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What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.
It seems like you want to associate these things because you want to strike a blow against materialism, but it’s just unrelated.
The former is a foundational axiom of the latter. People latch on to genetic determinism as "obvious" and "true" because they reject the validity of non-material/non-quantifiable explanations.
It’s not though. A universe containing non physical things could very easily contain organisms with wholly genetically determined intelligence. They just don’t have anything to do with one another.
Imagine a purely material universe with species A that is intelligent and has its intelligence completely determined by genetics. Now imagine that one day in that universe species B evolves and has souls (just an example of non physical things, it could be anything you like that is non physical). Nothing has changed for species A, they are still genetically determined.
I feel like you are conflating neccesary and sufficient conditions. A non-materialist model of the universe can readily accommodate physical elements. But a materialist model can not readily accommodate the non-physical.
The strong arguments for heritability being purely genetic are premised on the assumption of a deterministic universe. The existence of non-material causes would cast doubt upon this premise, and by extension the conclusion.
This is wrong for two reasons:
To be honest, I don't much care for the term "genetic determinism" in this context. I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role. In my experience the debate is between hard core blank slateists, who deny the impact of genetics at all because they understand that it would wreck the foundation of much of their worldview, and hereditarians who think that there is a mix of genetic and environmental factors. "Genetic determinism" is generally leveled as a slur against hereditarians because it's pretty silly to think that genes are the only thing that matters and that your exposure to lots of words and symbols as a kid has zero impact. Can you point to someone making a "strong argument for heritability" that really says things are 100% genetic?
Niether of those manage to refute anything ive said. Again i feel like you are mixing neccesary with sufficient and trying to control the conversation by controlling the null hypothesis. Asserting that because i have not shown x i must accept y but i am under no such obligation.
Then you must be new here (that or The Motte doesn't meet your criteria for "serious") because i have had precisely that argument multiple times here in the last 6 months, including with at least one user active in this very thread.
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Just wanted to drop a quick correction here: “qualia” does not mean “non-physical”. Qualia just means “conscious experience”. The word is entirely neutral regarding the question of what conscious experience actually is or what causes it. It could be physical, or it could be non-physical. But it’s still a qualia all the same.
I say this because the word “qualia” has gotten a reputation in some circles as being a “woo word” which causes people of a more materialist bent to nope out of the conversation whenever it comes up, and I really don’t think that has to be the case. It’s just a convenient word for describing the, well, actual conscious-experience part of conscious experience, as opposed to say its objectively observable behavioral or neurophysiological correlates. It’s just a handy word for talking about a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with. That’s all.
I'm not sure I understand what would it mean exactly for qualia to be physical. Isn't it like...obviously something fundamentally distinct?
Mainstream secular stance of "conscious states trace material configurations" feels more like soft-dualism where the mind part plays the junior role, but it's still there
Well, the problem is that some people have the exact opposite intuition! They can’t see why qualia should pose a problem for physicalism at all. Thus the debate carries on interminably.
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Yeah totally agree. Before I believed in god, I was a superveniance functionalist (now I’m confused). I think qualia are just one more superveniant thing in that frame.
A lot of people who are not materialists and also don’t believe in god cite qualia as the reason why, so I was trying to make the case in a way that would appeal to those people. It was sloppy and I regret the error, since I don’t actually think that makes sense.
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Typically the standard materialist/scientific worldview sees most things as genetically determined, as far as I'm aware! That may be changing.
I agree that you can believe in genetics without necessarily adopting a materialist frame.
I don’t think that’s true at all. There are plenty of materialists who think things are environmentally determined. This is liberal blank slateism in a nutshell. The opposite of genetic determinism is environmentalism in almost all debates on intelligence. This is actually the first time that I’ve encountered someone saying that variations in intelligence originate from something non-physical like the grace of God (this seems like what you are saying, but maybe you mean something else, it does seem like an odd thing for God to do to me).
Okay, mea culpa!
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Perhaps history's most infamous materialists were also dogmatically blank slatists.
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