simplicio comments on Bloggingheads: Robert Wright and Eliezer Yudkowsky - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Liron 07 August 2010 06:09AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (127)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: simplicio 08 August 2010 05:42:56AM 5 points [-]

Okay, so from what I can tell, Wright is just playing semantics with the word "purpose," and that's all the latter part of the argument amounts to - a lot of sound and noise over an intentionally bad definition.

He gets Eliezer to describe some natural thing as "purposeful" (in the sense of optimized to some end), then he uses that concession to say that it "has purpose" as an extra attribute with full ontological standing.

I guess he figures that if materialists and religionists can both agree that the eye has a "purpose," then he has heroically bridged the gap between religion and science.

Basically, it's an equivocation fallacy.