I’m not really sure, either, what “enlightened” materialism would be. I’ve heard of “enlightened” self-interest as well, but it seems in both cases, the use of the word “enlightened” is more a dressing to make something sound better. It’s more akin to marketing jingle words.

I wonder also what enlightenment might be, in materialism. I suppose you could say that something enlightened was sufficiently advanced in logical terms, and get away with it. But in materialism, could I be enlightened materialistically?

It’s strange – something being enlightened has a metaphysical quality associated with it. Yet we’re applying it to materialism. What is enlightened here, when we talk about it?

Smart materialism, and the abstraction of ethics that can grow out of it? Can a machine mind create an abstraction, like ethics, and have it be material?

As for the notion of things just being as they are, with no reason… sure, I think you can have that. But it’s also a very lazy and dangerous cop-out, unless you’re really certain.

Well, I just sound all negative here, don’t I? Sean, you know I love just about everything you do here. Well, at least you do now. I learn a lot, and I appreciate your sharing, greatly.

This is a little bizarre, though. I’m curious, are you looking for some excuses for something? Some wriggle room somewhere?

My critique of many universes with differing constants as an answer to
1. fine-tuning for life, and
2.the ultimate POSR problem of why this possible world is blessed to “‘exist” and others not: Where does it end? How many different kinds of reality are allowed to “exist”? What and why underlies the Über-laws” that determine the variation and scope of the other (more direct) “laws”, and what circumscribes the scope of “possible existence”? Modal realists make the cogent critique, that it doesn’t make sense at the highest level of abstraction for one “possible world” to “exist” and not other ones. (As I have said, it’s like the number 23 made into brass numerals while all the other ones remain abstractions – why “23″ and not “15″ or indeed all numbers reified, or none at all?)

Indeed, they reject the very notion of “reification” as a genuine distinction at all. To them, every world in “Platonic reality” exists so as to avoid the violation of the grandest, existential principle of sufficient reason. Yes, that would mean cartoon type worlds and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. (Look up on Wikipedia.)

Well, that seems the perfect solution to fine-tuning (and so says Max Tegmark), since then every possible universe that can even be described at all exists/doesn’treallyexist and we are in a lucky one.

But, I have a complaint which is also an argument for Goddidit: if every possible description is as real, then all the ones that involve irregular variations are as well. After all, “laws” are given after the fact if things are just “descriptions” with no inner virtus to “make” them so: if the forces follow 1/r^2, then we say pretentiously that they are “governed” by that law. But, it’s the other way around: that’s what things act like, so we are able to write that law. If they didn’t act like that, then we couldn’t.

The objection might be, we wouldn’t have developed in a disorderly universe to start with. Sure, but Platonic descriptions include all the cases where things are orderly up to a point and then behave differently afterward (effectively, laws that change in all possible ways – which are part of Platonic reality too since we can say what would happen, however weird to us.)

Since the range of variations is more than the orderly continuations: even if the world had incredibly remained orderly enough to nurture our development, we have a vanishingly small Bayesian expectation of continuing in a world that remains orderly. That is given that “laws” in modal realism would be after the fact generalizations, not enforcements in any sense. Since we are in an orderly universe, that looks like “Goddidit” since some overarching “management” has to step into the Platonic mess.

tyrannogenius

That super turtle representing “brute facts” will never be found by scientific investigation. Appealing to randomness and chance does not work since the ‘brute facts” must by definition be unique and not part of a random process. If they were, then where did the rules of that random process come from? You are stuck with an infinite regress. Atheistic materialism fails.

Out of curiosity, how is it that physicists have demonstrated that there are events which are in fact completely unpredictable? It’s very easy to claim that, for instance, the flipping of a coin is completely unpredictable without knowing the presumed deterministic laws that govern it.

Daniel, I wasn’t meaning to suggest that because this sunny philosophy had pernicious consequences, it must be incorrect. I was just saying that it could have pernicious consequences, despite being apparently sunny. That wouldn’t matter, if the PSR were correct, but I don’t think it is, for other reasons.

What exactly do you mean by a random process? I believe there are two main interpretations of randomness: one which we might call epistemic randomness, where the apparent randomness of an event stems from our ignorance of its causes, and ontological randomness, where the event actually cannot be predicted even assuming perfect knowledge of all relevant facts which might influence the event. It’s not clear whether or not the second exists in nature, and I believe that even if it were the case that some events were random in the strong sense, that it would not be provable that they were. (This would require perfect knowledge of the state of the universe, and somehow an ability to determine that the event could not have been predicted from this information. This seems impossible perhaps even in theory.)

If in fact there were truly random events, then this would most certainly contradict the Principle of Sufficient Reason as described here, since a failure to be able to predict an event in terms of prior events would translate into an inability to explain it. (Consider that we can explain “why” an event has occured if and only if we can identify its causes, so the two ideas are really equivalent.)

So, if we want to talk about, say, why the cosmological constant takes the value it does, the answer might be that there isn’t any particular reason why it took this specific value, but instead it derives from a random process. And that random process itself follows a specific probability distribution because of the particular way in which new regions of the universe like our own are born. To state this with a more realistic example, take a tornado: sure, there is no reason why the tornado struck my house, but if we know enough about tornadoes we can say an awful lot about how they form, why they tend to touch down in certain areas more than in other areas, etc..

An ideal situation would be that if one followed the regress back far enough, one would arrive at a single statement that is either self-referencing (i.e. it is its own reason), or could be no other way. That, I think, would be the dream of following this principle to its ultimate conclusion.

“That’s where the pernicious side of this purportedly sunny philosophy rears its head: if everything has a purpose, even the most terrible random events require an explanation, and from there it’s a short road to the urge to put the blame on someone.”

I believe this is an instance of the informal fallacy known as “argument from adverse consequences.” The fact that A implies B, B being anything unfavorable, (I’m not agreeing with you that it does here, only that your logic doesn’t make sense even if it did) does not mean that A is false, or even less likely to be true than otherwise.

Einstein remarked that if he believed in God it was the “God of Spinoza.”

Lawrence B. Crowell

A Zimbabwean friend explained to me that, in many traditional African societies, if someone gets sick it *must* be because a curse has been put on him by an enemy or someone working for an enemy. Basically, “anything bad that happens is someone’s fault”. He went on to describe the harm resulting from this notion.

I told him not to feel bad about this: we have exactly the same superstition in the West. “Anything bad that happens to anyone is a result of their being *oppressed* by bourgeois capitalist etc etc etc.”

what you need to do is come up with some quantification of the inhumanities of materialistic philosophies and of various theistic philosophies, rather than just counting one side. There’s the one hypothesis that most human beings want to “convert” people to their views, whether it’s materialistism or some religious belief. (I guess the only difference I can see is that materialists crush dissent “for the good of the majority” whilst the religious do it “for the eternal salvation of those doing the dissenting”.)

Human beings really don’t believe in live and let live except in those cases where “letting others live their lives” helps bulwark their own position.

(I know that others will dispute this, but I also think that there is a strong argument that it is only from the “everything has a reason side” that the inherent value of every human life wins out over the interests of the majority.)