| | Claude Shannon quotes Christopher Parker: "It is impossible to prove a negative. No one can disprove an afterlife just as no one can disprove there is an invisible purple dragon living in your house."
In Post #3, I disproved the possibility of an after life, by showing that the idea is self-contradictory.
Claude wrote, Re “impossibility of proving a negative”:
Syllogism:
Major Premise: No man is immortal
Minor Premise: Socrates is a man
Conclusion: Ergo, Socrates is not immortal
The conclusion is a negative statement, proven by the two preceding premises. To say that one can't prove a negative doesn't mean that one can't prove a conclusion by expressing it in a negative form. It means that one cannot prove the non-existence of that for which no evidence exists. A positive statement can be refuted by exposing its errors and contradictions. But doing so constitutes disproving a positive, not proving a negative.
Suppose I were to accuse you of murder without offering any evidence for it, either in terms of who the victim is, or how, where or when you were alleged to have committed the murder. And suppose I then demanded that you prove that you didn't commit a murder. Well, of course, you couldn't satisfy my demand, because you couldn't "prove a negative" in that sense of the terminology.
Christopher wrote, "But to believe in an afterlife ought to require some proof one exists." Claude replied, Lots of scientists believe in the possibility of intelligent extra-terrestrial life – even spending billions of tax dollars to send up satellites and start programs like SETI – and they do so with NO PROOF whatsoever that intelligent extra-terrestrial life exists. They base their belief – their hope – on considerations about the nature of life, the nature of the earth, a little probability and statistics, and voila! your tax dollars are gone. What Christopher is saying is relation to your example is that to believe in the actual existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life ought to require some proof. I assume that if the scientists you refer to have no proof whatsoever that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, then they don't yet believe in its existence; at most, they believe in its likelihood, and are looking for evidence that it actually does exist. There’s nothing irrational or self-contradictory about their assumptions (even if I think it’s a waste of my tax money). Of course, but if they have no evidence at all for intelligent ETs, then what they're assuming is presumably its likelihood, not its actuality. And there does exist evidence for the likelihood of intelligent extraterrestrial life, given the number of planets capable of supporting it. Same for the notion of “afterlife” or “antecedent life”. A consideration of consciousness and biological organisms shows them to be complementary to each other; we don’t find consciousness without a living biological organism; we don’t find living biological organisms without some degree of consciousness. Not true. Plants are living organisms that have no consciousness. What you intended to say, I take it, is that we don't find animal life without some degree of consciousness, which is true. We also know that matter is ultimately never created or destroyed; it merely changes its forms. Perfectly reasonable to ascribe to consciousness what we ascribe to matter. You mean that consciousness is neither created nor destroyed? I don't think so. The evidence indicates that consciousness arose with the emergence of animal life, and did not exist before its emergence. And consciousness is certainly capable of being destroyed. It's destroyed whenever an animal dies. You say that consciousness requires sensory apparatus to perceive reality? The converse is equally true: sensory apparatus requires consciousness to convert what would simply be material electro-chemical impulses into something called “experience”, which exists only within consciousness. Yes, but consciousness still depends on matter; it cannot exist independently of it. Matter, by contrast, can exist independently of consciousness. The notion that consciousness is a “property” of the physical part of the organism implies that it is ultimately physical in nature and is ultimately reducible to and explainable by physical laws. But it has to be a property of a physical organism, because it requires a physical organism in order to exist. Furthermore, the notion that consciousness is “inside” matter contradicts the previous notion that it is a property: if consciousness is “inside” the brain in the same sense that Coca-Cola is “inside” a glass bottle or aluminum can, then consciousness and brain are two separate physical things, just as “Coke” and “can” are two separate physical things. Coke is not a “property” of the can, so consciousness is not a property of the brain. On the other hand, if we maintain that consciousness IS a property of the brain, then it is not physically located “inside” the brain. Size is a property of a block of wood; it is not located “inside” the block. Right. I would say that consciousness is not "inside" the brain, since that would imply that it is an independent occupant; instead, I would characterize consciousness as the subjective manifestation of the operation of the brain and central nervous system. The most we can say about consciousness (since we have no idea what it actually is) is that it accompanies living biological organisms, and living biological organisms accompany it. Consciousness is known introspectively by direct experience, but I wouldn't say that the organisms that possess it "accompany" consciousness any more than I would say that they "accompany" the brain, since that would suggest that consciousness has an independent existence apart from these organisms. Nor would I say the reverse -- that consciousness accompanies the organisms that possess it -- any more than I would say that the brain "accompanies" the organisms that possess it, since that too suggests that consciousness has an independent existence. I think of them as intersecting. This would imply that it is at least possible to have a biological organism with no consciousness whatsoever, as well as a consciousness with no biological organism whatsoever. No, there's no intersection between consciousness and the physical brain and body, for the very reason that such an intersection would imply a consciousness that could exist independently of an organism. Again, a consciousness requires sense organs and a brain in order to exist and function. This model might, of course, be incorrect – just as the assumptions of the SETI scientists might be incorrect – but there’s no inherent contradiction involved. Yes, there is! A consciousness without a physical organism is a consciousness without the preconditions for experiencing the external world (for being conscious of it) and for retaining its perceptions and experiences in the form of memories and other kinds of cognitive processes. There are different kinds of knowledge about reality and different levels of certainty regarding the different kinds. For example, mathematical knowledge is completely certain yet requires no sensory evidence. Oh, yes it does! Without sensory evidence, one couldn't form concepts of any kind, including quantitative relationships. No one has ever seen, felt, or touched a perfect circle, yet it can be known exactly by the equation: (x - h)^2 + (y - k)^2 = r^2, where “h” and “k” are the coordinates of the center of the circle, and “r” is the radius. We do not arrive at the notion of “perfect circle” by “abstracting” from actual circles (which are all imperfect). You can’t abstract from the imperfect to the perfect since the “perfect” does not exist except in the head of the mathematician. No one has ever seen a golden mountain either, but I can imagine a golden mountain, because I've had other sensory experiences that enable me to conceive of one. I can conceive of a perfect circle as well, only because I've had certain sensory experiences that enable to me to form the appropriate abstraction. If we suggest one should believe in what one cannot prove, it would suggest knowledge is subjective and the fanciful whims of the individual is as valid as cold hard logic and sensory evidence.
Knowledge ultimately rests on axioms that cannot be proven and need not be proven; they simply have to work. Axioms lie at the base of knowledge and at the base of further proof. If we define proof as "the derivation of a conclusion from antecedent knowledge," then epistemological axioms cannot and need not be proved, but that doesn't mean that don't require validation. Validation is a broader concept than proof. As Professor Peikoff notes, validation "subsumes any process of establishing an idea's relationship to reality, whether deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning or perceptual self-evidence. In this sense, one can and must validate every item of knowledge, including axioms." (OPAR, p. 8) One validates axioms ultimately by a direct appeal to sensory evidence.
- Bill
(Edited by William Dwyer on 1/25, 9:47am)
|
|
