- Infinite regress
The First Cause Argument, Prime Mover Argument, and Kalam Cosmological Argument all rest on the premise that an infinite regress of causes is impossible. I do not think this is shown. There is no logical contradiction in an infinite past,…
- Functionalism
The standard objections are John Searle's Chinese Room, the "absent qualia" worry that a system could have all the right functional states and no experience (Philosophical zombies), and the "China brain" (a billion people with radios imple…
- Hard problem of consciousness
The arguments for the hard problem (Mary’s Room, Philosophical zombies) establish at most that we cannot currently imagine how experience arises from matter. An argument from what we can imagine is an argument from Personal Incredulity.
- Pareidolia
Personal Incredulity
- Owens Tryptic of Ignorance
The point of the tryptic is that my incomprehension is total and even-handed. I cannot understand an infinite past, but I cannot understand a finite one either, so the fact that an infinite past is hard to imagine (Hilbert's Hotel) is no r…
- Hilbert's Hotel
It shows no such thing. The hotel is counter-intuitive, not contradictory. Mathematics handles infinite sets without inconsistency (Georg Cantor's work on transfinite numbers predates Hilbert's hotel by forty years), and the "absurdities"…
- Philosophical zombies
My own view (see Consciousness): the argument establishes only a limit on what we can currently imagine, not a limit on what is the case. An argument from what we can imagine is an argument from Personal Incredulity. If consciousness is wh…
- Erich von Däniken
Erich von Däniken (born 1935), Swiss author of Chariots of the Gods? (1968), the book that made the ancient astronaut idea a mass phenomenon. Convicted of fraud and embezzlement in Switzerland in 1970, which has no bearing on his arguments…
- Fred Hoyle
Personal Incredulity
- 9-11 Terrorist attacks
Personal Incredulity
- Ancient Aliens
Reason for rejection: The argument is one from Personal Incredulity: the proponent cannot imagine how it was done, and concludes that it could not have been. But archaeology has documented how it was done. For the pyramids there are the wo…
- Flat Earth
Personal Incredulity
- Moon Landing
Personal Incredulity
- UFOs and UAP
The structure. This is the folder's standard shape with a better budget. The claim is unfalsifiable: every investigation that finds nothing is itself the cover-up. It requires the silence of thousands, now stretched over eight decades and…
- Emergentism
"Not derivable even in principle" is a claim about us, not about the world. When someone says that experience could not be derived from a complete account of neurons, I ask how they know. The honest answer is that they cannot see how it wo…
- Panpsychism
Premise (b) is the whole dispute, and it is asserted rather than shown. "Experience cannot arise from the non-experiential" has exactly the form of "life cannot arise from the non-living" and "the properties of a compound cannot arise from…
- Physicalism and Materialism
What the alternatives have in common. Each of the rivals begins from the same observation, that it is hard to see how experience could be physical, and each builds an ontology to house the difficulty. Dualism adds a second substance or a s…
- Mind-body dualism
The thought experiments usually offered in support of dualism (Mary’s Room, Philosophical zombies) establish at most that we cannot currently imagine how experience arises from matter. An argument from what we can imagine is an argument fr…
- Argument from Irreducible Complexity
It is an argument from Personal Incredulity. "I cannot see how this evolved" is the premise Charles Darwin answered in the Origin (chapter 6, on the eye) by setting out the series of intermediates. The correct response to a structure whose…
- Origin of Life Argument
The probability calculation is a straw man. No one proposes that a modern protein or a cell assembled by random collision. The proposals are stepwise: simple replicators, selection acting from the first molecule that copied itself better t…
- Teleological Argument - Argument from Design
The classical argument was answered in 1859. Evolution by natural selection produces the appearance of design without a designer, and does so from observable, well-understood mechanisms. Paley's watch is an argument from Personal Increduli…
- Creationism and Intelligent Design
Why it matters. Around 40 per cent of Americans tell pollsters that God created humans in their present form within the last ten thousand years. Creationist schools exist in Britain, and a replica of the Ark stands in Kentucky as a theme p…
- Evolution by natural selection
Personal Incredulity
- Flat Earth
Personal Incredulity
- Substrate Independence
Why the belief in a special material is so natural. It is the same move I describe under Souls: the brain models the self as a thing that has a body, so a thing is what people go looking for. The intuition that "mere" computation cannot fe…
- World View
Pseudoscience and conspiracy. These are the epistemology of layer 2 applied to particular claims. Homeopathy is water, and acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathy, detox and the supplement aisle are the same placebo in different packaging.…
