Belief in Naturalism. An Epistemologist's Philosophy of Mind, Susan Haack

Susan Haack is an English professor of philosophy and law at the University of Miami in the United States. She has written on logic, the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. She was invited by the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies to deliver a lecture series. Her first lecture -- "Belief in Naturalism: An Epistemologist's Philosophy of Mind" -- is about the nature of belief and the place of the concept of belief in a modestly naturalistic epistemology.

[toddstark]

Does anyone know if the slide deck for this talk is available?

[CliffStamp]

Does anyone know why she saying her behavioral view of belief which entails that saying p is true, is just the same as asserting p is not a redundancy theory of truth. That is one of the classic ways I have seen that defined.

[bristol]

Consciousness, perception and thinking.  A theory of mind according to platonic physics.

You will not find an explanation as understandable as this in the current Stanford Leibniz site,
    which is incomplete as it  makes no mention of Mind.

1. Plato's Mind (the One, the Self) is the cause agent, the singular cybernetic control point, of all perception,    thinking and doing in the universe, where control is top down from Mind.

2. Plato's Mind is timeless and spaceless, and  being the only Reality, time and space
    are not ultimately real, but are artificial constructions.

3.  Since Mind is mental, not physical, all control and causation  is mental, not physical,
     and top down, since Mind is the singular (cybernetic) control point at the top.

4. Thus Mind plays the brain like a violin, not the reverse.

5. Man's mind (small m) is a passive mental subset, or monad, of Mind and under its control.

6. This monad (our mind) is the mental correspondent of the brain and controls it. Our mind
    plays our brain like a violin.

7. Thinking is the intentional action of Mind (and thus mind) on mental entities such as ideas,
    manipulating and transforming them intentionally (through will).

8. Qualia are simply sensory experiences, the conversion by Mind of sensory nerve signals into
    mental sensory experiences in a fashion similar to the conversion of physical sensory nerve signals
    into mental images.
   
9.. As Dennett has explained,   In materialist thinking, there is no end to homunculi viewing the universe   through a chain of homunculi.   Leibniz terminates this infinite regress by making the last viewer the Self,     which is at a higher level and suitably equipped.

10. Perception occurs as Mind converts physical sensory signals in the brain into mental experiences in one's mind.

11.  These experiences can be made conscious (are made aware) by reperceiving or thinking them.
    This is called apperception by Leibniz.  Thus consciousness is apperception.

12. The universe, according to Leibniz, is viewed directly by the One (the Self, the ONLY true perceiver),     which views these scenes discretely and in sequence (analogous to snapshots) at discrete points as a whole     indirectly through the totality of individual monads,   and from their own perspectives.

13. This  totality of sets of individual perceptions is then  distributed in the proper order and perspective to     each of the monads in the universe.

14. These individual sets are called "perceptions", and must be distributied in this indirect fashion
    by Mind because each monad, in order to remain an individual, has no "windows", to use Leibniz's term.

15. The perceptions are made up of what the monad would see of its nearby neighbors
    if it were allowed to do so. This is purely mental, but allows us to speak in terms of
    spacial distances and directions, through these snapshots, between physical bodies,
    which Mind, being spaceless, cannot actually directly.

16. Mind is also timeless, so that time is physically "created" as an artifact through
    the actual motions of physical bodies in physical spacetime.

1
17. Intelligence is the nonphysical ability to freely make autonomous choices.  It is a faculty of
    nonphysical Mind, the Nothing out of which the physical universe exploded in the Big Bang. 

18. Another name for this nonphysical intelligence is "life."  Leibniz maintained that the entire
     universe is alive.

19. Each monad is perpetual, created at the beginning of the universe and only annihilated by Mind.

20. Since monads can contain other monads,   they can. as plants do through seeds,     and humans do through sexual reproducxtion, produce subsequent generations.

21.  A robot or computer has no Mind or Self which has the wide bandwidth, intelligence
    and intentionality to actually perceive, think, or do things, such as Mind does.     So, being without Mind, computers can have no actual intelligence or life.

22. The current theory of mind is materialist. In contrast to the above, it uses the usual decapitated,
    mindless, or where mind is at best an abstract entity, not a living presence as in the above.
    The materialist model of perception, thinking and doing, being Mindless, is dead.

DSG

Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (retired, 2000).

[mizikoniss]

I don't understand very good but this is very WOw :)

[randychurchill]

In this video Susan Haack expresses her commitment to naturalism as a world view. Naturalism is presented here as the only explanation of reality. The supernatural is excluded which is not surprising. I see this lecture as a demonstration of begging the question. Susan assumes her naturalism to be true but she never argues for why it is true.

Susan I'm sure believes that she is a person. How does naturalism work on chemicals in a slime pit billions of years ago so that those chemicals come to BELIEVE that they posses the qualities of personality? If there is no God working in creation then we can only assume that natural process is an impersonal determinism. How does an impersonal determinism create beings who BELIEVE in personality? If you BELIEVE anything, you are doing something that goes beyond simple existence. A rock in your front yard does not argue for anything. It has no being, person hood nor can it do anything but lay there year after year. No matter how long you wait that rock will just lay there. Susan is doing something that rocks and matter will never do. So how did Susan evolve into something more than a rock? If you make any truth claims you are in fact denying materialistic naturalism because scientifically no one can show by naturalistic process how you get a mind that expresses BELIEF. Susan BELIEVES that she has a mind. She can use her mind but she cannot account for why she is using her mind the way she is using it. Her lecture is nothing short of a logical fallacy. She is begging the question.

The other logical fallacy that stands out here is the pretended neutrality fallacy. It is not possible for anyone to look at the material world without expressing beliefs about the nature of the material world they live in. The world if filled with information. That information was here long before you existed. How does naturalism justify the existence of rational information that can assist in the sciences? All knowledge and information is immaterial in nature. Laws of logic do not grow on trees. Laws of logic are immaterial, abstract invariants. Why would a naturalist presuppose the existence of immaterial abstracts? How do these exist in reality by naturalistic presuppositions? I have never heard anyone who is committed to naturalism explain how you get a rational universe from a world created by random process.

Seems to me that naturalism is more fantastical than any belief in the Supernatural. If God exists then He is a person. He created us and that is why we are persons with personality. We are made in God's image and we have a rational basis for understanding our presumptions of personality. I'm only touching the surface here but I can never find anyone who advocates naturalism that can really go deep here and explain all the gapping holes in naturalism as a world view.