Great article, and it helps me explain to my friend that my faith is not, in fact, blind.
One problem: communication via the spirit from God to an individual is an epiphenomenon. So it can’t be proven externally? That’s one instance of a rational belief that isn’t contagious, though I suppose that’s why there are people who doubt the existence of epiphenomena altogether.
Communication is a physical process. Unless you can put forward a coherent, testable model for non-physical communication, then talking about communication from a non-physical entity to a physical entity has no semantic meaning. If no experiment can be performed to distinguish two hypotheses (e.g. that there is or is not such a thing as an epiphenomenon) then that thing is irrelevant given that human minds are purely physical objects and human thought, as far as all evidence is concerned, obeys our best models of computation (Church-Turing thesis, etc.).
Epiphenomenal hypotheses are still required to pass Occam’s razor. If there is a simpler explanation (e.g. purely physical) that accounts for the evidence, then intellectual integrity demands you take that view. Positing epiphenomena is no different than positing unicorns, unless you have quantifiable evidence for the phenomena and hence they would not be epiphenomenal.
In philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism is the view that mental phenomena are epiphenomena in that they can be caused by physical phenomena, but cannot cause physical phenomena.
I’m not sure what to call non-physical things changing the physical world, but it seems the communication you describe, if possible, would be non-physical to physical, right?
Great article, and it helps me explain to my friend that my faith is not, in fact, blind.
One problem: communication via the spirit from God to an individual is an epiphenomenon. So it can’t be proven externally? That’s one instance of a rational belief that isn’t contagious, though I suppose that’s why there are people who doubt the existence of epiphenomena altogether.
Communication is a physical process. Unless you can put forward a coherent, testable model for non-physical communication, then talking about communication from a non-physical entity to a physical entity has no semantic meaning. If no experiment can be performed to distinguish two hypotheses (e.g. that there is or is not such a thing as an epiphenomenon) then that thing is irrelevant given that human minds are purely physical objects and human thought, as far as all evidence is concerned, obeys our best models of computation (Church-Turing thesis, etc.).
Epiphenomenal hypotheses are still required to pass Occam’s razor. If there is a simpler explanation (e.g. purely physical) that accounts for the evidence, then intellectual integrity demands you take that view. Positing epiphenomena is no different than positing unicorns, unless you have quantifiable evidence for the phenomena and hence they would not be epiphenomenal.
Wikipedia says:
I’m not sure what to call non-physical things changing the physical world, but it seems the communication you describe, if possible, would be non-physical to physical, right?
You are, of course, correct. :3 I used the wrong term.
Is that because there isn’t a right term? I don’t know it if there is.
Perhaps there ought to be. Let’s invent one!