Sunday, December 29, 2019

A blind and deaf camcorder engineer

1. I'm going to revisit a pet issue of mine. I'm a realist about the external world. There's an extramental world, independent of observers. So I'm not a metaphysical idealist.

But in two respects I'm an antirealist. The uniformity of nature is an axiom of scientific realism. The physical world operates according to a continuous chain of physical cause and effect. It's like a machine. 

And I agree that the closed system view of nature is the default setting. But it has a manual override. There are personal agents with powers of mental causation who can  manipulate nature to produce outcomes that bypass natural processes. Take miraculous healing. That's discontinuous with antecedent conditions. It circumvents the chain of causes. It interjects a new cause, a new starting-point, that's not traceable to the causes leading up to that outcome. 

So that places limits on our ability to extrapolate from the present to the past or future. All things being equal, uniformity is the norm, but all things considered, we must always be open to the possibility of events that circumvent the default mode. 

2. The other is the issue of sensory perception. We don't perceive the physical world as is. Rather, that's mediated through the sensory processing system. 

It's like we have a camcorder in our minds/heads that records sights and sounds. What we see or hear is a mental copy of the external stimulus.

Recording is a representational process, where the copy is supposed to resemble the original. Now imagine a blind and deaf camcorder engineer. Because he can't see and hear, he can't compare the copy with the original. So he can't tell if they matchup. 

Consider naturalistic evolution producing a biological camcorder through dumb luck. And this would have to develop independently on countless occasions. The process can't compare the copy to the original to distinguish a match from a mismatch. It requires an outside observer to make that comparison. An observer who's not part of the circle.  

However, even if the designer can see and hear, there's another complication, because there are different ways to sample the same physical object. Two observers may see the same object: one has color-vision while the other is color-blind. They see the same thing but they don't perceive the same thing. Likewise, one observer may have the acuity to detect a camouflaged animal that's invisible to another observer. 

Some animals have different senses, like infrared perception, polarized light, scent trails, echolocation, and electromagnetic signals. So their inner camera takes different kinds of pictures. 

Science fiction posits superheroes with X-ray vision. Sensory relays can sample the same object at different scales of magnitude. It can peel back the layers to see the inside as well as the outside. So there's no one true viewpoint.  

Or take a music score. That's encoded music. An abstract record to reconstruct a musical performance. The score doesn't sound like anything. It's just a set of symbolic markings. 

Then there's the ineluctable circularity in the fact that we must use our senses to analyze our senses. We can never get behind our senses. My own description of the process is deceptively objective in that regard. 

Ultimately we're dependent on God to design a sensory perceptual system where the mental representation is an approximately accurate and adequate sample of the external stimulus.

Only God can break into the circle to provide an external check. It's like communication. If what you hear on the receiving end is gibberish, then the signal was garbled in transmission. But if an intelligible message comes through, that means there's a match between the input and the readout.  

So we depend on God to design a system in which the copy is an approximately accurate and adequate sample of the original. Even then, appearances may be several steps removed from reality. Mountains seem smaller and closer at a distance. So the mind must interpret what it perceives to make necessary corrections or adjustments. 

Science can never falsify revelation because science requires revelation to provide the intersubjectival benchmark. Only the Creator can stand back of the process to make perception correspond to reality. 

6 comments:

  1. Atheists to some extent realize this when they use evolutionary psychology to explain away religious belief. It's just odd that they stop there and don't consider that a mindless, non-truth-seeking mechanism endowed humans with much more faulty mental faculties. Like sawing away at the tree branch you're sitting on.

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  2. Steve, Luis Dizon posted on facebook a youtube testimony of a secular Jewish Harvard professor (Roy Schoeman) who converted to Catholicism because of a visionary encounter with (allegedly) the Virgin Mary. Here's a shorter testimony given at a different occasion. I'm reminded of sci-fi author John C. Wright who also converted to Catholicism from atheism because of (alleged) visions of Mary, Jesus, God the Father etc. He's the author of the popular book Count to a Trillion (and it's series). Here's a short 4 min. testimony.

    In the future, if you're interested, maybe you can share with us how you would interpret such experiences?

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    1. I've already discussed that in relation to Deut 13:1-5; Mt 24:24/Mk 13:22; 2 Thes 2:9 & Rev 13:13. Not all signs and wonders constitute a heavenly endorsement. Some constitute a test of faith. An enticement to follow false prophets. There are evil spirits (fallen angels, souls of the damned) as well as good spirits (heavenly saints and angels).

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    2. If Rome had a monopoly on miracles and apparitions, that might provide prima facie evidence for Rome. But that's not the case.

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    3. Great points and Bible verses. Thanks for the input.

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  3. When I came across this sort of argument, it stuck me as hard for a naturalist to resist. (And by this kind of argument, I mean the argument from reason in its various forms, and I think Edward Feser, drawing on Pruss and Koons, has developed a similar sort of argument from the PSR (and from that to God): to deny the PSR implies denying our ability to reason or get knowledge about the external world.

    Nagel tries to escape, but he doesnt go far enough (back to God). Aristotliean teleology (or something like it) is part of the answer on the creatively side of things: the mind has to be directed toward truth. But if the fifth way of Aquinas is right, that still leads you to God. Moreover, we would still have to ask why things with the sort of immanent teleology the Aristotlean would ascribe to things work well. Why minds directed toward truth (and not just the funniest beielf, etc.) and why do they have various powers and the like that enable them to get at it to some extent?

    Ironically, philosophers like Richard Rorty recognize this, and for whatever "reason" deny that we can know anything, except in a very relativistic sense of knowledge.

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