It seems clear to me that if scientists were required to volunteer for the things they do to their experimental subjects, Ockham’s razor would not be nearly so popular.

Well, undergraduates training in the sciences already are a rich source of research subjects.

And that has nothing to do with Ockham’s Razor in any case.

This metaphysical principle is often misunderstood. Ockham was talking about our *explanations* of nature, not about natures themselves. In modern terms, he wrote that we should not have too many terms in our models because then we would not understand the models. Reality, he said, could be as complex as God wished. As a Franciscan monk, he did not see how his principle excluded the immaterial.

I know, and the irony is rich. By seeking simpler explanations, we have found explanations that simply don’t require the immaterial.

In any case, I’m aware that – philosophically, hypothetically – there could be realities that human minds couldn’t grasp. But that philosophical possibility has no practical consequences.

How can we, in practice, distinguish between something ‘currently unknown but comprehensible’ and something ‘forever unknowable’? From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can’t conclude that it’s unknowable. It might be… but it also might be the case that you just didn’t happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt.

If you decide that something is fundamentally incomprehensible, you will stop trying to understand it.

Asserting there’s things you can’t know is the intellectual equivalent of dividing by zero. Once you go there, all bets are off. You can ‘prove’ anything you like.

For example, what if there is some kind of God (or gods), and It’s exactly like a shepherd… down to the shearing and slaughter, too? (I’m sure sheep feel comforted by the presence of the shepherd… until the knife comes down.) If a God is totally beyond anything we can understand, there’s no way to disprove this. By definition, It’s perfectly capable of fooling us perfectly. There’s no way to tell.

If you try to claim that you have evidence that a God is trustworthy and benevolent, then you are by that very fact denying that such a God is incomprehensible. Evidence only applies to comprehensible things. If you say something’s incomprehensible, you’re unavoidably saying that no amount of evidence can prove anything about it. You don’t get to pick and choose.

Now, the ‘circuit’ is immaterial. It may be instantiated physically in the arrangement of actual parts, but it may also be instantiated on a ‘circuit diagram.’ But it would also exist [in an immaterial way] even if no such circuit were ever built.

And that’s where we part ways.

The ontological status of epistemic phenomena is a subtle philosophical problem. Certainly it feels as if, say, the Mandelbrot Set “exists” in some sense. But I’d say it only “exists” as a potentiality, an algorithmic consequence. If you want to call it a ‘landscape’ of ‘eternal forms’, I suppose you can do that… but it doesn’t have causal power on its own.

We can think of the “Library of Babel” (the set of all possible books) as a conceptual model, but only a Vanishingly (to use Dennett’s capitalization) tiny fraction of that library is actually ‘lit up’ by instantiation as arrangements of matter.

(Mathematically, the ‘lamp circuit’ can be replaced part-by-part with flowing water. Is that the same ‘form’ or a different one?)

For living things, this is more complex. In terms of the number and arrangement of physical parts there is no difference between the live petunia and a recently deceased petunia.

Number, I’ll grant. Arrangement? Absolutely not – they do differ. Frequently it’s on a molecular level that unaided eyes can’t see; but yes, when a petunia dies, the “arrangement of physical parts” changes. (What did it die of?)

Also, there is a demonstration from Gödel’s theorem, which may be expressed as: in any system strong enough to support first-order arithmetic [which is equivalent to first-order logic] the number of true statement in the system will outnumber the provable statements.

Accurate enough so far.

But calculating engines can only produce provable-within-the-system sentences, while the human mind can recognize true-but-unprovable statements as true.

The human mind can recognize true-but-unprovable statements as true in a formal system simpler than a human mind. A more complex system can include truths unprovable in a simpler system, which is perfectly allowed by Gödel’s theorem.

YOS
Ockham’s Razor is a non-material entity with a decided effect on physical matter, given that scientists will behave a certain way because of it. This metaphysical principle is often misunderstood. Ockham was talking about our *explanations* of nature, not about natures themselves. In modern terms, he wrote that we should not have too many terms in our models because then we would not understand the models. Reality, he said, could be as complex as God wished. As a Franciscan monk, he did not see how his principle excluded the immaterial.
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Ray: If there’s something non-material going on in human consciousness, and human consciousness has some effect on the world (such as initiating people to speak and move), then it’s in principle detectable.

YOS
I think you misunderstand formal cause. It is not a prior efficient cause that kicks off some train of physical events. It’s what makes a thing what it is. For inanimate objects, it can be grasped as the number and arrangement of parts. The parts are the matter. A lighting circuit consists of a lamp, a power source, a switch, a resistor, and wire. These are collectively the material cause of the light. But if I dump the matter on a table, I do not get light. The matter must be in a particular arrangement to itself. The “circuit” is the formal cause of the light. (The efficient cause is the electricity flowing through the circuit, which in turn is caused by the flipping of the switch, which in turn etc. The final cause is the provision of illumination.)

Now, the ‘circuit’ is immaterial. It may be instantiated physically in the arrangement of actual parts, but it may also be instantiated on a ‘circuit diagram.’ But it would also exist [in an immaterial way] even if no such circuit were ever built.

For living things, this is more complex. In terms of the number and arrangement of physical parts there is no difference between the live petunia and a recently deceased petunia. But the one is in motion and the other not. So clearly there is something involved that is not physical. It would be as if a lamp had evolved somehow and by its own power extruded a part of itself to become wire and a segment of the wire thickened and became a resistor and etc. IOW, the form of a living thing has the power to self-organize the matter in which it is instantiating.

As for the rational powers, they are capable of grasping things that are not physical, such as that SQRT(2) is irrational or the proposition that an apple is red. Neither SQRT(2) nor “red” nor the “proposition” exists physically. [If it did, it would have weight, length, location, etc.] The parallel between digestion and understanding is that in digestion we take in the matter, but not the form of a thing. In understanding, we grasp the form, but not the matter. We eat the apple; we understand “red.” [And "apple" for that matter.]

If understanding were purely material – that is, if it were merely brain – then to grasp the abstracted form “redness” from the apple, our brain would turn red. Since redness does not instantiate in matter except as a “red thing.” That is, physically there is no “red” without a “red thing.”

Also, there is a demonstration from Gödel’s theorem, which may be expressed as: in any system strong enough to support first-order arithmetic [which is equivalent to first-order logic] the number of true statement in the system will outnumber the provable statements. That is, there will necessarily be true statements than cannot be proven within the system. But calculating engines can only produce provable-within-the-system sentences, while the human mind can recognize true-but-unprovable statements as true. Therefore, the mind cannot be reduced to a calculating engine; in particular, to the brain.
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Ray: [Digestion] also does not appear to have a supernatural component. Likewise granted. (Though Catholics[,] who believe in Transubstantiation[,] might object to this point.)

YOS
Why would they object? Digestion takes in the matter but not the form and it is precisely Catholic teaching that the bread remains materially bread. Even formally, the bread retains its accidental forms.

It seems clear to me that if scientists were required to volunteer for the things they do to their experimental subjects, Ockham’s razor would not be nearly so popular.

First of all: a program designed by humans? That’s your example of a purely physical process?

Secondly: the output itself is a bunch of lights on a screen or squiggles on a paper, PHYSICALLY. It is the human, not the computer, who recognizes the truth or falsity of the output.

Anyway, I am so far behind on grading, I’ve got to beg off for a while. So long, everyone!

boh? What would that be? I don’t think we are using the word form to indicate the same phenomenon.

Let try a different line of attack: define matter! You cannot except by experiencing things, and you do not experience matter, you experience substances with form. The Cartesian res extensa is just an abstraction from experience, which leaves with the absurd problem of adding a “ghost” and calling it the soul. I have no such problem, thank you!

Once upon a time, the materialists designed hospitals around the materialist assumption that physical, observable things are all that matter.

Ah, yes, “the materialist assumption”. All materialists are precisely the same in your view, and all think exactly alike, don’t they?

Since I’ve been making the point all along that the material doesn’t matter nearly so much as the arrangements and processes it undergoes, I’m afraid your point kinda misses the mark. You might also look here: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/love.html

Science has established that it is the only community or method that is capable of discovering anything

No, but it’s particularly good at discovering stuff, and explaining why.

Maybe if and when that day comes, the scientific community will stop pretending that Ockham’s razor is an appropriate assumption for everyday living.

It sure is. Everybody uses it, all the time. As I say about love in the link above: “People do have ways to detect love in practice – how many songs are there about the difference between saying you love someone, and
actually behaving as if you do?”

You are welcome to worship the myth of progress that says knowledge will someday lead to a world without pain, hardship, whatever.

Nah, the perfect is the enemy of the good. I’m just looking for incremental improvements, that’s all.

I keep finding these words in my mouth… why do you insist on putting them there? You could ask, you know…

But it still does not explain why I – or anyone else – should share your faith that evidence directly contradicting your materialist assumptions should be ignored

Um, the controversy is whether or not that ‘evidence’ really does ‘directly contradict’ materialism. Again, nobody has put forth a positive case for a non-material explanation of consciousness, beyond, “Gee, I can’t imagine how that works.”

I’ve been pointing out all along here that human imagination tends to fall short of what we find in reality when we look and investigate as well as imagine.

And now it’s your turn. “No, Craig, there are many results of purely physical processes which we can meaningfully describe as true or false, such as…

…the outputs of theorem-proving programs, the judgments of animals about their environment, and… apparently everything humans do on a cognitive level. (For evidence of the latter, I prescribe a dose of the books by Oliver Sacks.)

We can’t build a computer that thinks and experiences like a human yet, sure. However, the writing was on the wall for biology when Wöhler synthesized urea. Now we’ve got things like Deep Blue, and the new Watson that’s competing in natural English on “Jeopardy!”. Computers are doing things people said were fundamentally impossible for computers to do even ten years ago.

I’ll freely admit that, right now, we don’t have a full grasp of how consciousness works. But that means we don’t have a proof that non-material stuff must be involved.

Don’t be like Haldane, who assumed that because he couldn’t imagine how material stuff could possibly manage inheritance, no such explanation could exist. A few decades later, DNA was discovered.