Natural Selection Seems Insufficient

[Jal]

Axiom: the intangible cannot impact the tangible.   

Why is everyone acting like this is unrealistic? Suppose I want to hit a golf but not too far. Turns out I have a machine that can soften my club, to soften the blow.

So I try this out, but the ball went too far. I soften the club some more. Still a little too far - still a little too much IMPACT. 

Eventually I achieve the limits of the machine - it softs the club to the absolute, making it as intangible as Casper the Ghost. How much impact NOW? Zero.  None. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

If you think I need to disabuse myself of this conclusion, fine, but  I don't see how to do it.

I didn't say it was unreasonable, I asked if the contrary was equally as reasonable.  It seems you have answered with yet another worthless analogy.   Are you even capable of abstract thought, or must everything in your world be imagined in terms of concrete things?

Let's put some tread on the rubber.  A mathematician says that if a particular mathematical theorem is true, he will celebrate with a steak dinner.  This intangible theory leads to him having steak dinner.  How is this not the intangible influencing the tangible?  And try to resist the urge to make more stupid and pointless analogies.

It was not a bad analogy, you just don't like the implications.

Whereas YOUR analogy is a bad one. You've made a category mistake. You're comparing apples and oranges.  A theorem is NEITHER a tangible substance NOR an intangible substance. It's a subjective experience, it is the EVENT of feeling/ sensing/ cogitating something, subjectively.  That has nothing to do with what I am arguing here.

[Jal]

Sure tell me why.

The axiom is making a testable, scientific claim - not a philosophic one. In science, there is no such thing as an ‘intangible substance.’ It’s a contradiction in terms.

Boru

Exactly. You'll now understand the primary reason why I reject the existence of immaterial "forces". 

I don't believe in the concept of a substance without substance. That's one reason I am a full-blown materialist, unlike my Christian brothers.

[Angrboda]

As opposed to "our hunger initiates a food seeking behavior?"  What informs your preference for one over the other?  

It sounds like you have a definition of initiate that requires that initiating an action requires incompatibilist free will, aka libertarian free will.  There is no such implication in the word.  That's a you problem.  I scheduled a cron job to run some SMART tests on my NAS.  At 12:00 A.M. this morning, my NAS initiated those tests.  No free will required.  It seems that a great deal of your beliefs and errors are self-caused by you assuming meanings or principles which weren't necessitated by anything other than your own predilections and mistakes.  Instead of being open-minded enough to realize that there are perfectly acceptable choices that differ from yours, you have dug yourself in under the ostensible rule of my way or the highway.  This is the closed-mindedness you are infected with.

Points 1 and 2 that I wrote about, do indeed describe the real world:
1. We feel hunger.
2. Based on that hunger, we change our present course of direction. We INITIATE an attempt to procure food.

Yes, correct, I read this as an act of libertarian free will.  Now let's compare this with your scheduled cron job. You observed:
"At 12:00 A.M. this morning, my NAS initiated those tests.  No free will required."

Yes no free will required. Nor hunger!  Those tests ran due to a domino effect, unregulated by hunger.
Hunger is superfluous. Even if your NAS felt hunger, it wouldn't change the outcome of those tests.

That's the nature of a deterministiic system - hunger is irrelevant.

In real life, hunger IS relevant and DOES influence/ change/ impact our direction and the outcome of our activities.

Therefore my libertarian summary above is the correct view of the world.

No one is denying that deterministic processes (i.e. chains of dominos) transpire. But if that's ALL that transpires, mammals would have died of starvation long ago.

On what basis did you decide that whatever is going on that we perceive as hunger does not itself possess causal powers? Again, what justifies your belief that hunger is epiphenomenal. You've asserted it but not provided any reason for why you think it is correct. Lacking support for your view on the matter, I'm not moved by your declaration that your view is correct.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The axiom is making a testable, scientific claim - not a philosophic one. In science, there is no such thing as an ‘intangible substance.’ It’s a contradiction in terms.

Boru

Exactly. You'll now understand the primary reason why I reject the existence of immaterial "forces". 

I don't believe in the concept of a substance without substance. That's one reason I am a full-blown materialist, unlike my Christian brothers.

So, you have no fridge magnets in your house?

Your axiom is still incoherent.

Boru

[Jal]

Points 1 and 2 that I wrote about, do indeed describe the real world:
1. We feel hunger.
2. Based on that hunger, we change our present course of direction. We INITIATE an attempt to procure food.

Yes, correct, I read this as an act of libertarian free will.  Now let's compare this with your scheduled cron job. You observed:
"At 12:00 A.M. this morning, my NAS initiated those tests.  No free will required."

Yes no free will required. Nor hunger!  Those tests ran due to a domino effect, unregulated by hunger.
Hunger is superfluous. Even if your NAS felt hunger, it wouldn't change the outcome of those tests.

That's the nature of a deterministiic system - hunger is irrelevant.

In real life, hunger IS relevant and DOES influence/ change/ impact our direction and the outcome of our activities.

Therefore my libertarian summary above is the correct view of the world.

No one is denying that deterministic processes (i.e. chains of dominos) transpire. But if that's ALL that transpires, mammals would have died of starvation long ago.

On what basis did you decide that whatever is going on that we perceive as hunger does not itself possess causal powers?  Again, what justifies your belief that hunger is epiphenomenal.  You've asserted it but not provided any reason for why you think it is correct.   Lacking support for your view on the matter, I'm not moved by your declaration that your view is correct.

Hunger is innate,  not emergent, in my view, although degrees of hunger vary widely.

Hunger having causal powers? So if I could make one of the dominos feel hungry, it might go left, undermining the laws of physics?

But this conclusion essentially transitions a deterministic dynamic into a libertarian one. That seems like an unlikely transition but, even it were logically and metaphysically possible, I fail to see how it refutes my assumption that pure determinism is an insufficient foundation to Natural Selection. 

Again, blind causality doesn't care if you feel hunger. If a boulder is headed in your direction, it will flatten you regardless whether you crave food, clothing, or shelter.

When your subjective hunger moves you to initiate a change of direction (to dodge the boulder or point yourself in the direction of food), you've already transitioned to a libertarian phenomenology.

[Angrboda]

Exactly. You'll now understand the primary reason why I reject the existence of immaterial "forces". 

I don't believe in the concept of a substance without substance. That's one reason I am a full-blown materialist, unlike my Christian brothers.

So, you have no fridge magnets in your house?

Your axiom is still incoherent.

Boru

I'm sure each of those magnets is stamped, "Held in place by God." As are the molecules that are held together by God, the neutrons and protons bound by God, as are the electrons moving along their way in every wire in his house.

[Deesse23]

@Jal

Unfortunately the wind is blowing your sailboat in the opposite direction, partly because it COULD NOT CARE LESS what you hunger for.

It looks as if we can add ‘sailing’ to the list of things you know nothing about. 🤣

Boru

Wind is not doing anything. Never seen one, never touched one, never smelled one (ok, my own maybe   ). Allah (pbuh) is pushing sailboats. Everybody knows that.

[Deesse23]

@Jal

My axiom is that an intangible substance cannot physically impact a tangible one. 

That axiom is incoherent. Would you like me to tell you why or would you prefer to work it out for yourself?

Boru

me me me

Intangible <--> substance

[Jal]

Exactly. You'll now understand the primary reason why I reject the existence of immaterial "forces". 

I don't believe in the concept of a substance without substance. That's one reason I am a full-blown materialist, unlike my Christian brothers.

So, you have no fridge magnets in your house?

Your axiom is still incoherent.

Boru

Newton wondered whether gravity might be the hand of God. The Bible seems to suggest as much because it suggests that God upholds all the stars, for example it says "He sustains all things by the word of his power".

My view is that all the so-called "forces" are God leveraging His own physical hand to create the kind of environment/ world that He desired us to cohabitate  and co-labor in. That includes magnetism, electro-magnetism, gravity, electricity, and nuclear forces.

[Angrboda]

“I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”

Immanuel Kant, preface to Critique of Pure Reason