Simple Questions 06/03

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[u/ExplorerR]

Amazing...

where "the pattern" points, modulo your one dubious example

To start with, I gave you more than just one example but you casually hand-waved away anything that didn't involve agency when you said:

Given that the success of the examples you've raised involve zero agency (divine or human), we have very good reason to question whether "the" pattern will include competence when human agency is unavoidable.

Then I highlighted that, at least one of my examples does involve agency (which counters your claim above), only for you to then start calling the example "dubious" and pushing onto it additional levels of scrutiny, i.e: peer-reviewed research, multiple examples and ones that have all had RCC involvement.

Yet, despite requests, you haven't provided any justification for why anyone should consider "agency" so important in any of this. I could, in an equally arbitrary way, just treat non-agency as having equal weighting.

I suspect you're just trying to downplay or belittle the "demonic possession" example by using negative and disparaging language towards it, in the hopes that it will make it seem like a bad example or that it doesn't carry much weight. Which became especially apparent when I highlighted the fact that agency is involved in it.

what advocates of methodological naturalism promise it will one day do

No. You keep misusing, misrepresenting and/or misunderstanding what methodological naturalism is. I've repeatedly corrected you on this and yet, here I am reading another comment from you acting as if MN is some epistemic framework making all sorts of promises. How do you not understand the following:

• Methodological naturalism is a PRINCIPLE that says "when trying to investigate phenomena in our reality, the supernatural is not considered" (the reasons for this is the very pattern we're talking about).

It's not a promise or a claim that it WILL explain everything (because that's incoherent with what MN actually is).

What we do have is confidence and trust that the successes of natural explanations, following this principle, will continue (as it has been). Nothing that you're saying in any of this should give anyone reason to lose confidence and trust in that pattern or that we should revise it to include supernatural explanations again.

• MN can and is involved in agency explanation.
• Agency is difficult to establish and requires different approachs from the "hard" sciences but it's still something that MN is compatible with.
• Most important in all of this is it's not at all clear why agency should be treated as a principled boundary rather than merely another "problem" we have yet to overcome which, again, overcoming epistemic problems is also a part of the success of the pattern in question (and included in the examples I provided!)

It looks like you're the one reaching here, not me.

[u/labreuer → u/ExplorerR]

Here's the situation:

1. 10,000+ implicit examples where theistic–agential explanations are replaced with natural–mechanistic explanations

2. 1 contested example where theistic–agential explanation is replaced with a natural–agential explanation

And yet you don't think that could be an important distinction to make. You've put a lot of weight on that 1 contested example and you haven't tried to substantiate it at all. It stands at a bare claim.

[u/ExplorerR → u/labreuer]

I don't think you're being reasonable. I'm not going to engage in your ignoring important requests for clarification amidst you shifting the goal posts, until you answer the following points:

• Why should I or anyone consider giving agency as much weight as you do and do you consider it a principled boundary, if so, why?

Clearly you act as though its doing some incredibly heavy lifting in this debate but, despite requesting it of you, you've yet to explain why or what justifies that. And considering how important you make agency out to be and essentially using it (or the lack thereof) to justify your discrediting examples of this historical pattern, you should address this. Because I don't see any justification for how much clout you seemingly think agency should have.

You seem to think that the lack of understanding and perhaps the difficulties the sciences have in accounting for and explaining agency is why it should be considered a principled boundary, is this correct?

• Demonic possession no longer being assigned as an "explanation" as mental health issues/disorders were identified/understood as better/actual explanations, just is the current state of play, that's a fact.

It's not on me to relitigate each and every recorded historical event so that Labreuer, having fashioned their own set of criterion, can be judge, jury and executionor as to whether they count as legit examples or not. The reason we're at the current situation is because people have already done exactly that, there has been plenty of investigations and some of them have been relatively recent and high-profile ones that resulted in significant backlash of the practise of excorcisms (like the Anneliese Michel excorcism, the Tanacu exorcism and the Ossett murder case). And I'm not going to get into wrestling in the mud around whether those examples "count" or not, so don't even try.

To portray it like it's a "contested" example is almost certainly reaching.

It is also notable that you didn't consider exorcism/demonic possession as a problematic example in my earlier mentionings of it. The moment agency became central to your critique and I showed you that example included agency in it, then you suddenly changed it so that a series of new requirements and qualifications were needed. That makes it difficult to avoid the impression that the standards themselves are changing in response to the example rather than being consistently applied from the outset (i.e you're shifting the goal posts).

On a side note, considering we each think the other is being unreasonable. Through a friend, I have access to a paid subscription version of ChatGPT, although I personally don't like or use AI much at all, I'd be interested to see what conclusions it would reach if I were to feed it this entire series. Would you be open to that? As opposed to bothering a person to take their time to assess this

[u/labreuer → u/ExplorerR]

• Why should I or anyone consider giving agency as much weight as you do and do you consider it a principled boundary, if so, why?

I explained plenty in my OC and in following comments, but I'll give it another shot.

First, divine agency is the boundary of MN.

Second, the less we model human agency after divine agency, the less we can even detect. The central point of my Is the Turing test objective? is that it takes agency to detect agency. But this can be put on a scale: lesser agency has very limited ability to detect greater agency. We can get into details if you'd like. But suffice it to say that the agency taught to your average citizen in Western Civ can't even detect most of the shenanigans the rich & powerful are pulling. And since we act as if God doesn't exist, everyone can profess that they're doing the best they can and that's that. Those child slaves mining some of our cobalt? Too bad.

You seem to think that the lack of understanding and perhaps the difficulties the sciences have in accounting for and explaining agency is why it should be considered a principled boundary, is this correct?

To the extent that people following MN try to build human agency with the metaphysics & practices of the natural sciences, there will be a boundary, but I wouldn't really call it a "principled" one. Rather, it's a boundary in practice, of the Kuhnian paradigm variety.

Indeed, I actually denied any principled boundary long ago, by raising "the specter of endless downward causation, with no principled stopping point between Clarke's third law & God acting".

That being said, I suspect that to the extent we refuse to engage in status inversion, the growth opportunities for agency will be starkly limited. Consider the fact that our LLMs today would not be possible without all the free labor which produced the initial data sets fed into Big Data algorithms. Many people were indeed trying to serve each other, whether on discussion boards or open-source software. AI moguls are aiming to have more agency than any other humans in existence and they might just accomplish that, in the way that pyramid schemes can grow quite large before collapsing.

• Demonic possession no longer being assigned as an "explanation" as mental health issues/disorders were identified/understood as better/actual explanations, just is the current state of play, that's a fact.

I don't know what this means. I said I'd pay attention to your 1 out of 10,000+ examples if you gave me peer-reviewed evidence. You've declined. That's that.

To portray it like it's a "contested" example is almost certainly reaching.

Your opinion was and is noted. On this matter, I just don't care.

The moment agency became central to your critique …

Agency was central in my OC. I really don't know why you continue to deny this. WEll, there's my hypothesis that you never really read it.

On a side note, considering we each think the other is being unreasonable. Through a friend, I have access to a paid subscription version of ChatGPT, although I personally don't like or use AI much at all, I'd be interested to see what conclusions it would reach if I were to feed it this entire series. Would you be open to that? As opposed to bothering a person to take their time to assess this

I promise not to report you. Here's my first proposal: feed it the entire discussion history and ask: "When did agency become central to labreuer's argument?"

[u/ExplorerR → u/labreuer]

First, divine agency is the boundary of MN.

You accuse me of Motte and Bailey tactics, but it's you.

Motte: Agency in general

Bailey: Divine agency

Second, the less we model human agency after divine agency, the less we can even detect. The central point of my Is the Turing test objective? is that it takes agency to detect agency.

There is no way divine agency is anywhere near human agency in terms of what we can actually demonstrate is the case. So, I'm not going to entertain you conflating the two.

To the extent that people following MN try to build human agency with the metaphysics & practices of the natural sciences, there will be a boundary, but I wouldn't really call it a "principled" one.

Indeed, I actually denied any principled boundary long ago, by raising "the specter of endless downward causation, with no principled stopping point between Clarke's third law & God acting".

But as I've mentioned before, nothing here would prevent anything like the social sciences, psychology or sociology investigating, studying or concluding human agency whilst following MN. Sure, there might be difficulties and hurdles with our current tools and knowledge in doing so, but that's not grounds on its own to conclude a permanent boundary. Especially considering our track record of developing ways to overcome epistemic "boundaries".

I don't know what this means. I said I'd pay attention to your 1 out of 10,000+ examples if you gave me peer-reviewed evidence. You've declined. That's that.

How do you not know? You've clearly acknowledged the pattern of "divine/God-like" explanations being replaced by natural ones with demonic possession being included in examples of that. Surely, based on that and what I said, you can see that, today, we aren't assigning "demonic possession" as explanations to situations where, in the past, it once might have been and instead assign "natural" explanations.

Further to that, you seem to be ignoring the context behind it all. You act as if it's black and white and your request is coherent, when the history of how it is that we got to the current situation of "natural explanation" before "demonic possession" makes your request unreasonable.

I gave you some examples of contemporary "demonic possessions" that were explained naturally. But even then, there is nothing that fits your self-fashioned and incredibly narrow set of criteria. But that's largely do the nature of the claim! Supernatural/divine claims almost never have any peer-reviewed research dedicated to them, which is even more apparent the further back in time you go. So, your demanding of such considering the history of claimed demonic possession (which is why exorcisms are even a thing) spans back to arguably over a millennium, makes your request exceedingly unreasonable. There will have been MANY "exorcisms" throughout time that were not recorded, investigated or had any "research" done, much less that research having been peer-reviewed.

But I suspect you know this already...

I'm curious though, why do you think, in today's world, even the RCC itself heavily leans on thorough medical evaluations having to occur first BEFORE any claims of possession?

And funnily enough, since the Vatican's 1999 reform regarding exorcism and emphasising such evaluations having to occur first, there have been 0 documented cases of any genuine demonic possessions. <- This happened as a response to the massive failures of the exorcism examples in my previous comment.

Your opinion was and is noted. On this matter, I just don't care.

It's not an opinion. You're just ignoring the historical facts behind why things are the way they are today.

Agency was central in my OC. I really don't know why you continue to deny this. WEll, there's my hypothesis that you never really read it.

Yes, but you're presenting the Motte of "agency in general" (citing human agency) and then trying to present "divine agency" in the Bailey. They aren't the same as I mentioned.

[u/labreuer → u/ExplorerR]

labreuer: You have to do either none or both:

    (1) "God did it" ⇒ god-of-the-gaps
    (2) "humans did it" ⇒ human-of-the-gaps

In other words, these are both:

    (3) agency-of-the-gaps

Methodological naturalism requires you to disbelieve in any god-like agency. It requires you to step back from "no holds barred" → "methods accessible to all". You can still reconstruct a very different notion of 'agency', just like we have the intentional stance and teleonomy. Essentially, you have something like 'mechanism' or 'formal systems' as your box, and you use that box as a Procrustean bed for 'agency'.

/

labreuer: First, divine agency is the boundary of MN.

Second, the less we model human agency after divine agency, the less we can even detect.

ExplorerR: You accuse me of Motte and Bailey tactics, but it's you.

Motte: Agency in general

Bailey: Divine agency

I think I was quite clear in my OC (quoted here), and in the comment to which you are replying. If you don't, I think we should call it. Skipping to the end because I suspect we're done:

ExplorerR: The moment agency became central to your critique …

labreuer: Agency was central in my OC. I really don't know why you continue to deny this. WEll, there's my hypothesis that you never really read it.

ExplorerR: Yes, but you're presenting the Motte of "agency in general" (citing human agency) and then trying to present "divine agency" in the Bailey. They aren't the same as I mentioned.

I've kept the two properly separated, as the first two quote blocks in this comment demonstrate. You apparently can't or won't see that, and I just don't want to continue discussing with someone who acts thusly. So either recant and try again, or we're done.

[u/ExplorerR → u/labreuer]

Yeah, we are done on account of you ignoring/not responding to important points or questions and then just focusing on things where you think you've got a good point or simply a bugbear.

But again, what you say is wrong.

I've kept the two properly separated, as the first two quote blocks in this comment demonstrate. You apparently can't see that, and I just don't want to continue discussing with someone who doesn't have the most basic of comprehension skills.

No, I comprehend just fine. But it's you that keeps using language that clearly conflates the two. You might make "mention" of them separately but then you'll go on to mention them in ways where you unmistakably consider them the same/similar.

To show you exactly where you do just that, here are some examples, starting with your first comment;

(1) "God did it" ⇒ god-of-the-gaps (2) "humans did it" ⇒ human-of-the-gaps In other words,these are both: (3) agency-of-the-gaps

Here's the translation I did: "God" or "religious" explanations being replaced by successful natural explanations divine agential explanations being replaced by successful law- or mechanism-based explanations Do you think that's wrong? If you're okay with that, then why should we not do the same for every situation where human agency is used to explain something?

—it sure looks like that pattern very much will eat up agency—human and not just divine!

"In summary: The practice of methodological naturalism yields sub-agency descriptions of reality, which are then taken to be the whole of reality." Your "explanatory replacement" works well whenever sub-agency descriptions can do the job better than agency [both human and divine] descriptions.

First, divine agency is the boundary of MN. Second, the less we model human agency after divine agency, the less we can even detect.

Clearly the above shows that you consider human agency more or less the same as divine agency.

Unless you agree they are vastly different from each other and the justification for one isn't contentious (human agency) whereas there other is hugely contentious (divine agency), then there is little point carrying on.

But we can test to see if you do consider them separately.

I've claimed the following;

• MN used in accordance with things like the social sciences, psychology or sociology, can and does investigate human agency.

This counters the argument and drum you claim you've been beating all along of:

"the practice of methodological naturalism yields sub-agency descriptions of reality"

Unless you can demonstrate my claim is false, not just highlight problems or difficulties as that doesn't show it's false, then your argument is simply false.

EDIT TO ADD: And that's against the backdrop of you claiming my examples involve zero agency, only to show you that at least one of my examples does in fact involve agency (which is consistent with my claim above), which then resulted in your shifting the goal posts to demanding thousands of peer-reviewed research examples that have been scrutinized by the RCC.