The Cosmological Argument

But perhaps the ultimate cause mentioned here

 is another universe?

The weak point in this argument is the "must be God" assertion
which no doubt could be challenged.

As I said at the beginning of this post I've never been very convinced by  some of the traditional arguments for God's existence. In this connection my friend James Knight posted this blog on the Cosmological Argument. In commenting on his post I explained briefly to James why I have a reserved opinion on the Cosmological Argument....

***

I suppose it started in the 1970s when I became enamoured of idea that the best we can do in science is describe the patterns of the world. In particular I focused on the subject of randomness as a particular form of pattern that was difficult if not impossible to describe algorithmically. Causation, then, becomes a problematic notion with randomness. As the Cosmological argument makes use of the notion of causation this argument loses it's intelligibility somewhat.

That's not to say that the Cosmological Argument does not express something deeply intuitively true and compelling

***

The above explains why I was so obsessed with randomness at an early stage and why I was so determined to crack the question of randomness. (I'm sure professional mathematicians have done a better job, but my PDF on the subject was good enough for my purposes) 

If we are intellectually looking for God it is ironic that blowhard atheist Richard Carrier should identify the area where to start looking; namely, that God is the mysterious logical necessity left when one subtracts out all apparently contingent things. Richard wrongly identifies his logical necessity as probability and randomness. In doing so he appears to misunderstand the ontology of probability.

And while I'm here let me say that I am also unimpressed with Anselm's ontological argument for the necessary existence of God. But I concede that if God is that mysterious logical necessity which Richard Carrier identifies then in that sense the ontology of God makes His existence a necessity. But I suspect that for finite beings like ourselves the true ontological argument for God involves infinities and is likely to be beyond our understanding. However, there is nothing wrong in trying to develop an ontological argument; you never know what you might come up with.

For me God is the kind of explanation one uses abductively; that is, it is the best explanation I can think of which makes human sense of an otherwise senseless cosmos. It gives us the "why"* (rather than the mere scientific descriptive "how") of those astonishing empirical features of our cosmos such as its high organisation, the human compulsion for meaning, purpose & justice and the existence of conscious cognition as the cornerstone of both empirical science and morality. Theism is the crucial intellectual component of a worldview which makes rational sense of our scientific observations on a cosmos which otherwise is entirely absurd. In the beginning God.... (See also Hebrews 11:6ff)

Footnote

* The kind of "Why?" I'm thinking of here only makes sense in a context where sentience is an a priori feature. 

The Aumann's agreement theorem paradox.

Different perspectives implies a likelihood of different experience
sets and conflicting probability estimates, therefore setting 
 the scene for potential disagreement. 

I was rather intrigued by James Knight's use of Aumann's agreement theorem in a blog post of his that can be found here:

The Philosophical Muser: Why Christians Disagree So Much

James' post was a response to a challenge put to him that If Christianity is true, why are there such a varied set of Christians who disagree and squabble about so much? Towards the end of his article we read this (My emphases)....

Given the state of humanity, I’d no more expect Christians to agree on everything than I would mathematicians to agree about politics, or opera singers to agree about economics. But, I do wish they would – and as I often argue – Christians SHOULD agree more, especially on objective things – and two Christians of any sex, ethnicity, denomination, should converge on more and more consensus if they were to sit by the fire, Aumann’s Agreement-style, and honestly, rigorously seek the truth together, like people who care about what is true."

The exact "science" of Mathematics is a domain of knowledge incommensurable with politics and economics and no easy like-for-like comparison can be made. Mathematics is an activity, in fact a form of model building, which depends on very strictly agreed symbolic conventions and algorithmic procedures being followed. If in mathematics every one keeps strictly to the same conventions and procedures disagreement can't arise. The progress of mathematics bares this out; I'm not aware that mathematicians frequently and fundamentally disagree (except perhaps about un-proven conjectures). This of course is not so of politico-economics; disagreements about best economic policy and its political implementation abound. This why economics is a breeding ground for politicians and their political passions & power seeking; after all the only way to implement a particular contentious economic policy is to get political power (Hopefully by democratic means). But let's not think any better of those sanguine mathematicians over and against those battling politico-economists - the latter are dealing with very complex and epistemically tricky material which as we will see provides one reason among others why politico-economics breaks the assumptions of Aumann's agreement theorem and promotes the sharp divisions of power politics.....and that's before we consider those ever present very human psycho-sociological factors which one expects of complex adaptive systems like human beings. 

In fact I would rewrite the first sentence of the above quote as follows....

Given the natural state of human affairs, I’d no more expect Christians to agree on everything than I would politicians to agree about politics, or economists to agree about economics. 

***

Aumann's agreement theorem assumes we have a set of interlocutors who start with a common information base ("common priors") but then these interlocutors bring to the discussion table differing levels of knowledge in the form of conditional probabilities that all interlocutor believe to be a trustworthy contribution to the discussion (So-called "common knowledge" as opposed to "common information"). The interlocutors update their probabilities by mutual cooperative sharing of their differing conditional probabilities (*1).  They assume one another to be rational honest agents and that they can trust one another's probability estimates as they share them. According to the agreement theorem they will eventually converge on the same information set. See the following link for more on the agreement theorem: Aumann Agreement - LessWrong

Before I go any further let's get one thing straight. Most common sense people (which includes myself and people who believe there is such a thing as a single truth out there which stands over and above the slippery slopes of cultural relativism and critical theory) have an intuitive grasp of Aumann's theorem; that is, they understand that in an epistemically transparent world where evidence acquisition is not an issue and interlocutors are rational and honest, then agreement  about truth will inevitably emerge. So the agreement theorem proves what most common sense people already believe (Of course critical theorists and cultural relativists are likely to make heavy weather of this common sense truth). Aumann's theorem is a nice confirmation of what all reasonable people already know intuitively. But the article on Aumann's theorem that I have linked to above ends with this warning: 

The fact that disagreements on questions of simple fact are so common amongst humans, and that people seem to think this is normal, is an observation that should strike fear into the heart of every aspiring rationalist.

So, given the agreement theorem which is undoubtedly mathematically correct why is disagreement between humans so widespread? In this connection I made the following comment on James' blog entry. As a rule my comments never get past the Philosophical Muser's approval process and are therefore cancelled (The Philosophical Muser's concept of "free-speech" is qualified) So, rather than let my comments disappear into oblivion I thought this matter to be so important that it needs airing. What follows in the next section is based on the comment I added to James' post...

***

I think I agree with the general drift of your argument here but not in one or two of the details; especially, may I say,  you are missing the crucial point of the agreement theorem and vastly underestimating the epistemic issues impacting attempts to get agreement.

That cozy fireside talk seldom, if ever, arises. For a start whilst our interlocutors are locked in by the fireside they are not updating their experience or accumulating any further experience. They have to try and get agreement on the basis of the information they already have (in the form of priors and conditional probabilities). If this pool of information contains contradictions and they insist on sticking to their scripts they won’t necessarily reach full agreement even if they are rational.

Therefore our interlocutors are going to have to get off their backsides, get out on their bikes and find a set of consistent priors and conditionals. But that brings us to the main problem: This information can only come from statistics which result of a wide and long term experience of the cosmos. Moreover, any mature engagement with that cosmos requires thousands if not millions of bits of information. Single interlocutors, therefore can’t survey the whole lot; ergo, their experience is liable to being skewed and/or very partial. So, unfortunately our interlocutors, on top of all their other very human survivalist social traits, have to face the epistemic problem of systematic and random sampling errors.

The agreement theorem simply sets a lower limit on agreement time. That is:

Agreement time >= Aumann agreement time:

 

As I found out with my own AI Thinknet project AI systems also suffer from similar epistemic problems relating to sampling bias and partiality. After all, I think the YEC organization AiG have implemented their own YEC AI interlocutor presumably by training it with a bias on YEC texts.

As I’ve said before because of these fundamental epistemic limitations tribal identification & group think where one outsources epistemic help to the experience of a large group of minds is an adaptive trait and this factor shouldn’t be underestimated in terms of its potential epistemic utility. So what James refers to as “incentives, needs and agendas” have the potential to be adaptive whether we like it or not.

So, even without factoring in those many awkward human social foibles (which potentially have adaptive value), epistemic challenges alone are very likely to lead to agreement failure. My guess is that disagreement due to epistemic issues is the biggest factor in disagreement. The only antidote I see for this is epistemic humility. But the trouble with this is that when faced with utterly convinced  group-think such as we find in AiG & Trumpite brands of Christianity epistemic humility & tentativeness is read as weakness. Hence, a certain amount of vehemence is demanded in the heat of argument.

***

Olber's paradox was a famous theorem in astrophysics. This paradox shows that under plausible assumptions the night sky should not be black but a continuum of bright star light; the fact that this isn't the case pointed to the need to revisit the underlying assumptions; it was a profound piece of theoretical thinking which lead the way to our understanding of an expanding universe. I contend that likewise Aumann's theorem  prompts us to think a bit deeper as to why it's not a real world model; in particular it urges us to think about both our epistemological limitations and the complexities of socio-psychology which strongly influence the acquisition of knowledge. With respect to the latter we are prompted to investigate the adaptive value of group think & group belonging along with its potential downsides and tradeoffs. Because Aumann and his successors are making us think harder about human affairs then like Olber's paradox its pedological value can't be underestimated.

The upside of group think is that it widens the number of experiencing agents contributing to the conversation and this increases the amount of incoming evidence. It's true, however, that the instincts behind group think have a big potential downside as group-think can lock in error such as we see among cultists and fundamentalists who exploit the adaptive instincts; in this context the survival of the group identity takes precedence over further evidential updates. Aumann's theorem prompts us to study the cost/benefit balance entailed by joining an epistemic group with a strong sense of cohesion and collective identity. In this sense Aumann's paradox is as profound as Olber's paradox. 

***

I would want to rewrite the second half of the quote at the beginning of this post which I took from Philosophical Muser along these lines....

Christians are expected to make heavy weather of agreement, even about on objective things – and two Christians of any sex, ethnicity, denomination will not necessarily converge to a consensus if they were to sit by the fire, Aumann’s Agreement-style attempting to get convergence; disagreement is likely even if they honestly, rigorously and rationally seek the truth together, like people who care about what is true."

The Agreement theorem tells us that in principle agreement is possible if we get our priors and evidences right, but therein lies the epistemic challenge of gathering huge amounts of data some of which may present accessibility problems; this epistemic challenge necessitates that the quest for knowledge becomes a social symposium and this cues in all the foibles of the sociological dynamic. That these human and epistemic factors can make agreement problematical should always be at the back of our minds and therefore our difficulty in conforming to Aumann's theorem SHOULD be the basis of an attitude of epistemic humility rather than thinking that Aumann's theorem underwrites an attitude of epistemic arrogance; in my books this classifies as an abuse of the theorem. Agreeing to disagree until more information comes to light should not make us shudder.

But let me repeat and finish with this warning..... 

The only antidote I see for inevitable disagreement is epistemic humility. But the trouble with this is that when faced with convinced group-think such as we find in AiG & Trumpite brands of Christianity, humility is read as weakness. Hence, a certain amount of vehemence is demanded in the heat of argument.

Disagreement, sharp disagreement in fact, seems to be the natural state of human affairs.

Footnotes

*1 A conditional probability has the form "The probability of A given evidence B is P"; formally expressed as P(A/B). Here B is the evidence relevant to the truth of A. 

Examining Mr. R. Carrier's use of Bayesianism. Part IV

A gross theological caricature

(See here for Part I, Part II and Part III)

In part IV of this series, I'm continuing to comment on the following post by a Mr. Richard Carrier:

Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist • Richard Carrier Blogs 

As Richard stares out at our strange cosmos and considers the question of theism and whether or not a cosmos like our's would have been produced by the kind of God conceived by most theists, this is what he thinks:

It cannot be predicted that this [Universe] is what a God would produce, or that it is what he would want to produce. Whereas it is exactly 100% predicted to be what we’d see if there was no God

I would certainly question Richard's second sentence here: What kind of universe/cosmos would I have predicted if there was no God? As we saw in the previous parts I certainly wouldn't have predicted our own remarkable universe in all its organized complexity, it's surprising organized contingencies and above all an organization which gives it a very strong propensity to generate life....... especially that propensity to generate complex organic objects! After all, only in recent history have humans started to master systems capable of generating other systems.  Why wouldn't I have predicted all this in the absence of God? .... because the evidence of our experience is that organization of all types, both simple and complex, are associated with the activity of human (and animal) intelligence. Therefore, when I see a cosmos so organized that we can distill out of it those highly succinct mathematical laws of physics, laws which are crucial for the generation & maintenance of life, my intuitions turn to thoughts of an a priori intelligence being active. Moreover, the fact is that the laws we distill from cosmic organization can never have the property of Aseity (that is of self-explanation). This is because these laws are mathematically descriptive devices destined to always leave us with a hard core of irreducible, incompressible and enigmatic contingent information; those laws are therefore logically incapable of delivering the logical necessity of Aseity. Some atheists at least do understand this. Take for example atheists Galen Strawson and Sean Carroll: Both appear to understand that all probing human inquiry into the form and pattern of the cosmos must eventually bottom out with unexplainable brute fact: Aseity is beyond the reach of conventional descriptive science.  This is a mathematical truism. See the following links for more details...

Quantum Non-Linearity: Galen Strawson on "Why is there something?" (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: Something comes from Something: Nothing comes from Nothing. Big Deal (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

There have been some who have tried to get round all this by suggesting that somehow quantum mechanics can be used to redefine nothing in such a way that it tells us how it is possible to get something from nothing: But this line of thought is achieved by mere empty linguistic tricks: One can use the same tricks to claim that this simply amounts to a redefinition of something! (See footnote *2)

***

And yet I'm inclined to agree with Richard's first sentence in the quote above:  I don't think I could have predicted that the kind of God I think I know would have created the specifics of our universe, not only because of its strange impersonal and dispassionate vastness but also because of the much closer to home, well aired and time-honored conundrums around suffering and evil. Yes, I might have predicted a highly organized universe, but organization covers a multitude of possibilities, and it seems a multitude of sins. So, I do have some sympathy with honest atheists on this point. (But types like Richard don't want sympathy & measured opinions; they want abject submission to their thinking; his attitudes match those of the hardened fundamentalists of Biblical literalism).

Moreover, based on our experience of intelligent activity in this world (which by & large is human and animal) we have to admit that not only does intelligent activity have an immense space of creative options open to it making anticipation of specific activity in the absence of evidence all but impossible, but also that intelligent activity has a fair measure of inscrutability. For example, the ancient stone circles we see dotted around Europe entail a high level of organization both in their configuration and the logistics of their construction and yet as to their purpose we have to resort to hypothesis and speculation. Furthermore, coming from a vacuum of evidence I could not have predicted from first principles that early cultures (probably as a consequence of that time honoured search for cosmic meaning & purpose) would build stone circles. Because of the huge variety open to intelligent behavior I can't move from an evidential vacuum to stone circles. But the reverse is possible: Given the evidence of stone circles I can link that to known aspects of the human psyche, a psyche I share. This means we have at least some inkling of the motives driving the human organization of inanimate objects and therefore have a chance of interpreting the meaning of this activity; in this case that the stone circles probably represent a culture's attempt to engage with the numinous and seek to give shape, meaning, and purpose to the universe; I personally think I understand that mystical endeavor. 

Likewise, as we look out onto the cosmos itself, we observe high levels of organization in a pattern we couldn't predict even if we knew beforehand that a creating deity was behind it. But conversely, if we are sufficiently primed theists, we at least stand a chance of getting a purchase on cosmic purposes via theological hypothesis and speculation. But if we reject God's attempt at self-revelation and we reject the necessity of the epistemic bootstrap of faith (See Hebrews 11:3&6), we will remain as much in the dark about Divine purposes as we are about those enigmatic stone circles. For it is possible in my view to come up with at least a hypothesized framework as to the meaning of the cosmos. 

***

But now I ask myself this: What would I have predicted if there is no God of any sort? My first intuitive response to that question would be absolute empty nothingness; but this is patently not the case: Our conscious perceptions tell us that the universe exists and therefore we do have an evidential handle on this question. In fact, as I said in Part III of this series, if the evidence was that the universe is completely random (That is, a Big-R superverse), I would interpret that as evidence of the absence of the God I think I know. As Sherlock Holmes observed in the story of The Cardboard Box where he was commenting on a particularly tragic case of crime...

“What is the meaning of it, Watson?” said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But to what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”

(See the introduction to my book on Disorder and Randomness where I first used this quote)

But whilst I'd agree that our intuitions suggest that Big-R points to atheism, the reverse isn't true: Viz: Given atheism I wouldn't have been able to predict a Big-R universe: The consequences of the absence of God are just as inscrutable as God himself. In any case a prediction of Big-R isn't a straightforward deduction from the absence of God. Let me explain...

Firstly, in a Big-R universe I wouldn't exist to perceive anything and neither would anyone else. Being an idealist where I regard conscious cognition and perception as an important underwriter of reality, I would therefore question the coherence and intelligibility of Big-R notions.

Secondly, randomness represents the very opposite of a logical truism; A logical truism, once understood, has zero surprisal value and therefore no information, whereas randomness has maximum surprisal value and maximum information. If you are looking for the logical necessity of explanatory completeness or aseity you won't find it in randomness. The existence of randomness entails maximum contingency and maximum mystery. It is first and foremost the very opposite of a logical truism, the very opposite of "necessity".  It therefore explains nothing in the sense of explanatory completeness; rather it just leaves us with a conundrum as to who or what is managing to generate the most complex pattern of all, a pattern that requires a maximum of computational effort. 

***

In the following quote we find Richard continuing to dig even deeper into the hole he is already in....

RICHARD: Thus, Fine Tuning is not a “peculiar” thing for us to observe. It is not distinctive of God-made universes; it is, rather, distinctive of godless universes. It is literally the only thing we could ever observe—unless God existed and made the universe. Because only then could the universe possibly have been made conducive to life without the Fine Tuning of our peculiar fundamental constants. Hence God-made worlds will tend to not be Fine Tuned.

MY COMMENT:  As we saw in Part III, so-called "fine tuning" is just a small facet of a much bigger story of a remarkable order which has facilitated the human project of distilling out of the pattern of that order some remarkably elegant mathematical forms which from my standpoint have a very divine feel about them. They look to be the very epitome of an incredibly intelligent design. And let me repeat, further "explanation" of these forms can never deliver aseity but could only ever be a further enhancement of the succinctness of their form; but increasing mathematical succinctness can't go on until one has nothing left to compress; an incompressible kernel of contingency will always remain using mathematics as we know it. 

***

Richard Carrier has a very low view of our Cosmos. In spite of its exceptional and highly stable order, an order strongly conducive to the emergence and maintenance of life Richard still courts the Big-R hypothesis, the random bizarro universe that can be used to explain away anything. Take a look at the following...

RICHARD: This is a crucial realization. Fine Tuning of our observed fundamental constants is only necessary when a God is not doing the designing; it is only necessary when observers only evolve through billions of years of gradual cellular scaffolding, and life at all arises only by chance chemical mixing, and only after billions of years of the meandering random mixing of chemicals across a vast universe billions of light-years in size filled with random lifeless junk, which is almost everywhere lethal to life, and only hospitable to it in tiny specks of the chance arrangement of randomly mixed conditions. Only those conditions require Fine Tuning. Quite simply put: only Godless universes have to be Finely Tuned.

Which means when you observe a universe like ours (old, huge, deadly, and producing life only in the most awkward of ways and rarest of places), you can expect it to have been Finely Tuned by chance accident, not intelligent design. Intelligent design would more likely make a universe as large and old as needed to contain the life it was made for, and would create life directly (not employ billions of years of cellular scaffolding), and imbue the world with only those laws of physics needed to maintain it to its purpose (no weird fundamental constants, no weird fundamental particles). It would not produce a universe almost entirely hostile to life. There would be no lethal radiation-filled vacuum. No dead worlds or lifeless moons. Stars would not be uninhabitable monstrosities. Black holes would never exist.

MY COMMENT: And again: Chance fine tuning is a very bad argument for atheism; it neglects that the values of the "fine-tuned" variables only make sense in the context of the highly organizing effect of a set of remarkable laws and which together with those laws constitute pre-conditions which considerably enhances the chance of life. As I've said above, because of the huge space of possibilities open to intelligence and on top of that intelligence's inscrutability it is difficult to anticipate in advance what intelligence will do. But the reverse is an easier path. Given the works of intelligence we, as intelligences ourselves, can work backwards with a chance of interpreting the purpose of its works. To my mind all those dead worlds are the evidence of a search, reject and select computation, a declarative procedure that may well use teleological constraints.

The emphasis on fine tuning in Richard's quote above completely misses the plot; namely, that what is actually being fine-tuned is a remarkable cosmic computation machine of immense dimensions. And yet according to Richard's theology God simply doesn't do things like this; instead, God does things without logic and without sequence; it is ironic that Biblical literalists often think in a very similar way. But contrary to this kind of thinking is the evidence of our experience of the way intelligence works: Viz: It works using an experimental search, reject and select activity; the cosmos appears to be a tableau of intelligent activity, a tableau of creative activity.

And while I'm here a note to self: Here's a speculation for me to think about. The fine-tuning constants could have many, many non-zero decimal places after the decimal point. Therefore, if ordinary parallel processing rather than expanding parallelism is the search space method being used to develop the cosmos, the fine-tuning constants could be a sneaky way of feeding information, a priori, into cosmic evolution, thereby speeding the search up. 

***

Epilogue

In Part III I introduced the idea that the cosmos can be thought of as a fantastically large computation, a computation which is expressible in a very abstracted form as an equation relating the information content of the created configuration to a function of two variables: 1) The starting information and 2) the minimum possible number of computational steps. This equation looks something like this: 

I = S + Log T

Equation 1

Where I is the information content of the configuration created, and S is the minimum length of the algorithm needed to generate the configuration using a minimum number of execution steps of T. See here where I give more details on this relation.  (See also here). For a parallel computation the time taken for the computation will be proportional to T, but if as I feel is entirely plausible for our universe expanding parallelism is somehow being employed, the computation is achieved much faster. 

As we saw in Part III according to the theology of Richard Carrier, God, if he existed, would just do stuff abracadabra style; that is Richard takes it for granted that T ~ 0 and that creation has no sequential duration; in his theology God just does his stuff by downloading reified brute fact via his mighty magic commands. As we saw this is also the theology of the Biblical literalists (See footnote *1 below for the theology of the North American ID community). 

***

As I have said so often; there is a sense in which the elegant & succinct mathematical forms distilled from the high organisation of the cosmos "explain" absolutely nothing in the deepest sense of the word. Explanatory mathematical objects as we know them are less an act of explanation than that of compressed descriptions; as such they can never break the explanatory completeness barrier and deliver aseity. 

Our world is just one of the possible worlds that can be reified from the platonic realm. This fact is going to be hard to take for those who hanker after the secular notion that somehow the so-called material world can be so closed ended that it delivers an aseity of its own. Rather, it is just one of many possibilities that can be dragged out of the platonic world, reified and because of its organization, described with succinct "distilled" mathematical forms. It is in fact a work of art rather than a work of necessity; there is good art and bad art, but all is art, and art is but realized possibility. Our science gives us the pattern of the creation but not its fundamental origins; as many people have put it; the objects of science give us the "how" but not the "why?". But "why?" is only intelligible as a question in the context of an assumed a-priori sentience; in the context of this assumed conscious cognition the concepts of intention, goal and purpose have meaning. So, is our ravenous curiosity going to be satiated with answers that merely tell us about the "How"?  For some people at least that does seem to be the case. 

As we try to make sense of the cosmos we use a combination of induction, abduction and deduction: The generalizations of induction sometimes help prompt the production of theories but perhaps more often a theory is abducted with a giant intuitive leap of inspiration. Crucially, however, a theory arrived at by inspiration must then be tested via the predictions of deduction. This testing methodology has grown up around the relatively simple conceptual objects which control the physical regime, but it is a methodology that is far less effective when dealing with the inscrutabilities & complexities of the personal, the psychological, the sociological and above all the liminal world of the numinous. These phenomena are far too complex, erratic and full of exceptions to easily admit formal methods. The numinous in particular is the domain of anecdotal evidence, the domain of personal revelation. 

***

The evidence of our senses is that our cosmos is highly organized, and that this unique organization is such that it facilitates those descriptive conceptual devices and tokens we call the laws of physics which ride on top of and can be intellectually distilled from this order. That this order is being created and maintained everywhere and everywhen by an a priori intelligence is not an implausible proposition for many of us, even if for some it seems too large an epistemic step to make.  But I'll concede that it is not a proposition that can be formally tested like the relatively simple physical regime can be tested; testing such a complex entity is more akin to testing the partially veiled and complex world of sociology and human thought. So, although individuals may feel they have tested their faith anecdotally the anecdotes they tell won't convince everyone, least of all the evangelical atheists. But we do have this: Theism has the potential to at least make sense of the cosmos in terms of purpose and meaning whereas vanilla science, which only tells us the "how", cannot do this.  Moreover, as an idealist I would contend, that the reality of the particulate cosmos is unintelligible unless one first posits an a-priori up and running conscious cognition. Particulate matter only makes sense as the mathematical constructions of a conscious, thinking & perceiving sentience. For me Hebrews 11:3&6 is a necessary first principle of epistemology.

But of course, I can't expect an evangelical atheist like Richard to agree with any of this as it is very much dependent on personal anecdote rather than formal observational protocols. All I can advise is that people like Richard will just have to get out on their bikes and find some anecdotes of their own. As far as I'm concerned, all bets are still on!

***

Depending on how I feel I might complete this series by looking at Richard's tongue in cheek theology which he expresses in the picture that heads this post. Viz: God needs blood to fix the universe, but only his blood has enough magical power to do it, so he gave himself a body and then killed it. I wonder where Richard got his grist to come up with that one? I just wonder. The guilty parties probably know who they are.

Footnotes

*1 On North American Intelligent Design (NAID): Although I'm fundamentally an Intelligent Creation person I must once again disown any intellectual sympathy with this community, especially so as they fall into the welcoming embrace of the far-right, merging Christianity with politics. 

I personally don't have any intellectual commitment to the engine driving evolutionary change as currently conceived and yet I would heavily criticize the line taken by the NAID community: They have entrenched themselves in a tribal culture which is married to a set of misleading conceptual cliches: Viz: anti-evolutionism, "blind natural forces", anti-junk-DNA, "chance vs necessity" and subliminal deism. (See here for more). The NAID community make a sharp distinction between so-called "blind natural forces" and intelligent activity. The consequence is that they have adopted an epistemic filter which makes hard going of the identification of the basics of the physical regime as a work of hyper-intelligence; thus, in a sense chiming with Richard Carrier's view that the physical regime is a product of mindless blind Kaos; how utterly ironic!

If we assume that the cosmos is created and maintained everywhere and everywhen by the Divine will, then immediately the NAID category of "blind natural forces" becomes problematical. This is because in the context of intelligent creationism those forces can hardly be classified as blind and natural; in fact, the cosmos as the reification of artistic possibility rather than of necessity is highly unnatural. Although the NAID community are by and large like myself old cosmos creationists they nevertheless have subliminally taken on board the category of God as a super-duper conjurer creating stuff instantaneously as fully formed configurations, stuff that just springs into existence like a rabbit out of a hat. If this statement of their views is caricatured and unfair they had better tell me why it is. 

The particularly North American notion of God as a magician appears to be associated with the view that somehow the T term in equation 1 classifies as a "natural force" and therefore we must have T ~ 0. For them admitting T >> 0 is an intolerable bogy that is shockingly close to admitting some kind of evolution; to them it is the evil thin end of the "natural forces" wedge of secularization.  But in my opinion for the Everywhere and Everywhen God T is just as much a divine creation as is S. 

*2 Footnote: Falling into the linguistic trap of "nothing":

Richard tells us this: 

Why Nothing Remains a Problem: The Andrew Loke Fiasco • Richard Carrier Blogs

 What I showed is that once you actually allow for there to be nothing—nothing whatsoever—then a quasi-infinite multiverse is the inevitable, in fact unstoppable outcome. Because removing all barriers to what there can be or what can happen entails allowing all potential outcomes an equal chance at being realized (given only a single constraint: that logically contradictory states have a zero probability of coming to pass). There is nothing there to prevent that, nothing around to keep “nothing” a stable absence of everything. “Nothing” is, by its own defining properties, unstable.

That's not how probability works. Probability isn't a dynamic capable of generating something from nothing: it is about the level of observer information. Moreover, the physics of probability is about describing random patterns and not about the "instability of nothing". Probability and randomness are in no way an argument for the impossibility of "nothing"; trying to use them to generate aseity is well beyond their scope of usage. 

I've seen similar misinterpretations of the Uncertainty Relationship: As Richard is doing here, the principles of probability and randomness are glorified by raising them to the level of a kind of transcendent god-like dynamic or propensity capable of at least creating randomness from nothing. They don't see randomness as being only the mathematical description of a class pattern we meet in the universe rather than being a transcendent creative dynamic.

Another point: The principle of equal a priori probabilities concerns human information levels. That in itself isn't a sufficient condition that automatically translate into reified patterns of randomness.

Does this Interview Solve the Human Predicament? Part IV

 Spoiler Alert: Probably not, very probably not!

This boasting far exceeds even Donald Trump's bragging! 

The World Transformation Movement (WTM) is far too full of 

loud-mouthed hype to classify as a scientific movement. 

Self-praise is no recommendation. 

.

The previous parts of this series can be found here:

Part I

Part II

Part III,

The thesis proposed by WTM guru Jeremy Griffith, a thesis I have begun to criticize in the previous parts of this series, is this: That the human predicament with all its personal and social aggravations is down to a clash between inherited instincts and the conscious mind. 

I very much beg to differ with this analysis: As I've proposed in the previous parts of this series I find that the human predicament is grounded in the very physics of conscious cognition: Viz: That the private first-person perspective of the conscious mind means that it is not party to the experience of the second or third persons and therefore can only to infer, but not feel, the experiences of other minds. Consequently, reacting acceptably to other centers of conscious cognition presents both an epistemic and a moral challenge to the conscious individual ....Viz: The epistemic challenge of correctly inferring the experience of other minds and the moral challenge of rightly reacting to those inferences. 

Human instincts and motives are then layered on top of the basic physical fault line between individual minds, but I see no necessary clash between human instincts and the conscious mind. The repertoire of human instincts such as seeking social recognition and status, sexual motives, fear, joy, anger, aggression, hunger, love, the search for meaning, the search for coherence etc. etc. are all part of the human survival suite of goals, a suite which doesn't necessarily clash with the conscious mind, but rather works in partnership with it; Viz: it is these motives which constitute the interest suite of human life, a suite which motivates the intellect to work out the means and methods of achieving the goals of the whole person. Without the goal-seeking motivations provided by this suite conscious cognition would lose the spark, energy and purpose which drives it. Instincts, then, are a very necessary aspect of the conscious mind. The problems of the human predicament come about when there is a conflict of interest between individual centers of human cognition. But the fact is the relative isolation of those centers is built into the very physics and biology of life. 

In the following interview with Craig Conway, Jeremy Griffith fleshes out his thesis in more detail whereupon I will correspondingly criticize his thesis in more detail. Craig clearly thinks Jeremy's thesis makes sense; he then asks a question......

CRAIG CONWAY: Yes, that makes sense Jeremy, so what happened though when this animal became conscious and its whole life turned into a psychologically distressed mess?

JEREMY GRIFFITH: Well, the easiest way to see what happened is to imagine the predicament faced by an animal whose life had always been controlled by its instincts suddenly developing a conscious mind, because if we do that we will very quickly see how that animal would develop a psychologically troubled competitive and aggressive condition like we suffer from. So let’s imagine a stork: we’ll call him Adam. Each Summer, Adam instinctually migrates North with the other storks around the coast of Africa to Europe to breed, as some varieties of storks do. Since he has no conscious mind Adam Stork doesn’t think about or question his behaviour, he just follows what his instincts tell him to do. But what if we give Adam a large brain capable of conscious thought? He will start to think for himself, but many of his new ideas will not be consistent with his instincts. For instance, while migrating North with the other storks Adam notices an island full of apple trees. He then makes a conscious decision to divert from his migratory path and explore the island. It’s his first grand experiment in self-management.

MY COMMENT: Firstly, it seems likely to me that those animals who share with us a very similar neural basis for their minds also have consciousness, although what they are conscious about will likely considerably differ both in quality and quantity to ourselves: In fact, it is likely that the consciousness of human beings, with their relatively large brains, will qualitatively and quantitatively far exceed that of many animals. From this it follows that consciousness isn't an all or nothing affair but comes in degrees and in different qualities; it doesn't suddenly switch on when a cognitive threshold is reached.  

In the above scenario Jeremy is asking us to imagine a case where a migration journey is neurally hardwired into the mind of a stork. Presumably at one time this journey was a vital part of its survival strategy and was a solution to both breeding and feeding. But it seems that changing environmental conditions have brought about better potential solutions that the stork, if the stork had sufficient intelligence to work out those solutions, could have employed. In the above scenario Jeremy imagines that the intelligence of the stork has developed to the level where it is able grasp a more efficient survival solution.  What Jeremy has not told us is that the overriding urges servicing the need to survive such as an urge to feed, breed and conserve energy are instincts which are still very much in place. Therefore, in my view to characterize the human predicament as a conflict between instinct and intelligence is a misrepresentation. 

JEREMY GRIFFITH: But when Adam’s instincts realise he has strayed off course they are going to criticise his deprogrammed behaviour and dogmatically try to pull him back on his instinctive flight path, aren’t they! In effect, they are going to condemn him as being bad. Imagine the turmoil Adam will experience; he can’t go back to simply following his instincts. His instinctive orientations to the migratory flight path were acquired over thousands of generations of natural selection but those orientations are not understandings, and since his conscious mind requires understanding, which it can only get through experimentation, inevitably a war will break out with his instincts.

Ideally at this point Adam’s conscious mind would sit down and explain to his instincts why he’s defying them. He would explain that the gene-based, natural selection process only gives species instinctive orientations to the world, whereas his nerve-based, conscious mind, which is able to make sense of cause and effect, needs understanding of the world to operate. But Adam doesn’t have this self-understanding. He’s only just begun his search for knowledge. In fact, he’s not even aware of what the problem actually is. He’s simply started to feel that he’s bad, even evil.

MY COMMENT: As I have already suggested humans have a large suite of instincts motivating them: Let me list them more fully:

 e.g. feeding, breeding, sexual interest, seeking social status and recognition, seeking community, anger, seeking safety and security, seeking comfort and warmth, seeking meaning and purpose, curiosity, seeking understanding, artistic endeavor and above all an instinctual sense of what is and what is not just and moral. 

 None of these motivations can be labeled as bad or evil per se and as far as I'm aware none has a necessary conflict with the conscious mind: The conscious mind has a valuable partnership with these instincts in as far as the intelligence of that mind is able to find ways in which the goals behind these potentially life enhancing drives might efficiently be achieved. So, Jeremy's picture of a war between mind and instincts does not come over as true to life. Even anger, which we might see as potentially troublesome has its upsides:  For example, many people who face the tragic consequence of social injustices do not have to explode with an incoherent burst of anger but instead we often see them channeling their emotion of anger by dissipating it into constructive channels of endeavor as they seek to right the injustices in society and thus better society thereby. But what about egocentricity? Well, we will come to that next..... 

Where the angst and predicaments arise is when human beings are unable to fulfill these primary instinctual motivations, especially so because life is full of zero-sum games and therefore inter human-interests conflict and egos clash. But again, like other instincts ego is not a bad motivator per se: We all have a sense of dignity and worth and have a right to protect that sense of self-worth when it is challenged with a threat of belittlement or even extinction. Naturally enough each centre of conscious cognition seeks to enhance itself and its experience of life - nothing wrong with that in itself. But the zero-sum games of life mean that the interests of individual centres of conscious cognition have the potential to collide and conflict. So, the primary potential source of conflict isn't between one's instincts and one's mind but between individual centres of conscious cognition. Ego isn't the problem; the problem is egocentricity: that is when a particular human ego seeks solutions to his life experience by enhancing his experience regardless of and at the expense of the egos of other human beings; in short, egocentrics are people who ignore their super-ego. 

CRAIG: Okay, so what you’re saying is a war has broken out between his conscious mind and his instincts, which he can’t explain, and it’s left him feeling bad or that he is bad in some way, or even evil. So what happened then?

MY COMMENT: Well, Craig if you had the nous, you'd understand that there is no necessary clash between instinct and the conscious mind but there is a potentiality for a clash between the interests of individual conscious minds, a potentiality that results of the experiential isolation of the first-person perspective. This isolation is imprinted on the very substance of which we are composed.  I refer to it as a potential clash of interests because self-denial in favour of others (which is what morality is all about) should in theory kick in at this point. Human beings have a choice on this score; they can either give deference to the inferred feelings and experiences of their fellows or put the priority entirely on the self, the ego and become egocentric. Which is it to be? I must also point out that compounding the challenge of self-denial are the epistemic difficulties of being able to correctly extrapolate into other minds. 

JEREMY: Well, tragically, while searching for understanding, we can see that three things are unavoidably going to happen. Adam is going to defensively retaliate against the implied criticism from his instincts; he is going to desperately seek out any reinforcement he can find to relieve himself of the negative feelings; and he is going to try to deny the criticism and block it out of his mind. He has become angry, egocentric and alienated— which is the psychologically upset state we call the human condition, because it was us humans who developed a conscious mind and became psychologically upset. (And ‘upset’ is the right word for our condition because while we are not ‘evil’ or ‘bad’, we are definitely psychologically upset from having to participate in humanity’s heroic search for knowledge. ‘Corrupted’ and ‘fallen’ have been used to describe our condition, but they have negative connotations that we can now appreciate are undeserved, so ‘upset’ is a better word.) So Adam’s intellect or ‘ego’ (ego being just another word for the intellect since the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘ego’ as ‘the conscious thinking self’ (5th edn, 1964)) became ‘centred’ or focused on the need to justify itself—Adam became ego-centric, selfishly preoccupied aggressively competing for opportunities to prove he is good and not bad, to validate his worth, to get a ‘win’; to essentially eke out any positive reinforcement that would bring him some relief from his criticising instincts. He unavoidably became self-preoccupied or selfish, and aggressive and competitive.

So our selfish, competitive and aggressive behaviour is not due to savage instincts but to a psychologically upset state or condition. Basically suffering psychological upset was the price we conscious humans had to pay for our heroic search for understanding. In the words from the song The Impossible Dream from the musical the Man of La Mancha, we had to be prepared to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’ (lyrics by Joe Darion, 1965). We had to lose ourselves to find ourselves; we had to suffer becoming angry, egocentric and alienated until we found sufficient knowledge to explain ourselves.

MY COMMENT: That diagnosis of the human predicament is far from the truth. As I keep saying the existential angst of the human condition comes not from a clash between instinct and the conscious mind; after all, as we have seen our instinctual motivations, if properly served, are life enhancing and the conscious mind has an important role in finding ways of fulfilling those profound instinctual goals.

Summing up: The real clash at the root of the angst in the human condition has its origins in....

1. Conservation laws which mean that life is full of zero-sum games.

2. The physics of human conscious cognition which entails private first-person perspectives isolated from the first-person perspectives of other sentient beings. This privacy entails a potential clash of interest between humans who do not directly share one another's consciousness. I stress potential clash because cooperation, self-denial, compromise and the urges of moral instincts present to us choices which have the opposite potential of heading off clashes of interest between egos.

3. The epistemic problems of putting oneself into the experiential shoes of others. 

Given this context our life enhancing instincts are not to be shunned or blamed for our existential angst; our conscious cognition has no necessary argument with those instincts; they are important motivating and goal seeking urges. As we have seen even anger has an upside as a justice seeking motive. 

The tendency toward egocentricity is a potential outcome of the separation of conscious cognition into quasi-isolated first-person units each of which is tempted is to serve self above all: This situation has a far deeper grounding in the hardware of our cosmos than mere instinct: it is built into the very physics of living things. 

I simply can't identify with the thought that any existential angst I have has its origins in a clash of instinct and intellect: Which of my instincts gives me aggravation? None that I'm aware of!  Where the clash comes is when the implementation of my drives is likely to badly impact the experience and feelings of other human beings; it is then that the following language used by Jeremy (taken from the above quote) actually applies: Viz:  

Adam (that is myself)  is going to defensively retaliate against the implied criticism from his (moral) instincts; he is going to desperately seek out any reinforcement he can find to relieve himself of the negative feelings; and he is going to try to deny the criticism and block it out of his mind. He has become angry, egocentric and alienated— which is the psychologically upset state we call the human condition,

That correctly describes a human, like myself, a sinner sold under sin, when I know I've done a disservice to the goals of a fellow human; I am then tempted to engage in the deceptions of self-justification that Jeremy talks of. So Jeremy's description of the human condition is in some ways correct but his identification of the deep causes are wrong. Moreover, to call it an "upset state" is an understatement that makes light of a fundamental human fault line built into the very fabric of reality.

Jeremy goes on to continue to construct this straw man that our existential angst is because our instincts are rebelling against the search for knowledge. No way!... it is the very search for knowledge that is driven by our deepest instincts such as curiosity and the search for meaning and purpose. There is no way in which my heroic search and thirst for knowledge is being labeled by my instincts as bad or evil: That is simply not true. What does trouble my conscience and is liable to be labeled as bad or evil is if in life's zero-sum games, I short-change my fellow humans in favour of self. In spite of Jeremy's straw man depiction, just who is labelling the heroic search for knowledge as bad and evil? No one I know. But the label "corrupted and fallen" is appropriate to my frequent failure to give the first-person experience of fellow humans a rightful place in my life. 

CRAIG: Wow Jeremy, I mean this is just fascinating. So Adam Stork—we humans—developed a conscious mind and unavoidably started warring with our instincts, an upsetting war which could only end when we could explain and understand why we had to defy our instincts, which is the understanding that you have just supplied, yes?

MY COMMENT:  *shakes head*

JEREMY: Exactly, remember Adam Stork became defensively angry, egocentric and alienated because he couldn’t explain why he was defying his instincts, so now that we can explain why, those defensive behaviours are no longer needed and can end! That’s basically all there is to explain, that is the biological explanation of the human condition that so explains us that, as Professor Prosen said, it brings about ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’!

CRAIG: This is such a simple story but so far-reaching in its ramifications—I mean it is world-changing is what it is, because it truly enables ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’! I mean that is just wonderful.

MY COMMENT:  Simple story? Rather, it is simply false!  Once again: I'm personally unaware of my intellect being at odds with any of my instincts, least of all the heroic search for knowledge, meaning and purpose: Both intellect and instinct are life enhancing and especially so if they work cooperatively in tandem. But the temptation to serve exclusively within the purview of my first-person perspective is the only "instinct", if "instinct" it can called, that has the potential to open a door to a troubled world of angst, ambivalence and denial. Yes, I'd agree that the explanation of the human condition is biological, but Jeremy has nailed the wrong biological explanation. Moreover, because the perceptive fault-line between those centers of biological sentience is so fundamental to the fabric of reality the WTM's superficial analysis that the solution to the human predicament lies in the psychological rehabilitation of the human race falls woefully short of the mark.

Well, I don't suppose I can expect too much insight and critical analysis from Craig who seems to be utterly blown away by the presence and guru status of Jeremy Griffith and Harry Prosen both of whom clearly fail to see where the real challenge of the human predicament lies; namely, in good old fashioned "sin", the word with the "I" in the middle.

***

There is also one another source of human vexation which I really need to mention: That is the unfilled targets of our instinctive ambitions.  If we are thwarted in our aims, this can be a great source of frustration and unhappiness.  However, this is often related to the clash of human interests; viz: Selfishness, when it proceeds against a background of zero-sum games, leads to the goals and aspirations of many being at odds with one another and consequently in the subsequent scramble many dreams remain unfulfilled. 

ADDENDUM 13/02

I've been trying think of cases where there is a clash between instinct and intellect.  Possible cases: 

1. Eating habits: When there is a surfeit of food such as we find in rich industrial societies the instinct to eat as much as possible while the going is good  - which is appropriate when food is much scarcer - can impact health badly; that's even though our intellects understand this health impact.

2. Large anonymous industrial societies which are very much a product of human intellectual work may cut across human instincts which prefer smaller intimate tribes and communities close to the natural order of things. cf The Romantics. This instinct, if instinct it is, of tribal/group/class/community identification and its potential for inter-community competitiveness may be bound up with the factional human violence which we see so much of. 

***

....to be continued. 

'Hostilities began in an extremely violent way': How chimp wars taught us murder and cruelty aren't just human traits (msn.com)

Does God Exist?: Hendricks vs Myers

 

Does God exist? Perry Hendricks & I argue about it (freethoughtblogs.com)

I was interested to do a first parse of the above debate on God's existance with theist Perry Hendricks and evangelical atheist PZ Myers.  If time permits, I might do a more detailed commentary on this video but here are some initial comments.

Much of Perry Hendricks' argument was based on the Bayesian type reasoning which uses priors like the existence of cosmic design, organization, biological structures and human moral instincts as evidence for God. These arguments have a generic form which employs Bayes theorem to derive a high probability of God's existence. I considered an example of this class of argument here: Bayes and God. He also used the cosmological argument; Viz: Because the natural world is shot through with contingency and cannot be the seat of Aseity or the realm of explanatory completeness, Aseity must exist beyond the material world and must be the ultimate cause of the hard core of cosmic contingency. Hendricks is a bright guy and is a credit to the faith.

PZ Myers dismissed all that without further ado as just philosophy and therefore not worth further consideration. PZ made it quite clear he is looking for a God he can test like he can test a mechanical system such as a chemical reaction: i.e. Press button A and you get output B. He's looking for a God of quick tricks and the example he gave is this: Can God tell me what I've got in my pocket? If God can't rise to that simple test, then it is unlikely there is a God, although to be fair PZ admitted that no one can answer the question "Is there a God?" either way with absolute certainty. I'd agree there is no human certainty and I have some sympathy with atheists who feel that a world like ours can't be a result of a personal, loving and infinitely wise Creator; just think of Ken Ham, Alex Jones, Margorie Taylor-Green, Donald Trump & QAnon promoter Trey Smith and you've got some evidence for atheism.  But as for providing some tricks for PZ, you never know: After all God is a God of grace! What PZ didn't seem to twig is that underneath it his reasoning was Bayesian! How ironic! The further irony is that those Christians who say they know God exists because they have God in their hearts, are also using Bayes without knowing it!

Does this Interview Solve the Human Predicament? Part III

Spoiler Alert: "No"

The extravagance of the WTM claims is a concern in itself

(For Parts 1 & II see here and here)

Some people have called it a "cult" and I can hardly blame them: The World Transformation Movement, as I pointed out in the previous parts of this series, laud their movement with language borrowed from religion. Moreover, as I said in Part I "Griffith has received such enthusiastic accolades from his followers that it's almost as if he is some kind of religious guru ushering in another plan of salvation, decisively addressing the human predicament". Griffith claims to base his plan of salvation on science and would therefore deny he's talking religion. However, I can understand a certain wariness about this movement; one might expect a truly scientific community to be a little more cautious, tentative, restrained and self-critical (and so should Christianity in my opinion!). The whole thing has shades of scientology, but that could be unfair as Jeremy Griffiths, as a personality, gives me good vibes. Just how cultish or otherwise the WTM are would eventually become apparent in how they deal with dissent and criticism.

Anyway, continuing with my analysis of the interview that saves the world (sic)...

***

CRAIG CONWAY: ……that we have brutally competitive, survival-of-the-fittest instincts, which we are always having to try to restrain or civilise or try to control as best we can; I mean that’s what I was taught in school

JEREMY GRIFFITH: Yes, that’s what we were taught, but let’s think about this—and what I’m going to say now is very important, so I hope everyone’s listening closely. Surely this idea that we have savage competitive and aggressive, must-reproduceour-genes instincts cannot be the real reason for our species’ competitive and aggressive behaviour because, after all, words used to describe our human behaviour such as egocentric, arrogant, inspired, depressed, deluded, pessimistic, optimistic, artificial, hateful, cynical, mean, sadistic, immoral, brilliant, guilt-ridden, evil, psychotic, neurotic and alienated, all recognise the involvement of OUR species’ fully conscious thinking mind. They demonstrate that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour; that we don’t suffer from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’, but a conscious-mindbased, psychologically troubled HUMAN CONDITION

MY COMMENT: As I said in Part II, I'm probably too old to have been taught in school that the “selfish gene's” need to reproduce is the origin of our savage, competitive and aggressive motives. In fact, the history of human emergence is irrelevant to the real hard-wired problem with human behaviour: Whatever the history of the human race is, whether it be the fundamentalist’s 6000 year old creation, or the North American IDist’s God of evolutionary patching, or bog-standard evolution or something else altogether, the challenges of human behaviour trace back to each person being a quasi-isolated perspective of first-person-consciousness. Viz: My personal private experience of consciousness is vivid and all but overwhelming, whereas the experiences of other people have to be inferred rather than directly felt. Therefore, when faced with a conflict of interest in our world of zero-sum games, a conflict which entails a choice of either choosing in favour of oneself or other selves, then unless I’m exceptionally selfless (which unfortunately isn’t true in my case) I’m likely to choose in favour of self. That's because I feel my feelings but not the feelings of others. OK, sometimes the moral imperative to put others first does win through, but unfortunately not always. I’m a sinner, so help me God!

In conclusion, then, the WTM’s claim that the problematic human condition traces back to a troubled psychological complex which seeks an excuse in the teaching that genetic opportunism drives humanity’s competitive behaviour is the wrong diagnosis: One may know nothing about genetic opportunism and yet one is still troubled by the choices one has to make in the face of the fundamental fault line between the consciousness of self and the consciousness of all those others. Whatever the history of the emergence of our strong sense of personal existence and individual identity, it is a fact that the consciousness of our individual identity is felt more vividly than the conscious identity of other humans; therein lies the rub. The challenge to human behavior is to weigh the inferred experiences of others as strongly as we weigh our direct experiences.  This challenge is far deeper than fixing a psychosis.

It is a trivial truism to say that there is a psychological dimension to our behavior; of course there is, by definition: Our behavior, especially in the social sphere where "love-thy-neighbour" choices are demanded, is largely a product of our neural make-up and the information that make-up stores. But yes, we are psychologically troubled because I know what is right and yet that strong sense of first-person-consciousness means that…. 

14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (Romans 7:14-20)

That sums up my experience of the power of the self.

 ***

 

JEREMY: What’s more, we humans have cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts, the voice or expression of which we call our conscience—which is the complete opposite of competitive, selfish and aggressive instincts. As Charles Darwin said, ‘The moral sense… affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871, ch.4). Of course, to have acquired these cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts our distant ape ancestors must have lived cooperatively, selflessly and lovingly, otherwise how else could we have acquired them? Our ape ancestors can’t have been brutal, clubwielding, competitive and aggressive savages as we have been taught, rather they must have lived in a Garden of Eden-like state of cooperative, selfless and loving innocent gentleness—which, as I’d like to explain to you later in this interview Craig, is a state that the bonobo species of ape is currently living in, and which anthropological findings now evidence we did once live in. For instance, anthropologists like C. Owen Lovejoy are  THE Interview That Solves The Human Condition And Saves The World! reporting that ‘our species-defining cooperative mutualism can now be seen to extend well beyond the deepest Pliocene [which is well beyond 5.3 million years ago]’ (‘Re-examining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus ramidus’, Science, 2009, Vol.326, No.5949)

So saying our competitive and aggressive behaviour comes from savage competitive and aggressive instincts in us is simply not true—as I’d like to come back to shortly, it’s just a convenient excuse we have used while we waited for the psychosis-acknowledging and-solving, real explanation of our present competitive and aggressive human condition!

MY COMMENT: Yes, I would completely agree we have moral instincts, but these are often at war with our temptation to put our very vivid first-person experience before the extrapolated/inferred experience of others. Our potential for selfish, aggressive and assertive behaviour and our contrasting potential for selfless loving and cooperative behaviour live side by side in us all. Humanity usually knows what is right and often does what is right, but certainly not always, in fact not often enough. We easily slip into selfish competitive ways, and regardless of how humanity emerged in ancient history the problem traces back to the balance of choice between serving our vivid first-person experiences and the extrapolated, inferred experiences of others.

The picture Jeremy is painting of both humanity and the primate animal kingdom looks to be wrong. Take for example the bonobos: If the references in Wiki are right then in spite of fact that bonobos are often cooperative and supportive, males still fight competitively for females.  Chimpanzee aggressiveness and competitiveness goes further still; they not only kill other animals for meat but also have been known to kill one another. So again, we find aggressive competitiveness and supporting loving instincts living side by side in both human and primate communities. This is no surprise: Humans and primates can be very supportive and loving toward fellow community members, but when it’s a choice between self and all those others in a world where zero-sum games abound that vivid first-person identity tempts a self-first choice.

So, who is saying that our competitive and aggressive behaviour comes from savage competitive and aggressive instincts inherited from the past? That sounds like a caricatured straw-man to me. Human behaviour, like primate behaviour is a mix of support and competition and both humans and primates are morally hard put to it when a zero-sum game forces a choice between self and others. Where Jeremy gets this primate Eden from I don’t know: Not from the Animal kingdom, or from Human behaviour: So, I assume he has extracted this picture from the Bible and is using it as a metaphor; but at this stage it is not clear how he is using it; will we have to get further into the interview, to clarify this point.  

***

CRAIG:  Wow, so that’s a pretty big statement Jeremy, I mean it’s a pretty important point you’re making here. You’re saying that our competitive and aggressive behaviour is not due to must-reproduce-our-genes instincts like other animals, but is due to a consciousmind-based, psychologically troubled condition, yes?

JEREMY: Yes, our egocentric and arrogant and mean and vindictive and even sadistic behaviour has nothing to do with wanting to reproduce our genes. That was absurd. And it is actually really good news that our behaviour is due to a conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled condition because psychoses can be healed with understanding. If our competitive and aggressive behaviour was due to us having savage instincts then we would be stuck with that born-with, hard-wired, innate behaviour. It would mean we could only ever hope to restrain and control those supposedly brutal instincts. But since our species’ divisive behaviour is due to a psychosis, that divisive behaviour can be cured with healing understanding. So that is very good news. In fact, incredibly exciting news, because with understanding we can finally end our psychologically troubled human condition. It’s the understanding of ourselves that we needed to heal the pain in our brains and become sound and sane again

As I said, the ‘savage instincts’ explanation was just a convenient excuse while we searched for the psychosis-addressing-and-solving real explanation of our divisive behaviour, which is the explanation I would now like to present

MY COMMENT:  Jeremy continues to assert his case that the human predicament is being covered up by misleading theories about the selfish gene and that all we need is to do is to go into psychological rehab...... but the epistemic gap between our first-person experiences and the third person whose experiences can only be reached by empathetic inference & extrapolation is hard-wired in the physics of biology.  Given the fundamental nature of this gap it would be wrong to suggest that this is down to a “psychosis” that is remedied by rehabilitation. Yes, I agree, understanding ourselves is certainly the first step but that should entail understanding the fundamental fault line in human nature that drives our potential for selfish and competitive behaviour.

 ***

CRAIG: Okay, so what you’re saying here, Jeremy, is that we don’t need the convenient excuse anymore that we have some kind of savage animal instincts because we have the real explanation of our conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled human condition

MY COMMENT: That so-called convenient excuse is a straw-man. The real problem is far more fundamental than the WTM pundits make out. In other words, the WTM don’t have the full explanation for the human potentiality for competitiveness and selfishness.

***

JEREMY: Yes, and this key, all-important, psychosis-addressing-and-solving explanation is actually very obvious. If we think about it, if an animal was to become fully conscious, like we humans became, then that animal’s new self-managing, understanding-based conscious mind would surely have to challenge its pre-existing instinctive orientations to the world, wouldn’t it? A battle would have to break out between the emerging conscious mind that operates from a basis of understanding cause and effect and the non-understanding instincts that have always controlled and dictated how that animal behaves.

 CRAIG: Yes, that makes sense Jeremy, so what happened though when this animal became conscious and its whole life turned into a psychologically distressed mess?

MY COMMENT The epistemic distance between my personal experiences and the experiences of others is a fundamental and irreducible feature of nature that isn't due to a psychologically distressed mess; it is, in fact, the way physics determines how the biological human works. This epistemic separation, which in the zero-sum games of life tempts selfish and competitive behavior, behavior often condemned by our consciences, is the real challenge of the human condition. 

Consciousness lies on a continuum that is a function of (but not identical to) the level of cognition possessed by an organism. In fact a single human being becomes more conscious of the world around as (s)he learns and grows; that is, consciousness increases with perception and learning. In my view dogs, cats, and primates are also conscious, but their neural set-up, their perceptions and learning mean they are less conscious than humans about many things. I'll be tackling Jeremy's references to an animal becoming fully conscious in my next part, Part IV.

 ***

 So, if our conscious quasi-isolated first-person perspective is generated by the way biology uses the laws of physics then this probably means that cats, dogs, dolphins and primates have a first-person experience; that is, they are conscious beings, albeit with a level of cognition that in many areas (but certainly not all) is far exceeded by human beings.  That the extent of consciousness is a function of (but not identical to) cognitive level means that consciousness is on a sliding scale. So, when Jeremy talks about an animal becoming fully conscious that’s far too binary; there is clearly a consciousness spectrum that depends on the extent of one’s cognitive ability & perceptions. A high level of ability means one is more conscious of the world than at a lower level. For human beings much of that excess of conscious cognition resides in the world of community; human beings are gifted with strong social processing powers and have an awareness of those around them. Ironically, then, it is that very social consciousness which opens the door to sin, the word with the "I" in middle: My social cognition reveals to me how other people might be feeling and experiencing, even though I don’t experience those feelings directly myself. Emerging consciousness opens the door to potentially selfish behavior. This seems to be the very opposite of what Jeremy is maintaining!

***

In his very moving series "The Power of Art" historian Sir Simon Schama comments on the life and work of the Italian artist Caravaggio, a man who lived on the edge of the precipice of his strong passions and emotions. He led a life of profligacy and lost control more than once. According to Schama, however, Caravaggio was aware of his flaws, at least toward the end of his life. In Caravaggio's late-life painting of David holding the severed head of Goliath Schama tells us that it displays the self-knowledge of a self-aware sinner; the head of Goliath was a self-portrait. The figure of David, instead of wallowing in the pride of victory looks at the head with a pensive compassion and sadness. 

Schama picks up the story:

The power of his [Caravaggio's] art is the power of truth, not least the truth about ourselves. For if we are ever to have a chance of redemption it must begin with an act of recognition that in all of us the Goliath competes with the David. 

Until we grasp the truths at the root of our schismatic motives, truths about the epistemic distance between ourselves and our fellow human, salvation will continue to allude us.