Atheist Reductionism

Recap of a debate I had with a guy on carm who billed himself as "atheist reductionist." This was not his screen name but his philosophical position. I find that this form of reductionism amounts to losing the phenomena and it makes up the foundations of the atheist approach to science and to their attacks on any ideas concerning God, the Supernatural, or arguments for God.


my argument:

I distinguish between methodological reduction and philosophical. As a research method reductionism is useful. As a philosophy used for ruling out claims of anything beyond a narrow range of empirically quantifiable materialistic hypothesizes, reductionism tends to be a mere loss of phenomena.

Reductionists such as Proudfoot or Dennett merely allow phenomena they can't control to slip between the cracks and reduce all matters of investigation to this narrow range of data that they can control.


Typical example is the studies on "God part of the brain." Most of the peple who do such studies such Ramarchandrin do not use any sort of controlled means, like Hood's M scale to determine the nature of a religious experince. They mere assume any religious imagery is as good as any religious experince claim.

In fact they are losing the phenomena because in claiming that some religious image in the subject's head constitutes a religious experince, and thus is proof that such experinces can be induced, they are actually just ignoring what might be validated as true religious experince on the M scale and if they used the M scale they might find that they are not actually inducing religious experince at all.

There are many such examples that one could dig up. Mainly I would find them in dealing with questions of brain mind. The way that Chalmers accuses Dennett and compnay of pulling the bait and switch by confusing consciousness with brain function is a perfect example.

The guy I was arguing with,
Mahollinder's answers:

The drive of the reductionist is to identify and represent those properties which are both necessary and sufficient to the ontology of an object of consideration. And in this manner they are “real properties”. This often results in the removal of those properties, which are neither inherent to the object of consideration or necessary and sufficient to its being. The addition of extraneous variables when identifying and representing phenomena does not add any ontological properties to the referent itself. The object cannot – and they cannot be by us – internalize those extraneous properties. For a representation as such merely stands as a “saying something about” an unfundamental property of the object, and not about what the object is – or the object itself. And thus, the object itself is neither being identified or represented appropriately. A rose-itself does not have “beauty” as a property. “Beautiful” is not a universal aesthetic we can find in all roses nor can we find it at all in the rose-itself, even though a rose can be beautiful to someone.

And such is the case with dualism. The dilemma of dualism is being systematically deconstructed and stripped naked. It is being shown for what it is – a misnomer (to be polite) - by increased neurological understanding and common sense. Seperative dualism says nothing about the thing: mind, which cannot be said about the brain and cannot be shown to be done by the present brain. That particular dualism is merely a conservation of the linguistic or more generally philosophic practice. The reductionist will ask you, if things like the mind and consciousness are not commensurate with the brain, then when you are knocked out, where does it go, why does it leave, and if it has not taken flight, why have you lost time if it's still there? And ultimately, how do you account for it if it has some ontological property of its own? To the reductionist, the answer is simple: you were (“were” being used in the stipulative sense of “being”) unconscious, and it is not a matter of the consciousness being out there, with its necessary, accompanying ad hoc contrivances, like following thinkers. It is about removing these unfundamental properties of the experience that tell us nothing about the experience itself, but only serve to represent analysis or extraneous variables that are not inherent to that experience – the mind wandering away when knocked unconscious, or the inability of the linguistic man to be effective towards the empirical man.

The spiritual experience, that you seem to be incapable of getting beyond, as such, is just an experience with the extraneous, unaccountable variable of “spiritual”. It is unaccountable in the same sense that personhood is left unaccounted in persons, despite the fact that someone may identify personhood in persons (ala Proudfoot). So, the test for the reductionist is to see which properties can be removed without effecting the ontological station of the experience itself, that we might actually get to the experience and what it is (not what it means). So to the question that is introduced in your post: is there a loss of phenomena? The answer is an unequivocal one: no. To the reductionist, the only manner in which there can be a loss of phenomena, is if something necessary and sufficient to the ontology of the object of consideration is removed. And it is at that point where we have lost the referent or the phenomenon completely. The spiritual experience only serves to inform us of what the experience meant to someone, not what the experience is or what causes the experience to come into being.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post

he's a reductionist when anything to do with God is concerned. that way he can lose the phenomena. In other words explain away spiritual experiences by demanding tangible data then claiming he's disproved it becasue he just kept reducing to the point that the original phenomena was no longer under discussion.

Notice that was my major criticism and he didn't say anything about it.
And this highlights why I would like you to more carefully read my post. Either you admit that you didn't really read or you didn't understand it. Because there is no way that you could make this claim having read or understood my criticism, when the entire last paragraph attended to this basic point.


Quote:Mahollinder's answers:

The spiritual experience, that you seem to be incapable of getting beyond, as such, is just an experience with the extraneous, unaccountable variable of “spiritual”. It is unaccountable in the same sense that personhood is left unaccounted in persons, despite the fact that someone may identify personhood in persons (ala Proudfoot). So, the test for the reductionist is to see which properties can be removed without effecting the ontological station of the experience itself, that we might actually get to the experience and what it is (not what it means). So to the question that is introduced in your post: is there a loss of phenomena? The answer is an unequivocal one: no. To the reductionist, the only manner in which there can be a loss of phenomena, is if something necessary and sufficient to the ontology of the object of consideration is removed. And it is at that point where we have lost the referent or the phenomenon completely. The spiritual experience only serves to inform us of what the experience meant to someone, not what the experience is or what causes the experience to come into being.

The only "original phenomenon" is the experience. The "spiritual" qualification is nothing more than an aesthetic judgment - an addendum to the experience itself, vis a vis my very first conjecture, my second conjecture and my last conjecture. You did not read my criticism or you did not understand it. Stop pretending.

Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
Quote:
he's a reductionist when anything to do with God is concerned. that way he can lose the phenomena. In other words explain away spiritual experiences by demanding tangible data then claiming he's disproved it becasue he just kept reducing to the point that the original phenomena was no longer under discussion.
Mol said:


Quote:
Notice that was my major criticism and he didn't say anything about it.
And this highlights why I would like you to more carefully read my post. Either you admit that you didn't really read or you didn't understand it. Because there is no way that you could make this claim having read or understood my criticism, when the entire last paragraph attended to this basic point.
I started this thread. your arguments are not responsive to the criticisms I made in the op. you have to responnd to me I don't have to respond to you if you are non responsive. see how it works? you have to answer my criticisms.

you didn't. IF you think you did please show me where you think your comments are relevant.



Quote:Mol

The spiritual experience, that you seem to be incapable of getting beyond, as such, is just an experience with the extraneous, unaccountable variable of “spiritual”.

Meta

You have no reasons for saying it's "unacceptable" except you do so purely for ideological purposes. I need not produce special evidence that proves the existence of Mind. I think it's a prori self evdience that mind exists. Since we have minds, we know minds exist. Since (in my viwe) Spirit = mind, then we know spirit exits.

Quote:Mol
It is unaccountable in the same sense that personhood is left unaccounted in persons, despite the fact that someone may identify personhood in persons (ala Proudfoot).

Meta

but you see Proudfoot does exactly what I how reductionists do.He reduced the data to the point that he loses the phenomena. He does this by doing exactly what he claims theists do, or mystics, he labels. He says mystics label their expericnes as important whent hey are not. so they become important. But that's exactly what he does. He labels experinces as labeling.

If you listen to him you will accept, if you really understand him, that there are no feelings, you dont' have a mind, yu don't make decisions you need him to control your inner life. It's just a game of control.

following an ideology that falsely labels itself itself "free thinking" when in reality it is slave thinking?why do you want to give up being a valid person with rights whose feelings matter and become a slave?

Quote:Mol
So,

the test for the reductionist is to see which properties can be removed without effecting the ontological station of the experience itself, that we might actually get to the experience and what it is (not what it means). So to the question that is introduced in your post: is there a loss of phenomena? The answer is an unequivocal one: no. To the reductionist, the only manner in which there can be a loss of phenomena, is if something necessary and sufficient to the ontology of the object of consideration is removed. And it is at that point where we have lost the referent or the phenomenon completely. The spiritual experience only serves to inform us of what the experience meant to someone, not what the experience is or what causes the experience to come into being.

Meta:

You have just created an internal contradiction in your thinking. AS a reductionist you are suppossed to oppose philosophy. You accept ontology because you think it helps you in some way. But if you open the door to ontology then you have to accept spirit. You are contradicting your whole ideology.

Quote:Mol

The only "original phenomenon" is the experience. The "spiritual" qualification is nothing more than an aesthetic judgment - an addendum to the experience itself, vis a vis my very first conjecture, my second conjecture and my last conjecture. You did not read my criticism or you did not understand it. Stop pretending.

Meta:

You have no basis for saying that except that your ideology commands that you to. You are saying "spirit can't exist because it opposes my materialist masters" and that's all you have to support it. that's nothing. that's just waving your arms about and demanding that we listen to the yeah-boo theory.

What's totally rich is that you just proved my point. You just committed every fallacy that I said reductionists commit.

you try to explain away emergent properties that we know a prpri exist, such as mind, and you do that for no better reason than that your ideology tells you to. Then you lose the phenomena because you are not talking about experinces anymore, you are talking about brain function.
__________________
Metacrock


Rosenberg (Ibid.)

"Take the matter of 'downward causation' to which Harman gives some attention. Why should this be an issue in brain dynamics? As Erich Harth points out in Chapter 44, connections between higher and lower centers of the brain are reciprocal. They go both ways, up and down. The evidence (the scientific evidence) for downward causation was established decades ago by the celebrated Spanish histologist Ramon y Cajal, yet the discussion goes on. Why? The answer seems clear: If brains work like machines, they are easier to understand. The facts be damned!"[Miller quoting Rosenberg, Journal of Consciousness Studies, op. cit.]

e.Consciousness as a basic property of nature.

JCS, 3 (1), 1996, pp.33-35

Benjamin Libet
Department of Physiology,
University of California, San Francisco,
Abstract:

"Solutions to the `hard problem' of consciousness must accept conscious experience as a fundamental non-reducible phenomenon in nature, as Chalmers suggests. Chalmers proposes candidates for an acceptable theory, but I find basic flaws in these. Our own experimental investigations of brain processes causally involved in the development of conscious experience appear to meet Chalmers' requirement. Even more directly, I had previously proposed a hypothetical `conscious mental field' as an emergent property of appropriate neural activities, with the attributes of integrated subjective experience and a causal ability to modulate some neural processes. This theory meets all the requirements imposed by the `hard problem' and, significantly, it is experimentally testable.
Conscious events as orchestrated space–time selections.

DiaLogos issue #15
The Creator's Software:
An Extensive Interpretation of Information
in Natural Science and Philosophy
byPeter Thoma http://megabyte.crosswinds.net/popup.flycast.php

Peter Thoma is a German Physicists who has devoted his retirement to developing his theory of information density.

"Under the lemmatic* assumption that the entirety of nature obeys a conservation law (it does not change and does not vanish) it is proposed to designate this complete set of laws of nature as the "primary information density" or "Ip" . In this way a discrimination between a higher order information controlling nature and the conventional data transfer information carried by energy is achieved."

W.Heisenberg (Gesammelte Werke, Band 3, Piper Verlag, 1985) had first explained the key role of symmetries for all processes in the phase spaces of physics (a closed space of thermodynamical variables) and led his student Weizsaecker to describe symmetry as the basic element of information in nature. (.C.F.v.Weizsaecker: Aufbau der Physik, DTV Verlag 1988)."

"H.Lyre, one of Weizsaecker's students, recently has formulated a quantum theory of information (H. Lyre: Quantentheorie der Information. Zur Naturphilosophie der Theorie der Ur-Alternativen und einer abstrakten Theorie der Information, Springer Verlag, Wien 1998) using Weizsaecker's Ur theory ( "Ur" is translated here as "prime"). He shows that the symmetries of nature are built up by prime alternatives or "yes-no" decisions (primes) and that such a prime is the unit of quantum information or a quantum bit. This is probably the first complete description of quantum information in nature. The primes are nonlocalizable; they do not carry energy, but gauge symmetry per unit volume (1/m3). Using a different approach Collier (J.Collier: Information originates in Symmetry Breaking, Science and Culture 7, 247 (1996)) affirms these results."


"Following these conclusions this work proposes to include the basic laws of nature into a more general conception of information and to introduce in this way the primary information density Ip as one of three constituents of nature. The other two are the total energy H represented by a multitude of elementary particles and Einstein's space-time tR . Ip contains all (known and unknown) laws of nature including evolution and autopoiesis (self-organization) and controls nature by means of its four basic forces and it has a sequential priority, since the process follows the program. The probable "first" control commands in the moment of the Big Bang "create symmetries and evolute" ("fiat lux") which do not exclude the antisymmetric, but rare, command "devolute", tempting the observer to attribute a vectorial property to Ip, but this is speculative. Independently of the expansion speed of the universe it extends throughout its space. Here tR is a differential operator in the set of equations governing the four basic forces with a (preset) array of initial conditions."

"Looking at physics we note that Ip does not need H for its availability and conservation and looking at biology we note that we know only a very small part of the valid laws of nature within our own living environment of very weak gravity. The larger, unknown part of Ip governs nature under strong and extreme gravity. The elementary particles interacting in the first seconds of the universe and the particles in the present universe are identical or, in other words, there is no evolution of elementary particles and therefore no evolution of the interactions between them."

[*Editor's Note: "lemma" generally means any assumption, but especially, in mathematics and logic, one invoked to facilitate the development of a hypothesis -- in this case, a universal set of laws or conditions governing the entire cosmos, including those portions of which are likely to remain beyond the bounds of empirical investigation. ](RWK, editor)
__________________
Metacrock