I’ll leave a longer comment later, but just a brief comment: I don’t think the facts have to cause your beliefs. Instead I think they have to, in a broad sense, explain your beliefs. They could ground your beliefs without causing them directly, just as the fact that 11 is not divisible by 2 explains, but does not cause, it to be impossible to divide 11 apples into two equal groups.
Right, but then the challenge is why we need supernaturalism; broad explanatory connections based on the *contents* of your beliefs seems like something that's compatible with epiphenomenalism, and not apt to be debunked by any merely causal explanation of how you came to have the general psychology that you have. The sort of view I defend in 'Knowing What Matters' is precisely one on which an agent who starts in roughly the right place ends up with true philosophical beliefs *because* they are true (though similar natural causes could easily lead someone else astray).
Generally if A explains why B is true, then if (per impossible) A were different, B would be too. But on your view, you can give a complete explanation of our moral beliefs without invoking the moral facts, which means they don't feature in a full explanation.
It's not remotely clear that your first sentence is true -- not least because it's often unclear how to assess counterpossibles: if 2+2 had instead equaled 5, would my mathematical beliefs changed to track this difference? The claim seems either nonsensical or false.
> "you can give a complete explanation of our moral beliefs without invoking the moral facts, which means they don't feature in a full explanation."
I'm not sure what you mean by "complete" and "full" here. Many things admit of multiple sufficient explanations. In such a case, I would say that the "full" or "complete" explanation incorporates *every* true explanation. But you can offer *a* sufficient explanation without adverting to *every* true explanation. So it's not true that "not featuring in *a* sufficient explanation" means that a feature isn't (also) explanatory.
I think this is important to appreciate, because it's just very obvious that there is a sufficient causal explanation of our philosophical beliefs that does not advert to their truth. (Otherwise, scientists could work out what was true just by inspecting people's brains and seeing which beliefs/neural activity were physically inexplicable, and that's obviously absurd.)
I think it's simple because I was a disbeliever in spiritual effects until they kept happening to me, and then I finally started to listen and see the unexplainable. I had been practicing Zen meditations to increase my awareness to survive Vietnam. Several times I dodged death because my gut told me to duck or not get on certain trucks. Because the Zen meditations increased my hearing, seeing, etc., I didn't know it also increased my sensing the 6th sense or the spiritual world whereas something there beyond my belief system was operating to save my life multiple times. This idea went against my Physics class teaching in High School, but I kept thinking about it, reading science and physics for about 50 years until articles about the structure of the Universe began to show up. That was it! Now I understood that all the forces in the Universe from quantum physics to gravity operating on planets, stars, and galaxies, all of this is information, information storage, and information operations. Sound like anything you know? Yep, a computer. The Universe could be a computer, and if we listen into it, we will hear answers about questions we have way before we even ask the questions. The reason this link is open to us is that we are physically part of the computer. To access the feed, all you have to do is meditate for long periods or pray for long periods. There are better or faster link-in meditations or prayers, but I should leave it to you now because only you can begin to listen.
I’ll leave a longer comment later, but just a brief comment: I don’t think the facts have to cause your beliefs. Instead I think they have to, in a broad sense, explain your beliefs. They could ground your beliefs without causing them directly, just as the fact that 11 is not divisible by 2 explains, but does not cause, it to be impossible to divide 11 apples into two equal groups.
Right, but then the challenge is why we need supernaturalism; broad explanatory connections based on the *contents* of your beliefs seems like something that's compatible with epiphenomenalism, and not apt to be debunked by any merely causal explanation of how you came to have the general psychology that you have. The sort of view I defend in 'Knowing What Matters' is precisely one on which an agent who starts in roughly the right place ends up with true philosophical beliefs *because* they are true (though similar natural causes could easily lead someone else astray).
Generally if A explains why B is true, then if (per impossible) A were different, B would be too. But on your view, you can give a complete explanation of our moral beliefs without invoking the moral facts, which means they don't feature in a full explanation.
It's not remotely clear that your first sentence is true -- not least because it's often unclear how to assess counterpossibles: if 2+2 had instead equaled 5, would my mathematical beliefs changed to track this difference? The claim seems either nonsensical or false.
> "you can give a complete explanation of our moral beliefs without invoking the moral facts, which means they don't feature in a full explanation."
I'm not sure what you mean by "complete" and "full" here. Many things admit of multiple sufficient explanations. In such a case, I would say that the "full" or "complete" explanation incorporates *every* true explanation. But you can offer *a* sufficient explanation without adverting to *every* true explanation. So it's not true that "not featuring in *a* sufficient explanation" means that a feature isn't (also) explanatory.
I think this is important to appreciate, because it's just very obvious that there is a sufficient causal explanation of our philosophical beliefs that does not advert to their truth. (Otherwise, scientists could work out what was true just by inspecting people's brains and seeing which beliefs/neural activity were physically inexplicable, and that's obviously absurd.)
I think it's simple because I was a disbeliever in spiritual effects until they kept happening to me, and then I finally started to listen and see the unexplainable. I had been practicing Zen meditations to increase my awareness to survive Vietnam. Several times I dodged death because my gut told me to duck or not get on certain trucks. Because the Zen meditations increased my hearing, seeing, etc., I didn't know it also increased my sensing the 6th sense or the spiritual world whereas something there beyond my belief system was operating to save my life multiple times. This idea went against my Physics class teaching in High School, but I kept thinking about it, reading science and physics for about 50 years until articles about the structure of the Universe began to show up. That was it! Now I understood that all the forces in the Universe from quantum physics to gravity operating on planets, stars, and galaxies, all of this is information, information storage, and information operations. Sound like anything you know? Yep, a computer. The Universe could be a computer, and if we listen into it, we will hear answers about questions we have way before we even ask the questions. The reason this link is open to us is that we are physically part of the computer. To access the feed, all you have to do is meditate for long periods or pray for long periods. There are better or faster link-in meditations or prayers, but I should leave it to you now because only you can begin to listen.