Skyhooks and cranes

[Mithrae]

Recently I bought and began reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I'm barely halfway through yet (too many TV shows and games demand my attention) but I already find myself impressed by some points Dawkins makes, and particularly sympathetic to the aversion or hostility which must result from an honest biologist's encounters with Creationist's agenda and propaganda. Dawkins seems well-acquainted with most of the pertinent social, philosophical, scientific and historical issues which bear on religious discussion in the Western hemisphere, very organised in his presentation of that material, and a capable rhetorician in his portrayals (both positive and especially negative) of various facts, events and opinions.

Unfortunately, cursed with a hangover and reading over a chilli rice breakfast this morning, I encountered what seems to be a fundamental oversight or critical flaw in his reasoning. But to be honest I wasn't particularly surprised to find it; in fact ironically it was barely a week ago on this forum that I most recently explained what that problem is. After explaining my suspicions on why infants and children are naturally drawn towards a dualistic view of themselves and reality (selfs/subjects/minds vs. other/objects/matter), I commented:

• Mithrae wrote:
  What's all that got to do with the price of feet? Back in the day the common view (especially in Western history) reflected this selves/other or subject/object distinction which is so fundamental to our development, reasoning, language and thinking. Not only were we as humans believed to be both physical body and immaterial soul, but (depending on the era and culture) animals, trees and streams might have their own spirits governing their behaviour; or the weather, sea and so on as a whole might have their respective gods; or all of creation might have its great Spirit overseeing its formation and behaviour.
  
  Here's the rub: In recent centuries both philosophers and scientists have increasingly and rightly rejected that dualistic view of reality - but mostly in favour of the 'physical' or objective view.
  Why is that?
  
  As a basic childhood distinction, nurtured by the Christian view of physical reality as a thing unto itself, distinct from its creator, it's understandable. But that doesn't make it justified. Atheists rightly demand justification for a creator distinct from our 'physical' reality. But we should also demand justification for viewing reality as 'physical' rather than mental or 'spiritual.'

I already recognised the problem, but I was actually quite amazed this morning to discover the breath-taking ease with which Dawkins (surely not ignorant of idealism or 'mental monism'?) skims over, or indeed completely ignores it. From chapter 5, page 209 of my paperback edition:

• The psychologist Paul Bloom, another advocate of the 'religion is a by-product' view, points out that children have a natural tendency towards a dualistic theory of mind. Religion, for him, is a by-product of such instinctive dualism. We humans, he suggests, and especially children, are natural born dualists.
  
  A dualist acknowledges a fundamental distinction between matter and mind. A monist, by contrast, believes that mind is a manifestation of matter -- material in a brain or perhaps a computer -- and cannot exist apart from matter. A dualist believes the mind is some kind of disembodied spirit that inhabits the body and therefore conceivably could leave the body and exist somewhere else. Dualists readily interpret mental illness as 'possession by devils', those devils being spirits whose residence in the body is temporary, such that they might be 'cast out'. Dualists personify inanimate physical objects at the slightest opportunity, seeing spirits and demons even in waterfalls and clouds.

Richard Dawkins explicitly sets up physical monism, or materialism, as the obvious/only alternative to that silly old dualism. But even in Western thought various expressions of idealism, panentheism or panpsychism have been available since ancient Neoplatonism, through Baruch Spinoza (regarding whom Dawkins quotes Einstein as an inspiration for imagining 'god'), George Berkeley (by whom I first encountered such notions aged seventeen) and so on down to some modern philosophers and theorists of consciousness. They are even more common in Eastern philosophies and religions.

But why does that (intentional?) oversight matter so much? Why - if he doesn't address it in the second half of his book - is this such a critical problem for Dawkins' overall argument?



Because of skyhooks and cranes.
Against Creationism, Richard Dawkins makes the compelling argument that naively explaining complexity or improbability by immediate reference to a Designer is no answer at all, because that Designer must surely be even more complex or improbable than whatever first aroused our incredulity. He points out that whereas evolution comprehensively details and explains a long series of incremental increases in complexity or 'design' from simple origins, like the height increases in a crane's load from a grounded base, Creationism or Intelligent Design simply appeal to a fantastic skyhook which lifts our incredulous load with no apparent foundation or explanation of its own.

However he also notes four remaining points of potential incredulity where the evolutionary crane or the gradual slope of Mount Improbable may still be unsatisfactory as a complete explanation:
> The origin of consciousness
> The origin of eukaryotic cells
> The origin of life
> The origin of our 'finely-tuned' universal constants

Regarding the origin of life he quite correctly in my opinion points out that if there are billions of planets in each galaxy, even an exceptionally low probability of life forming by chance could still imply its occurrance on one or several of those many planets. The appeal here, as Dawkins writes, is that "Scientists invoke the magic of large numbers," based on what we've observed and might reasonably infer. The same reasoning might plausibly be applied to the development of eukaryotic cells (a subject on which I myself know nothing) based on the sheer numbers of bacterial organisms and generations in the two billion years or so before eukaryotes appeared.

In common with some other scientists (such as Stephen Hawking, the only other popular science author I've read), Dawkins again invokes the magic of large numbers regarding cosmological improbability or apparent 'design.' He mentions theories of an infinite series of big bang/crunch universe iterations, an infinite multiverse, and (infinite?) parent/daughter universes spawning through black-hole singularities. They're all interesting theories of course, but with one important distinction: Compared with the large numbers invoked for the origins of life or eukaryotes, from what little I've gathered these cosmological theories are not based on observation or particularly strong inferences. We can see the multitude of stars; we can measure numbers of bacteria and their reproduction rate. We cannot see other universes, or before and after our own universe, or inside of black holes.

Now, in fairness I have often thought that the many-universe hypotheses of theoretical (metaphysical) cosmologies are not obviously any worse (or better) than the single-god hypothesis: If the basic ideas which lead to them are simple, many worlds needn't be a more complex or improbable notion than a single deity. But they are both, obviously, a type of 'skyhook'; they are both unexplained explanations, unprovable theories, wild speculation or whatever else you want to call them.

Or are they?

The omni- omni- omni- three-in-one God of Christianity is indeed a blatant skyhook far as I can tell. It assumes everything to 'explain' anything. But we needn't be so culturally-blinkered in our thinking as to assume that this makes all theistic hypotheses of the skyhook variety. And in fact Richard Dawkins himself inadvertently acknowledges this very fact: Natural selective pressure on self-replicating structures is the only known physical 'crane' or process by which complexity or apparent design increases over time. But in his criticism of religion Dawkins carefully and explicitly illustrates an analogue to genes' variation-with-adaption in the case of thoughts, or memes.

This idea and its possible consequences are not new to me. Back in 2011 when I still considered myself an atheist, I had one of the more illuminating and formative discussions I've had on these forums with Ionian Tradition and Ragna, regarding idealism (mental monism) in my thread Atheist arguments for God:

• Mithrae wrote:
  The likely scarcity of thoughts without any objects of thought actually strengthens the case for other minds. (It strengthens the case for an external world too, but not necessarily a physical external world.)
  
  In response to your comment, I can think of three questions: Could a Mind have a sense of 'self,' when there's no other? Could a Mind conceive of numbers, when there is only One? Could a Mind conceive of non-being, when there's only being? Identity, maths and logic - I can certainly see why it's hard to imagine a lone mind conceiving any of them, especially given that we can barely conceive a lone mind! But I don't think we could answer any of those questions with a definite (or even probable) 'no.' And a 'yes' to any of those questions, however vague and indistinct that conception may be, would be the first block upon which further thoughts and conceptions could be built. Interestingly, this may provide an answer to your next comment:

  It's also worth mentioning a number of facts that are, let's say, uncomfortable to this position: the fact that consciousness appears to be a biological continuum, the fact that it doesn't look like the world is all about Earth (the only life we know), the biological intuition that there is a real world, etc. Is the Great Mind voluntarily deceptive? This reminds me of a quote: "Intelligence doesn't beget Nature, Nature begets intelligence."

  If a Mind, the only thing existing, started with nothing more than the thought "I am," we surely wouldn't expect to see a fully-functional cosmos complete with intelligent life and a deceiving serpent by next Saturday. I built this argument (thanks obviously to Berkeley) around the centrality of the self and the need to justify beliefs, but not around the centrality of humans. Given what the self knows, and given what can be best justified, I genuinely think this idealism makes sense. And in light of your comment about thought and objects, it seems to me that a (relatively) simple cosmos gradually building up to intelligent life also makes a lot of sense as the Mind expands its boundaries of conception.
  
  
  Mithrae wrote:
  All of my maths examples come from deduction based on the relationships between 1 and either 0 or 2. Birds aren't great at deduction I agree, and nor are many humans; but with no other distractions and no limit on time, I'm merely pointing out that our 'great Mind' would probably fare even better than my poor understanding of maths would suggest. But even overall, maths merely serves as an example of how quite complex things can develop from a very simple foundation.
  
  Maths is a deductive example; there's nothing new about numbers, arithmetic, fractions and so on which can't ultimately be extrapolated from the relationship between 1 and either 0 or 2. This illustrates how the most basic of concepts could, ultimately, lead to much more complicated concepts - I myself do not know of any upper limit to such potential development. That's a response to the observation (not truism) that generally our thoughts are ultimately based on prior stimuli; it doesn't take much stimulus to get the ball rolling.

And again, expressed a little better after I'd begun pondering some form of theism as a more reasonable view, in my thread A few questions of interest:

• Mithrae wrote:
  The simplest 'just is' scenario, to my mind, is also one which is recommended by our own first principles: That originally there just was a thinking, choosing thing. Every imaginable facet of reality or permutation of possibilities can be explained by that very simple scenario, because if we could imagine it in our brief and limited minds, presumably given enough time so could this original thing.
  
  Note that attributing knowledge, goodness or the like to this thing seems irrational to me (unless we later reach them as a conclusion), though if it were the original thing then presumably it would have all 'power.' But clearly it could have no conception or knowledge of our good old tables and chairs, because there were no tables or chairs. In fact, such a thing would presumably be initially ignorant of everything except its own self. How would it gain in knowledge? By thinking, imagination and experimentation, surely. And I wonder: If there were nothing else, what would be the difference between the thoughts of this 'god' - the mental stuff which it creates - and reality?
  
  Starting from a position of near-total ignorance, surely we'd not expect this being to create a perfect world in six days. In fact, surely we'd have no reasonable basis to expect it to ever create a world which we would consider 'perfect.' What we might speculate (possibly after a near-infinite period of deductive and object-relations thinking; maths, logic and so on) is that it would think/create something relatively small at first, but which would increase in size and complexity as time went on and our hypothetical deity's scope of thought increased. Eventually, it might even come up with the notion of things which move for themselves and ultimately even think for themselves!

------------------------------------------------


I haven't finished reading The God Delusion yet, so I must strategically acknowledge that I might yet be persuaded that theistic beliefs in general are indeed irrational.

But for now it seems to me that quite the opposite is the case. Dawkins is quite right in his compelling reasoning for rejecting the omni- omni- omni- God of traditional Christianity, the ultimate skyhook. But by the explicit analogy he draws with genetic selection, it seems to me that thoughts or 'memetic' selection in some form provide the only other 'crane' - the only other ground-to-air or simple-to-complex mechanism - which is known to us by observation and experience. Variation and advantageous selection of genetic stuff has produced the marvels of the living world; variation and advantageous selection of thought-stuff has produced the marvels of our technological and cultural worlds.

It is with breath-taking ease that Dawkins skims over (indeed, completely ignores) the possibility of mental monism in his dismissal of our natural, childish inclinations towards dualism. But if we here on this forum choose to be a little less dogmatic in our approach - if we at least recognise the alternative possibility that thought, choice and so on might not be illusionary organic anomalies of an unthinking cosmos - then surely we must consider by this analogy that thought potentially offers an inference-based cosmological crane which the many-worlds theories cannot.



Has Richard Dawkins - save for that singular choice to overlook an obvious type of monism, one of the common 'theistic' views of Eastern religions and well-known in the West also - made a compelling case for theistic idealism, or panentheism?

Or am I missing some subtle (or obvious) reason why our experience of simple-to-complex thought development is only an organic anomaly, and cannot reflect reality in general?

[dusk]

I personally don't get the difference between that kind of pantheism and monism/atheism.
Effectively it is the same is physicalism and materialism. Whether all that is real is inside of a super mind or not doesn't really matter. To me this is no more than a thought experiment with no real implication like actual theism has.
In theism you have a personal god, with intentions, a plan of sorts. With usually some interference in the world. A god which matters to the humans that believe in it not just as a though experiment but as having actual implications and demanding acts and behavior.

If all you have is a self that spun everything we call reality into being by being. To be it would need to think. To think you need go from one mental model to another in a forward movement in time. But that model has its rules and is coherent than it would still be identical to atheism or deism. It has simply nothing to do with the kind of theistic religion that atheists like Darwin rant against.

Personally following your thoughts, I would ask: "How does this self think before there was time." Emergent phenomena I think are a real thing. Self is one such IMO. I don't see why self should have been first other than because it is fun to think about it.

Going into Math and graph theory.
1. Say you have a point.
2. Two points.
3. A line connecting starting at a point and ending at a point.
4. Many lines connecting points.
5. Some lines form a loop. -> Self

Why ought there be a loop before there are lines and points?
I think a self is too complex to be simply represented by a line that points back at the singular one dimensional point it originated from. Self is too complex to be at the beginning in the theory you propose.
In that way I think the complex theistic gods actually make more sense as a first cause however contradictory I(&you) find them otherwise.

[Mithrae]

I personally don't get the difference between that kind of pantheism and monism/atheism.
Effectively it is the same is physicalism and materialism. Whether all that is real is inside of a super mind or not doesn't really matter. To me this is no more than a thought experiment with no real implication like actual theism has.
In theism you have a personal god, with intentions, a plan of sorts. With usually some interference in the world. A god which matters to the humans that believe in it not just as a though experiment but as having actual implications and demanding acts and behavior.

Hi Dusk, thanks for the reply I agree that as it stands the bare theory of panentheism (distinct from pantheism, though the terms are a bit confusing) doesn't carry any practical implications. But then, there are no practical implications for the versions of Christianity which many people in western countries hold either: Besides perhaps going to church on Christmas or Easter, they also may be utterly indistinguishable from atheists except if you go out of your way to ask what they 'believe.'

Or perhaps a better point of comparison would be gravity, because while I understand some of the theory, I don't actually see any particular difference between gravity as an attractive force exerted by objects of mass (a la Newton) and gravity as a distortion of space-time by objects of mass. The two are essentially identical for all practical purposes which I'm ever likely to encounter. But to physicists the difference is quite significant, and I gather that a great deal of additional knowledge has been developed from the relativistic view of reality.

Similarly while the practical differences of barebones theistic idealism are nil, it's a theory which leaves open possibilities which atheism or philosophical naturalism close. An atheist of Dawkins' type will deny any alleged witnessed miracles, any notion of life after death or alleged experience of consciousness without brain activity, any claims of divination, prophecy or revelation. They simply don't make sense in a naturalistic worldview. A panentheist on the other hand might not be convinced by any of those claims, but needn't reject them entirely; she remains more open to persuasion.

If all you have is a self that spun everything we call reality into being by being. To be it would need to think. To think you need go from one mental model to another in a forward movement in time. But that model has its rules and is coherent than it would still be identical to atheism or deism. It has simply nothing to do with the kind of theistic religion that atheists like Darwin rant against.

Actually throughout chapter 2 Dawkins is careful to explain that his criticism applies to all forms of 'supernatural' beliefs, all deisms as well as theisms, and even what he views as compromising approaches such as agnosticism or the non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) idea:

• Nevertheless, let us follow Gould and pare our religion down to some sort of non-interventionist minimum: no miracles, no personal communication between God and us in either direction, no monkeying with the laws of physics, no trespassing on the scientific grass. At most, a little deistic input to the initial conditions of the universe so that, in the fullness of time, stars, elements, chemistry and planets develop, and life evolves. Surely that is an adequate separation? Surely NOMA can survive this more modest and unassuming religion?
  
  Well, you might think so. But I suggest that even a noninterventionist, NOMA God, though less violent and clumsy than an Abrahamic God, is still, when you look at him fair and square, a scientific hypothesis. I return to the point: a universe in which we are alone except for other slowly evolved intelligences is a very different universe from one with an original guiding agent whose intelligent design is responsible for its very existence. I accept that it may not be so easy in practice to distinguish one kind of universe from the other. Nevertheless, there is something utterly special about the hypothesis of ultimate design, and equally special about the only known alternative: gradual evolution in the broad sense. They are close to being irreconcilably different. Like nothing else, evolution really does provide an explanation for the existence of entities whose improbability would otherwise, for practical purposes, rule them out.

Of course as I've argued in the OP, Dawkins himself implies the imprecision of his comment there: There is another thing which provides an explanation for the existence of entities whose improbability would otherwise rule them out, and that is the gradual development of thoughts over time.

Personally following your thoughts, I would ask: "How does this self think before there was time." Emergent phenomena I think are a real thing. Self is one such IMO. I don't see why self should have been first other than because it is fun to think about it.

Going into Math and graph theory.
1. Say you have a point.
2. Two points.
3. A line connecting starting at a point and ending at a point.
4. Many lines connecting points.
5. Some lines form a loop. -> Self

Why ought there be a loop before there are lines and points?
I think a self is too complex to be simply represented by a line that points back at the singular one dimensional point it originated from. Self is too complex to be at the beginning in the theory you propose.
In that way I think the complex theistic gods actually make more sense as a first cause however contradictory I(&you) find them otherwise.

As far as I'm aware, above the molecular level (at least) consciousness or subjective experience is the only example of 'emergence' which isn't either already a subjective perspective on phenomena (eg. 'wetness,' rainbows or the like) or the interaction of the already-present properties of a thing's parts, viewed on a larger but still objective scale (eg. states of matter, stars, or the organised groups of molecules we call 'life'). I've never seen anything even remotely analogous to the development of characteristics as unique or different as those of subjective experience, consciousness or 'self' from parts which (supposedly) don't already have those types of properties.

Of course 'self' can only exist in contrast to the 'other,' so I don't think it would be correct to say that panentheism would suppose self to be an original thing; it's possible that 'god' might not have any concept of self at all! The reasoning is simply that instead of proposing some kind of non-mental or 'physical' stuff as the basic type of reality (how can we even know if something is non-mental, besides our childhood dualist presumptions?), which somehow produced the remarkable order and complexity present in our universe even before the beginning of life, it is more reasonable to suppose that what we ourselves experience of thoughts, choice and so on accurately reflect reality rather than being weird (and potentially inexplicable) organic anomalies. More specific or detailed concepts of 'god' may or may not be built on that, though that would probably require some kind of mystical or revelatory experience I'd imagine, and I've had none

My point in this thread is simply that if we don't just assume physical monism - as Dawkins does - we find that the simple-to-complex potential in thought processes could provide a remarkable cosmological analogy to the simple-to-complex potential of biological evolution. So on face value this inference from experience is surely the more reasonable type of monism to espouse and invoke in 'explaining' the remarkable features of our orderly universe, rather than invoking the magic of large numbers in a multiverse without any evidence at all!

[dusk]

It would seem to me Darwin still describes a very personal sort of deity. Deism or not it is still an intelligence and intention behind everything. Even if left to itself by the deity it is that which he goes against.
If you simply have this mental "force" in your panentheistic view at the beginning of such a simple primitive type as you describe it, it would seem vastly different from the complex, intelligent original deity that acts with intention and deliberation.
If I understand physical monism correctly it could embrace such panentheism as simply another "force" of a different kind, yet without the necessity of an intentional being behind it.
Postulating this personal being is what Darwin is really talking about.

You are right that naturalism expects order everywhere. Things have mechanisms and do not act erratic. If I daydream I can change the rules at any which time I please. I can change the speed of time at any point. Naturalism doesn't allow that.

I am not sure simply allowing for the supernatural makes certain supernatural things more believable. I still cannot wrap my head around accepting that ghost just pop up at random disappear. Are real for a time in which the dreamer allows them to be. I would find myself wanting to have a dreamer in which I instill again the order I expect from the natural world but do not get. So I would just go one higher up to make it fit.
What I mean to say is that accepting that the worlds dreamer spins out the supernatural erratically is difficult so I would just include the dreamer and end up where I started, for no better reason other than I want it so. Now if that dreamer doesn't know what it is doing and is guided by indeterministic unconscious mind it is a wonder the world is orderly at all.
Seems to me that associating the supernatural accounts with imperfect fuzzy observation overcorrecting mental processes and similar faults of our oftentimes too subjective minds seems to make for a more stable world view.

My point in this thread is simply that if we don't just assume physical monism - as Dawkins does - we find that the simple-to-complex potential in thought processes could provide a remarkable cosmological analogy to the simple-to-complex potential of biological evolution.

Why would physical monism be a problem for that. Simple to complex seems to be available in both.
Mental to material is the issue and vice versa, isn't it?
Why ought mental to be complex and material to be simple?
I am afraid I don't get that last part.