AtlanticCitySlave

It seems to me the problem with McGinn's approach is that to say we are cognitively closed to something suggests we know a line of what we can and can't know (McGinn would say we can't know how consciousness arises, or "the mysterious flame", as his book is called), i.e. we have at least some inkling of what we would need to know to not be cognitively closed, which indicates we really aren't cognitively closed.
Ignoring that though, and I assume McGinn (and others) can easily respond to it, I'm curious if anyone here has considered the obvious question of whether we are cognitively closed to knowing that we are cognitively closed? I'd like to see any thoughts on that matter.

(Overall, I agree with McGinn (and others) that we are cognitively closed from things. I think it's silly, and arrogant, to assume, based on our evolved abilities, that we can know anything and everything, even if there are things that are so complicated most humans can't understand it/them, i.e. complicated mathematics, theoretical physics, etc.)

davidm

To Clutch: I understand your point. I should have characterized your statement as weighing against, not refuting, CC. It's an interesting topic, but it seems to run out of steam, since we don't seem to have any way of verifying or refuting CC.

To RW, it should be noted that CC is not necessarily a theistic argument at all. I am an atheist and have no interest in defending theism. I do, however, have an interest in playing with ideas that might give theism or the supernatural some logical toehold apart from "faith." CC might be one of those ways. A realm that was cognitively closed to us, yet still affected us in ways we could not explain, might be practically indistinguishable from a supernatural realm. This is not an argument from ignorance if we could extend our cognitive reach somehow, perhaps computationally or genetically, to bring such a realm within the sphere of our cognition. Personally, I seriously doubt, agreeing with ACS above, that evolution crafted a brain capable at least in principle of grasping all truths. I suspect we are walled off from aspects of reality but I have no way of proving it.

rainbow walking

rw: Since we are able to comprehend and discuss the possibility that our cognitive faculties may be insufficient to detect and or comprehend the incomprehensible I think your question has an obvious answer. Having said that let’s move on…

rw: David, I think your example is insufficient to support your claim. Luvluv’s example was more analogous to the human challenge because it invoked a species with verifiable cognitive attributes. Something you would be hard pressed to verify in a rabbit. It cannot truthfully be said that a rabbit can make a dualistic connection, resulting in anything equivalent to an explanation, between the lights of a vehicle and danger. Its behavior is hard-wired and not contingent upon explanatory cognition to evoke a response. It responds automatically based on presets established by its nature. That isn’t to say that its presets cannot be desensitized to a specific stimuli. Even though this would appear to be a form of learning in actuality it isn’t because it requires a greater stimulus of its survival mechanism to desensitize it to the hard-wired signal of danger to an approaching car. Something like hunger and availability of food could overpower it’s flight syndrome resulting in an aberration of normal behavior such that the rabbit appears to know that the car lights pose no threat. But there is no evidence to suggest this is a form of knowledge derived from a primitive cognitive ability. Therefore using a lower species as an example doesn’t justify a claim of a limited cognition in humans. As Clutch has pointed out, human cognitive skills are expressed in symbolic languages that are extremely adaptive to almost any experience but they are contingent on experience. A phenomenon that exists beyond human experience remains, for all practical purposes, non-existent. A phenomenon that exists within human experience but remains incomprehensible cannot be said to be outside our cognitive abilities. It merely awaits comprehension which is achieved via normal methodologies.

I submit there are phenomena which do, in fact, exist and remain beyond our comprehension, (but not our cognitive abilities), and that those phenomena are not external but internal making them much more difficult to observation, identification and classification. But not impossible. The greatest challenge to the human species is comprehension of the human species.

rainbow walking

To RW, it should be noted that CC is not necessarily a theistic argument at all.

rw: Noted.

I am an atheist and have no interest in defending theism.

rw: Excellent.

I do, however, have an interest in playing with ideas that might give theism or the supernatural some logical toehold apart from "faith."

rw: I am not. My concern is to articulate truth that will break the hold of theism from the mind of reason.

CC might be one of those ways.

rw: And that is why I have chosen to challenge it.

A realm that was cognitively closed to us, yet still affected us in ways we could not explain, might be practically indistinguishable from a supernatural realm.

rw: And you can rest assured it is a territory the theist will claim. Any phenomena capable of affecting us, thus experiential, cannot possible reside outside our cognitive abilities. This is a contradiction. What can happen is what I call a mis-placement of assignment. For instance, the theist claims specific experiences are his personal evidence of the existence of a god. This god, he claims, exists both externally and internally. I submit his experiences are subjective and internal only, entirely attributable to internal cognitive conflicts created by a stress between his nature to assign an explanation to all experiences and his nature to adopt the least labor-intensive method of explanation. The theist does not invent a god, one has already been provided, complete with all the necessary accoutrements, to make it appear plausible. The god he is experiencing is a combination of his imagination fed by pre-programmed urges that satisfy his tendency to take the path most traveled. It is, one would conclude, the safest way. It is entirely subjective and provides no evidence that this god resides anywhere beyond his own imagination, thus there is no non-cognitive dimension to trouble ourselves over.

This is not an argument from ignorance if we could extend our cognitive reach somehow, perhaps computationally or genetically, to bring such a realm within the sphere of our cognition.

rw: Nature has already provided us with all the tools we need to address any experience we might encounter. It is up to us to provide the explanations consistent to that nature and reality.

Personally, I seriously doubt, agreeing with ACS above, that evolution crafted a brain capable at least in principle of grasping all truths. I suspect we are walled off from aspects of reality but I have no way of proving it.

rw: And I seriously suggest you re-examine the premises that have created the doubt. No offense intended.

davidm

RW, thanks for your well-reasoned responses. I need to give them some thought before responding (off to work now, unfortunately).

As an off-topic aside, I respect your goal to "articulate truth that will break the hold of theism from the mind of reason." You're doing a good job of it, too, as evidenced by your demolition of David Matthews. For myself, I have a much more live-and-let-live attitude about the subject. I could be wrong, but I tend to suspect that if religion disappeared tomorrow, the world would be just as fucked up as it is today. People would just organize around some other fallacious idea and things would proceed as usual.

AtlanticCitySlave

"Since we are able to comprehend and discuss the possibility that our cognitive faculties may be insufficient to detect and or comprehend the incomprehensible I think your question has an obvious answer."

-Yes, the answer being that we are cognitively closed to things.

davidm

To RW: There are several different issues here. Let's drop the rabbit/sun analogy, I agreed it is flawed

It could be that there are elements of reality that are cognitively closed to us, and do not affect us in any way. Then they would be nonexistent from our viewpoint and we need to worry about them. Would you say that such a realm could exist? I don't find it clear from your argument.

You do say that it is a contradiction to imagine that any part of reality could affect us while remaining beyond our cognitive grasp. Perhaps that is true.

There is also the issue of whether we are cognitively closed to knowing that we are cognitively closed.

And finally there is the issue of things cognitively within our grasp but incomprehensible to us. You mention internal human states. Maybe also the singularity at the heart of a black hole qualifies, where spacetime physics breaks down. A proper theory of everything, however, if it is achievable, would presumably abolish that incomprehensibility.

It has been suggested that we might achieve the means to create our own universes in a laboratory. Such universes would inflate into their own spacetime realms and would have no further contact with our reality. What if said universes eventually evolved self-aware beings? Wouldn't it be correct to say that they are cognitively closed to our existence, and we are cognitively closed to theirs? Or is this just a matter of mutual incomprehensibility? In either case, note that we would be responsible for their existence, so if it is correct to say that they are cognitively closed to us, this would be a case where nevertheless we affected them greatly, by creating their universe in the first place

Or: a programmer creates self-replicating digital units that over many generations evolve complex patterns. Already done in the lab. What if it were possible that these entities evolved self-awareness? Would they not be cognitively closed to us? At the same time the programmer (creator) could tweak their code to manipulate their evolution and even their intelligence. Yet how could these digital entities in their mysterious mathematical terrain ever have a cognitive grasp of an analog world outside their digital universe?

Just a couple of speculative examples. Note that both examples involve a creator and the created, though neither posits anything like a supernatural or perfect "god."

luvluv

I don't believe that our ability to use language to reduce concepts to an intelligible level totally excludes us from the CC dilema.

I realize I will be torn apart for this, but it does seem to me that the only concepts I can come up with which would be beyond the capacity of humans to imagine are concepts that are attributed to Deity.

Now, humans are able to reduce one of God's attributes to a word, let's use the word/concept omnipresence. Humans are capable of roughly translating this concept into a word whose meaning is widely known. But I would argue that if omnipresence is possible, it's ACTUALITY is beyond the scope of our imagniation. We cannot imagine, for one nano-second, anything approaching the reality of what it would BE LIKE to be ominpresent, or what all of it's implications are. The same holds true for omniscience or the (as far as I'm aware at least) uniquely Christian idea of God's temporal omni-presence (the idea that God exists simeltaneously in all possible times).

In short, I don't know that we can claim to disprove any of these attributes because either they are imaginary and have no reality behind them or they are beyond our capacity to investigate or understand. How would you go about observing something's omnipresence?

So it seems there is one readily available phenomenon that is either beyond or ability to understand or else totally imaginary and that is God. How would we go about deciding whether God is hidden from us from CC or whether He is simply the product of the imaginiation? Logically speaking, if God exists and is anything like the Jews, Christians, or Muslims say He is then many of his attributes would be beyond our ability to understand.

At any rate, I think the ability to reduce concepts like omnipotence and omniscience and infinity down to manageable words still does not move us towards having a grasp on the full implications of what these words mean. The reality behind the words may be too much for any human to grasp.

davidm

I still hope for a response from RW, or others, to the couple of scenarios I outlined above. These and other scenarios can be posited that provide a rebuttal to the idea that all truths are in principle accessible to the human mind. The human mind is the product of billions of years of the accidents and contingencies of evolution. To suppose that such a brain is sufficient to interpret and explain all of reality seems speculative to me. And realms beyond our (current) cognitive capability could contain many strange truths, and strange entities.

keith r

The problem is that we are still enslaved to primitive religious superstitions even if we believe we have abandoned Religion become atheist/agnostic.
It is not enough to give up Religion, we must give up all the assumptions of the ancient which led to these Religion.
And so we have this ancient concept of "Proof".
This is an illusion. It is not only not possible
it is not what we do. Instead we offer theories which others may find satisfying or not. And factual elements, evidence, are not really as important as the emotional satisfaction. It may be very satisfying to imagine that you know something for sure, but you never can. The practical thing is to drop the ancient superstition of "Proof" and seek to offer theories - maps which can accomplish what we desire. Keith r