Just to add to the above. The “self” is involved in a never ending red queen race re-updating the model of a universe that includes itself.
Another little bit of silliness here is Calculon’s argument: {Current} computers are deterministic machines without any sense of self, etc… Therefore any belief that humans brains have any analogous materialistic functioning is arguing that human brains are subject to all the same imitation of computers.
No that does not follow.
Current computer technology can only replicate human brain functions in very narrow domains (albeit in some narrow domains they can put our brains to shame) and to the best of our knowledge no computer system has an emergent sense of self (although I wonder if we’d recognize it if it someday did, given that we do not even really know how to recognize a sense of self in other species or even other humans other than by assuming that they have it because they behave as we do … but that is another debate). But that in no way informs as to the analogy.
The problem is more fundamental than whether or not we can know a particular thing or not. The problem is whether or not we can truly know anything at all. If you accept a materialist worldview it destroys any confidence that we can have that we are actually able to know truth in any meaningful fashion.
The model that you propose seems to take it for granted that as our view of the universe evolves it moves closer to truth. That this should be true is not obvious at all. If our thoughts are determined by the laws of nature then there is no reason to suspect that they are true, or that they are even moving any closer to the truth through time.
The fact that you admit that the perception of the self may be an illusion I think shows that you recognise this. That you ackowledge this, yet still insist that it is required for for your view of reality to work suggests to me that you are so intent on making materialism work that you are basically willing to accept fundamentally illogical things rather then admitting to its flaws.
Just for the record I don’t think that computers are like brains. It is Der Trihs that insists on that analogy. What I was saying was that if you think that about the brain, then you have to accept that the limitations of computers also exist in the brain.
Also, I don’t see how you actually refute the argument. When comparing computers and brains all we can do is use computers as they are now. It is all well and good to imagine some sci-fi based super computer that is conscious in some way. However until we work out how such a computer would work it is useless to try and use that idea of a computer in analogies. It is not even clear that such a computer could exist.
I cannot speak for “materialists” having only a passing and impatient interest for what currently gets called philosophy and a greater interest in cognitive neuroscience and science in general. I’ll speak only for my own worldview.
Well that depends on what you mean by meaningful. You seem to define meaningful as absolute, which is only possible if your epistemologly is based on revealed knowledge. Within that context all “truth” is “meaningful” by definition as it is defined as truth. To me however such truths are meaningless because they rarely correlate with future experiences.
To me reality (“truth” if you want) is something that exists behind the drapes. We can only have indirect perceptions of reality filtered through our perceptual apparatii. The human trick has been to try to build tools that enhance those perceptual appartii - tools as varied as the scientific method and a scientific community, to mathematics, to telescopes and computers. The first, a method for forming imperfect models of reality and constantly trying to prove them wrong and improve upon them, sometimes in a rocky fashion, has been the most important.
Since that method accepts, nays demands, that we accept that we do not know anything in an absolute fashion, that what we currently believe may be proven false and demands that we try to prove it so and only hold our model of “truth” provisionally, you may say that such a method prevents any “meaningful” understanding of truth. Such is your right, but I would hold that it is the only meaningful model possible, requisite flaws and all.
As to your computer argument:
“Rex is a dog. Rex cannot swim. Therefore no dogs can swim.”
The illogic of that “deduction” holds even I have no knowledge of swimming dogs. It may be a valid induction but it is falsifiably by a new example. Not to make DT’s argument for him, but one can easily ague that the fact the brain is a physical structure that computes and that has sentience and a sense of self, is in itself, the example that disproves the induction.
No; you ARE saying that I don’t exist. You keep trying to say that we have no connection or can’t know we have a connection to reality; since I’m real that’s the same as saying you don’t believe in me.
Computers are mostly deterministic because we find them more useful that way, not because it’s some inherent limitation. They have if anything MORE control over what they “think and know” than we do; we can’t rewrite ourselves from the ground up, or access most of our own minds. And computers are both simpler and of a very different architecture with very different programming than a mind; so saying that the apparent fact that computers aren’t conscious proves that brains aren’t computers is like saying that because a calculator can’t run a climate simulation that it’s not a computer.
NOTHING can make the neuron or anything else go against the laws of nature. The neuron in question IS the thought, or rather a small part of it. You are assuming your own conclusion, that there is some natural law violation going on that materialism has to explain.
Nonsense. There’s no reason to think that thought or the sense of self requires violation of the laws of physics. As for meaning; choices have meaning because we say they do; meaning is a human generated concept.
No; in fact he has MORE moral responsibility than in your woo-woo worldview. If he isn’t operating according according to cause and effect, then there’s no point in holding him responsible or punishing him or reasoning with him because he’s not acting according to the past, or according to future consequences, or according to reason, or the external world at all. He’s just the puppet of some mystic thingamabob that ignores cause and effect, and therefore ignores morality and logic and reality.
You’ve said plenty; you simply keep pretending that those beliefs are what materialists believe and then pretended that proves they are contradicting themselves.
Computers are not limited by what is programmed into them; they can accept external input. And just like us they can adjust their programming and knowledge to match that external input. And they can be poorly programmed and ignore or distort that external input; again just like us. You are engaging in a common practice; you are trying to say that we are better/different than computers because of some quality we have, without actually showing that we have that quality in the first place.
Nonsense again. First, science is an artificial technique, not something that is evolved so his whole argument is aimed at the wrong target. Second, evolution is a natural, inevitable consequence of material forces in the right conditions; he has to explain what is stopping it from happening and what mystic woo-woo is taking it’s place while providing a perfect fake of evolution. Arguing against evolution is like arguing against gravity. Third, he assumes that imperfection is the same thing as total detachment from reality, like you keep doing.
You keep trying to denigrate materialism by saying that we can’t prove that our minds have some perfect perception of the material world; but you don’t bother to demonstrate that anything better is even possible.
This is all well and good, but the question is deeper than just how we know truth. The question really is what the nature of thought really is and what control do we have over it.
If we posit that
The movement and structure of the brain is determined solely by the laws of nature, as is everything else.
and
Our thoughts at any given moment are solely determined by the structure of our brain.
Then it naturally follows that we have no control over our thoughts, that our thoughts are controlled by the laws of nature and not by any self or “me” that we can speak of. The existence of the “me” is really just a persistent illusion.
Of course, you are free to think what you like. However if you take both premises 1 and 2 as being correct, then it can always just be said that what you think is just what the laws of nature force you to think and have no bearing on reality. Because our thoughts are determined by forces outside our control, there is no way to determine that our thoughts are correct. Of course they may actually be correct, but we can’t know that they are.
It is somwhate like watching a movie on TV, and then insisting that because you see something happening on the screen then that thing must have really happened. Which may or may not be true depending on the movie. Ultimately the images on the screen and what is externally real to the movie are two different things. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes not, and just watching the movie doesn’t tell if the movie itself is true or not. We determine the truth of the movie by other knowledge that we have from the world. It is the same for our thoughts. If our thoughts are something that we are forced through nature to experience, then there is no connection between what we think and what is real.
I am not really making any claims based on computers. As I siad it is Der Trihs that is doing that. As best I can understand his argument, he is trying to use computers as an example of something that operates by natural law and that also thinks and knows truth. If computers can do it, then obviously it must be possible for humans to. I however don’t think computers are like this at all. I am saying that computers in no way have any sort of consciousness, and therefore cannot be used as examples of things that have consciousness and run on the laws of nature.
The question at hand really is whether or not “consciousness” is a meaningful concept in a materialist worldview. Assuming that brains both compute and have a meaningful conscious is merely dodging the whole debate.
To some degree I’ll agree with Calculon: we are not evolved to figure out that which is “true” in some absolute sense; we are evolved to figure out what works, what is reproducible, what will allow us to influence future events and thereby to survive and to prosper. Getting closer to a more true approximation of reality just happens to serve those ends well. Accepting revealed “truths” that end up having little predictive value does not.
So you are actually wanting to take up the “free will” discussion. Been there done that. Yeah, I can readily accept that free will is an illusion and that it is a requisite illusion without which “self” could not exist.
No, you want me to say that you don’t exist. You are desperate to make the argument that you are right because I am wrong. What I am doing is intentionally not telling you what I believe so that you have to justify your beliefs in their own terms and actually show that they are consistent. Just because 2+2 does not equal 5 does not mean that then 2+2 = 3.
I don’t think you understand how computers work at all. The Turing model of a computer, which is at a base level all computers are, is a deterministic model of computation. Sure, it can be complex, even to the point that we may not be able to tell what a program will do before we run it (ie: the halting problem). However complex a program may be it is still deterministic, and that is a fundamental limitation about the way computation is done.
So are the thoughts of the brain determined by the neurons or not?
If all is controlled by the laws of nature, then thought, being part of nature, is controlled by those laws rather then the “me”.
More “you are wrong and therefore I am right” stuff. You just avoid the question. In a materialist worldview, if all matter moves according to the laws of nature, in what sense can any particular piece of matter be said to be “responsible” for what it does. Is a human any more responsible for killing another than a comet is for colliding with the earth?
Then why don’t you find all the quotes that explain exactly what I believe and make a case for it. Just asserting that I am saying what I believe doesn’t make it so. You are reading in what you want my worldview to be, because you don’t want to critically evaluate your own. It is much easier to shout others down then to defend your own belief.
You are aware that “The Terminator” was fiction, right? That the Skynet computer doesn’t really exist? It is hard to tell from the way you talk about them.
Computers are PRECISELY limited by their initial program. How computers process external input is entirely determined by their programming. And while it is possible to concieve of computers that can over-write their own programming, the way they do that is again determined by their pre-existing program. Your views of computers seem to be more influenced by sci-fi than reality.
I don’t think you understand the argument. Go away and think about it some more.
The proof that something is false does not require you to show that an alternative must be true. Whether or not materialism is consistent and true is entirely independant of the truth of other worldviews. If materialism is true then you should be able to demonstrate it without reference to other views. That A is true because B is false is a fallacious argument. The fact that you insist that I provide my own worldview suggests that you can’t really defend your own materialist beliefs on their own terms.
Far be it from me to get too far embroiled in your back and forth with DT but you chicken egg determinism of thought vs neuron requires a comment:
Which determines what - air molecules moving fluidicly or the wind? Thought and activities of large groups of neurons firing in particular patterns are the same event described at different levels of analysis.
Nonsense again. Our thoughts are not “determined by the structure of our brain”; they are part of the structure of our brain. You also fail to explain how rejecting materialism changes the situation.
Our mental processes control each other, and are influenced by the external world. They most certainly have a bearing on reality; as opposed to your scenario, where we are all quite insane. Because “insane” is exactly what a mind not controlled by cause and effect would be, assuming one was possible.
Nonsense again. Without those awful laws of nature what makes you believe we could think at all? What makes you believe that there would be anything to think about even if we could? No stability, no order means no thoughts and no world. Our minds work because they are constructed of simpler components that obey predictable rules.
They are information processing, problem solving systems like we are, that work upon the same principles.
Materialism has no problems with consciousness.
No. You are refusing to state your beliefs because they are at best baseless. And that’s assuming that they go any farther than an irrational distaste for materialism. You have no good arguments for your beliefs, so you are trying to weasel out of talking about them.
Materialism/physicalism is the one and only worldview that has evidence for it; it’s the worldview that actually works. You know that your own worldview can’t compete on that level so you don’t want to talk about it. You know that your beliefs won’t explain anything that physicalism doesn’t, so all you can to is snipe at it without providing an alternative.
You can introduce randomness into the computation if desired; it’s just not normally considered desirable. You also again are trying to pretend that the mind is different/better without providing evidence that it has the quality that you are deriding computers for lacking.
The thoughts in the brain ARE the neurons. You are trying to create a false separation between the two.
Another false dilemma. “Me” is just a subsystem of the brain that happens to be aware and can talk to the outside world. It’s not some homunculus that controls the mind; no such thing exists. The mind controls itself. Natural laws provide the structure that lets it do so.
No, that would be you. By your own admission you are avoiding answering questions.
Yes, because we are capable of making choices. Comets and such don’t.
Again, that is what by your own admission YOU are doing.
No; it’s that your view of computers is standard anti-AI, internally inconsistent vitalism boilerplate. And again, you fail to provide evidence that humans or anything else can do differently.
I understand it just fine; it’s a standard example of how modern philosophers tend to be quite ignorant outside of their little speciality. And as a result have little meaningful to say.
I already have, repeatedly. Just by typing on a computer I do so; just by acknowledging your existance I do so. The evidence for materialism is massive and overwhelming; it is your responsibility to show that an alternative is even possible.
So if thoughts are part of the structure of the brain and the brain is a physical object, then thoughts must also be physical objects. So then what is the mass of a thought? What does a thought look like under a microscope? What is its atomic structure?
As I keep saying, what I think has no bearing on the consistency or incoherence of materialism
You then just end up with a chicken/egg argument. If to think, you need to first think, how did thinking arise in the first place?
There are many possible answers to this. Maybe it is true that there is no order to the world and our thoughts are meaningless. Maybe we are able to think because there is some God out there who created us with the ability to think. Whatever. As I keep saying other possibilities don’t effect whether or not the materialistic view of reality is consistent. Just saying that materialism HAS to be true because you can’t think of another option is a fallacious argument.
No, you can’t defend your own position so you are trying to shift the discussion on to attacking mine, and then claiming that you are right by default. I am not buying into that. The question in the OP is around whether or not materialism is consistent with the idea of an autonomous self. Lets stick to the topic shall we.
Another circular statement. Evidence is only evaluated within the framework of a pre-existing worldview. Appealing to evidence is entirely circular because experience only has any meaning in the context of a worldview that rationalises it. You can’t explain something by first assuming it to be true.
But anyway, what I say is not that materialism is true or false because of evidence, but that it is inconsistent in that assumes two things which cannot be logically held together. Since it is inconsistent it cannot by definition be true.
No, you can’t introduce true randomness into calculations. If you understood how computers worked you would know that. Random number generators are not truely random. They are chaotic enough that they appear random, but “random” (really pseudo-random) numbers are still generated with deterministic non-random algorithms. They are useful not because they are actually random, but because they are close enuogh for most intents and purposes.
Secondly the fact that the mind is conscious and able to know is required for any worldview, including materialism to be a meaningful worldview. If a mind cannot rightly think, then it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about the world. If you want to assume that the mind cannot think rightly, then that is fine with me. Materialism can’t work without a functioning mind.
And by what means do you propose the mind controls itself? If the mind just moves according to the laws of nature then it is those laws, and not the mind itself that controls it. It is an either/or situation. Either the mind controls itself and is possibly able to rightly think, or it is controlled by the laws of nature and the thoughts of mind are then set for it by those laws. Which is it? Does the mind control itself or is it controlled by the laws of nature?
The question of the thread is whether or not materialism is consistent, which is what I answered. If you want to talk about what I believe start a different discussion.
Maybe the comet controls itself by the laws of nature?
If everything happens according to the immutable laws of nature, then no, humans are not capable of making decisions in any meaningful way. By what meachanism do you propose that they are? What natural law explains human decision making? Again if comets and humans are both fundamentally just matter, why is one
OK then, educate me. Why is this view of computers wrong? What method of computing beyond that represented by the Turing machine model do you propose? How do you suggest that we engineer machines capable of thought and decision making beyond the deterministic application of logical rules?
From what I can see you yourself have nothing to say on how computers work. You keep insisting that computers are capable of independant thought, yet you give no explaination by which mechanism such a thing would work.
I have pointed out that the fundamental model of computing, the Turing machine model, is entirely deterministic and allows for no free thought beyond that which initially programmed into it. Either tell how in that model you can achieve non-deterministic free thought, or propose a different model that allows for it. Just saying “but it can think” over and over again is not convincing.
It is not my responsibility to do anything. Generally when someone in an argument starts resorting to “burden of proof” arguments it is a sure sign that they can’t actually defend that which they assert. I have proposed a logical inconsistency within the materialist worldview. If you wish to assert that materialism is indeed consistent you have to show how the inconsistency can be resolved.
Let’s say that, under the immutable laws of nature, some arrangements of stuff give rise to new properties. Combine hydrogen and oxygen in the right proportions and you get this weird substance with a much higher boiling point and a knack for expanding when frozen. Combine protons and neutrons and electrons to get the hydrogen and the oxygen – and their vastly differing properties – in the first place.
Things change in lots of ways if you heat 'em up, or run electrical currents through 'em, or soak 'em in water, or whatever; some organisms mature faster, or get their growth stunted, or whatever, according to assorted combinations of heredity and environment; does it make sense to say “awareness” is yet another possible outcome?
The same as living brain tissue, since that’s what it is.
Yes, it does since you keep inserting your own imaginary ideas into materialism in order to find “contradictions” to proclaim.
Evolution of course. And you don’t need to “think first in order to think” anyway.
Nonsense. It is impossible that there is no order to the world, or it wouldn’t last or be consistent; nor would we exist to have an opinion on the matter. God is not an explanation, since you haven’t explained how he works; “God did it” isn’t an explanation, it’s a way of avoiding making explanations. And religious claims are pretty much wrong by default anyway, judging from history. And materialism is a perfectly rational explanation that fits all the facts; it is firmly established as the truth. There’s simply no reason to think it wrong, and without evidence there is no reason to do so.
Oh, please. All you are doing is trying to deny the obvious truth while not admitting to whatever silly fiction that is undercut by that truth. Materialism is perfectly consistent with the existence of a self; it poses no problems. You are just manufacturing problems in order to shore up whatever it is that you refuse to admit to.
That’s utterly ridiculous. Evidence is the only way we have of knowing anything; if you deny it’s usefulness you shouldn’t bother taking at all because there’s no point. It also shows how bankrupt the anti-materialist position is, that they have to deny the value of evidence.
Except that there is no contradiction. You keep throwing in non-materialist claims, calling them materialist and then pretending there is a contradiction.
No, random number generators are just simpler and cheaper than including a component like a radiation decay detector that would introduce true randomness. So the designers of computers typically go with random number generators instead. And at any rate, any computer receiving external input is going to get a hefty dose of randomness from that.
Nonsense. The material world would be there if there were no minds at all.
False dilemma. Without the laws of nature it would not exist and would not be able to control itself. And it controls itself because it’s constructed using a lot of feedback loops and hierarchical systems.
In other words, you don’t dare actually say what you believe outright. But you WILL continue to shove in bits and pieces while claiming them to be “materialism”.
No, it has no way to control itself, it’s just an inanimate object. Neither a machine nor a creature.
Humans and some machines have complicated data gathering systems, decision making systems and the ability to act upon the decisions made; a comet doesn’t. You, again are making up dilemmas that don’t exist.
The most straightforward ( if presently beyond our ability ) would be to finely scan a human brain and run all or part of it as a simulation. We don’t presently know how to write the software for an intelligent mind.
The same way our own thoughts work. You keep insisting that there’s some mystical woo involved in human thought without providing any evidence for it.
Allow for external input; the occasional influence of quantum mechanics will introduce non-deterministic factors ( not that it really matters ). We know it can think, because humans can think and we use a brain that is just a wet, oddly designed information processor. As for “determinism”, it’s unimportant; thought is about cause and effect not randomness. Nondeterminism is a problem to be dealt with, not something that makes a mind more profound.
You’ve done no such thing; you’ve claimed non existent contradictions, made false claims about what materialism actually is and refused to honestly offer up your own beliefs to criticism.
“Me” is an emergent veneer on a complex system. As such, you can’t reduce “me” to just the sum of its material components, you need the dynamic system to be working in order to see “me”. But this is in no way incompatible with materialism. It is incompatible with strict determinism, and some people here seem to be arguing as though the former were, in fact, the latter. But that is not, in fact, true.
I don’t really have the patience to read through the rest of this back-and-forth just now, but you might not be aware that at least some thoughts are perfectly well observable in the brain; indeed, using fMRI techniques, it is possible to ‘read’ those thoughts with good accuracy. They are very much present in the physical substrate of the brain, as physical patterns of firing/not firing neurons.
Besides, your questions could be asked of the information within a computer just as easily, yet I don’t think anybody would debate that this information is purely physical.
Hmm, that doesn’t seem immediately obvious to me. Determinism itself surely does not preclude emergence – water is wet where H[sub]2[/sub]O molecules are not; gasses have pressure and temperature where individual atoms don’t --, so why would strict determinism be incompatible with the emergence of a self? Note, I don’t believe that we live in a strictly deterministic world; I’d just be interested in your reasoning here.
I haven’t time either, but I thought I’d quickly address this point:
I would agree that we have no reason to trust absolutely in physicalism, and that we have no real definitive evidence of anything - after all, we could be fundamentally wrong about everything!
But such criticisms apply to all philosophies, not just physicalism. (Indeed, I consider such ultra-open mindedness and ultra-skepticism one of phsyicalism’s strengths.) What physicalism does say is that the evidence provided by our senses must be accommodated first - that sensory evidence has primacy - since such an empirical and scientific approach makes more accurate predictions in a Popperian sense. And the thing is, even that might be wrong! Since falsification cannot itself be falsified, all physicalism represents is a best guess by many guessing apes, happy to embrace the uncertainties of waking up in such a strange and beautiful apehouse. Other apes make other guesses and consider theirs more certain, but it’s all just monkey noises when you get down to it (or so it seems to this particular ape!)
As to the charge of inconsistency, again, I really don’t understand it. In physics there is nothing so fundamental as a field, or a wave, or an interaction. None of these entities have a mass, a structure, a smell, or anything which other physical entities might or might not have. The best analogy for consciousness in physicalism is, I think, a first-person computer game. Clearly such games supervene on the physical substrate in the computer circuits, but don’t weight anything, look like anything, or have an atomic structure.
As to “how thinking arose”, try this. Close your eyes gently, and look at a light source. Now pass your hand in front of your closed eyes. You can detect a change in light levels, and that’s all - it is a bare minimum of information, rather like what an automatic door “sees”. This is perhaps a brief window into the “mind” of the first organisms in which neurons allowed differentiated actions given an envionmental stimulus. From simple eyes to simple brains to the emergence of language in an ape half a billion years later, there is to my mind no inconsistency with a purely physical evolution of consciousness.
Well, we could argue about whether the randomness in human decisions is “true” randomness arising from QM uncertainty in the cognitive modules comprising the brain, but pseudo-randomness is surely all that is necessary to inject enough variation in my decisions given similar facts to account for the illusion called free will.
Again, there is nothing inconsistent about a biological computer which makes decisions based on past histories of similar situations (perhaps encoded by evolution into specific cognitive modules, such as our ‘choice’ not to find our siblings sexually attractive), calculations of future consequences, and some kind of random or pseudo-random variables. The calculation of future consequences is then strongly influenced by the actions promised by other biorobots called ‘police’. This seems to me to be an adequately coherent physicalist description of the phenomenon called ‘responsibility’.
Incidentally, here is the so-called “Evolutionary argument against naturalism” that Calculon and ITR allude to. Like I say, I don’t see how theistic philosophies sidestep the obvious counterclaim that theists might be completely wrong in their probabilistic assessments as well: it should really be called the Evolutionary Argument Against Preferring Any Philosophy Whatsoever.
