How do you know there is nothing particularly special about our home? See the article on the
Rare Earth Hypothesis.
I neither know nor don't know it. What I said was that I see no reason to suspect that there is anything special about our home. Why would there be?
Really? You have evidence that aliens are probable (I assume that's the one you mean). Can you post it or point me to it?
You've already been given the evidence repeatedly -- we know there are other planets; we have found nearly earth-sized planets recently. We know that water is common, and even exists on other planets in our solar system. So, the necessary conditions exist elsewhere, especially given the fact that they obviously exist here, and I still see no reason to suspect that what applies here is different from what applies throughout the rest of the universe.
Given the vast expanse of space, it would seem unreasonable not to expect life to have arisen elsewhere. It probably takes a fairly unstable system to result in eukaryotes, but once that hurdle is reached, multicellularity becomes possible and intelligent life then becomes possible. If there is predator and prey something is going to hit upon intelligence.
I assume by "rational" you mean something other than "coherent" or "consistent with reality." So that just brings us around full-circle. By what definition of "irrational" is dualism irrational?
By not following rules. If it follows rules and can be explained by the mechanisms we see, then it is part of the same single substance and not dualism. Dualism -- we're talking substance dualism here, not the many other potential meanings of the word -- is not coherent because it must work by something other than an explainable mechanism.
And what makes teapots orbiting Jupiter irrational since it doesn't seem to require dualism?
Who said anything about teapots orbitting Jupiter being irrational? I said they were an intentionally silly story.
Define "magic" as you're using it, please.
Working without the means of a mechanism through a completely unknowable means. If a mechanism is involved, then it follows rules and it is part of our garden variety monism. For there to be a second substance, that substance cannot interact through mechanistic means; it must do so through an unknowable "process" (where process is obviously the wrong word because it implies mechanism).
If by "magic" you mean "it's impossible" rather than "we don't know" then no it would not require magic for the supernatural to interact with the natural any more than it's magic for us to interact with fish (we can go in the water or on land even though fish are generally confined to the water).
-Bri
If I meant impossible, I would have said impossible. I didn't. I said that dualism is logically possible. We cannot exclude it on logical grounds. But the way that we use the word substance, we cannot speak of a separate substance working through a theoretically explainable mechanism. It isn't an issue of us not knowing, but an issue of us not being able to know even in theory how it works.
When I use the word substance here, I do not refer to concrete over there and bromium over here as separate substances. There is an underlying physical substrate -- a more fundamental substance -- that explains how each came to be. We don't know all the details, and we call it "strings" sometimes, leptons and bosons other times, etc.
In the past, before we knew the mechanisms underlying the four basic forces, it was possible for us to fudge and pretend that there were other spooky things that had a fundamentally different nature. We can no longer pretend that is the case.
This substance that we know about works through rules; it interacts through mechanisms that can be known theoretically (even if we do not know them all now). A different substance would not interact in that way because, if it did, then it wouldn't be a separate substance -- it would just be an attribute of the same stuff we already know about.
The only option left is that it works through magic -- through some manner that we cannot know. That is where the rational/irrational angle fits in.
JREF order of merit awarded this date, two-aught-aught-nine, for dedication above and beyond call of doody to a thread about the rationality of bayesian fine-tuning & drake's equation, to SusanB-M1...
