RE: Occam's Razor, atheism, theism and polytheism.
February 8, 2017 at 12:46 pm
(This post was last modified: February 8, 2017 at 12:48 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
Simon's question was if there were things naturalism cannot explain. I listed three. The problem isn't that someday, maybe natural explanations will appear. The problem is that naturalism (based on the arbitrary self-imposed rules of analytic philosophy) either logically excludes any kinds of solutions or wishes away phenomena that require explanation. Maybe you know about a kind of naturalism with which I'm not familiar.
All I can say for now, without knowing any specific theory naturalistic theory of mind Simon Moon or you think will save you from absurdism, is that any appeal to 'emergent properties' (ghosts out of the machine) or 'epiphenominalism' (i.e. ectoplasm) is itself the real magical thinking. Likewise, ignoring the obvious contingency of the physical universe is really just hand-waving. Or thinking that undirected and irrational physical processes can supply rational moral imperatives to a complex electro-chemical reaction is just...to put it diplomatically, not very bright.
All I can say for now, without knowing any specific theory naturalistic theory of mind Simon Moon or you think will save you from absurdism, is that any appeal to 'emergent properties' (ghosts out of the machine) or 'epiphenominalism' (i.e. ectoplasm) is itself the real magical thinking. Likewise, ignoring the obvious contingency of the physical universe is really just hand-waving. Or thinking that undirected and irrational physical processes can supply rational moral imperatives to a complex electro-chemical reaction is just...to put it diplomatically, not very bright.