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Debate 6: Whether Truth Exists in a Deterministic Universe

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Debate 6: Whether Truth Exists in a Deterministic Universe

Mariner
Longing

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Joined: Jan 12, 2004
Location: Brazil

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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 12/10/04 - 06:50 PM:	#11
Well, the debate is ending, and we are unfortunately only scratching the surface of the issue here. I'm sorry to say, but your account of meaning is completely off the track. You could use the same concepts to describe the translation of information from DNA to protein, or indeed to address planetary formation. Perhaps "anyone who has taken a speech course in high school" would agree with your account, but high school accounts are rarely philosophical in nature . No, meaning is quite unrelated to all which you described there. You, in effect, assumed meaning from the beginning. You assumed that the monkey was meaning something with his call. You were, quite simply, anthropomorphzing, just because the monkey is quite similar to you. Would you say that "DNA shouts to the ribosomes, 'add this and this kind of aminoacid here, for we need some protein real fast!' "? I hope not. Your account of "communication" simply omitted the important stuff, awareness; you haven't examined the question of whether the monkey knows what he is doing, and what he is saying. Now, just to add some spice to the debate , I can say to you that it is quite possible that there is some incipient free will involved in those monkeys. And this is because they can do something that DNA can't do. They can lie. They know, and use, falsehood in their endeavours. (Perhaps you are not acquainted with the whole story, but here it goes: velvet monkeys have one call for "leopard" and one call for "eagle". The responses are different; and they have been observed using the "wrong call" in order to prompt responses that would favor them, individually -- like making all other monkeys run to a tree when the lying monkey found a cache of food he does not want to share). I hope you see what is the main ingredient of this "lying situation" here -- that the monkey knows the expected response of his fellows. But is this enough for us to conclude that we know what he is doing? Honestly, I don't know. Evolution could select for lying monkeys easily. They could be just following their good ole' programs. But I'm happy to leave the question in the open, because if we conclude that they are not following their programs, that they are purposefully lying, then we just extend the concept of free will to them -- by definition. Either they follow "lying programs", which are not lying at all since they don't aim at truth but rather at self-propagation, or they are free, and any conclusion suits me in this debate. DNA doesn't lie. Neither do biochemical pathways, which result in fruits like apples or bananas; neither do physiological reactions, which result in belches. All of these things "communicate" in the sense which you just explained -- none of them have any meaning. While you don't address the issue of falsehood, your account will remain vulnerable (a charitable word) to the argument that I described. There is also the "little issue" , still unaddressed, of how to determine truth at all if logical laws are effects of deterministic causation. Two issues that, quite simply, nullify any attempt at accounting for truth in a deterministic universe. It is quite easy to say that "if there is an actual leopard, then the monkey was saying the truth". Quite easy, and quite fallacious, for this is a logical reasoning. You have to establish the truth of "A=A" before drawing such conclusions; while remembering that in your deterministic universe, you wouldn't be able to tell "A=A" apart from "A/=A", for they would be equally "results" from deterministic causation. Indeed, the whole problem with the deterministic universe is that all propositions are self-referenced; none of them can ever reference anything but themselves. We can produce jumping monkeys in several different ways. All of them, by your own admission, "mean" "there is a leopard out there". What that means, Socrastein, is that you have a "proposition" completely disjointed from reality. Which is not a proposition at all, for a proposition, as we may recall, is a statement that affirms or denies something -- as opposed to nothing, which is the case here. You can't even say that a jumping monkey "means" anything, for they will all be observed in many different instances. There is, of course, the usual appeal to poetry in this kind of argument of yours -- "the universe is marvellously complex!". As if this solved anything. No, what you have to show is how a marvellously complex universe can account for meaning (which is clearly not by your 5-step reasoning, unless you want to imagine a universe in which photons and atoms "talk" to each other "meaningfully" -- and, of course, never lie, something which is also as yet unaddressed. Yep, we've barely scratched the surface of the topic, I wish we had a 20-round debate about this ). At the end of your post you become almost mystical. You say that if the monkey thought that he was "saying" "Boy I wish I had some bananas right now", he would still be making the statement "There is danger over there". Care to explain how can you be so sure of that meaning, especially if the speaker disagrees with you? That seems to me a wonderful way to simply nullify all arguments, including yours. How can you tell what I am meaning here, if you just do not care about what I want to mean? So you have some direct insight into what people are "truly saying" even if they disagree with you? People often use words equivocally, and language evolves. Your position would simply bash Aristotle's use of "Form" in opposition to Matter because "Form means shape", regardless of what Aristotle meant by it. The more extreme examples simply show something that is present with all speakers, and all words. One must make an active effort to interpret words as the speaker wanted them to mean; this is not passive, and indeed it requires free will. Otherwise, rational communication would fail to address its main function, which is conveying thought (instead of conveying what the listener already knew before listening ). Conveying thought. Which can be true or false, and which references something else besides itself, for it is usually thought "about something". Unlike anything in a deterministic universe; nothing is "about something" there. Unfortunately (for your position), meaning requires that the speaker is conveying something, purposefully. Otherwise, there is no meaning. Imagine a dysfunctional monkey that jumped. You would run for cover. He wanted bananas. What a marvellous communication you two had . The exact same thing happens with humans, much more clearly. A man wants bananas. He asks some bananas from you, using the words "Bush is the president". You congratulate him for speaking a truth. Does that make sense? It makes even less sense if the man wants to say that Kerry (or Teddy Roosevelt) is the president, by using the words "Bush is the president". For in this case, unlike in the banana case, the man is clearly stating something false, if you consider what he wants to say. But you still congratulate him on his saying the truth. How can anyone think that "communication" is taking place? Your account of the deterministic universe, as I can't avoid repeating, has no explanation for falsehood. It has an explanation for a mistake (not a very detailed one, "shit happens", but since the point I'm making is not based on the fallibility of sense-data, which is what you addressed, your explanation is also not germane), but not for disagreement assuming equal data. Yet, here we are, disagreeing, even though we are both humans who share equal data as regards the will . One of us is wrong. In your universe, none would be. I would be free, and you would not be free; or perhaps I would have the illusion of freedom, and you would have the illusion of determinism (This is called "absence of truth" ). One thing that surely could NOT happen is that you are not deluded while I am... and yet this is the core of your argument. That's, of course, why it is contradictory, and why there is no truth in your universe. If we are either both wrong or both right, where can there be truth? (And note that this applies to every proposition, including monkey propositions, if they exist). To summarize a long digression into one sentence -- you completely failed to grasp the intentional character of meaning. And here stands the focus of the whole debate. Finally, you end your post with the speculation that "because some propositions will sometimes comform to fact, then there is truth". Not only this undermines logic and hence truth itself (logic can't be "probabilistic", because probabilities are intrinsically logical; they require 100% accurate logic to work in the first place), but it also denies the possibility of propositions. You can never be sure of whether they affirm something or not. To say that "Bush is the president" is true, you would have to assume that this conforms to fact, even though you can't know anything about anything in that scenario -- and Kerry may very well be the president, without you being aware of it . (You are describing a sort of "pragmatic skepticism", but it is just skepticism, hence just wrong. To be pragmatic, it has to make several assumptions about logic and perception, and these assumptions require the denial of skepticism to work in the first place. You can't deny logic without all sorts of nonsense stemming from it, and to say that logic works "sometimes" is to deny it. Logic is either apodictic or zilch.). Summing up. The problems of incompatibility between truth and determinism are still as unaddressed as when the debate began (which is why I wish we had more posts). They are (cutting and pasting from earlier posts): "We both agree on that definition provided above. What is required now is for you to overcome the contradiction inherent in the statement "it is true that my statement is the product of deterministic causation"; taking care to note that your explanation must account for the statement "it is not true that my statement is the product of deterministic causation". Your explanation must show how these two sentences can take place in a deterministic universe." (This wasn't even attempted yet). "While you don't address the issue of meaning and belief, your statements will remain being blind statements, just like the poor computer who actually spewed out a series of 0's and 1's only to see you interpreting them as "Bush is the president", while the computer hasn't got a clue about what "Bush", "president", "is", or "the" mean. " Well, this has been addressed, but failed far short of the mark. The monkey account is just as useful to describe subatomic interaction. The intentional aspect -- quite salient in that quote, above, about the computer -- has been ignored. And that's it. While these problems remain, truth is -- quite clearly -- incompatible with determinism. If you can solve them (as opposed to "getting rid of them" , by ignoring intentionality), then truth becomes possibly compatible. Not before someone solves them, though.
"In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't." -- Blaise Pascal "The more I am by myself and alone, the more I have come to love myths" -- Aristotle in his later years

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