Atheism and Art

Well, we do have empirical evidence that intelligent life can exist on a planet with the environment to support it,

In other words, that planet Earth does support intelligent life leads you to conclude that if there are other Earth-like planets somewhere in the universe, they might support intelligent life too.

Doesn’t exactly pass muster as “empirical evidence” of intelligent life in the universe, especially since there’s no evidence for any Earth-like planet aside from Earth itself. Additionally, SETI is not looking for Earth-like planets – which, by your own admission, is the crux of the empirical evidence argument for ET intelligence – it is looking for electromagnetic transmissions of any sort. The idea is that if there is ET intelligent life, it might be advanced enough to beam coded transmissions into space, even from a planet it might have inhabited that would normally be hostile to life.

so there's no reason to assume that it could not exist on another planet with a similar environment.

But there’s no evidence that such planets actually exist. That they might exist is true; it is also not empirical – it is merely speculative (just like the idea that mind might exist without brain).

You’ve confused wishful thinking and speculation with empirical evidence.

(Oh, and by the way, my argument is not that wishful thinking and speculation aren’t valid reasons for engaging in scientific research. They are. My argument is that (i) science does NOT always proceed according to empirical evidence but often by wishful thinking and wild speculation; and (2) wishful thinking and speculation are quite different from empirical evidence.)

A mind or consciousness requires a means of perception and cognition. It requires sensory organs to apprehend the external world and a brain to process and store sensory information.

Always the naïve materialist.

There are non-material organs of perception and data processing. For example, the physicist Edwin Land (who, among other things, invented the Polaroid process of photography – the Polaroid camera was originally called the Land camera) studied color perception for much of his life and created the “Retinex Theory” of computational color perception. The “retinex” (from “retina” + “cortex”) is a non-physical organ of color perception, somewhere between the retina and the visual cortex. According to this model (which was first published in the late 1950s in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in two parts: part 1 appeared under a “Physics” section; part 2 appeared under “Physiology”), the retina compares three sets of wavelengths relative to one another: short, medium, and long (loosely corresponding to the physiological primaries in the cones of Blue, Green, and Red). These wavelengths, by the way, can be located anywhere along the color spectrum. They simply need to be short, medium, and long relative to one another; not relative to the color spectrum as a whole.

The retina sends this triadic comparison to the retinex; the retinex assigns it a number; the number is then sent to the visual cortex, which interprets the number as a specific color. Irrespective of the three wavelengths involved, as long as the retinex assigns the triad the same number, the cortex will decode it as the same color. This explains the reason that we can see the same color under widely differing lighting conditions (a phenomenon known as “color constancy”).

In his famous experiment, Land projected a full-color image on a screen from two stereo-photographed black and white slides. The color was not an illusion or “after image” but real; the resulting image was even photographed and used on the cover of Scientific American.

Given the empirical existence (via introspection) of distinct properties of mind…will, intellect, imagination, desire, wonder, etc….the existence of non-material organs of perception is not impossible. Speculative only? Maybe. But speculation didn’t stop scientists from launching SETI.

A disembodied mind or consciousness would have no sensory receptors with which to perceive the external world.

Sure it would. The “receptors” would be non-material.

I wrote, "I didn't say that we have empirical evidence for intelligent life on other planets, only that there is empirical evidence for its possibility." Claude replied,

And precisely what, pray tell, is the empirical evidence for the possibility of ET intelligent life? And assuming you can find (or invent) anything resembling it, what would that have to do with SETI?

Earlier, I said, "Well, we do have empirical evidence that intelligent life can exist on a planet with the environment to support it." And you replied, "In other words, that planet Earth does support intelligent life leads you to conclude that if there are other Earth-like planets somewhere in the universe, they might support intelligent life too." There's your answer, which you seem to have conveniently forgotten just a day latter.

Reread my post. I’ve already addressed that issue. That Earth supports intelligent life is not empirical evidence for anything except that Earth supports intelligent life. Period. That brute fact provides no empirical evidence that other Earth-like planets exist. It provides no refutation of my original claim – which you have conveniently forgotten – that SETI looks for signs of ET intelligence in the absence of empirical evidence for its existence. The belief that it might exist is based on speculation; exactly the same sort of speculation underlying the claim that mind might exist without brain.

Greeks in antiquity certainly believed that. “Nous” was not identified with the subjective mind, but rather with an aether-like substance that filled space.

Again, please try to keep the context from one post to another.

I find that difficult given your constant shifts, your evasions, and your inventing “facts” whenever it’s convenient for your argument. Your recent posts on logic show that clearly enough.

Then you added, "Doesn’t exactly pass muster as “empirical evidence” of intelligent life in the universe." Hello! I never said it did!

Then you’ll cite the empirical evidence that you had in mind when you claimed that empirical evidence for ET intelligent life justified SETI.

As for your not understanding the retinex model, you haven't read any of Land's papers. I especially admire this quote by Land (from the title of an article he wrote for Harvard Magazine in 1978:

(1978) "Our 'polar partnership' with the world around us: Discoveries about our mechanisms of perception are dissolving the imagined partition between mind and matter" Harv. Mag. 80:23-25

How does the lack of a partition between mind and matter support a non-material receptor? It should think it would imply just the opposite -- that mind does not exist independently of matter.

Actually, it implies that matter depends on mind. Anyway, the idea of polarity allows for extremes: something which is all-mind and something which is all-not-mind. It’s perfectly consistent with the idea of non-material organs of perception.

I wrote, "I don't understand how a receptor could be non-material and still exist."

Lots of naive materialists and rank behaviorists don't understand how an idea or thought can be non-material and still exist. So? A failure of imagination or cognition is not an argument.

First of all, a receptor is not an idea; it is a physical organ,

Question begging. Whether or not a receptor need be a physical organ is precisely what is at issue. You obviously, therefore, cannot assume it as a given.

and a physical organs can no more be non-material than any other physical object can; secondly, ideas cannot exist without a brain to formulate them; they are non-material only in the sense that they are part of consciousness, which does itself depend on brain activity.

I wrote, "Will, intellect, imagination, desire and wonder depend on on sensory information."

Absolutely incorrect. No amount of sensory information leads to the idea, for example, of a perfect circle (to take a simple example). On the contrary, sensory information, which is always imperfect, leads away from the idea of perfect geometrical shapes and perfect, necessary geometrical relations.

Without sensory input, the conscious mind could not conceive of a circle or any other geometric object, let alone a perfect one.

How do you know that? You don’t. You just made it up. As a matter of fact, no possible kind of sensory input could lead to the notion of “perfect”, “exact”, “limit”, “point”, “parallel”, etc. These sorts of concepts are formed in spite of sensory input, not because of it.

No, it's Dwyer. Among other things, he invented his own meaning of "literal" and "colloquial" in order to avoid having to admit that he was wrong about logical propositions.

The thesis is that religious belief is the source of (the highest of) art forms. But religion, like illness, or sexuality, or speech, is a near universal.

One wouldn't argue that most artists are omnivores, so vegetarians can't be good artists, unless one could argue that there is some essential connection between the two.