Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[anonymous66]

@Alias
Are you admitting that you realize there is no current explanation for the existence of life, and the appearance of complexity? And you're okay with that?

[Alias]

@Alias
Are you admitting that you realize there is no current explanation for the existence of life, and the appearance of complexity? And you're okay with that?

I admit - if admission is the correct term - that I don't know what-all explanations for life and complexity are in circulation at the moment. There must be thousands, some more plausible than others.
What happens if I'm not okay with that that?

[anonymous66]

@Alias
Are you admitting that you realize there is no current explanation for the existence of life, and the appearance of complexity? And you're okay with that?

I admit - if admission is the correct term - that I don't know what-all explanations for life and complexity are in circulation at the moment. There must be thousands, some more plausible than others.
What happens if I'm not okay with that that?

It seems to me that the explanations and evidence we currently have are sufficient for us to say that we know that the universe is something like 13.7 billion years old and that we know all life evolved through the process of natural selection from a common ancestor. I wish there was an explanation 1. for how it is it that life came from non-life, and 2. for how it is that complexity was introduced into life (an explanation for how it is that complexity arose from simple single-celled life). It's my understanding that we can't yet explain those 2things.

[Alias]

I wish there was an explanation 1. for how it is it that life came from non-life,

There is no shortage of theories, but you don't have to pick one and stick with it just yet.
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/bio ... ns-of-life

Russell’s hypothesis proposes that the transition to life was brought about by a peculiar geophysical and geochemical process called serpentinization—a process that played out on and just beneath the surface of our very young planet’s ocean floor in the “Hadean” epoch more than 4 billion years ago.https://www.igb.illinois.edu/article/cr ... ight-exist

https://phys.org/news/2017-11-theory-li ... rdial.html
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 160756.htm
Experimentation continues apace.

2. for how it is that complexity was introduced into life (an explanation for how it is that complexity arose from simple single-celled life).

https://www.wired.com/2014/08/where-animals-come-from/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 082646.htm
https://ask.metafilter.com/15365/Is-the ... -organisms

It's my understanding that we can't yet explain those 2things.

Depends whom you mean by "we".

And you didn't answer my question:
If I'm dissatisfied with anything less than a final, definitive answer, what are my options?
I could start my own research.
I could wait until somebody competent comes up with one.
I could accept not knowing.
I could turn to religion.
I could throw a tantrum or go on a hunger strike or fall into a terminal depression.
I could make up a self-contained, circular argument, hang it in mid-air, and say: There, that's an explanation.

[Pelegrin_1]

(1) All things that are complex were designed.
(2) The world we live in is a thing that is complex.
Therefore, (3) The world we live in was designed.

That God entity is really the simplest most non-complex thing of all. So certainly it didn't need to have been designed or created by anything.


I say that the universe is so infinitely vast that it's full of virtually all possibility, and complexity is certainly part of that universe of possibilities,... naturally and logically.

[Felix]

Thinking critical: "Reason, purpose and intention it seems are simply not a necessary property of existance."

Me: "Not necessary for existence, but necessary for life and it's evolution."

Alias: Why? Life tries every available option, discards what doesn't work and keeps truckin'.

Trying options is an aim, the will to live itself is an intention, purposeful activity or "teleology" is integral to life - birds building nests, termites building mounds, etc., etc. A human business license is not required to engage in purposeful activity.

[Pelegrin_1]

Trying options is an aim, the will to live itself is an intention, purposeful activity or "teleology" is integral to life - birds building nests, termites building mounds, etc., etc. A human business license is not required to engage in purposeful activity.

In some cases, I think you're confusing "purposeful" with instinctual or genetically programmed through the age old process of: only what worked got passed on to the next generation.

And "the will to live" is not an intention, it's an objective. "Trying options" is an intention (not an aim). But then, evolutionary trial and error, so-to-speak, doesn't involve any deliberate intention, so therefore there is no literal "trying" going on.

[Alias]

Trying options is an aim, the will to live itself is an intention, purposeful activity or "teleology" is integral to life - birds building nests, termites building mounds, etc., etc. A human business license is not required to engage in purposeful activity.

Trying options is a metaphor.
Once they're complex enough to have a will to live, individual life-forms have their own hopes and plans.
That doesn't apply, however, to the processes of life, let alone the process whereby life arises and evolution operates.
Evolution is not a thinking entity. It has no ideas, intentions or aims. It's just something that happens to living things in the reproductive cycle. Genetic drift and mutation are not menus from which Evolution chooses options. They're accidents that happen inside living cells and show up as variations in the offspring. Some give a slight advantage to the creature they happen to; some kill the bearer, some make it vulnerable - all are without design, purpose or intent. We don't see the process. We don't see the variants that were not viable 3 million years ago or last week. We only see the ones that have persisted - and even a lot of those don't make much sense from an engineering standpoint: they've survived through the accidents of environmental conditions, the state of the competition, available resources at the given moment, etc, etc. A whole long chain of random accidents.

Everything that could happen did happen. We see what survived; we are what survived and we like to see ourselves as the great and wonderful thing it's all been meant to produce all along.
We're not. We're the victims/beneficiaries of accident.

[Felix]

Alias, practically everything you've said is speculation with no explanatory value.

"Once they're complex enough to have a will to live"

All living organisms have a will to live, but not a conscious will.

"Everything that could happen did happen"

Well excuse me, I didn't realize you are omniscient and know everything that happened over the course of Earths history, and therefore can confidently make such an assertion!

[Belindi]

Felix wrote:

Well excuse me, I didn't realize you are omniscient and know everything that happened over the course of Earths history, and therefore can confidently make such an assertion!

You too learn from experience , your own and other people's.There is no other way to learn.

Inanimate objects , ideas, and universals don't purpose.

All living organisms have a will to live, but not a conscious will.

The will to live as it affects most plants and animals is biological. The will to live in the case of humans (with apologies to crows, Border collies, dolphins and so on) is nurtured by culture. Culture and its appendage, language, are that facet of nature from which all our conceptualisations depend.

[anonymous66]

I just wanted to go back to the reason I posted in this thread in the first place.

The teleological arguments are, by definition, the arguments for theism such that the things in the world are created by purposes (i.e. telos, in Greek), or sometimes called 'design arguments for theism'.

The OP assumes that all teleological arguments are arguments for theism. However, it has come to my attention that Thomas Nagel is an atheist who rejects theism, and yet he is pursing the possibility that teleology may do a better job than materialistic evolutionary naturalism, to explain our world.

[anonymous66]

And you didn't answer my question:
If I'm dissatisfied with anything less than a final, definitive answer, what are my options?
I could start my own research.
I could wait until somebody competent comes up with one.
I could accept not knowing.
I could turn to religion.
I could throw a tantrum or go on a hunger strike or fall into a terminal depression.
I could make up a self-contained, circular argument, hang it in mid-air, and say: There, that's an explanation.

It sounded to me like you were saying something like, "Don't ask why... just have faith that the answer to anything we can't currently explain will be one that will fit within a physicalist explanation." But maybe I misread you?
I just read a paper titled Consciousness regained? Philosophical Arguments for and Against Reductive Physicalism by Thomas Sturm, PhD. The question he explored is whether or not consciousness and mental states can be reduced to the physical (consciousness is another reason that teleology appeals to Nagel). Sturm came to the conclusion that it's not time to give up on physicalism, but also remarked, "The chief function of skepticism is to sharpen our reasoning, and to avoid both dogmatism and naivety...""Dogmatism would be to assume that reductive physicalism must be true and defended, come what may."

[Alias]

[What happens if I'm not okay with the available explanation? ]
It sounded to me like you were saying something like, "Don't ask why... just have faith that the answer to anything we can't currently explain will be one that will fit within a physicalist explanation." But maybe I misread you?

Or maybe it's not me you were reading.
Such evidence as we currently have are all the explanations we have. Whether we like it or not doesn't change any facts.

..The question he explored is whether or not consciousness and mental states can be reduced to the physical

And if they can't be "reduced" (from what quantity and/or quality to which lesser quantity and/or quality?), then what?

Sturm came to the conclusion that it's not time to give up on physicalism,

...in favour of what avenue of inquiry?

but also remarked, "The chief function of skepticism is to sharpen our reasoning, and to avoid both dogmatism and naivety...""Dogmatism would be to assume that reductive physicalism must be true and defended, come what may."

And... What came?
How does one go about exploring, let alone quantifying, the non-physical?
(other than making **** up?)

[anonymous66]

...in favour of what avenue of inquiry?

Something that is anti-reductionistic when it comes to consciousness. Isn't it the case that both the mental and the physical are basic and not able to be reduced to something else? If it is the case that the mental does not reduce to the physical, then physicalism is false.

How does one go about exploring, let alone quantifying, the non-physical?

Aren't we already doing that when we talk about mental states like beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions and knowledge?

To answer your question: By considering that possibility that physicalism can't explain everything, by considering the possibility that whatever it is that will give us a complete understanding of our world, it will also have to explain mental states- to be more precise, it will have to explain why it is that we have minds.

[Alias]

[How does one go about exploring, let alone quantifying, the non-physical? ]
Aren't we already doing that when we talk about mental states like beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions and knowledge?

We talk about all kinds of things, whether they actually exist or not. What I'm asking is: how do you learn about them scientifically?
You can explore the knowledge and intentions of a live and conscious brain.
You can explore the functioning of a live brain, with its mental states intact.
You can examine a brain when consciousness and emotions have vacated it.
Try removing the brain, and then studying any of the other things in its absence.

To answer your question: By considering that possibility that physicalism can't explain everything.

Possibility, sure. Experimental evidence - problematic. Proof? Show me.

By considering the possibility that whatever it is that will give us a complete understanding of our world, it will also have to explain mental states-

How about considering the possibility that we are incapable of understanding the complete world? Or that we could maybe understand it, if we were able to recognize and collect all the relevant data, and that may be beyond our reach in space-time.

to be more precise, it will have to explain why it is that we have minds.

Force the mind to explain its own reason for being? I doubt that it - or anything! - can do that without making **** up.

But --
this is important! --
What makes you think there is any more reason than that it gave its owners a survival advantage?