saying that the scientific method always proves materialism correct is a tautology If, on a hypothetical example, we could come up with an experiment where you removed half of 100 people's nervous system and most of them kept acting like normal then the scientific method would "prove" that materialism isn't correct (unless, of course, someone came and found out that what actually makes people behave like they do isn't their nervous system). There is nothing making the scientific method unable ascertain whether there is more to the universe than the physical things in it. The scientific method just fails again and again at reaching the opposite stance.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  > If, on a hypothetical example, we could come up with an experiment where you removed half of 100 people's nervous system and most of them kept acting like normal then the scientific method would "prove" that materialism isn't correct Ah, you yourself are falling into the old failings of combating materialism: Using materialist methods and materialist measures. Trying to prove materialism wrong with materialist frameworks is a fools errand. Like mentioned above: it has failed time and time again, and I'm fairly confident it would fail in your example.
  - jacobr1 5y ago
    > Trying to prove materialism wrong with materialist frameworks is a fools errand ... it has failed time and time again Howso? What alternative is there that still uses logical, if albeit not materialist methods?
    - BobbyJo 5y ago
      There are none. Non-materialist sciences are horribly underdeveloped. We have two options for exploring solutions to problems we may suspect non-materialist answers to: 1) Try materialism over and over again anyway hoping it will eventually solve the problem. 2) Develop a new discipline starting with the axioms of the problem at hand. Number 1 has been so successful and provided so much work for scientists that any problem it doesn't work for mostly gets ignored. I'm not saying materialism is necessarily wrong or bad BTW, just that it has a limit. It starts and ends at the perimeter of shared *human* experience.
  - Dudeman112 5y ago
    What method exactly are you going to use? If the argument is "X isn't encapsulated in the material" then surely removing the material should leave X intact. The other option is experimenting on what actually encapsulates X, but non materialists have a tendency to say what actually encapsulates X cannot be interacted with nor observed. Yet they somehow claim that the non interactable non observable stuff is the actual mechanism by which things work. Which begs the question of how they reached that answer to begin with... since it's non interactable and non observable Unless you got good reason to believe that there is more to it, you don't attach additional meta proprieties that no one can investigate, even from first principles (and this part is important, because it could be that the investigation methods simply haven't got there yet)

plutonorm 5y ago

Examine your own experience. Pinch yourself. Attempt to deny the salience of that experience. Now attempt to explain that subjective experience arising from pure matter.

simiones 5y ago
This has largely been solved by computation, for me and many others. In this interpretation, the brain is a computing machine that decodes signals from the outside world into various internal forms, akin to, say, the in-memory representation of a data structure representing an image being observed by an image sensor. Subjective feelings are then the result of a certain part of the brain analyzing other parts of the brain. All of the various quibbles about "qualia" and "p-zombies" and such seem to just be conceptions that beg the question. Sure, we can imagine or conceive of a being which reacts to stimuli and reasons without having internal feelings, but there is no reason to actually assert that such a being is actually possible. It is very possible that feelings/"qualia" are a necessary component/by-product of a computing system capable of general intelligence and self-reflection. In the Mary's Room thought experiment, it's quite possible that if Mary knows everything that there is to know about the physics of light and the neuroscience of color perception, she can literally cause herself to imagine the color red, or ultra-violet, so that she will not be at all surprised when she encounters actual red for the first time. In the Chinese Room thought experiment, the Room (homunculus + books) quite possibly understands Chinese in the same sense as a Chinese-speaking human does, even if the homunculus inside doesn't.
- huetius 5y ago
  I’ve always found it amusing that in the Chinese Room, we are expected to uphold as reality the perspective of the guy being duped.
  - simiones 5y ago
    Are you referring to the person sending its question to the Chinese Room as "the guy being duped"? If so, if they pose a question in Chinese and obtain a meaningful answer in Chinese, in what way are they "being duped"? You would only call them "being duped" if you believe that the answer is somehow meaningfully different from what a real Chinese-speaking human would have given, which I and many others do not accept.

monktastic1 5y ago

Perhaps the greatest trick that materialism has pulled off is conflating "natural" with "material." To the idealist, mind -- this experiential fabric that is directly and unmistakably apprehensible -- is perfectly natural, and so idealism is "naturalism." The in-principle-unobservable abstraction called "matter" is what's spooky and unnecessary. Struggling hard to avoid a particular outcome ("*-worshipping") makes it harder to be completely unbiased and look where the raw data is pointing. That's why the Enlightenment, in setting itself in direct opposition to the Church, ended up with materialism (though it first made a foray into Cartesian dualism).

bobthechef 5y ago

This is a terrible argument. The bit about the supernatural is also non sequitur in this context. The OP was talking about materialism specifically, and naturalists are materialists, but the emphasis where materialism is concerned is metaphysical, namely, the thesis that that all that exists is matter and that matter is essentially extension in space, devoid of all those things any sane person acknowledges (qualia like color and intentional states like desires). Materialism, as have been shown time and again, is incoherent. It cannot explain something like color even as an illusion, because it cannot account for color even in principle in any way. At least the Cartesian, crippled by his own set of problems, could relegate things like that to the res cogitans. Trying to explain these things using only the res extensa is like trying to build the color blue out of triangles. It also does not follow that any non-materialist position automatically accepts "magical" things (though you weren't specific about what you meant by "magical" or even "non-natural"). No one thinks of qualia or intentionality as "non-natural" or "magical". It is the nature of human beings to have desires and beliefs. It is the nature of matter to have color. But more to the point, I'm not sure how you leapt naturalism-qua-materialism to what is essentially God-of-the-gaps. (Mind you, the traditional understanding of God, in Catholicism and reaching all the way back to Moses, is that God is self-subsisting being whose nature it is to exist and that by which all things exist. Things cannot account for their own existence because existence is prior to things; if it were a property, it would be posterior which is absurd, and if it were identical with things, then plurality would be impossible, though this, too, is absurd). Materialism is insinuated by the scientistic strains in our culture which creates a kind of bad mental habit of rejecting anything that cannot be pigeonholed into the straightjacket of materialist presuppositions and a compulsion to rephrase reality in terms of those presuppositions. But these aren't explanations. These are redefinitions.

inter_netuser 5y ago

Read some Steiner.