The term "naturalism" is vague and bordering on being meaningless

[bilby]

I think that "natural" and "supernatural" are perfectly clear in the context of a philosophical dualism in which reality is split between two distinct domains--the physical and the spiritual (or "occult"). Those two domains can interact causally with each other, so phenomena in the physical world can have supernatural causes and vice versa. So a spiritual being such as a god can perform miracles in the physical world, and events in the physical world can cause effects on spiritual beings. A "naturalist" then would be someone who rejects that concept of dualism and believes that there is just one "natural" domain. All things that happen, including all mental phenomena, therefore have physical causes. Conventional dualism holds that at least some mental activity takes place independently in the spiritual realm.

Yeah.

Dualism is very popular, and demonstrably wrong.

But as philosophers typically don't know much advanced physics, they are comfortable with assuming that it's not necessary to know advanced physics in order to have an informed opinion on the matter.

Dualism persists solely because of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

 

[Copernicus]

I think that "natural" and "supernatural" are perfectly clear in the context of a philosophical dualism in which reality is split between two distinct domains--the physical and the spiritual (or "occult"). Those two domains can interact causally with each other, so phenomena in the physical world can have supernatural causes and vice versa. So a spiritual being such as a god can perform miracles in the physical world, and events in the physical world can cause effects on spiritual beings. A "naturalist" then would be someone who rejects that concept of dualism and believes that there is just one "natural" domain. All things that happen, including all mental phenomena, therefore have physical causes. Conventional dualism holds that at least some mental activity takes place independently in the spiritual realm.

Yeah.

Dualism is very popular, and demonstrably wrong.

But as philosophers typically don't know much advanced physics, they are comfortable with assuming that it's not necessary to know advanced physics in order to have an informed opinion on the matter.

Dualism persists solely because of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

But you don't need to be a physicist to show that Cartesian dualism is extremely unlikely. We all know that physical changes to the brain have a direct effect on mental activity, and there is no evidence to suggest any mental function that does not correlate with physical brain activity.

I think that a philosopher would tend to take the position that Cartesian dualism cannot be ruled out as impossible. Advanced physics can help us to understand why dualism violates Occam's Razor, but dualism cannot be ruled out from a logical perspective. The problem with trying to use science to disprove dualism is that science is grounded in the unproven assumption that all physical phenomena have physical causes. If we dropped that assumption, then scientific proofs would be impossible. So it would ultimately be circular to try to use science to prove or disprove an assumption that science is based on.

 

[Torin]

[MENTION=37]bilby[/MENTION]

Let's say the supernaturalist argues that all of the observed laws of physics have only held up to now due to the work of the supernatural, undetectable, and incomprehensible Physics Elves. However, the Physics Elves are mischievous, and can reverse the laws of physics at their leisure if and when they choose.

This is absurd and arbitrary, but I see no conceivable way of disproving it.

Are you saying this assertion can be disproven?

 

[Politesse]

I had the impression that the contrary position to dualism was monism, not naturalism. No?

 

[bilby]

[MENTION=37]bilby[/MENTION]

Let's say the supernaturalist argues that all of the observed laws of physics have only held up to now due to the work of the supernatural, undetectable, and incomprehensible Physics Elves. However, the Physics Elves are mischievous, and can reverse the laws of physics at their leisure if and when they choose.

This is absurd and arbitrary, but I see no conceivable way of disproving it.

Are you saying this assertion can be disproven?

I am saying it can be proven to be absurd. We know that mass and energy are interchangeable. Any force acting on matter must therefore be associated with a particle whose mass is proportional to the energy exerted.

And this interchangeablility is observable - put enough energy into one place, and every possible particle must arise (unless QFT is wrong, which it's not). That's how the hypothetical Higgs boson was discovered - we built a machine that concentrates vast amounts of energy in a tiny space, and looked at the particles that this generated.

In order to have an effect on the universe at human scales, the hypothetical physics elves must interact via one of the forces in the Standard Model (unless QFT is wrong, which it's not). We now have a complete list of all of the particles and forces that can exist at the relevant scale - any 'unknown' particle or force must either be so weak as to only have significant effects on vast scales, or so energetic as to vaporize anyone it interacts with. And this fact applies to your physics elves, just as much as it does to any other interactions.

You can hypothesize all you like - but you need to recognise that by doing so you are asserting (by implication) that our most robust and well tested scientific theory is completely, wildly, and utterly wrong, and that we have failed to notice that fact. This is a considerably less reasonable and rational assertion than that the Moon really is made of cheese, but we haven't noticed.

That's as close to disproof as it is possible to get outside pure mathematics. It's as robust a claim as any claim can be, at our current state of knowledge, so to question it is truly absurd - and tantamount to a claim that we know nothing at all, and that all of our technology, engineering, and infrastructure works not because we figured out how to make it work, but because we have been incredibly lucky, and it has worked despite our theories about how it works being utter crap.

Such absurd claims are just mental masturbation. They are a waste of everybody's time.

 

[bilby]

I had the impression that the contrary position to dualism was monism, not naturalism. No?

Sure; But if only one realm exists, it would be rather strange to insist that it isn't the material realm, given that we can kick stuff.

 

[ruby sparks]

I’m good with dualism in principle, by which I mean that I would not rule it out. That said I am not sure what sort of dualism I mean.

In principle, that the mental is pretty fecking different from other stuff is not some thing I would deny.

Of course, it could just be that what we call the mental is just a type of physical that we can’t get our heads around (this is in fact my favourite opinion).

 

[bilby]

I’m good with dualism in principle, by which I mean that I would not rule it out. That said I am not sure what sort of dualism I mean.

In principle, that the mental is pretty fecking different from other stuff is not some thing I would deny.

Of course, it could just be that what we call the mental is just a type of physical that we can’t get our heads around (this is in fact my favourite opinion).

It's the only possibility.

And frankly, the leap from "I don't know how it works" to "therefore it must use some special stuff that's by its nature is beyond understanding" is one that has been made many times before, and has always been found to be false. It's also massively egoistic, and stupidly unparsimonious.

The only reason to invoke duslism seems to me to be the desire to avoid admitting ignorance (or at least to hedge that admission with a claim that ignorance is the only possibility, so it doesn't qualify as a failing).

"I don't know, but I hope one day to find out" appears to be very hard for many people to say, and the result is a lot of rather foolish speculation that cannot stand scrutiny. Dualism is ultimately a turbocharged argument from ignorance: "I don't know, so nobody ever shall".

 

[Copernicus]

I had the impression that the contrary position to dualism was monism, not naturalism. No?

I tried to make it clear that I was only talking about Cartesian dualism. Recall that there are different philosophical positions on types of dualism, e.g. substance (aka Cartesian) dualism and property dualism. That is, there are alternatives to Cartesian dualism.

 

[abaddon]

I’m good with dualism in principle, by which I mean that I would not rule it out. That said I am not sure what sort of dualism I mean.

In principle, that the mental is pretty fecking different from other stuff is not some thing I would deny.

Of course, it could just be that what we call the mental is just a type of physical that we can’t get our heads around (this is in fact my favourite opinion).

My stance is similar - that subjectivity is distinct enough to keep wondering at it and we're not near an answer to what everything is yet.  Property dualism might be the sort of dualism you mean. See  panpsychism and  neutral monism also, if interested.

 

[ruby sparks]

I’m good with dualism in principle, by which I mean that I would not rule it out. That said I am not sure what sort of dualism I mean.

In principle, that the mental is pretty fecking different from other stuff is not some thing I would deny.

Of course, it could just be that what we call the mental is just a type of physical that we can’t get our heads around (this is in fact my favourite opinion).

My stance is similar - that subjectivity is distinct enough to keep wondering at it and we're not near an answer to what everything is yet.  Property dualism might be the sort of dualism you mean. See  panpsychism and  neutral monism also, if interested.

We could for example, I'm thinking, follow Tammuz' suggestion and start with one basic, overarching category, existence.

A = All that exists (ie is real).

Then we could say:

A(1) = Physical/material stuff
A(2) = Mental stuff

So it would just be having two taxonomic subcategories which are types of A.

Is that dualist, or monist?

I think it's arguably essentially monist (there's only one type of thing, A).

And the two suggested subtypes would only need to be sufficiently (but not completely) different from one another to permit for separate categories within the larger one.

I might argue that the two subtypes (physical and mental) are sufficiently unreconciled (at this time) to allow for separate categorisation in a taxonomy. I think a case could be made for that.

I think many atheists (including myself) are understandably averse to dualist concepts because of the associations between dualism and theism, but I'm not sure that's enough of a reason. I would guess that it's possible to hold some form of dualism without being theistic in the slightest, or indeed invoking anything supernatural.

One which note, I considered saying:

A = All that exists (ie is real, is natural).

Which would then eliminate/exclude the supernatural. Although to be strict about it, it would only eliminate/exclude the binary opposite of natural, the non-natural. The prefix 'super' might not be as exact, and might merely indicate 'more than normal' which is one of its common/everyday usages. Although to be fair I don't think that covers all its usages. I think another fundamental one is 'above and beyond', in which case I would say it would be eliminated from A. But perhaps non-natural is more precise and less potentially ambiguous, because there is only one thing it can mean.

Similarly, when describing something that is not conscious, we might be better to say non-conscious than subconscious. I'm using the prefix 'sub' as an antonym for 'super'.

 

[ruby sparks]

It's the only possibility.

"I don't know, but I hope one day to find out" appears to be very hard for many people to say....

Evidently the second seems to be true in your case.

 

[bilby]

It's the only possibility.

"I don't know, but I hope one day to find out" appears to be very hard for many people to say....

Evidently the second seems to be true in your case.

Ah, but some things I do know. And that nothing outside the Standard Model can affect things in that model at scales relevant to human beings is one of those things.

 

[Bomb#20]

I think that "natural" and "supernatural" are perfectly clear in the context of a philosophical dualism in which reality is split between two distinct domains--the physical and the spiritual (or "occult"). Those two domains can interact causally with each other, so phenomena in the physical world can have supernatural causes and vice versa.

Clear as mud. If causality flows freely between the two domains, then what distinguishes the border from any other arbitrary line drawn through reality?

So a spiritual being such as a god can perform miracles in the physical world, and events in the physical world can cause effects on spiritual beings.

Likewise, a tigerish being such as Mantecore can perform miracles in the untigerish world, and events in the untigerish world can cause effects on tigerish beings. So what's the difference between your calling an effect of a god on a human a "miracle", merely on account of your having chosen to draw a line between gods and humans, and my calling Mantecore crippling Roy Horn a "miracle", merely on account of my having chosen to draw a line between tigers and humans?

Reality contains all manner of things we can't see: things we infer the existence of from observing the behavior of stuff we can see. Gravity waves, for instance. We routinely call such things "physical" and "natural", purely on the basis that we have figured out that causality flows between them and the rest of the stuff we call "physical" and "natural".

A "naturalist" then would be someone who rejects that concept of dualism and believes that there is just one "natural" domain. All things that happen, including all mental phenomena, therefore have physical causes. Conventional dualism holds that at least some mental activity takes place independently in the spiritual realm.

If causing and being caused by "physical" events is sufficient to make a gravity wave "physical" and "natural", why is it insufficient to also make mental phenomena "physical" and "natural"? A conventional dualist insists they are in a distinct "supernatural" "spiritual" domain. Why? What criteria does that mental activity fail to satisfy that a gravity wave satisfies?

Let's say the supernaturalist argues that all of the observed laws of physics have only held up to now due to the work of the supernatural, undetectable, and incomprehensible Physics Elves. However, the Physics Elves are mischievous, and can reverse the laws of physics at their leisure if and when they choose.

This is absurd and arbitrary, but I see no conceivable way of disproving it.

Are you saying this assertion can be disproven?

Before we consider whether it can be disproven we need to understand what the supernaturalist is claiming.

Let's suppose there really are mischievous, undetectable and incomprehensible Physics Elves. Let's suppose our observation that action always equals reaction has only held up to now due to the Physics Elves having deliberately made that happen every time we were measuring carefully. Let's suppose they not only can but sometimes have reversed that when we weren't looking. Let's suppose Physics Elves sometimes move rocks by pushing on them, without the rocks pushing back on the Physics Elves in turn. Let's suppose all that's true. So what exactly is the supernaturalist claiming about this situation when he calls the Physics Elves "supernatural"? What exactly is the distinction he is drawing, when he calls the statement "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." a "law of physics that the Physics Elves reversed", instead of simply calling that statement "wrong"?

Which is to say, what criteria do Physics Elves fail to satisfy that a gravity wave satisfies?

 

[Copernicus]

I think that "natural" and "supernatural" are perfectly clear in the context of a philosophical dualism in which reality is split between two distinct domains--the physical and the spiritual (or "occult"). Those two domains can interact causally with each other, so phenomena in the physical world can have supernatural causes and vice versa.

Clear as mud. If causality flows freely between the two domains, then what distinguishes the border from any other arbitrary line drawn through reality?

I didn't say that causality flowed freely. Most people in the world start with the assumption of dualism. Belief in a spiritual plane of existence is widespread and taken as a given. We may be in violent agreement that it is an implausible, untenable assumption, but it is a logical possibility. People who believe that there are two different planes of reality--spiritual (mental) and physical--don't purport to know how they interact, so this isn't much of a challenge for them. Our earliest experiences were of a distinction between our mental reality of bodily sensation and control vs. external events that we could not always sense or control. Our brains were hardwired to build hypotheses about how external reality worked and to test those hypotheses through observation and experimentation. So dualism of some sort is grounded in early experiences.

So a spiritual being such as a god can perform miracles in the physical world, and events in the physical world can cause effects on spiritual beings.

Likewise, a tigerish being such as Mantecore can perform miracles in the untigerish world, and events in the untigerish world can cause effects on tigerish beings. So what's the difference between your calling an effect of a god on a human a "miracle", merely on account of your having chosen to draw a line between gods and humans, and my calling Mantecore crippling Roy Horn a "miracle", merely on account of my having chosen to draw a line between tigers and humans?

Reality contains all manner of things we can't see: things we infer the existence of from observing the behavior of stuff we can see. Gravity waves, for instance. We routinely call such things "physical" and "natural", purely on the basis that we have figured out that causality flows between them and the rest of the stuff we call "physical" and "natural".

OK, sure. You reject that kind of dualism as implausible. So do I. I'm not defending its plausibility, just its clarity as a model of how reality works. You are picking an argument with someone who also rejects Cartesian dualism. What I don't agree with is the claim that the natural/supernatural dichotomy is any vaguer than competing models of reality. If you want to say that there are other possible, even more absurd, models of how things work, I'm not going to argue with you. Build all the straw men you want, and I'll help you knock them over.

A "naturalist" then would be someone who rejects that concept of dualism and believes that there is just one "natural" domain. All things that happen, including all mental phenomena, therefore have physical causes. Conventional dualism holds that at least some mental activity takes place independently in the spiritual realm.

If causing and being caused by "physical" events is sufficient to make a gravity wave "physical" and "natural", why is it insufficient to also make mental phenomena "physical" and "natural"? A conventional dualist insists they are in a distinct "supernatural" "spiritual" domain. Why? What criteria does that mental activity fail to satisfy that a gravity wave satisfies?

I would say that the answer to that goes back to our earliest experience of ourselves interacting with the external world. Our mental reality consists of perceiving the external world through bodily senses and moving our bodies to interact with that world. So dualism has an intuitive basis going back to infancy. Brains and gravity waves are concepts that we acquire much later in life, well after our instinctive grasp of dualism has been firmly established from long experience. We come to learn of gravity waves as a hypothetical force that attracts physical objects, not as a spiritual force. But who knows? Maybe angels and demons are behind all physical forces. Some folks believe they are.

 

[Bomb#20]

...Those two domains can interact causally with each other, so phenomena in the physical world can have supernatural causes and vice versa.

...If causality flows freely between the two domains, then what distinguishes the border from any other arbitrary line drawn through reality?

I didn't say that causality flowed freely.

If "can interact causally" isn't the same thing as "causality flows freely", what restriction on the flow of causality do you have in mind?

Most people in the world start with the assumption of dualism. Belief in a spiritual plane of existence is widespread and taken as a given.

People believe a lot of goofy things that make no logical sense. "Everything has a cause; therefore there must have been an uncaused First Cause.", for instance.

We may be in violent agreement that it is an implausible, untenable assumption, but it is a logical possibility.

But that's not something I agree with. To qualify as an implausible, untenable assumption, a sentence first has to mean something.

People who believe that there are two different planes of reality--spiritual (mental) and physical--don't purport to know how they interact, so this isn't much of a challenge for them. Our earliest experiences were of a distinction between our mental reality of bodily sensation and control vs. external events that we could not always sense or control. Our brains were hardwired to build hypotheses about how external reality worked and to test those hypotheses through observation and experimentation. So dualism of some sort is grounded in early experiences.

That's a self-vs-other division, not a spiritual-vs-physical division. You can control your own arm but not your neighbor's arm; you can perceive your own thoughts but not your neighbor's thoughts.

So a spiritual being such as a god can perform miracles in the physical world, and events in the physical world can cause effects on spiritual beings.

Likewise, a tigerish being such as Mantecore can perform miracles in the untigerish world, and events in the untigerish world can cause effects on tigerish beings. So what's the difference between your calling an effect of a god on a human a "miracle", merely on account of your having chosen to draw a line between gods and humans, and my calling Mantecore crippling Roy Horn a "miracle", merely on account of my having chosen to draw a line between tigers and humans?

Reality contains all manner of things we can't see: things we infer the existence of from observing the behavior of stuff we can see. Gravity waves, for instance. We routinely call such things "physical" and "natural", purely on the basis that we have figured out that causality flows between them and the rest of the stuff we call "physical" and "natural".

OK, sure. You reject that kind of dualism as implausible.

No, I don't. You're interpreting me as meaning the opposite of what I said. I reject spiritual-vs-physical dualism as meaningless, as content-free, as "not-even-wrong". Implausible would be a giant leap forward for it.

So do I. I'm not defending its plausibility, just its clarity as a model of how reality works. You are picking an argument with someone who also rejects Cartesian dualism. What I don't agree with is the claim that the natural/supernatural dichotomy is any vaguer than competing models of reality.

Well then, if next year we discover another entity that affects our observations, what criterion will it have to satisfy to qualify as nonphysical?

If you want to say that there are other possible, even more absurd, models of how things work, I'm not going to argue with you.

Huh? Why would I want to say that? I'm arguing for my views, not for yours.

Build all the straw men you want, and I'll help you knock them over.

What are you on about? I didn't build any strawman -- I didn't tell you what you think. It's you who told me what I think, and botched it.

The problem with calling something a miracle because it involves causality crossing between the tiger and the untiger domains isn't that it's a model that's possible but absurd. The problem is that it's a non-model. It's empty, arbitrary, uninformative, content-free. If somebody told you such interactions are "miracles", that would give you no information about men or tigers; you'd only learn that he conceptually divides reality into a tiger part and an untiger part, and the border in his mind between those domains is important to him.

An implausible but possible model of how things work would be something like Kepler's theory that the planets' orbits correspond to the Platonic solids. It implied a falsifiable prediction: that Uranus didn't exist. In contrast, Cartesian dualism doesn't have what it takes to qualify as a model of how things work, any more than a division of the world into tiger and nontiger domains does. Those are just labelings of the world. They have no implications for what happens. What prediction can you make that follows from Cartesian dualism?

 

[Copernicus]

I didn't say that causality flowed freely.

If "can interact causally" isn't the same thing as "causality flows freely", what restriction on the flow of causality do you have in mind?

I start with the premise that the experience of volition is what gives basic meaning to the concept of a supernatural force that affects physical reality. It is the cause of our bodily movements. Nevertheless, it is limited in that it cannot move other people's bodies or other physical objects. Gods and other spirits can, but they have greater power over external physical reality. So there can be limits on what supernatural forces can control.

We may be in violent agreement that it is an implausible, untenable assumption, but it is a logical possibility.

But that's not something I agree with. To qualify as an implausible, untenable assumption, a sentence first has to mean something.

If you disagree with the assumption, you must be able to understand what it means. If it truly has no meaning, then you shouldn't say you disagree with it. You should say that you don't understand it. But I think you do understand what I am saying and that you just want to defend the claim made in the OP.

...
That's a self-vs-other division, not a spiritual-vs-physical division. You can control your own arm but not your neighbor's arm; you can perceive your own thoughts but not your neighbor's thoughts.

Fair enough, but let me elaborate on the reasoning behind my position (See  Experientialism). In my view, all human cognition is associative by nature, and we create new experiences--concepts of reality--by analogy with stored associations. The directly-experienced self-vs-other division gives us the analogical (or metaphorical) link to the more abstract spiritual-vs-physical division, i.e. dualism, that is so ubiquitous in human cultures. In fact, this common experience explains why belief in spirits(and deities) is so widespread.

So do I. I'm not defending its plausibility, just its clarity as a model of how reality works. You are picking an argument with someone who also rejects Cartesian dualism. What I don't agree with is the claim that the natural/supernatural dichotomy is any vaguer than competing models of reality.

Well then, if next year we discover another entity that affects our observations, what criterion will it have to satisfy to qualify as nonphysical?

You still keep acting as if I were defending belief in spiritualism rather than the clarity of a belief that I reject as implausible. I don't believe that the moon is made of green cheese, but that doesn't mean that the absurd claim is meaningless. Your implicit misrepresentation of me is why I keep accusing you of a straw man argument. I don't know of any such criterion, but a spiritualist would likely just claim that they don't know. They can quote a lot of atheists who claim that they don't know whether God exists, so why does anyone have to know how to prove negative claims about spiritual causes?

The problem with calling something a miracle because it involves causality crossing between the tiger and the untiger domains isn't that it's a model that's possible but absurd. The problem is that it's a non-model. It's empty, arbitrary, uninformative, content-free. If somebody told you such interactions are "miracles", that would give you no information about men or tigers; you'd only learn that he conceptually divides reality into a tiger part and an untiger part, and the border in his mind between those domains is important to him.

I am going to say something to you that I want you to pay attention to. Here it is: Absurd claims are not content-free. Absurd claims are not meaningless. The fact that they bear a clear meaning is what allows us to declare them to be absurd.

Now, I hope that that clarifies the point I am trying to make to you. We really are in violent agreement about rejecting the plausibility of the supernatural/natural dichotomy. Where we disagree is the part where you call it a meaningless or content-free distinction. It is not. It is just an absurd distinction. That's where the argument is here--over meaningfulness, not plausibility. You appear to be confusing plausibility with meaningfulness.

An implausible but possible model of how things work would be something like Kepler's theory that the planets' orbits correspond to the Platonic solids. It implied a falsifiable prediction: that Uranus didn't exist. In contrast, Cartesian dualism doesn't have what it takes to qualify as a model of how things work, any more than a division of the world into tiger and nontiger domains does. Those are just labelings of the world. They have no implications for what happens. What prediction can you make that follows from Cartesian dualism?

Oh, it obviously predicts that there will be some physical phenomenon for which we cannot discover a physical cause, e.g. the claim that immaterial "free will" causes some physical human activity. That's where all those debates over free will come from. Kepler's model is not really absurd as a scientific theory. It's just that there are alternative theories that fit the facts better. I think that one can make such a claim about the theory of an immaterial component to "free will". One can also come up with better theories to explain the universe than "goddidit". That doesn't mean that the theory of "God" is meaningless or contentless or even absurd. But there are good reasons to consider it implausible and absurd as part of a model of reality.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

If naturalism is vague the non-materialist worldview is even more vague. No one ever explains anything about how non-materialism is supposed to work. There is no working theory of non-materialism.

 

[Lion IRC]

Non-materialism is only vague because the nature of matter is (still) vague.

...there is no single universally agreed scientific meaning of the word "matter".

Sorry Plato. Sorry Democritus. Sorry Parmenides.

Unified Theory of Everything. LOL

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Non-materialism is only vague because the nature of matter is (still) vague.

...there is no single universally agreed scientific meaning of the word "matter".

Sorry Plato. Sorry Democritus. Sorry Parmenides.

Unified Theory of Everything. LOL

Ok, so you admit non-materialism is fundamentally useless as a way to explain anything?