The response of Alex K. seems representative of the brute fact stance; physical laws describe the physical universe. No one suggests otherwise. He merely asserts that it is and ignores any proscriptive principles underlying our descriptions.
In his OP, Harris either forgets to mention or does not know that his position depends on making just this existential choice in favor of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PRS). Simply stated, the reason things happen as they do is because things happen for a reason. His detractors have made their choice in the other direction taking the natural order as either a brute fact or tacitly accepting the absurd. I have committed to the position that reality is intelligible and knowledge is possible for objective reasons that are not contingent on human perceptions. In another thread I summarized this position thus:
It is no wonder that Alex sees Harris’s elaborations of the first paragraph as ad hoc. By invoking the anthropic principle, Alex draws on a kind of Kantian idealism that severs the subjective human intellect from an objectively intelligible reality. According to this position , phenomena have no knowable relationship to nomena, even assuming that nomena of some kind exist. I take Kierkegaard’s “blind faith” as a powerful response to Kant (and by extension to Alex); rational people must live ‘as if’ reality is intelligible and knowledge can be attained, but reason can neither confirm nor deny why this should be so.
But the choice has consequences. When someone commits to an absurd reality, in which no reason connects how things appear with they actually are, he or she foregoes the ability engage productively with others over fundamental issues. To assert that the efficacy of reason is based entirely on an artifice is to say that knowledge cannot be trusted to inform any shared understandings on which most societies build its consensus about value, responsibility, identity and meaning.
I find it interesting that no one can express the natural order without invoking proscriptive principles. The human mind can no more conceive of physical reality apart from some imposing agency than it can conceive of a one-sided coin. Metaphors of governance and law necessarily imply a governing body that enforces those laws. Something actively constrains the actions of bodies and places limits on the nature of things. Some may see this as just be linguistic quirk. Others will see something fundamental like Aquinas’s 5th Way or some similar principle. Their perspective depends on whether or not they accept the implications of the PSR.
In his OP, Harris either forgets to mention or does not know that his position depends on making just this existential choice in favor of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PRS). Simply stated, the reason things happen as they do is because things happen for a reason. His detractors have made their choice in the other direction taking the natural order as either a brute fact or tacitly accepting the absurd. I have committed to the position that reality is intelligible and knowledge is possible for objective reasons that are not contingent on human perceptions. In another thread I summarized this position thus:
It is no wonder that Alex sees Harris’s elaborations of the first paragraph as ad hoc. By invoking the anthropic principle, Alex draws on a kind of Kantian idealism that severs the subjective human intellect from an objectively intelligible reality. According to this position , phenomena have no knowable relationship to nomena, even assuming that nomena of some kind exist. I take Kierkegaard’s “blind faith” as a powerful response to Kant (and by extension to Alex); rational people must live ‘as if’ reality is intelligible and knowledge can be attained, but reason can neither confirm nor deny why this should be so.
But the choice has consequences. When someone commits to an absurd reality, in which no reason connects how things appear with they actually are, he or she foregoes the ability engage productively with others over fundamental issues. To assert that the efficacy of reason is based entirely on an artifice is to say that knowledge cannot be trusted to inform any shared understandings on which most societies build its consensus about value, responsibility, identity and meaning.
I find it interesting that no one can express the natural order without invoking proscriptive principles. The human mind can no more conceive of physical reality apart from some imposing agency than it can conceive of a one-sided coin. Metaphors of governance and law necessarily imply a governing body that enforces those laws. Something actively constrains the actions of bodies and places limits on the nature of things. Some may see this as just be linguistic quirk. Others will see something fundamental like Aquinas’s 5th Way or some similar principle. Their perspective depends on whether or not they accept the implications of the PSR.
