Interbane wrote:

He's stated that an alien removed from its environment would still be able to be understood s a reducible material. by our understanding. That presupposes alien life develops along the same evolutionary processes as life on earth.
What evidence is there for that?

It is assumed that the alien has the same aggregate function, not because they actually would in reality, but because it's an analogy, intended to show that reduction does not necessarily correspond to a unique correlation of phenomena.

It is assumed, for the purposes of analogy alone, that some arbitrary alien species has a mind with patterns of activity that are very close to our own.

I think you're reading way too far into this. He's not making a statement regarding aliens. He's using an analogy(that just so happens to have aliens in it) to make a statement about reduction. As I said, there are other analogies that serve the same purpose. I personally prefer the example of a computer that operates with different substrates. But this doesn't allow an easy path to segue into reduction of scientific fields.

It's an overzealous speculative false analogy that implicitly states our scientific reductionism governs universally, provided things are nearly equal universally (which there clearly is NO evidence for)

You metaphysical naturalists get away with far too much. Not only that, but you're also schizophrenic - one minute you're metaphysical speculators, the next you are antiquated logical positivists (when convenient, of course) .

I'm sick of it and am holding you all accountable as of today.

It's an overzealous speculative false analogy that implicitly states our scientific reductionism governs universally, provided things are nearly equal universally (which there clearly is NO evidence for)

That is not what the analogy states. The analogy is for one of many points concerning reductionism in the book, and a specific point at that. It is to show that grossly different substrata can lead to similar higher order characteristics and functioning. Or in Carrier's words, "reduction does not necessarily correspond to a unique correlation of phenomena." A higher order phenomenon does not necessarily correspond to a lower order phenomenon, since multiple lower order phenomena can lead to a similar(and sometimes identical) higher order one. The truth of this understanding does not rely on Carrier's analogy. We know it to be true through observation of how the world works, and there are plenty of examples. The one that helped me to understand it was the computer chip analogy - computer chips can be manufactured from materials other than silicone, but the computational results are the same.

Not to say it's simple to understand, this stuff is all fuzzy. Fuzzy stuff is fun to think and talk about.

You metaphysical naturalists get away with far too much. Not only that, but you're also schizophrenic - one minute you're metaphysical speculators, the next you are antiquated logical positivists (when convenient, of course) .

Should we use only a single method to sort through our knowledge? What should we use? Science? Then what of logic? And what of the areas where science does not apply? We use different methods depending on the target of analysis, and that is something everyone else on the planet does as well, whether it's realized or not.

I think it is very difficult for ordinary people to make good judgements on the science Carrier appeals to, which cover very specialized areas of study.We can try to judge the arguments but it's hard to get into the science itself.
In trying to get into the whole multiverse thing in relation to Carrier. I came across some articles by Dr Luke Barnes who is a researcher at Sydney University.
He gets into a spat with Carrier, in relation to one of Carrier's essays where Carrier says that based on probability, intelligent design is impossible. In his blog Barnes has a couple of articles under; Probably Not-A fine tuned critique of Richard Carrier.
This touches on the multiverse and fine tuning. For anyone interested here's the link ,and people can try see for themselves whether Barnes criticisms are valid or not. Bad link. Google; A fine tuned critique of Richard Carrier, if you are interested.

He gets into a spat with Carrier, in relation to one of Carrier's essays where Carrier says that based on probability, intelligent design is impossible. In his blog Barnes has a couple of articles under; Probably Not-A fine tuned critique of Richard Carrier.

Carrier is known for saying some ridiculous things, which is why I haven't read his book until now. It's been published for nearly a decade. There is much on the internet from Carrier that is disagreeable. I don't know enough about Bayesian statistics to tell where errors might lay on either side of this spat, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that Carrier is wrong.

The position he takes in his book is much more reasonable - he doesn't make absolute claims, and uses soft wording around every claim. Perhaps it was his editor or a colleague that tempered his normal arrogance in the book, I'm not sure.

Hi Interbane, Barnes critiques Carrier on his probabilistic claims and methods and some in relation to fine tuning etc.
I find it quite technical and haven't personally studied probability theory. In the blog all sorts of readers respond and that's usually science stuff. Carrier understandably doesn't like the criticisms and exchanges ensue.
I'm just making people aware of another point of view in relation to some of his ideas.
Could laws arise from chaotic lawlessness in the beginning for instance? The science is technical,so it's hard sometimes to evaluate these things.

I know there are contrary views, and well argumented ones.

A great deal of our disagreement in the book can be reduced to the accepted brute fact. We can agree to disagree on this point, but don't let that stop you from reading until the end. It would be refreshing to talk naturalistic politics.

Regarding the brute fact, there is symmetry to our positions. There is a knee jerk reaction we have when we dwell on concepts such as infinity and timelessness. It is one thing to pack these concepts into another abstraction. It is entirely another to imagine in your head how these things are objective. I can abstract a tree, and I can wrap my head around seeing an actual tree, walking around it, enjoying the susurration of leaves in the wind. We can't do that with infinity, or the beginning of the universe.

Unless we formulate an alternative explanation. Your question on how laws could possibly arise from chaos, or how something could come from nothing, or how the universe could go back in time infinitely, they elicit the same inability to imagine. Our minds recoil from this. Our minds do not recoil from the idea of an agent, such as god. We are used to dealing with agents, but not physics.

But when we analyze the idea of a god, the same problems present themselves. How did god come to be, and why? Does he exist so that we may exist? Why should either of us exist? Why isn't there nothing rather than something? We each have answers for the other person's incredulity, but incredulity is ultimately an emotion.

We will go in endless circles with symmetrical incredulity at the brute fact the other accepts. That's what we've been doing, in fact. Let's agree that we accept different brute facts and move on now. Or if you wish, discuss the part where Carrier discusses which brute fact we should accept.

But that is an earlier chapter - another thread.

Some mind-blowing ideas in this chapter. One is pretty obvious when you think about it, but Carrier does a great job describing it. As Sagan said, we are made of starstuff. And so is everything. But what it is depends on his geometric configuration in space-time.

Even if Ed Norton never suffers the horrible fate of falling through a meat grinder, we can say that if he did so, he would be destroyed, and what came out the other side would not be Ed Norton, but a pile of goo. We can say this because the pattern of matter and energy instantiated by Ed Norton is such that this is what will result when it collides with the pattern of matter and energy instantiated by a meat grinder. It is a geometric inevitability. . . . There can only be an Ed Norton if matter and energy exist in a certain pattern of organization, a pattern that will be fundamentally changed by a meat grinder. The goo that results will contain all the same material out of which Ed Norton was made, but it will not really be Ed Norton, because it lacks the arrangement necessary to make an Ed Norton.

There's a great Robyn Hitchcock song I want to quote here, but I'll refrain.

The other idea is that energy and mass are bound up in space-time. Energy is teeming even in the vacuum of space. Maybe there's no such thing as nothing? So my conclusion is that the Big Bang wasn't something from nothing because space is never really empty. It contains huge amounts of energy.

In fact, it seems it is impossible for energy not to exist. There is growing evidence that even a complete vacuum is seething with energy. And there has long been strong evidence that energy can never be created or destroyed—which makes sense geometrically, since you can’t flatten any area of space-time without bunching up another, unless you can somehow generate or eliminate space-time itself. Otherwise, remove one ripple over here, and another pops up over there—the principles of geometry allow nothing else. Consequently, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get away from the stuff. Wherever there is any place to go in space or time, we always find energy there, and nothing we do can really get rid of it.

haha, wow!

What got Ed Norton pulled into that example!? haha!

Geeze.