In working slowly through a gigantic backlog of blog comments, I met with one that goes back to an old school question, about my project to demarcate the natural and the supernatural. The comment by Enlightenment Liberal is here. He is asking questions about the conclusion I argued here and in print here (with a followup here). The first, Defining the Supernatural, supports the others, Defining Naturalism I and II. His perspective can be summarized as “If we grant your definitions of ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, I think that all hypotheses of the form ‘X is supernatural’ entail absolutely zero observable predictions about the world,” in particular because “I think that I have absolutely no basis to conclude that there is any relation or correlation at all between the fundamental nature of things and the observable nature of things,” in accordance with Logical Positivism.
So, is he right? Let’s explore…
To understand his remark, note the very elegant refutation of strict Logical Positivism by Hilary Putnam, which is smartly summarized on Wikipedia. One point there relevant to here:
Putman also alleged that positivism was actually a form of metaphysical idealism by its rejecting [any] scientific theory’s ability to garner knowledge about nature’s unobservable aspects. With his “no miracles” argument, posed in 1974, Putnam asserted scientific realism, the stance that science achieves true—or approximately true—knowledge of the world as it exists independently of humans’ sensory experience. In this, Putnam opposed not only [logical] positivism but [any] other instrumentalism—whereby [a] scientific theory [is] but a human tool to predict human observations—filling the void left by positivism’s decline.
Though I have been very influenced by logical positivism and retooled some of its most useful aspects for use within my own philosophy, I agree with Putnam that it is not coherent. I am now (and was already upon writing Sense and Goodness without God) a scientific realist. I had been influenced as much by Michael Polanyi (Personal Knowledge) as by A.J. Ayer (Language, Truth and Logic), and my semantics and epistemology is a synthesis of them (I still consider both their books just named as essential reading for any philosopher today). And my metaphysics follows from that, in conjunction with the facts of science.
In result, I do believe there is a meaningful, and testable (and thus verifiable and thus falsifiable) distinction between a natural world and a supernatural one. Tautologically a natural world is a world with nothing supernatural in it, and a supernatural world is a world with at least one supernatural thing in it. So we aren’t just talking about whole worlds, but the properties of individual things: there can be a supernatural person, object, force, etc. These are all coherent and meaningfully different from those same persons, objects, forces being entirely natural. Epistemic access to the difference might not always be available. But it can be available enough. And more importantly, the differences are meaningful, in that, we can understand what would be different about the world if one were true and not the other. Which entails we can in theory observe those differences.
A natural object (or person or force etc.) is an object that is entirely causally reducible to a nonmental thing (or system of nonmental things). So, for example, if all human conscious thought and experience can be entirely causally reduced to just the neurological biochemistry of the brain, then the human mind is a natural thing. A supernatural object (or person or force etc.) is an object that cannot be causally reduced to nonmental things. At some fundamental level of its existence, it is dependent on at least one irreducibly mental property. Souls, God, magic potions can all be supernatural in this sense. Now, the supernatural as thus defined might be logically impossible, in which case naturalism is necessarily true (and God, as traditionally conceived, necessarily does not exist). But no one has adduced a deductive proof of that, so we can’t yet say that it’s so. (For a full exploration of the possibility, though, and why it might be more than just a possibility, see The God Impossible.)
To understand why this makes sense—and doesn’t have the consequence that ‘X is supernatural’ entails no observable predictions about the world—just follow along with us as I briefly fisk EnlightenmentLiberal’s case:
-:-
Perhaps the disagreement is here: I think that I have absolutely no basis to conclude that there is any relation or correlation at all between the fundamental nature of things and the observable nature of things.
So you think “Leprechauns cause all the observations of the Periodic Table” is just as probable as atoms causing it? Somehow I doubt that. You therefore cannot really believe there is no correlation between observed evidence and inferred causes of those observations.
So my first question is, are you confusing probability with absolute certainty? Because the Leprechaun theory of the Periodic Table is possible and could well be true. But it requires adding so many assumptions not in evidence that its prior probability drops to a vanishingly small value (see Proving History, pp. 80-81, 104-06). Whereas that does not happen for the “atomic” theory of the Periodic Table. Therefore it is highly probable atomic theory is the cause and not leprechauns.
And this holds all the way down—like trying to explain why atoms exist by appealing to leprechauns rather than the Standard Model, or trying to explain the Standard Model with leprechauns rather than, for example, Superstring Theory, and so on. This is why a fatal problem with logical positivism is that it cannot answer any Cartesian Demon (or CD) argument. It is therefore logically defunct. If a theory can’t explain why a CD explanation (or indeed a solipsistic CD explanation) of all observations is not likely, that theory is probably hosed. Or else you should be declaring you have proved it is likely only you exist and the whole world is your invention. And if you think that would be a weird thing to say, you’ve noticed the problem.
The reason CD scenarios are epistemically improbable is that they require assuming too many things are true for which there is no evidence. That then translates into a high likelihood that it is false in fact, because if it didn’t, then it would be incorrect to say it was epistemically improbable if you know that in fact it’s, say, 50/50. See chapter six of Proving History, especially the second half. The reason a highly needlessly complex theory is epistemically improbable is that it is indeed metaphysically improbable, because it requires more things to exist (or a thing with a much more specified set of properties) than need to exist to cause the actual observations.
If you don’t yet see how that translates, just imagine building a “many worlds” tree in which every logically possible world exists, and then counting the number of those worlds that have our observations but no leprechauns and only atoms (etc.), and realize that means even if those worlds all exist (a la Tegmark), the actual physical (not just epistemic) probability that we are still not in a leprechaun world is extremely high.
This is one reason Eliezer Yudkowsky correctly articulated my demarcation principle in terms of information theory (in this video, timestamp 12:38 to 20:44, which especially makes sense in the context of 5:45 to 9:30): the Kolmogorov complexity of leprechaun worlds is so high, compared to mere “atom” worlds, that even if all possible worlds exist that look exactly like ours, the number of them that are caused fundamentally by leprechauns is extremely small. And that even assumes leprechaun worlds are logically possible. That might not even be true (again, see The God Impossible).
This allows falsification, because things didn’t have to turn out that way. And still could turn out differently…
Again, just to be clear, I fully agree that if the usual model of Christian young Earth creationism were true, there would be plenty of actual evidence we could find, and it is totally conceivable that we could gather enough evidence to have a firmly supported conclusion that the usual model of Christian young Earth creationism is true. However, under your definitions, I think we could never conclude it’s “supernatural�.
Here we can turn the table around to illustrate my point: just as a leprechaun world is less probable as an explanation of what we observe in this world, so also, conversely, would a naturalistic world that explained observations that corresponded to Young Earth Creationism. The elaborate number of sub-hypotheses you would have to invent out of whole cloth to get that to fit would be just as staggering as for the leprechaun-based Periodic Table. Naturalism would therefore at that point be the one with a vanishingly small prior (not a zero probability; just a really, really small one), rather than the other way around.
In other words, at some point, the number of putative supernatural things observed reaches a point where to explain them naturalistically requires a way more complicated theory than just accepting that you are in a supernatural world. At some point, after living at Hogwarts long enough, holding out for a Forbidden Planet explanation ceases to be rational. Yes, maybe it will be that. But it’s really, really unlikely. Because it requires assuming, without evidence, a vast quantity of things to be the case (the whole Forbidden Planet scheme, from entity to creation to function, all the way to its coincidentally being undetected), far more than would be required by a supernatural theory (even accounting for its full Kolmogorov complexity). In other words, the simplest hypothesis then would be that magic just exists, and mind overrides matter.
It just happens that we haven’t observed ourselves to be in such a world. Our world looks the opposite: it looks exactly like a non-supernatural world would look. To credit that as merely a coincidence is to import a massive improbability into your explanation, an improbability that is removed if you just accept that this is not a supernatural world. Therefore, naturalism on present observations is the far more probable theory. And we conclude this on the evidence of the world (all the information in b, the set of all background knowledge, in a standard Bayesian equation—upon which all the probabilities in Bayes’ Theorem are conditioned). Had the evidence of the world been different, so might our conclusion have been.
Therefore…
To use an example: materialism might be true to all possible tests we can employ, but our observable reality might…
Stop there. “Possibly, therefore probably� is a fallacy.
You are done.
No argument of any value can proceed from “it might be that…�
What you need is an argument of the form “it is just as likely that…â€? (or, even better, “it is more likely thatâ€?). But notice how very much harder it is to adduce evidence for that proposition. Arguing for something being likely is a bitch. Arguing that it merely “might” be is easy. Because the result is virtually useless. All things possible are not equally likely. So what is merely possible, is of no use knowing. (Except for its one practical use, which is in ruling out the impossible.)
Because you need evidence for something being likely (even as likely as 50%, for anything that has any theoretical complexity at all). And in the absence of evidence for a proposition, that proposition can only be maintained on a raft of ad hoc assumptions, each of which is not 100% probable but at best 50/50 either way, and often considerably less (after accounting for the evidence accumulated in b…evidence that might have turned out entirely differently, but alas, didn’t). And all those probabilities multiply against each other, creating a diminishing epistemic (and thus metaphysical) probability. The more random stuff you have to throw on it to gerrymander it to fit observation, the less probable it becomes, not more.
You could try to leverage that prior probability up by having a mountain of prior evidence. But we don’t have any (so, that option is not available now). And even if we did (or suddenly found some), it’s really hard for it to be enough. For example, if the movie Inception were a true story and you lived it, then you would have a much better reason than we do now to suspect all reality might be someone’s dream. The prior probability in that case would go way up, because you would have tons of data in b that make it more likely. But that entails our lacking that data makes its prior probability go way down. In fact, down by precisely as much as having that data would have brought it up. Thus, it is our not having that data (even though, logically, we could have by now) that is the test that falsifies the Inception hypothesis. The more we live in the world without encountering any evidence of Inception capabilities, the less likely it becomes that Inception capabilities exist. That is the proper effect of evidence on belief.
And yet, even if you had all that Inception evidence, still counting against your theory that it’s all just some guy’s dream is that such a hypothesis adds one extra ad hoc layer of explanation over on top of an explanation without it. It thus violates Occam’s Razor—which means, it cuts the prior probability down tremendously. Because there still has to be a universe in which the dreamer resides, and not just a universe, but one that explains the dreamer’s existence, the dreamer’s powers, and the particularly bizarre and amazingly coincidental way those play out so as to look exactly not at all like a dream but very exactly like a material world would look by itself. So now you are hypothesizing two universes (a complex and bizarre real one you don’t observe and have to invent out of whole cloth, and the dreamed one you do observe) to explain observations that are perfectly well explained by just one universe (which, all told, is vastly less complex in its required component propositions). Statistically, therefore metaphysically, therefore epistemically, the latter explanation is vastly more likely to be true. On the evidence. And in that case, even with Inception evidence.
However, if you lived Inception, though your “it’s all a dream” hypothesis would be unlikely to be true (unless you gained access to evidence supporting it, e.g. you encountered and met the supreme dreamer and got a convincing explanation from them of how they can exist without a material universe to contain them and why they exist and why they have the weird powers they do and why those powers are playing out in just precisely coincidentally the least expected way so as to look exactly like a universe without any such dreamer), that different set of evidence would entail naturalism is probably false. Because to explain Inception powers and events on naturalism would require an immensely complex Rube Goldbergesque system of assumptions. So if you have no evidence for any of those assumptions (like they did in Forbidden Planet), epistemically (and thus metaphysically) their conjunction is simply improbable. Supernaturalism would be the far simpler theory, and thus on the evidence the one far more likely to be true.
The remaining “possibility” that you are deceived in all this is still accounted for by the probability of that explanation not being zero. But though it may be nonzero, it is still extremely small. You therefore have no rational reason to believe it’s the case. And every rational reason to believe the most parsimonious supernatural theory is very probably true.
It’s just, again, we don’t find ourselves in such a world. No Inceptions for us.
Thus, when I said “the underlying mechanics of quantum phenomena might be physically beyond all observation and therefore untestable, but no one would then conclude that quantum mechanics is supernatural. Just because I can’t look inside a box does not make its contents supernatural,” I was already taking into account the vast body of evidence in b that makes it extremely unlikely that supernatural things are in that box. I don’t have to look in the box to know that. It’s a statistical certainty already, given the evidence outside the box. Evidence that could have been different, but alas wasn’t. If we were Incepting people at Hogwarts, then I’d have a really good reason to suspect what’s in that box is indeed in some way supernatural. I certainly would then have no basis for saying it’s very unlikely to be. But we aren’t Incepting people at Hogwarts. Or anything of the kind. The evidence thus tells us the world is probably the exact opposite of that. The box almost certainly has just mundane natural stuff in it.
Thus…
Just because I cannot look outside the box which is this universe and see the sleeper who is dreaming – that would not make the world any less supernatural under your definitions.
My definitions fully allow that there is a small nonzero probability that this world is indeed just the dream of a disembodied psychic leprechaun, and therefore supernatural after all. But that being possible is irrelevant. Do we have any reason to believe it is likely? Well, no. Even so much as 50% likely? Not even close. And that’s the end of it. And the reason this is so is because the evidence has tracked that way. Logically, it could have tracked differently. It didn’t.
And trying to get around that by inventing an elaborate Rube Golderbesque explanation for why the evidence tracked entirely differently than a dreamworld would be expected to look and behave, in fact tracked in precisely coincidentally the one way that looks exactly not like a dream world but in fact an “atomic” one, doesn’t escape the consequences of probability theory. All the unevidenced assumptions you must then add are vastly greater than any you must add to explain the world just “atomically,” with the effect that their collective improbability sinks the ship.
So…
Thus far, the only actual useful and meaningful definitions that I can find to back “natural� and “supernatural� are based on the modern scientific notion of materialism.
There is no modern notion of materialism. The term has been supplanted with physicalism. Because matter is actually just a condensed (cold) form of energy. Energy is now the fundamental physical unit. It is defined as a vibration (a movement, and thus atemporally just a geometric shape) either of a fundamental massless material (like strings), or of space-time itself (and I think the latter is the more parsimonious explanation). But there is nothing logically necessary about that. Physics could have remained fundamentally nonmental yet reduced to completely different stuff. Unless, of course, there is indeed only one logically possible physics! Which would be a lovely discovery. But alas. No one has yet discovered such a thing.
Does some thing X count as “natural� or “supernatural� under your definitions if X is wholly causally reducible to some mind thing Y which is itself wholly causally irreducible, e.g. Y is (wholly) supernatural?
Any such X is supernatural. Because if X can’t be causally reduced to the nonmental, then X is supernatural. By definition.
The question is, at what point does our failure to causally reduce X make its non-reducibility the more likely explanation of that failure than our lack of epistemic access? When we don’t have epistemic access and it’s obvious why, then the priors hold (what’s in the unopened boxes is probably just like what’s in all the opened ones). When we have to start making up elaborate ad hoc excuses for why we still don’t have epistemic access even though statistically we should have by now, then it becomes a matter of what is more probable: that there is no natural explanation, or that we haven’t discovered it yet. And at some point those probabilities will begin to shift.
And that’s what my many examples illustrated: the more complicated you have to make a causal reduction with unevidenced assumptions, the less likely that causal reduction is. Until evidence changes that assessment (e.g. discovering a far simpler causal reduction, or discovering evidence making the assumptions it depends on very likely). So if a natural reduction has to be inordinately complex in its ad hoc parts, it then becomes the less likely explanation. If a supernatural reduction has to be inordinately complex in its ad hoc parts, then it becomes the less likely explanation. (And here complexity means in terms of information theory, not “actual physical parts,� e.g. God is extraordinarily complex in his specified complexity even if he has no parts at all).
Right now, we observe a world the simplest explanation of which by far has been naturalism. That was not logically necessarily the case (so far as we know). Had we found ourselves in fact to be in the world exactly as described throughout the Bible, then the simplest explanation by far would be a supernatural one. Albeit not the one Christians might be comfortable with, given that it would entail God is actually frail, fallible, and evil.
Hi Richard, great post. I find your way of distinguishing between natural/supernatural very helpful, but in reading this I wondered if the distinction would break down if some version of panpsychism were true. ie. if everything in the universe had an irreducibly mental component (albeit not full-fledged consciousness). Is the concept incoherent? Would we expect the universe to look differently under panpsychism?
No, panpsychism is supernatural. Very, very supernatural. Taoism is an example. So is the ultimate dreamer hypothesis discussed in the article above.
I agree evanhubbard, Carrier’s definition breaks down for certain kinds of panpsychism. Scientific (or naturalistic) panpsychism, or as David Chalmers prefers to call it proto-panpsychism, maintains both that everything is fundamentally (also) mental but also that everything follows universal uniform laws of nature. Carrier will rule such a world (e.g. one following the Standard Model) is Supernatural, but that in my opinion is false.
Conversely, Carrier’s definition will denote as “natural” a world where vampires and werewolves exist, say, (assuming their existence to be a mystical-thing rather than a divine curse or whatever).
This is why I advocate for “Natural = Follow uniform, universal (microscopic) laws of nature” – which rules out every clearly-supernatural stuff. It also tells us a lot about what a “natural” world will look like and, most importantly, is the metaphysical background that grounds the scientific method.
(Of course, other types of panpsychism, such as the Taoist or “dreamer” panpsychism he invokes, are Supernatural under my definition.)
You aren’t listening to my definition. It says nothing whatever about laws at all (much less laws of nature). If there is anything that is irreducibly mental, it is supernatural. That is my definition. Even if that thing is governed by “laws of nature” (which are nowhere an element in my definition of either natural or supernatural). Because “is irreducibly mental” does not entail “is not governed by laws.”
So there is no way to argue my definition classifies panpsychism as natural, any more than you could argue the definition of mammal includes snails.
Your definition, meanwhile, doesn’t work to any use. Because God may well follow uniform, universal laws of nature. And yet still be disembodied and irreducibly mental. And therefore supernatural. There is no reason why supernatural things wouldn’t obey their own laws. So if you want to mean that “nature” laws are different from “supernature” laws, then your definition is uselessly circular: because then it never actually defines “nature” laws so as to distinguish them from “supernature” laws.
This was precisely the incoherence problem my definition was developed to solve.
If the world around us looked like Young Earth Creationism was true, how would this provide evidence that any mental phenomena exist which are irreducible to non-mental phenomena?
The whole Bible, not just Genesis.
But taking the question as to just Genesis, YEC would entail direct spontaneous creation of the entire universe a short time ago, and in deliberate intentional one-day stages. A supernatural will having done that is a far simpler hypothesis than any elaborate mechanism by which it would be accomplished in a deductively nonmental way. The latter is not impossible. It just requires inventing out of whole cloth a Rube Goldbergesque contraption of inordinate complexity. Which is simply less probable than the more parsimonious supernatural explanation (though, again, it is not parsimonious because it is simple; it is parsimonious because it is simpler: it requires fewer component propositions to fully describe, even granting Yudkowsky’s entirely correct observation that full descriptions are always more complex than most people assume–and notably only not so when there are no elaborate contraptions, but just a few simple rules, which just unfold automatically into the world we observe, which happens to be what we have discovered instead of YEC).
Of course, evidence can change that. For example, waking up in the Matrix would confirm a natural mechanism behind it.
To me, in the Genesis-YEC scenario, I don’t know how to assign probabilities to these two hypotheses
1. A mental phenomenon irreducible to natural phenomena produced the universe
2. There remain natural phenomena we have not yet observed, which implement a mentality, which produced the universe.
How should we assign probabilities to them?
You don’t have to assign a probability. (1) requires vastly more complexity (as explained by Yudkowsky) than (2). And by vastly, I mean by huge orders of magnitude. We don’t need to know how huge. Because we can just tip the iceberg (e.g. sample some 2s and run the numbers for just a few facts in 1 that aren’t needed in any 2; again, as per Yudkowsky’s example) and already show a Bayes factor of something like (10^10):(1) against. You wouldn’t need to even keep going at that point. It would be obvious that continuing would push the ratio into the power of hundreds or beyond. And yet already at (10^10):(1), the probability of 1 in ratio to 2 is vanishingly small. Hence, you can ignore all 1s.
Until someone discovers a 1 that isn’t that ridiculously complex.
Hi Richard,
Perhaps you can help me understand this a bit better. Forgive me if you’ve gone over this somewhere else, but the crucial thing here seems to me to be how you define mental and non-mental phenomena.
While many definitions can be imagined, it seems to me that any useful candidate must encode some notion of complexity. Otherwise, we might run into difficulty making a fundamental distinction between, say, the mental phenomenon that is my desire to pursue sound philosophy, and the desire of one proton to stick to another one nearby (a ‘desire’ that we quantify in terms of the strong nuclear force).
Clearly, without the ability to separate such tendencies into those that are and those that aren’t mental phenomena, all things that ever happen are guaranteed, a priori, to be supernatural, thus making any discussion of the matter unnecessary.
Where I’m struggling is with the attempt to make this desired distinction without directly incorporating complexity into the concept of the mental.
Now, I may be jumping to conclusions, but it seems to me that if we can’t fulfil this desideratum, then your concept of the supernatural is doomed. For if we define the supernatural to be those things not reducible to non-mental phenomena, and we require that mental phenomena are complex, are we not defining a class of entities whose simplest parts are in fact complex? And, since any complex thing has, by definition, simpler internal moving parts, isn’t our class of supernatural entities necessarily empty?
I look forward to your thoughts!
Tom
Yep. Information complexity at the very least. That’s why (as my article above explains) supernatural theories are vastly more complex than natural ones—even when they have no physically distinguishable parts.
Whether that would entail substantive complexity is the question I discuss in The God Impossible. So far, no one has proved that. It would be an extremely important thing to prove, though. As I’ve said before, I think a formal proof that the set of supernatural things is empty would be Nobel Prize material.
(Note also that we are defining space-time and mere objects as nonmental. What we mean by mental are properties that are distinctive of a mind: so, things that are sentient and motive without mechanism, e.g. a Tao, God, potions, incantations; or non-materialized concepts with physical potency, e.g. Platonism.)
Here’s another rabbit hole you’ve pushed me into. I hope you’ll humour my confused musings.
Let’s say a disembodied mind could exist and let’s call it god. This mind would either have libertarian free will, or causal free will.
If it’s causal would we still call it supernatural?
If it’s libertarian, would that not be the same in practice as “random” (because not determined by any cause)?
So is a god of complete random chaos the only option for the supernaturalist?
Yes, a causal system can be supernatural. So, no, if a supernatural being obeys causal laws, that does not make it natural.
(But yes, libertarian free will is incoherent. As you note, it is simply synonymous with random and uncaused. But God also can’t make a rock so big he can’t lift it. The solution to these logical conundrums is to just redefine the capabilities so as to exclude them, e.g. God has all powers that are logically possible to have; God has compatibilist free will; etc.)
If I’ve understood you: the behaviour of a supernatural mind could be entirely determined by physical causes, but the mind would still be supernatural because, ontologically, it is not composed of solely physical (or non-mental) parts?
Conversely, in an example like psychic abilities, we’re dealing with an embodied mind, but no physical mechanism to explain the behaviour?
So we could say there are two “modes” of being supernatural. Supernatural existence and supernatural behaviour. Maybe that would be a useful distinction to make when thinking about whether the supernatural is logically possible. You wrote in The God Impossible post about the logical impossibility of a disembodied mind, but that might not rule out supernatural behaviour from embodied minds? Or do you not see the distinction in this way? Would what I’ve called here supernatural behaviour also necessarily involve the ontological kind of supernatural?
Physical is a distracting word in this context, though, because people don’t consistently apply or define it (so it runs the risk of becoming circular or vacuous). Better understanding arises if you avoid it.
It’s solely about whether the parts something is reduced to are not mental. As in, you break it down, into all the most fundamental parts needed for it to exist or happen, and you examine each part separately. Looking at that part, is it a mental property (like love, or thought, or will, or an idea), or is it a nonmental property (like an inert object, a region of space-time, or the shape of either or both, i.e. things not distinctive of a mind nor usually requiring a mind to exist). After inspecting all the parts that way, were any of them irreducibly mental? Then it’s supernatural. Were all of them nonmental? Then it’s natural.
The same goes even for “likely further reductions” when you don’t know for sure the fundamental reduction, based on prior probabilities from past cases, e.g. if it’s been cupcakes the last hundred reductions, it’s probably cupcakes all the way down. The more so if you can posit hypothetical fundamental reductions that are relatively simple (e.g. Superstring theory in which the strings are actually just knots of spacetime; far simpler than elaborate ghost minds).
Yes. I discuss the different modes (and that as an example) in the original article about defining the supernatural. There I demarcate supernatural beings, substances, powers, properties, and effects (or more accurately, causes) as the available modes of the supernatural.
It’s always ontological. The natural-supernatural distinction is always an ontological one, not a merely epistemological or semantic one (or ethical one, etc.).
So, yes, if a disembodied mind is logically impossible, all supernatural things are logically impossible, because they all require at least one attribute of a mind. By definition.
Hence the example in my original article: a love potion might not be sentient, but it has to know what love is and what changes to make to a body and brain to cause it; and that can be accomplished in only two ways: an elaborate mechanism (some sort of computer, the component parts of which are each nonmental, i.e. require no mental powers or properties to exist or function) or a supernatural power. The latter is some aspect of mind. It doesn’t have to be a whole mind. But it has to be part of one: the part encompassing the ability to know things (what love means in terms of changes to a body and brain, etc.) and will things into existence (causing a body and brain to reconfigure itself into a state of love).
The God Impossible argues that those things probably can’t exist, except as the outputs of elaborate mechanisms.
Therefore, nothing supernatural can exist. If mental powers and properties can only be the outputs of elaborate mechanisms.
And that is therefore the question.
Good article. Minor editing point: Yudkowsky with a “y”.
Right! Fixed!
Thanks for getting around to my quesetion.
About a month ago we met in San Jose and I bought you a lot of drinks, and you gave a brief answer to my questions. I didn’t want to bother you more at the time on this topic.
I agree to many of the things you’ve said. I agree that the following hypothesis is highly unlikely: the Leprechauns hypothesis behind properties of the elements of the periodic table. I agree that Kolmogorov complexity of a hypothesis is a good first indicator of how likely a hypothesis is, and that we should use Kolmogorov complexity of a hypothesis to inform our beliefs aka inform our priors.
My current stumbling block is this. I’m using your definitions of “natural” and “supernatural”. The Leprechauns hypothesis requires a large amount of information (complexity) to specify. However, what if we summed up all epistemically possible supernatural scenarios which match the evidence, and compare that to the sum of all epistemically possible natural scenarios which are match the evidence – applying all of the proper Bayesian modifiers and Bayesian reasoning. I am not yet convinced that we can extrapolate a single obscure supernatural hypothesis like Leprechauns to the sum of all epistemically possible supernatural scenarios.
Let me use a short example:
Consider your example from here:
If you cannot look inside the box, then how did you conclude that the contents are more likely to be natural than supernatural? That might be the simplest description of my current stumbling block. You would need to take the sum of the epistemic confidence over all epistemically possible underlying supernatural models, modified by the known evidence, and compare that to the sum of the epistemic confidence over all epistemically possible underlying natural models. (If I understand this right, then those two numbers should sum to 1 e.g. 100%, so calculating one gives the other.)
I suspect this might have to do with my lack of clarity of the meaning of the word “mental”. Off the cuff, I would look at how Daniel Dennett defines the word. I suspect the proper definition of “mental” begins with a list of competences. I really need to read his book Consciousness Explained.
I am beginning to suspect that if I had a more rigorous understanding of the word “mental”, I would be able to conclude that this infinite summation actually leads to real observable predictable differences. If that’s right, then your assertions would be right and I would have been wrong.
PS: I might not get tickets to see you Wednesday. I am sad. I think I have to register with the group to RSVP. Waiting on a response to that now.
I spent some more time thinking about the “mind” concept, and now I actually think you’re wrong Richard.
Let me introduce this quote from Daniel Dennett.
> Daniel Dennett on William Lane Craig
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb10QvaHpS4
> Starting around 10 minutes 20 seconds
Transcribed myself. Apologies for errors.
To give you an example of where I’m going, there is a beautiful lecture by Daniel Dennett where he compares a philosophical zombie with a quote unquote “real human being” with “qualia”. Daniel Dennett notes that in order for the philosophical zombie to be indistinguishable from a “real human being”, its brain needs to have the same structure. Thus, it may not have “qualia”, but the states of the brain over time will be the same, and the states of the brain over time are representative of a train of thoughts. In fact, one might argue that it has a real train of thoughts, as Dennett argues.
Remembering what I’ve learned from several Dennett lectures, and thinking about it now, I’m starting to see the truth in the above quote. If we define “mind” in the way that Dennett does in terms of competences, that almost immediately suggests a system with moving parts. Further, it is true that the system may not have moving parts in the way that we’re accustomed to, but it must have some internal state which is functionally isomorphic to the brains we’re used to. This is comparable to how philosophical zombies might not have “qualia” – whatever that means, but they still have trains of thought represented in the state in their brain.
To argue from another perspective, for any mind that you show me, I will be able to do psychology on it. If I cannot do psychology on it, then it’s not a mind as I recognize the concept. Further, the very act of doing psychology on something means creating models of internal state, and describing how the internal state changes based on external stimulus and how it changes over time. Again, what does it mean for this internal state to be “real” vs a non-real artifact of the model? I argue that there is no difference. Again, it’s very comparable to the non-difference between a the train of thought of a philosophical zombie compared to the train of thought of a “real human being”. I think I will argue that if I can create an accurate model of a hypothetical internal state of the mind, and describe the state transitions of that internal state of that mind, then it has real internal state, and thus it’s not irreducible.
At this point, I think I have to agree with Dennett when he says “that’s as good as my life work to show how personal causation reduces to scientific causation”. There’s the chance I might be taking his conclusion farther than he intended, but given the context where he used this regarding the mind of god, I don’t think so.
In conclusion, Richard, I think your definition of “supernatural” is not merely synthetically empty, but actually analytically empty, and thus vacuous. There is no such thing as a irreducible mind. It’s a contradiction in terms.
Perhaps the only way you have to escape my argument is to define “mind” in terms of qualia. However, I don’t think that will be a fruitful path because “qualia” is so hard to define, and because any hypothesis about qualia is completely untestable. (In fact, one might argue that the word “qualia” is by design untestable.) I would be very curious if you want to make a computation complexity argument regarding hypotheses that involve qualia in order to make arguments concerning the likihood of a supernatural vs natural under a qualia definition of “mind”.
Alternatively, maybe you would argue that a mind can have real internal state, but also be irreducible. If you take that option, then I’m not sure I understand what you mean with the word “irreducible”. Maybe you would mean that there is no tool which can take it apart and expose the internals? If so, I have to go back to the quantum black box example. Given we know that any mind has real internal state, which hypothesis is simpler? The hypothesis that there is a tool which can separate pieces of the real internal state (natural), or the hypothesis that there is no tool which can separate pieces of the real internal state (supernatural)? I don’t know if you’ll take this approach, but I have a hunch that the simpler hypothesis is that any internal state will be separatable.
PS: Note that I whipped up all of this myself over the last day, and so this is all quite tentative.
You are essentially repeating my argument in The God Impossible. So I was already there ahead of you. And even mentioned the fact in this article. Twice.
Unfortunately this can be at best a hunch. We have no logical demonstration available that it is a correct analysis.
Which leaves us with my definition.
Which is essentially a definition of what someone needs to prove is logically incoherent, in order to conclude that it is. Which requires a deductive syllogism.
I would love to see that, because it would prove God is logically impossible and end theology forever, and possibly even secure you a Nobel Prize (and I am not being facetious, I’m being serious).
Laws of probability. If a billion open boxes have a ball in them, we can calculate the probability that any of the unopened boxes don’t have a ball in them. We do not have to open those remaining boxes to know what that probability is.
That’s how statistics as a science even exists (when we poll a population, for example, we open 1000 boxes and from that can infer what is in the remaining 100 million unopened boxes–and we know that, to a calculable confidence level and confidence interval). This is actually deductively certain, BTW. As long as the sampling procedure is random, or random enough for the math being used. Because randomness (even approximated randomness) entails things about the probabilities that result when inferring to a population from a sample of it. (For more on this see here.)
Kolmogorov complexity: when you count logically possible universes, there are vastly more simple ones than complex ones (and remember, we are only counting universes that look like this one, since we are trying to ascertain how many such universes predict the same evidence we observe).
Thus if supernatural ones are a lot more complex than natural (and they are: when explaining our observed universe), there will always be more natural universes that look like this one. A lot more. I mean, a lot.
Now, sure, if you can come up with a supernatural hypothesis that is indeed simpler than any known natural one (i.e. its Kolmogorov complexity is lower), you might have something to take seriously.
All I can say is, good luck with that.
Because if such a thing existed, physicists would have already found it by now.
As to the rest, we already approximate sums over infinite theories, all the time. Because the probabilities diminish and thus sum to a small value even when infinitely numerous. And we can subtract the common factor before running the ratios. The math is the same. See Proving History, index, “coefficient of contingency,” for how that works. So we don’t need to trouble ourselves with all possibilities. The uncertainties left from treating them in bulk are so small they vanish below our margins of error.
All human reason depends on this being the case. Otherwise we could never know which theory was more likely than any other, and thus could never use mental models to manipulate our environment, and thus we would remain today in the stone age (indeed, not even as advanced as that). Even the mere act of catching a ball requires our brains to sum Bayesian outcomes for infinite scenarios. They don’t need to actually count to infinity to do that. As Newton and Leibniz eventually found out (though as Archimedes had already discovered, unbeknownst to them).
Sorry if I didn’t fully understand your arguments on the first go. Sorry if I didn’t remember all of your arguments while thinking about it myself and constructing my replies.
Concerning infinite sums and sampling. I do have an undergrad in math, and so I am familiar with such ideas. However, I have not seen even a semi-rigorous attempt at doing so. As I said, I think that would require a much more rigorous definition and understanding of the word and concept “mind” than which I currently possess.
I think part of your response is a little ambiguous. Do you share my hunch that it may be logically impossible to have a mentally irreducible thing? I think you said that. If so, cool.
However, if you agree with this hunch, then I am especially dubious of your purported sampling of the sample space and arriving at the conclusion that concordant non-mental irreducible hypotheses outnumber concordant mental irreducible hypotheses. If you share my hunch, then I strongly suspect that when you did this sampling exercise, you used underspecified and ambiguous criteria to separate probable irreducible non-mental things from probable irreducible mental things. In other words, if our working definition of the word and concept “mind” hints at the conclusion that all minds are reducible to non-minds, then I do not think we can construct honest and sufficiently rigorous criteria to use in any such sampling exercise. On this matter, I will follow up with some more of your links now.
Again, thanks for your time. I will see you Wednesday, even if I have to stand in the back.
All I have to do is notice that every supernatural hypothesis has an astronomically high complexity, while many natural hypotheses do not.
I don’t need to sample the entire infinite space of all possibilities to tell you what that means in terms of relative prior probability. Nor do I need any advanced math. Sixth grade math suffices.
See Proving History, index, “a fortiori.”
I question your sampling method. I don’t think this represents a fair sample. With a finite sample space, I would request something like a Simple Random Sample. For an infinite space, some analog would suffice.
Rather, I think that you are comparing popular supernatural hypotheses vs popular natural hypotheses, rather than all supernatural hypotheses vs all natural hypotheses. I think you need a better sampling method if you want to talk about the space of all instead of the space of popular. Specifically, popular supernatural hypotheses do seem to be wildly more complex than natural hypotheses, but it seems far from obvious that this is an inherent fact about all supernatural hypotheses.
During my first attempt to do a better sampling, I found myself asking the following questions: Take the current model of physics (ignoring relativity): a bunch of mindless quantized fields with certain interactions. What’s the simplest way I can transform that into a supernatural hypothesis? Could I just change the word “mindless” to “mind-ful”? E.G. “Reality is a bunch of mental quantized fields with certain interactions”. Would that be logically consistent? How would that change the complexity of the specification of the hypothesis?
In other words, I found myself looking for equivalently simple supernatural hypotheses. I took a simple natural hypothesis, and I tried to make the simplest supernatural hypothesis out of it which I could. My first try was to just flip “non-mental” to “mental”. Part of me wants to say that’s not allowed because the definition of “mental” and “mind” carries some weight, but what weight is that? My initial hunch was to say that minds by definition must be complex, but I don’t like that idea, because the difference between a mind and a non-mind is a sliding scale rather than absolutes …
And at this moment just now that I’m writing this, I realized that I think your entire enterprise is bankrupt. Mind vs not-mind, e.g. mental vs non-mental, does not represent a well-formed dichotomy. Rather, it is a sliding scale. That’s what one should take away from modern psychology – not neuroscience – psychology. The difference between a carrot, an ant, a dog, and a human, is not one of absolutes. Does an ant have a mind? It has a brain – sort of. Do you want to draw the line in between mind and not-mind in this case? Where is it? There is no line. I want to say that this is something like the fallacy of composition.
And I think I completed a full circle back to our starting agreement that the idea of an irreducible mind may be logically malformed.
If you have some good supernatural hypotheses to test, get on that.
Otherwise, no data is no data. You have to draw your inferences from that.
And the failure of anyone to come up with one in hundreds of years, is kind of bad news for anyone hoping there are such things.
That’s what we base our inferences on.
It’s the same reason grue almost certainly doesn’t exist. Because if properties like that existed, we’d have seen some by now. Unless they are extremely rare. But that’s just a synonym for improbable.
As to mental and nonmental being a continuum, no. The demarcation is very clear (yes, ants experience distinctly mental properties that nonmental things alone by definition do not, e.g. intelligence). I don’t know why you are having a problem with it.
Specifically, can you draw the line in the following chain between “mental” and “non-mental”?
1- A human’s mind
2- A dog’s mind
3- An ant’s mind
4- A chess playing computer program (to borrow from Dennett)
5- The modern understood rules of physics
I especially like the similarity between the chess playing computer program and the rules of physics. However, it’s also really jarring to try to see the similarities between step 3 and 4, and between 4 and 5, at the same time.
Off the cuff, I might blame the cultural knowledge of dualism, spirits, and minds as actual separate entities.
I think a paraphrase of Dennett has it right. Just because we have a car does not make us experts in cars, nor do we know what a car really is, how it works, what it’s made of, etc. Similarly, we all have minds, but we’re not experts in minds, and it seems that most of us do not understand what a mind really is, what it’s made of, and how it works.
To be clear, my problem with your entire approach, Dr Carrier, is that our very understanding of the word and concept “mind” is that it embodies a certain minimum threshold of complexity to count as a “mind”. It’s part of the relevant difference between a dog’s mind and a chess playing computer program. However, that line is completely arbitrary and does not represent a real fact about the world. It’s entirely a cultural construct. Minds, when properly understood, are the result of pieces put together in the right arrangements, and thus thinking about “irreducible mental substances” is very much a fallacy of composition.
In particular, your sampling method is bad because you focus on the extremely complex supernatural hypotheses, such as the mind of a Leprechauns, instead of a mind like an ant, or a chess playing computer program.
If you allow the hypothesis that the world is merely mindful quantized fields with certain interactions, then supernatural and natural hypotheses are just as likely because it’s trivial to change one into the other. If you don’t allow that hypothesis because it’s not mindful enough for you, then where do you draw the line? At the chess playing computer program? At the ant or ant hive? At the dog? (Hopefully we agree that dogs have minds.) If you draw a line, where is it and why there?
I don’t know if you’ll agree Dr Carrier, but thank you so much! I feel so much better now for realizing all of this.
You are talking about amounts of mentality, not the difference between being mental and not.
1-4 are all expressing mental properties, such as: intelligence.
You bet, if 5 did that, we’d be in a supernatural world.
How do you know that ants have mental properties? You hinted that you also believe that a chess playing computer program has mental properties. Is that a correct statement of your beliefs? Are you sure you want to stick to that position w.r.t. a chess playing computer program? If a chess playing computer program has mental properties, why not the quantized fields of quantum field theory that comprise all of observable reality (module general relativity) ?
What is this bright clear unambiguous distinction between mental and non-mental? I don’t see one. I am not sure, but I bet my cited expert Dennett does not see one either. Note: If you try to explain this difference in terms of “displays intelligence”, it would just be moving the problem by one step, and it wouldn’t actually explain anything. You would then need to give a satisfactory distinction between “displays intelligence” and “does not display intelligence” which is not a continuum.
It sounds like I’m talking to a dualist, which is quite surprising considering everything you’re written on the subject of compatibilism and our personal conversations on compatibilism.
It comes down to information processing:
(1) if anything behaves non-randomly, why?
(2) is it because of an assembly of individual parts each of which is the simplest possible act of processing (none logically simpler being possible)?
(3) or are there steps of processing being skipped–they have no mechanism, they just magically happen with no reductive cause?
A yes to 2 is naturalism. A yes to 3 is supernaturalism.
That’s the ontological distinction. Most obvious when comparing macro systems (the ontological difference between Harry Potter and Forbidden Planet is undeniable).
Reducing it to the smallest logically possible skipped-step distinction might make it hard to define, because it requires technically advanced distinctions, but no one really cares about such fine distinctions. Certainly there is some point where a single metabolic process in an amoeba can flip between being natural or supernatural, based on a single bit of information being skipped (i.e. a single bit of information being magically generated without cause, and yet in a non-random way). But we don’t have to explain to anyone why we shouldn’t believe such things exist. Everyone already knows such notions are silly, that they posit categories of power for which all prior evidence is against and none for, and for which there is no evidence now, nor any ideology dependent on them.
Just ask someone to place a large, scary bet of money on the supernatural option for the amoeba, for example, such that you would bet that completing an investigation of the amoeba’s metabolism will find at least one bit of information processing accomplished magically out of the blue, with no underlying mechanism. No one will place that bet. And that’s the point.
The fact remains that the ontological distinction is clear in macro-cases. So you clearly do understand there is a difference. The rest is just refinement of technicalities.
Then we get to the epistemic question: could we possibly be in a supernatural world that is just so coincidentally arranged as to prevent us ever finding any evidence of any such thing? The massive coincidence that requires is extremely improbable. Therefore positing it requires adopting into your prior an extreme improbability. Hence, it’s extremely improbable. Unless you get evidence. When you discover Hogwarts, now you’ve got some evidence. Is it enough? The same question then flips exactly around: after you’ve checked all the places you can think of for an underlying mechanism (e.g. you have verified the earth doesn’t have a gargantuan Forbidden Planet machine inside it), could we possibly be in a natural world that is just so coincidentally arranged as to prevent us ever finding any evidence of any such thing? The massive coincidence that requires is extremely improbable. Therefore positing it requires adopting into your prior an extreme improbability. Hence, it’s extremely improbable. Unless you get evidence. Like, for example, finding where the gargantuan machine is.
Yes, this does mean it’s possible you can be in a world that is 100% natural but looks 100% supernatural, a world massively coincidentally arranged in just such a way, such that you are warranted in believing it is indeed supernatural. But that’s warranted precisely because the alternative (which just by coincidence happens to be the truth) is extremely improbable. Hence all knowledge claims are claims to probability, not certainty.
“You are talking about amounts of mentality, not the difference between being mental and not.”
But if mentality exists on a spectrum, how do we know there is a sharp distinction between being mental and not? How do we know where to draw the line?
I think there is an analogous question with qualia. In “Sense and Goodness without God” you write “…any process that produces virtual models, and analyzes and reacts to them intelligently, probably experiences qualia…And advanced computers, still pure machines, have achieved perception…I think it follows they have experienced qualia.” (pp.146-7) The key phrase there is “that produces virtual models” etc. That could be the place to draw the line, both for qualia and for mentality (if there is even a difference). But I think that just pushes the problem back a step. “Virtual models” might exist on a continuum as well. How complex does a sensory system have to be before we can say it is producing a virtual model of the world?
Nonrandom acausal decision-making.
So far, all decision-making (even the behavior of colliding rocks) is either random or causally reducible (to inert objects or the geometric shape of space-time, or often in fact, randomness, e.g. the second law of thermodynamics).
A supernatural thing would be where there is at least one decision-making event that is neither random nor causally reducible (e.g. Harry Potter says a word and a lightning bolt flies out of a stick at his chosen target…although there is a whole huge number of decision-events in that process without mechanism, as I explain for love potions in my original article on the supernatural).
Anything that has sensory input, memory of that input, and use of that memory to effect output, is running a virtual model. It can be a really simple and piss poor model. But still. This is similar to how we define computation as a Turing mechanism.
The only relevance this has, though, is that in such a case the question is, is the model entirely causally explained by components none of which is itself a virtual model machine, or not? If not, it’s supernatural.
A bit of off-topic, but nevertheless. In an old comment you criticized the argument hat the Universe has, on the whole, zero energy, claiming that contrary to what some physicists say, gravitational energy is not negative.
Now, this is clearly not your field of expertise, and various able experts in the field, who certainly know the basics, – such as Guth and Hawking – say that it is negative in the relevant sense and that it does cancel out the energy of matter.
Question: why should one take your word over that of the experts in the field, and how does one know that your simple dismissal is not an intellectual analog of the simplistic creationist refutations of evolution (like “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys”)?
Here is the actual comment you are referring to.
What I actually said there was that it is a tautology to say there is as much gravitational energy as there is mass energy (because the one causes the other); calling one the “negative” of the other is just semantics. Which fact does not allow the spontaneous creation of something out of nothing. It’s still two things, that add up into one big thing. Calling it “negative” does not erase that fact. (At best it solves a conservation of energy equation in Big Bang theory; but that’s it.)
In actual fact gravitational energy is still very much a thing and measurable: gravitons have a calculable quantum mechanical energy same as photons and all other particles, and that energy can be transferred causing the motion of objects or the warping of spacetime.
In fact, what is called the “negative energy” of gravity is what we used to call potential energy. Which isn’t actually energy in the same sense: it’s the possibility of energy being transferred. In quantum mechanics that energy transfers from a field to an object (or from one field to another).
That’s the semantics of description, not the discovery of an anti-energy parallel to anti-matter. And it’s just not useful, if your actual aim is to explain why there is something rather than nothing.
There is a good explanation of what the semantic meaning is of “negative energy” in the context of gravity here, which I’ll extract for convenience:
Notice the difference: it’s just which direction the energy flows. So it’s not really a “substance” we are talking about, as if “negative energy” was fundamentally different from “positive” energy. Rather, it’s just one way of describing in which direction energy moves (from potential to actual) when you pull objects apart that are experiencing different kinds of force attraction between them.
Hence:
Note how this is simply about where energy is coming from and where it’s going. Instead of calling the field energy density “negative,” you could just as easily say that energy gets moved around such that the energy density of that field decreases. But the energy didn’t vanish. It just moved somewhere else. Just like doing work to heat something, or doing work to cool something: you could describe the latter as negative heating, but that doesn’t change the fact that its all just energy getting moved around and some of it becoming waste heat.
As Guth explains, what he means by “negative energy” is simply this: that “[it] has the opposite sign because the force law has the opposite sign: two positive masses attract, while two positive charges repel.” That’s it.
Thank you for a detailed reply. It has always been my understanding that the only reason most physicists bring this up is to solve “a conservation of energy equation in Big Bang theory”, nothing more. Maybe someone uses it “to explain why there is something rather than nothing”, but I’m not aware of it (and that wouldn’t make sense indeed). It’s just a retort to the usual creationist argument of “but this contradicts the energy conservation laws!”.
There actually are atheists (some even scientists) who try to use it to explain that. Usually because they don’t understand or notice the distinction between causation and coherence.
And it wasn’t to answer creationists that Guth developed the proof that gravity obeys conservation laws by being a source of potential energy; he simply wanted to show that it obeys conservation laws, therefore his Big Bang theory is parsimonious—it doesn’t require hypothesizing novel physics. And he wasn’t worried about hypothesizing novel physics because of creationists. He’s fine with hypothesizing novel physics (and his theory does so), in fact all of science progresses only because scientists hypothesize novel physics (which they then test). Rather, he is trying to find the most parsimonious theory. Thus, he wants one with as little novel physics as possible. And being able to get rid of the question of what caused energy to appear if the first law always holds was one such advantage. He still has to explain what caused energy to appear (and he has a good theory of that, based on quantum mechanics). But that explanation no longer has to explain the breakdown of the first law of thermodynamics. So his explanation can be simpler than one that does.
Could there be elements of the universe which exhibit no necessarily mental properties, and that are in principle inaccessible to our discovery/understanding? Ie. could we observe some effect and be unable to determine whether it was caused by something mental or something non-mental?
It may not be the best example, but I was led to this question by thinking about acupuncture, as an example of woo that I couldn’t fit neatly into your categories of the supernatural. Qi energy is something some people might think of as supernatural, even if no mental capacity need be invoked to explain its effects. Suppose acupuncture reliably worked, and couldn’t be explained by any known science. The needles were having a demonstrable effect on health, but we just didn’t know where this revitalising, curative energy was coming from. Nothing mental seems to be invoked.
It sounds like you are asking in isolation from prior probabilities. Which is invalid reasoning.
The only logically possible way to end up in the situation you describe is if by now we had confirmed half of all phenomena were more likely supernatural than natural, thus establishing that all inaccessible causes have a 50% chance of being either, and therefore we can’t say which is more likely.
Alas, we find ourselves in a world where every box we open has the natural inside it. We’re at billions of boxes now. So the remaining boxes have an extremely high probability of likewise containing the natural. Thus, at this point, one needs extremely good evidence of anything supernatural, before they can say it’s even likely to be one of the causes still inaccessible.
That’s confusing supernatural with paranormal. I discuss the distinction (and how things like a Qi energy discovery could be natural or supernatural, depending on its mechanism) in the original article Defining the Supernatural.
“we find ourselves in a world where every box we open has the natural inside it.”
Could one respond that this is because the “natural” boxes are the easiest to open – they’re the low-hanging fruit? Suppose one day science hits a brick wall and our naturalistic explanations dry up. Well there are still unanswered questions (let’s say). In fact, we don’t know how many unanswered questions, because there are unknown unknowns. Maybe we’ve found so many naturalistic answers because they’re the only ones our brains are good at finding.
I’ve been going over your old posts on this topic, and I have an indirectly related question about something you said in a comment thread. In response to “there are concepts in mathematics which do not correspond, even potentially, to any physical quantity or property”, you said “Everyone who says that, isn’t aware of the actual physical underpinnings of mathematical formalisms … For example, the square root of negative one refers to a physical rotation operator, realized in actual physical systems like radio circuitry … Likewise, Fermat’s Last Theorem describes a geometric shape. Etc.” I think it would be important to know whether this is generalisable to all mathematics, as you assert. Is there a name for this position that I could look up? Could you recommend anything to read (even just a wikipedia article, something with a bibliography to get me started)?
That’s an ad hoc supposition. What is the probability that that would just coincidentally be the case? That the supernatural just happens to only exist in hard to open boxes, and in none of the easy to open ones?
Think this through and you’ll realize the organization required to make that so is vastly complex. Thus, vastly improbable.
Until you get enough evidence to change that assessment.
Again, this is exactly like grue.
Attempts to challenge it appeared in the comments here.
No one found an exception.
Dear Richard Carrier,
“You aren’t listening to my definition.”
You confuse not agreeing with not listening.
“So there is no way to argue my definition classifies panpsychism as natural”
… which is why I specifically said “Carrier will rule such a world (e.g. one following the Standard Model) is Supernatural” – adding that “in my opinion [that] is false.”
“Your definition, meanwhile, doesn’t work to any use. Because God may well follow uniform, universal laws of nature.”
No, he may not. Universal as in Newton’s universal law of gravity – applies to all things. Uniform as in applies across all space and time. God doesn’t work according to rules that apply to all things and across all space and time. [We can go to rounds about how universal the laws of physics are, but do we really need to?]
“So if you want to mean that “natureâ€? laws are different from “supernatureâ€? laws, then your definition is uselessly circular: because then it never actually defines “natureâ€? laws so as to distinguish them from “supernatureâ€? laws.”
Universal and uniform.
“This was precisely the incoherence problem my definition was developed to solve.”
Solved. Without falsely categorizing Werewolves as natural, or opining on what does or doesn’t lie at the fundamental level of existence, and while providing a basis to construct a much more detailed view of what a natural world will look like and thus to judge whether ours is, and to metaphysically ground the scientific method that allows us to do so.
There is no One True Definition of “natural”. But answer me this – if “naturalistic” panpsychism is true – i.e. all of reality follows the standard laws of physics, and things feel a certain way all the way to the bottom – why would you insist on calling this kind of world “supernatural”? What’s so “supernatural” about it, aside from the fact that your definition judges it to be so?
Then you didn’t read my article Defining the Supernatural.
How can it falsely categorize them as such? A definition is a tautology. To falsely categorize is an epistemic problem not a semantic one. You seem now to be confusing the two.
Werewolves could be natural or supernatural (and when we don’t know, paranormal). Exactly as explained in Defining the Supernatural.
There is what people mean in practice. (My definition comes from an analysis of how people actually use the words.)
Everything else is a waste of time discussing.
Hello Richard,
I enjoyed this piece immensely. I agree with the vast bulk of your argument and find the probability argument against supernaturalism (if I might term it that way) very persuasive.
I want to question your definition of supernatural. You say it’s supernatural if it cannot be reduced to the non-mental. But what if we had unexplainable phenomena occurring in the world which was actually caused by another (as yet) undiscovered dimension or realm of physical forces. These might be living things without thoughts who are able to influence our reality by their nature, even though there is no deliberate thought process or mind at work. Things like Trees in another realm cause ghost trees in our realm. Sure, this is spectacularly unlikely and you can dismiss it that way. But no more unlikely than the speculation that there are immaterial minds out there reading our thoughts or intervening in the middle of heart surgery. We don’t know if there’s anything there or not – we have no knowledge to base speculation on, including yours in attaching the supernatural exclusively to the mental. Is not defining it in your way, to some small degree at least, accepting the proposition of a religious claim having some sense of veracity or likelihood over an infinity of other possibilities (including some that our terrestrial brains could not even conceive), for no evidential reason.
I have argued a similar position here and have had some difficultly defining naturalism v supernatural. I would be interested in your response. http://rationalrazor.com/natural-vs-supernatural-the-false-dichotomy/
That’s just more physics. I see no irreducibly mental properties at work there.
I actually discuss the example of parallel universes influencing ours in my original article Defining the Supernatural.
I also differentiate supernatural from paranormal there, and you may want to read that, too.
Finally it’s not “for no evidential reason” when we are basing our prior probability on a vast database of evidence. As in fact we our.
Had we been in a supernatural world, odds are we’d know it by now. Because it wouldn’t likely look like this one.
Dear Richard Carrier,
“There is what people mean in practice. (My definition comes from an analysis of how people actually use the words.) Everything else is a waste of time discussing.”
People who write dictionaries should be concerned only with what people mean in practice. People who do philosophy should realize that folk-terms need explication into clearer philosophical concepts, and that there isn’t necessarily only one useful way to explicate a given term.
What people mean in practice when they say “werewolf” is that a man changes into a ravenous wolf on nights of full moon. That has NOTHING to do with whether the world is fundamentally mental or not. It is ruled out, however, if causality is restricted to microscopic universal laws. My definition is superior on this front, which is why I said yours is false…
“How can it falsely categorize [werewolves as natural]? A definition is a tautology. To falsely categorize is an epistemic problem not a semantic one. You seem now to be confusing the two.”
‘False’ here signified that your definition deviates too much from the common usage of the word, e.g. failing to categorize huge swathes and paradigmatic cases of what people call “supernatural” as such. That’s the very criterion you raise above, essentially. Try to apply the principle of charity, please.
“[“God doesn’t work according to rules that apply to all things and across all space and time.]
Then you didn’t read my article Defining the Supernatural.”
I did, but it was a long time ago. If you feel there is any argument there that is relevant, do feel free to actually state it. If not, you’ll have to forgive me but reference isn’t an argument.
“Werewolves could be natural or supernatural (and when we don’t know, paranormal). Exactly as explained in Defining the Supernatural.”
Reference isn’t an argument. But if you do decide to make one, please do apply the principle of charity again, hmm? Remember I raised werewolves as an example of something paradigmatically supernatural. Treat it as-such. “Everyhing else”, to quote yourself, “is a waste of time.”
Finally, I note you haven’t answered my direct question. I’ll ask it again: consider a world following precisely our world’s laws of physics, but also where all things FEEL a certain way, all the way to the bottom. This world would contain nothing not composed of quarks and leptons and so on, and will not be measurably or physically different from our own. Why, aside your definition, would you be inclined to call this a “supernatural” world?
You need to read the original article then. I addressed all of this there.
Thanks Richard. I read the article, and I gather from this you would define ‘ghost trees’ as paranormal not supernatural.
So would you agree that using your definitions – not everything that is not natural is supernatural? Some of it is paranormal. So effectively you are altering the general understanding of what a layman understands supernatural to mean. You are narrowing the definition of natural to ‘reducible to non-mental’ which determines a narrow definition of supernatural which results in another category of paranormal to pick up the remaining non-mental (previously supernatural items) such as Ghost Trees. So if mysterious forces exist in other dimensions that are not mental (they are like gravity but with quantum like indeterminacy) which produce effects in this world – they are? Paranormal?
My other objection was not based on our evidential knowledge of nature, it was based on lack of knowledge of supernatural. There may be nothing in this set, or a collection of things with properties beyond our conceptions. I agree we can define natural, but supernatural still insists on being simply Not-Natural by definition (even yours) and since we cannot predict what that might be, it is effectively indefinable.
Paranormal things are either natural or supernatural. Period. There is no middle category.
What makes them paranormal is that we don’t know yet which, or we don’t know yet what the causes are (even if we’ve concluded most likely they will turn out to be natural…or, were we living in Harry Potter’s world, supernatural).
That there is a very clear and definable difference between Harry Potter’s world and Forbidden Planet world, belies your attempt to claim that the difference is indefinable.