Reasons for believing....
Dan Dennett is known for his "no good reasons for believing" in God argument. I always found this more or less a cop out on his part. This really amounts to saying that he can't come up with any....
A lot of people believe or think or hope or fear that human beings will be able one day to create artificial intelligence, machine consciousness. I submit, if it is believed possible for humans to create consciousness, why should it be any less possible for human consciousness to be created?
I guess that would be a 'pragmatic-optimistic ontological proof'?
A lot of people believe or think or hope or fear that human beings will be able one day to create artificial intelligence, machine consciousness. I submit, if it is believed possible for humans to create consciousness, why should it be any less possible for human consciousness to be created?
I guess that would be a 'pragmatic-optimistic ontological proof'?
Comments (42)
That’s ‘cause he believes in science, and he thinks it’s one or the other.
Right. So I am assuming he probably believes in the possibility of realizing AI. In which case, per my argument, a fortiori, he should believe in the possibility that human consciousness is itself created...
Personally, I do not believe that we will succeed in creating actual artificial intelligence, only a facsimile. Consequently, this proof does not work for me. However I also do not "actively disbelieve" in the possibility of God, in abstracto.
I haven't heard of it.
Quoting Pantagruel
Though like I said, I am not familiar with Dennett's argument, this doesn't sound remotely like your 5-word summary of it.
I don't need to summarize his argument if his own beliefs demonstrate the contrary, in the context of my argument. (As I said, even the argument itself proves nothing except that he himself fails to find any good reasons for believing. That's another thread, but one obviated by this one).
I don't follow Dennett, but I checked and he seems to be a very active proponent of strong AI. That's all that is required to substantiate my argument.
Contrary of what?
Quoting Pantagruel
So you are just making shit up.
This is a worthless OP.
Your inability to follow or comment on the actual argument suggest that the problem lies more on your side rather than mine.
It doesn’t follow that because consciousness can be created by humans that human consciousness must be created too.
I can create ice by putting water in the freezer that doesn’t mean ice that I find outside in the winter is also created by someone.
The fact that something can be created doesn’t mean that it can only be created. Your argument is fallacious sir.
And you are saying that Dennett both believes that God is possible and denies the same? Show me, I am not taking your word for it.
And in any case, as you said, this is a trivial argument. Was it worth starting a thread for it?
I didn't say must be created. It follows that if you believe consciousness can be created then you believe consciousness can be created.
Ok, so you don’t seem to really be saying much at all then. You haven’t presented a “good reason” for believing, just acknowledging a possibility.
A - that is one possibility out of a virtual infinity of possibilities and demonstrates nothing.
B - it doesn’t refute anything you say Dennett claims.
I’m afraid your argument is still fallacious.
What I am saying is that if Dennett (or anyone) believes that consciousness can be created, a fortiori, he must believe that his own consciousness could be created. And since being the creator of consciousness is one of the most important properties (if not the most important) usually ascribed to the concept of God, if Dennett (or anyone) believes that consciousness can be created, he a fortiori believes in the possibility of God.
How is that fallacious?
It’s fallacious as an argument against a position Dennett holds. You started by quoting Dennett, “good reason” being the two key words. You have not provided a “good reason” to believe...something being possible is not a good reason to believe in it. So your argument in no way refutes what Dennett said. Dennett isnt denying the possibility, he is denying that there are good reasons.
I'm not arguing against Dennett explicitly, as I made clear. What I am doing is presenting my own argument, which amounts to a type of "ontological proof," which establishes Dennett's position as self-contradictory. Hence casting doubt on the whole "reasons for believing" approach in the first place.
i thought that what my main argument was was pretty clear, inasmuch as it was both stated and short.
If Dennett has "good reasons" for believing in strong AI then he as equally good reasons for believing in God.....
No, his good reasons for believing in “strong AI” are not thats it’s possible. There is an entire branch of science that give good reasons to think AI is possible contrasted by no such scientific field to source for good reasons god exists. All believing in god has is naked possibility, like any number of absurd possibilities I could name. You are making a false equivalence between a possibility (not a good reason to believe anything) and good scientific reasons. The former is all belief in god has going for it and the latter has both but more importantly it has a basis in science and rationality.
You have shown no self contradiction to what you have claimed Dennetts position is because your argument is fallacious...a false equivalence is a fallacy.
No, this is precisely not the case, which is the entire point of my post. The only germaine possibility is the possibility of creating consciousness. If you hold that human beings can create consciousness, then consciousness can be created. End of story, nothing more is required than that. If AI were created, it would only strengthen the argument for the existence of God. As it is, it validates the possibility to the extent that it is believed to be possible.
You are arguing a strawman.
I’ve reached the limit of my willingness to explain it to you. It’s not remotely a strawman argument I’m making. I suspect you think that because you do not understand the logic of what you are saying so it seems like I’m creating a strawman but unfortunately for your “argument” the premiss and logic I’m using is yours. It’s just that it’s fallacious, as in logically fallacious. You haven’t actually addressed that at all.
Or you just don’t understand what a strawman actually is.
Brilliant.
I accept that consciousness is created. But who says it is created by god? It could be created by a salamander. Or a black hole in the vast expanse of the universe. They are NOT GOD.
You seem to INSIST that consciousness is created by god. Why are you so sure about that?
If consciousness can be created intentionally, then our consciousness could have been created intentionally. All it does is put the concept of god on equal footing with whatever other theories you would care to propound in good faith as having produced consciousness.
Again, I am not conceding that consciousness, can be created intentionally. I believe all AI will ever be is a sophisticated facsimile. It's only if you actually do believe it that this argument has force.
And yes, I am saying that if something has the property "It created our consciousness intentionally", then it matches in a very broad sense a key feature of a god, as we commonly understand it.
Creation involves a creator. One scenario necessarily involves creators while the other doesn’t. I don’t see any contradiction here.
Exactly. They are equally possible.
So the argument is that, if it is possible for us to create machine consciousness, then it is possible that a deity created human consciousness.
Sure. But this goes nowhere towards demonstrating that human consciousness was created by a deity.
SO it's a non-starter as a reason to believe in god.
What?
As in, put your argument together, because as it stands it doesn't work. You seems to have:
There is no good reason to believe in god; Strong AI; if it is possible for us to create machine consciousness, then it is possible that a deity created human consciousness; therefore god exists.
'Something that can be described as "the creator of consciousness"'
You perhaps have as a premiss:
'Human beings will be able one day to create artificial intelligence, machine consciousness'
Can you fill in the gaps?
You say god creates consciousness. (I think you are saying that; correct me if I am wrong, please.) I agree with your\ if you say you believe god creates consciousness. But I highly doubt your authenticity and your being right if you say you KNOW god creates consciousness. An entity that you don't have any clue about (since the entity has never ever revealed anything of the entity's self) is not something that you can hang such an important role on, realistically speaking, as creating consciousness (intentionally or not). God never revealed any of its qualities or attributes; it never even revealed it exists; and yet you speak of an ability of god as god's own private and exclusive ability.
Again, it was strictly a hypothetical, "if you believe in strong AI and if you also believe in atheism" then those positions lead to contradictory conclusions. For me personally, the jury is still out.
I didn't expect so much reaction to the logical form of the argument itself - obviously it isn't as self-evident to others as it is to me!
Wrong interpretation. He says he has heard pretty much every (traditional and loopy) reason people give and none of these pass standards of reason or evidence. Nothing wrong with that. Most atheists argue this way and use the shorthand phrase "no good reasons for believing". However if you accept the theistic claims made by people who argue from personal experience or mysticism then you may consider Dennett's position vulnerable.
"(A small child thinks to himself): My parents feed me, clothe me, keep me warm and clean. And safe. So I trust them. So, I also trust whatever they tell me about anything, including what they say about "God"."
Obviously, this reason is not available to just anyone, one has to be born and raised into those particular epistemic circumstances.
This is my own position with respect to that specific approach of his. I (or anyone else) can argue compelling reasons not on his list because they have to be compelling to me and by my standards. If he failed to find them he failed to find them is all that can be said. The fact of his good evidence argument or standard does not itself justify or recommend the conclusion he reaches for anyone else.
Yet both religious apologists as well as their a(nti)religious counterparts tend to dismiss this approach, arguing that "compelling reasons by one's own standards" aren't good enough.
What do you have to say to them?
and hence justify the validity of one's own beliefs? If so, I wonder how many people can be said to believe anything at all?
I guess my point is, people justify their beliefs by their commitment to them, ultimately. If a belief can find positive enaction (i.e. you believe in god, so you volunteer, treat your fellow man with dignity, etc.) then that is the best reason there is to hold a belief.
This is not a stance generally held by philosophers or scientists.
Doesn't mean that there are good reasons for disbelieving either.
I'm agnostic.
@Wayfarer
What would be good reasons to believe in god? The way atheists oppose belief in the divine, ignoring multiple arguments from the theist camp, I'm left with the impression that nothing less than an one-to-one meeting with god, complete with physical contact and maybe an exchange of words, will suffice as proof of god. This kind of "close encounter of the third kind" proof I call direct evidence of the divine.
Yet, these same atheists who demand a "close encounter of the third kind" vis-à-vis god happily accept and publicly profess a lot of scientific claims, claims that contradict scripture, based on indirect evidence i.e. evidence that rely on deducing the past from the present.
This is like a person who says aliens exist because fae saw a UFO but demands that others who have the same belief have evidence of an actual encounter with aliens in flesh and blood or whatever passes for those in alien biology.
That belief is deeply embedded in action is not a generally held position? Thanks for the tip. You might want to enlighten the advocates of embodied/embedded cognition, because I'm pretty sure they are all about enactment in context. I think those guys are mostly philosophers and scientists.
Accepting "compelling reasons by one's own standards" as a valid criterion means that we'd need to accept that pretty much anything anyone believes is justified -- from believing that Trump won the 2020 elections to beliving that human civilization on Earth was started by aliens etc. etc.
Neither philosophers nor scientists accept that. Nor do religious people or culture at large. Instead, they maintain that people must have some objective, interpersonally verifiable or agreed upon reasons for believing something, in order for those reasons to count as "good reasons".
I think the fact of a belief being validated by its actions is about the apex of intersubjective verifiability, don't you? Unless your are talking about something that is trivially measurable. As soon as value enters the picture, it becomes a matter of what constitutes proof.
Secular culture is the culture of unbelief. It's very much the age we live in, it's a mindset, a whole package.
When I was an undergrad, the view I formed at the time was that modern Western philosophy was very much a product of leaving God out of the picture. 'Anything but God' seemed to be the driver - not that this was actually stated so much as implied. There was a liberal tolerance for the fact that individuals might believe in God, but modern philosophy bracketed it out. In the Philosophy Department, the major influences were, on the one side, 'Oxbridge positivism' and on the other, the New Left and Marxist Political Economics (this was the late 70's and the full impact of post-modernism hadn't quite manifested yet, it seems to me.)
I was very much a sixties type, pursuing what I understood as 'enlightenment' rather than conventional religion; at the time I was pretty scathing about 'churchianity'. But I also studied Comparative Religion, which eventually I majored in (fat lot of use that's turned out to be). That's emphatically not 'divinity' or 'Bible studies'. It helped me make connections between the various schools concerned with enlightenment - new religious movements, as well as Eastern religions.
So, the view I formed at the time was that at the formation of Christian orthodoxy, the orientation to enlightenment was associated with the early Gnostics, and was basically suppressed or driven out by the victorious mainstream. From then on, the emphasis in Western religion was always 'believe and be saved'. This came to a head with Luther's fideism and Calvin's doctrines of predestination. You were obliged to believe - refuse, and be damned. (But then, according to Calvin, you might be damned anyway!)
The wars of religion and the stranglehold that the Church had over politics were also major factors. Western culture rebelled against that - inevitably, in my view. But the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. In other words, there is a kind of truth in religion which can't be found by other means. But how it's framed, understood, interpreted, practiced, is all important. So now we're in a one-dimensional world, where nihilism is rife (even though a lot of people don't know what the word means). Modern empiricism is irrational, in that it has banished the idea of first and final causes or any sense or Reason (capital R). It believes life arose as a result of the 'accidental collocation of atoms' (as Bertrand Russell expressed it, although I'm not suggesting creationism.) The idea of 'reason' as it was traditionally understood has been abandoned, or relativised and subjectivized. Welcome to modernity. At least it has given us the freedom to dissent!
See A Secular Age, Charles Taylor.
The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie.
The Neural Buddhists David Brooks
A Buddhist Response to Contemporary Dilemmas of Human Existence, Bhikkhu Bodhi.
Should we believe in belief? Karen Armstrong.
This element is what attracts me to Spinoza. Instead of introducing "God" as something that hurts our brains to even bring up, it is the first thing you think of when reflecting upon your own conscious existence. Aristotle said he didn't know much but that he was pretty sure he didn't dream all this up for himself.
Some of the confusion comes from what having a Credo could be as a form of life. Saying what you believe as a part of a ceremony is not something all "believing" people do. Is the comparison of different liturgies equivalent to the promulgation of theological opinion?
I'm currently reading some of Max Scheler's lesser-known works (as much of his work is). He matter-of-facts God as a correlate or adjunct of higher consciousness constantly, without reading anything else into it.