Sounds like he is working out a purely internalist concept of truth. Internalism as such is not an unusual position, although it is more commonly deployed in the context of knowledge and justification.

I'm saying the argument is self-undermining. I'm not making any positive claims.

If simulation, then evidence is simulated. — unenlightened

The idea is that the simulation is a simulation of (a part of) the actual world under representative conditions. So yes, evidence is simulated, but if the simulation is accurate enough, then this simulated evidence is close to the real evidence.

Like, for instance, if I was simulating an engine turbine, I would be putting in the material properties, geometry, physics, and boundary conditions that are characteristic of the real engine that I am interested in.

(I am not endorsing the simulation hypothesis, btw, least of all Musk's OP. Why are we even talking about Musk?)

Read someone who writes well relative to contemporary popular writing norms. — Terrapin Station

I think Russell's lecture notes (which were recommended above) actually aren't a bad choice if you just want to stimulate someone's interest in philosophy. It worked for me, anyway :) Russell was not only a brilliant thinker, but a lovely writer as well, which, unfortunately, is not so common. But of course, entertaining as that little book is, you don't want to use it for a systematic study.

Yeah, part of what I'd like to argue is that this kind of approach to things simply is idealism par excellence, and an insidious one at that, insofar as it couches itself in the language of the ‘physical’, despite being a metaphysical (in the pejorative sense) chimera through and through. It always amazes me that those who hew to this kind of view don’t recognise just how shot-through with theology it is. And I don’t mean this as a cheap-shot (like ‘oh science is just the new religion'), but in a properly philosophical key: it shares with theology its ‘emanative’ logic wherein, to botch Plotinus, everything flows from the One and returns to the One - and where the ‘flow’ is just so much detritus and debris. What you call reductive physicalism mirrors, exactly, ancient theological tropes and, from my perspective, is more or less indistinguishable from them. — StreetlightX

I am not bothered by distasteful associations (egad! Theology!) I believe that we should judge ideas on their own merit. Besides, in all likelihood, theological ideas get their inspiration from some of the same intuitions about nature that give rise to materialistic ideas. And those intuitions are realist at their core. I am convinced that, whatever ideology we outwardly proclaim, whatever stuff we say the world is made of and however it is parceled out, inwardly we all believe that much of the world is indifferent to our thoughts and desires. We have some leeway in how we choose to conceptualize it, but there are strong constraints on those conceptualizations that are not up to us to choose. And that is the only ontology that matters. We can quibble about whether chairs or wave-functions "really exist," but that's just semantics. What matters is that there is this recalcitrant something that we all have to acknowledge, on pain of undermining all our empirical knowledge.

Where I believe both the faithful and at times the materialists, especially philosophically less sophisticated scientists, sin again reason is in jumping to strong metaphysical commitments without proper warrant. But in resisting unwarranted metaphysical commitments we can only go so far in the opposite direction. We can allow for a plurality of conceptualizations, but we have to acknowledge that these conceptualizations are all subject to the same constraints. They are different maps of the same territory, and therefore they cannot be truly independent. Then the question legitimately arises: what is the nature of their interdependence?

Reductionism proposes a hierarchical structure of asymmetric dependence - by way of nomological reduction or supervenience (at the very least) - with the TOE at the top. This idea does have some empirical corroboration, but perhaps not enough. Above all, this should be treated as, at best, a provisional conclusion, not as an a priori metaphysical assumption, as often appears to be the case. Moreover, physicalist reductionism edges into the ethical territory when it deprecates non-fundamental conceptualizations, like for example the mind, as less than real, superfluous, causally inert - all the more reason for caution and skepticism.

As for (traditional Christian) theology and supernaturalism in general, it simply doesn't trust matter to behave (as @schopenhauer1 puts it) on its own. The First Cause, the Prime Mover - which you analogize with the TOE - has to be some anthropomorphic agent, which, unlike matter, is not entirely open to empirical examination.

I think there's a misunderstanding here: I'm not against 'big picture claims' (Gould is wonderful, as is Darwin!), and I invoked Weinberg and Dawkins not as avatars of 'big picture thinking' but because the specific ways in which they theorize the 'big picture' are severely misguided. Each, in their own way, attempts to assign full explanatory power (in physics and biology respectively) to a privileged ontological stratum so that certain parts of reality are simply reduced to epiphenomena that have no material agency.

That's the point: I'm not at all trying to furnish a 'non-reductionism physicalism' - whatever that might mean - but rather, give full 'ontological rights', if we can speak that way, to all of what is often simply dismissed as medial. The equation of the material with the medial isn't meant to reduce the medial to the material. Quite the opposite: it is meant to expand our understanding of what counts as material. — StreetlightX

What I would call reductive physicalism envisions a unique (but so far only hypothetical) Theory of Everything, usually identified with fundamental physics, that fixes everything in existence. All other theories and explanations, from chemistry to psychology, at best supervene on and approximate this TOE. The TOE thus has a unique status. Its ontology is the only true ontology, and its causality is the only true causality - everything else being illusory and epiphenomenal. With some variations, this is a pretty popular view among physical scientists (especially physicists, natch) and scientifically-minded laymen.

Those who reject this view, but still adhere to a broadly empiricist epistemology, which moreover does not privilege mental phenomena in its explanatory scheme, often stake their position as non-reductive physicalism. But there are different ways that one can oppose the thoroughgoing reductionism that I just outlined. One can reject the premise of a single TOE and propose instead a patchwork of theories that operate in different regimes, scales and domains. (Clearly, these theories cannot be entirely independent of each other, but presumably their interrelationship does not amount to a straightforward top-down reduction.) One can take an issue with epiphenomenalism (and here too there are different options). You seem to be rejecting the primacy of some fundamental physical ontology and instead insisting on a multiplicity of coequal ontologies.

I am sympathetic to this view, but I might be coming to it from a somewhat different direction, one that deemphasizes ontology in favor of epistemology. To my mind, ontology is theory-dependent.Theory comes first, and whatever entities it operates with, that is its ontology.

While I'd like to think that yes, materialism does entail more mature, more elaborate theorizing than the various idealisms which it arrays itself against, I think you're vastly understating the influence and pervasiveness of the latter. If one accepts materialism in the sense outlined here, people like Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg become nothing other than arch-Idealists; searches for reductive 'theories of everything', where all the universe follows from a small handful of first principles, turn out to be idealist desiderata par excellence. — StreetlightX

I am not really seeing the opposition that you are setting up here. I can understand you pitting reductionist physicalism against non-reductionist physicalism, but that's a different debate. What does this have to do with the question of matter?

You were talking about "the principle of the irreducibility of the medium," but what your examples suggested was that all you wanted was for your reductive explanations to incorporate more of the underlying messy details. Which is fine; as I said, this is the trajectory that sciences take anyway as they explore their domains in-depth. But there is also a place for big-picture, high-concept theorizing of the likes of Dawkins and Gould - and Darwin for that matter.

It is a key feature of our world that regularities emerge at multiple levels of detail. The picture does not dissolve into noise as we step back and take it in at a larger scale; instead, new patterns come into focus as we scale up or down. This is why we have multiple sciences, all of them more-or-less viable as empirical models. And even within one science, such as evolutionary biology, we can grasp general outlines of a theory, even if they are not exceptionless and do not afford a very precise fit. How else could Darwin have made his great discovery without the benefit of genetics and molecular biology and evo-devo, if the patterns that he noticed were not there to be seen with a naked eye?

For that matter, how could we ever have any "special sciences," anything other than what we call "fundamental physics" if we could not idealize the medium, neglect and smooth out messy details - and still end up with an acceptably accurate model? How could there be evolutionary biology if we could not (mostly) ignore the medium of chemistry and physics? How could we have so much success with the Big Bang theory if we could not ignore the medium of stars and pretty much everything else and idealize it as a perfect fluid?

Besides, what is medium at one level is the nuts and bolts at another, more fine-grained level. You acknowledge this yourself when you pick examples from different sciences that look at the world at different levels of detail. So where exactly is that medium that you are talking about? What is it?

That aside, it leads very nicely into Whitehead's dictum that 'the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained'. — StreetlightX

Of course it does. (Scientific) explanation is nothing other than abstracting a general rule/regularity/model out of concrete material instances. All explanations are abstractions - including those that you hold up as examples of the triumph of materialism. Rather than these fleshier theories being a case of us getting wise to the materiality of the world, they are simply the result of more mature, more elaborate theorizing, which, while still being abstract (as all theories are, by definition), can afford to incorporate more detail.

As for the question of whether these abstract forms are immanent or transcendent, whether matter possesses its own powers or is animated from without, I am not even convinced that this is something worth asking. In any case, this rarefied metaphysical debate gains no purchase in empirical sciences.

Reading your examples, I thought of another from the same stock: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, where he points to material factors, such as climate and biogeography, in order to explain large-scale trends in the development of civilization in different parts of the world

However, I think that the contrast you are drawing is rather between more and less abstract levels of explanation. Abstraction removes detail, and detail is where your "materiality" is. The more abstract an explanation, the more immaterial it seems, as it were, its ontology consisting of made-up concepts like "genes" and "networks," instead of familiar, immediately perceptible "stuff."

You seem to be articulating the principle of locality, which says that all interaction is mediated by local, i.e. immediate contact, and Einstein's relativity further puts a speed limit on such interactions. But I am not sure what this has to do with matter specifically.

I'm fairly sure you're talking about his "on the hypothesis that animals are automata" essay, and it's comparing it to a steam whistle having no effect on its machinery. — JupiterJess

I looked that up, and no, I was thinking of something else. Not Huxley then. Too bad, it was a lovely passage, but I can no longer locate it.

As for epiphenomenalism, I think it's a misguided idea.

Identity theorists say that consciousness is identical to certain mental states. But for sake of argument, I can image a physically identical world lacking that identity. It's called all the other theories of consciousness. — Marchesk

One problem with that line of argument is that we can easily imagine states of affairs that are nomologically and even logically impossible. Being able to imagine something doesn't really tell us much.

I think it was T. H. Huxley (though I cannot find the quote), while critiquing vitalism, compared it to the belief that there is some essential "traininess" in a steam locomotive, which comes in addition to all of its manifest physical features - its gleaming steel body, the steam, the whistle... He also mockingly compared it to "aquosity" - a hypothetical property or mechanism that is responsible for the essence of water, quite apart from its chemical composition.

However, I think that "phenomenal consciousness" or "qualia" is a harder nut to crack than vitalism. Again, I am not agreeing with Chalmers et al., I just don't think that it is as obvious, as you say. There is something odd about consciousness that calls for a careful conceptual analysis.

The reason it's a fair analogy is that we're saying that:

(a) The physical make-up of x is exactly the same
and yet
(b) The properties of physical stuff x are different — Terrapin Station

I was wrong, and your (a) is right. But your (b) is not quite right: Chalmers (following Kripke) stipulates that zombies are identical to humans in all physical respects. But since slipperiness is a physical property, just as being made up of water molecules is, your analogy does not work either. It would be hard to come up with an analogy of the zombie argument for something like ice, because after you take away everything that is physical about it, it seems that nothing is left over. Chalmers wants you to believe that it is at least conceivable that phenomenal consciousness is an optional extra to all the physical stuff. I don't buy his argument, but I think it's not so obvious that you can just shrug it off.

We could say, "It's conceivable that everything is identical re the ice, temperature, etc. yet the ice wouldn't be slippery." P-zombies are "conceivable" in the same way as that. — Terrapin Station

I don't think that's a fair analogy. Perhaps Chalmers would suggest this as a better analogy: It is conceivable that something looks and feels exactly like slippery ice, and yet it is not ice. (Which, of course, is easily conceivable and even plausible.) But I am not sure that this is a fair analogy either.

Many companies would just love to hire manic people at first, if they would stay that way with that positive upbeat. But usually it leads to burn out. — ssu

I had a colleague who was a manic-depressive. He did seem to feel great in his manic phase, but as far as job performance, it's hard to say whether it was better or worse. True, he worked like a demon, but he had a harder time concentrating on a single task and seeing it to completion. He would start things and quickly became bored and wanted to move on to something new. He even found some side jobs (and once tried to get me to join some startup with him), but that didn't last either.

The genius of humans is their ability to work together. — macrosoft

It's not even some unique genius of humans. Dogs don't actually eat dogs (not as a rule), nor do bats nor bees nor any number of social animals. In fact, even solitary hunters, who you might think would be most prone to violence, generally avoid conflict with their conspecifics, because even when advantage is on their side, it's usually just not worth spending energy and risking an injury.

Does my wager- which concludes only that one should study philosophy of religion, not believe in God- really have infinite live options? — Empedocles

I understand your argument as being premised on the general principle that one should take seriously any claim that attaches high stakes to your future conduct. But this general principle is unworkable, because if we were to follow it consistently, we would be doing nothing other than investigate every conceivable claim of that sort - and we would still fail at this task, because there are just too many such claims. So you cannot base your argument on just that principle; you need something else.

Life is happening - and at some point it will end - and at the very very end of the day it will either end with a black hole (something natural) or something super- natural. In Pascal terms - the coin is spinning - not calling heads or tails is not an option. — Rank Amateur

Yes, that is exactly the faulty argument that I have been addressing in this thread.

Trying to guess what evolution would favor based on a naive first guess is a losing proposition, especially for something as complex as psychology. Evolutionary solutions are not obvious even for much simpler problems; this is why evolutionary algorithms are used to solve problems that can't be solved with our usual analytical methods.

If you are interested, a lot of research, both theoretical, computational and experimental, has been done in the field of the evolution of morality, and specifically altruism and cooperation. There are popular-level books and articles that cover these topics.

Pascal claims that you have everything to gain if God is and nothing to lose if God is not. So it is clear that he considers a very specific God: one whose favor can be gained by being a good Catholic, and one very specific alternative: one in which nothing interesting happens after you die.

not quite correct - better said God ( of the Catholic religion) is, or is not. This is an undeniable true premise - it in-compasses every possibility. — Rank Amateur

That would be quite a useless and unnecessary premise, since it is a trivial tautology. And my point was exactly that Pascal was not considering every possibility. If he was, his argument could not get off the ground - for reasons that I just explained.

Pascal begins that pansee by reminding the reader that he already provided arguments for (Catholic) God earlier, and the argument that follows is aimed at those who view those earlier arguments favorably, but still have some doubts, or just don't take the implications seriously enough.

And when it comes to the wager, he only considers two live possibilities: an afterlife as envisioned in Catholic teachings, or no afterlife at all.

I'm not sure if that makes as much sense written out as it does in my head, let me know if I should clarify any of it. — Empedocles

No, I think it's fine. High stakes serve as a lever, and infinitely high stakes, as Pascal argued, should overwhelm any doubt you might have when considering further action. However, in Pascal's mind there were only two live possibilities: God of the Catholic religion (or at least something like it) - or atheism. But is this so?

Forget about religion for a moment and consider a more general proposition:

P: At some future time T one of two things will happen: either you will be rewarded with inconceivably great rewards R or punished with inconceivably great punishments U. Which it will be depends on whether you choose a particular course C (undertaking some actions and/or assuming some mental attitudes).

You say that because of the stakes being so high, you ought to take P very seriously indeed. But because of its general form, P amounts not to one proposition, but to an infinitely large family of propositions, which can be obtained by varying C (we could also vary T, R and U, but for the purposes of practical decision-making that won't make much of a difference, provided that T is sufficiently far in the future). So what are you to do? How would you go around studying all of those propositions?

What's worse (or better, depending on how you look at it) is that for any possible course C you could consider its opposite, i.e. not undertaking any of those commitments implied by C - and that will constitute another possible course C'. If you are neutral to both of these mutually exclusive alternatives (and why wouldn't you be?), then they exactly cancel each other out, leaving you at a standstill.

So you see, there is no a priori argument for doing something, e.g. investigating religious teachings, based only on possible consequences. You still need to evaluate the relative merits of the available options and narrow your choice to a few live options - or else you will be confronted by countless mutually exclusive and mutually countering possibilities.

Why do you think that subjective opinions are wrong or misguided? And what do you mean by subjective/objective, anyway?

I would say that a statement is objective if its truth does not depend on who is making the statement. That, of course, implies that subjective statements can be true - it's just that that their truth condition includes the speaker.

I can, of course, conceive of a GCB that is all powerful and created numbers and so we need not worry about the impotence of a GCB. — lupac

Speaking of impotence... Using a parallel argument we conclude that god created masturbation and masturbation cannot exist outside of God. So indeed, we need not worry about the impotence of a GCB!

Through the brain, the mind can influence the body, for the body is controlled by the brain. I thought this was generally accepted, but without a connection to the brain(stem), the human body cannot function. — Tzeentch

The human body cannot function without the liver either, but that doesn't mean that every process in the body is controlled and directed by the liver. But never mind, I don't think your point hinges on this position being 100% accurate.

The reason the placebo-effect is so interesting is because it shows the mind's ability to influence unconscious processes in the body. — Tzeentch

OK, so I asked what relevance the phenomenon of the placebo effect might have for the philosophy of mind, and you just presented us with an example where the placebo effect has implications for a theory of mind that you support. To summarize, the theory says that the mind controls or influences bodily processes. But there are actually two minds: conscious and unconscious, and each of them has its own domain of influence. It might seem that there is little if any crossover between the two, but the placebo effect shows that the conscious mind has at least some degree of influence over the unconscious mind. The idea is that the placebo effect occurs when the conscious mind influences the unconscious mind, which in turn influences some processes over which the conscious mind normally does not have a direct influence.

This is a good answer; I agree: within the parameters of your theory, the placebo effect is relevant and potentially significant. I'll just note that the theory of conscious vs. unconscious mind should not be taken as the received view among experts (I don't think there even is one such view), but rather sounds like a folk theory of mind. Also, the interpretation of how the placebo effect works (i.e. the conscious mind works through the unconscious mind) is not obvious even if the main premises of the theory are taken for granted. But, to repeat, if all of these premises are accepted, then your point is valid: the evidence of the placebo effect makes a difference.

You seem skeptical, but personally I believe the influence of the mind, with practice, can become very significant. — Tzeentch

I am rather more skeptical of the whole conscious/unconscious mind theory, but I don't claim much expertise on this subject.

If you mean that the fact that our mind has some control over our body has implications for eliminative materialism, then the placebo effect would not seem like the best example. A far more obvious and uncontroversial example would be a volitional action, such as moving your hand, etc.

Of course, I would expect that eliminative materialists would already have a response to something as obvious as that.

So we know that faith healing works, to an extent, and it is supposed to be the foundation of medicine that it works better than faith. But the supposition is faith, and disentangling that faith from 'real' medical benefits is only possible if you question that faith. — unenlightened

That is what clinical testing is supposed to tease out, no? Which is also how we know about the placebo effect in the first place.

Look, first you say that the placebo effect is interesting because it evidences brain's (and thus mind's) control over the body. Then you say that the brain's total control over the body is a "scientific fact" and "not up for debate." You can't have it both ways. If the placebo effect evidences brain's control over the body, then (also according to you) this doesn't tell us anything we don't already know for a fact. What makes your argument even worse is that the placebo effect is just about the weakest manifestation of the brain's effect on the rest of the body that we know about.

BTW, I am not a medical man, but does anyone else think that "Everything the body does has it's origin in the brain?" That is news to me.

This is scientific fact and as far as I know not up for debate. — Tzeentch

Lawyers have a saying: "If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have neither on your side, pound the table."

The facts in question do not support your position, so you resort to pounding the table. You think it's graceful?

The fact that the brain has such a large influence on the body lends credibility to the claim that the brain is master over the body. — Tzeentch

Are we talking about the same thing here? The placebo effect suggests that the mind has slightly more influence over the body than most of us had credited it with, although this extra influence manifests itself in rather obscure and capricious ways. "The brain is master of the body?" Please...

Most such sayings are neither true nor false. They require some (or a lot of) unpacking before we can make an informed judgment. And much will then depend on what meaning (if any!) was packed into them.

Take this one, for instance, from fdrake's "academic" pile:

Moral responsibility is undermined by determinism. — fdrake

Quite a lot of thoughtful and nuanced arguments have been offered in defense of this position, so it can't simply be dismissed as a settled matter. While I mostly disagree, I do believe that there is some truth to it - but much more needs to be said for there to be a meaningful debate over it.

Here is an example of a different kind:

Nothing comes from nothing.

This is something that is usually taken as unquestionably true. And yet, when you ask to unpack its meaning, people are either stumped by the request, or else it turns out that the adage is not fit to do the work for which it was brought up.

I don't really understand why the placebo effect is regularly trotted out in the context of the philosophy of mind. What is it that calls for a philosophical explanation here? That mind and body interact should not be a surprise to anyone. Can you do something at will, e.g. move your hand? Well, there you go. The placebo effect is interesting in that your mental attitudes have effects that we do not usually expect them to have. But then most of us know very little about how the mind works, so the fact that something does not meet our expectations in this context is not particularly significant. What is it specifically about the placebo effect that philosophy of mind ought to address? Does it vindicate or go against some philosophical theory?

What, pray tell, is the alternative to adapting? — Bitter Crank

What makes you think there must be some happy alternative? If you are told that you've got an untreatable cancer, you will, of course, have to "adapt" to that fact, but that doesn't take away the fact that you've got cancer.

Fucked in the way climate science forecasts. I am not going to paraphrase it here for you - go read about it if you really want to know (or fuck off if you are here to troll).

How do you have so much time to read? — ProbablyTrue

Heh, you'll be surprised how much you can get through if you set aside just an hour of undistracted reading a day. — StreetlightX

Good reading skills must help too. I too set aside some reading time, usually more than one hour per day, but there is no way I could get through an average-sized book in a week, especially a philosophy book.

(I read mostly fiction though. Currently finishing Javier Marías's A Heart So White in English translation. It is a fairly slim book, as novels go, but it still took me a couple of weeks.)

You are simply reprising the original argument of the OP, which I've already addressed in my first response.

The reason why market forces won't help us avert the catastrophe is simple: the time scale of climate changes is much longer than any business cycle, or for that matter senior executives' expected tenure on their current jobs. So there simply is no economic incentive for anyone to do anything right now, and if we don't do anything right now we'll miss the last window of opportunity. So yeah, we are fucked.

This story is a fake. First, the vote happened over a year ago. Second, the article, and especially the scandalous title, misrepresents the content of the resolution. It was directed broadly against the death penalty:

1. Urges all States to protect the rights of persons facing the death penalty and other affected persons by complying with their international obligations, including the rights to equality and non-discrimination;
2. Calls upon States that have not yet acceded to or ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights aiming at the abolition of the death penalty to consider doing so;
3. Calls upon States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to ensure that it is not applied on the basis of discriminatory laws or as a result of discriminatory or arbitrary application of the law;
4. Calls upon States to ensure that all accused persons, in particular poor and economically vulnerable persons, can exercise their rights related to equal access to justice, to ensure adequate, qualified and effective legal representation at every stage of civil and criminal proceedings in capital punishment cases through effective legal aid, and to ensure that those facing the death penalty can exercise their right to seek pardon or commutation of their death sentence;
5. Urges States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to ensure that the death penalty is not applied against persons with mental or intellectual disabilities and persons below 18 years of age at the time of the commission of the crime, as well as pregnant women;
6. Also urges States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to ensure that it is not imposed as a sanction for specific forms of conduct such as apostasy, blasphemy, adultery and consensual same-sex relations;
7. Calls upon States to comply with their obligations under article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, and to inform foreign nationals of their right to contact the relevant consular post;
8. Also calls upon States to undertake further studies to identify the underlying factors that contribute to the substantial racial and ethnic bias in the application of the death penalty, where they exist, with a view to developing effective strategies aimed at eliminating such discriminatory practices;
9. Calls upon States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to make available relevant information, disaggregated by gender, age, nationality and other applicable criteria, with regard to their use of the death penalty, inter alia, the charges, number of persons sentenced to death, the number of persons on death row, the number of executions carried out and the number of death sentences reversed, commuted on appeal or in which amnesty or pardon has been granted, as well as information on any scheduled execution, which can contribute to possible informed and transparent national and international debates, including on the obligations of States with regard to the use of the death penalty;
10. Requests the Secretary-General to dedicate the 2019 supplement to his quinquennial report on capital punishment to the consequences arising at various stages of the imposition and application of the death penalty on the enjoyment of the human rights of persons facing the death penalty and other affected persons, paying specific attention to the impact of the resumption of the use of the death penalty on human rights, and to present it to the Human Rights Council at its forty-second session;
11. Decides that the upcoming biennial high-level panel discussion to be held at the fortieth session of the Human Rights Council will address the human rights violations related to the use of the death penalty, in particular with respect to the rights to non-discrimination and equality;
12. Requests the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to organize the high-level panel discussion and to liaise with States, relevant United Nations bodies, agencies, treaty bodies, special procedures and regional human rights mechanisms, as well as with parliamentarians, civil society, including non-governmental organizations, and national human rights institutions with a view to ensuring their participation in the panel discussion;
13. Also requests the Office of the High Commissioner to prepare a summary report on the panel discussion and to submit it to the Human Rights Council at its forty-second session;
14. Decides to continue its consideration of this issue in accordance with its programme of work. — UN resolution, 22 September 2017

That said, I fully support the resolution and can't see any good reason for the US to oppose it. The resolution does not require states to abolish the death penalty; it only urges them to "consider doing so."

You need to remember that most science is about spherical cows in a vacuum. If you are modeling the Solar system in Newtonian mechanics (or even in relativistic mechanics) you'll probably treat the Sun and the planets as point masses. FLRW cosmology (which is where the Big Bang theory comes from) treats the entire universe as a fluid. Obviously, you would be crazy to take either of these ontologies too literally; you would be even more crazy to commit to both of these, as well as all the other ontologies of the many scientific models at the same time.

It seems that science in general makes no commitment to what really exists. Science deals in models, which only need to be good enough for the job. And if point masses or ideal fluids or spherical cows do the job in a given context, so much the better.

Now, what about epistemology? Does science have anything to say about ways of acquiring knowledge, and whether or not we are justified in believing something? The scientific method, in its general outlines, is basically an empiricist epistemology. If we are talking about science in general, rather than specific theories and discoveries, then we are mostly talking about epistemology. And the epistemological discussion doesn't stop at the general principles; it can get very specific, very detailed, and sometimes even very controversial (take, for instance, arguments over the use of different statistical methods in cladistics).

Quantum mechanics seems to make claims of the form (and please further my insight if I’m wrong) “if some particular measurement is taken, there is some particular probability that the value measured will be...” — Bearden

This can be read either as an operationalization of the theory, which you can similarly do with classical mechanics or any other theory, or a particular philosophical interpretation of the theory (as in the following quote from Heisenberg). While individual scientists and philosophers of science will have different takes on metaphysics and ontology, I don't think they can be generalized to anything very specific, if we are talking about science in general.

You keep using this word "intelligent." What do you think it means? At one point you say "organized/intelligent." So does "intelligent" simply mean organized, orderly, patterned, non-random? If so, then "an intelligent [organized, orderly, patterned, non-random] external force" shouldn't be a problem in our world, where, science tells us, external forces tend to be quite organized, orderly, patterned and non-random.