Entitled to believe? Alas, the Perfect Master is but half way to enlightenment. Hard as this is for us to swallow (me included) the state of the evidence today rather clearly points to the conclusion that it’s all chemistry. No minds, no spirits, no memes; nothing but the product of chemical reactions following the laws of physics.
It would be nice if Cecil would every once in a while take a step away from his own ontological views and recognize that other ideas concerning these ideas exist. I am not asking for a dissertation covering all objections but . . . we don’t have a mind!? Some of us believe that we are only mind – that matter is a construction of mind (using language) – that only mind exists. (Yes I am one of those archaic (advanced?) sort of people). It is a bit intellectually dishonest to just dismiss dualism and immaterialism in favor of exclusive materialism. One can argue for all three views (and some others) convincingly. The nature of existence (including ours) has not been solved as easily as Cecil assumes.
Inclined to agree with you, sort of. My own religious background (LDS) rejects the notion of dualism. The mind (or spirit, if you will) is a material thing, just like the body.
The fact is, we cannot explain free will in a scientific manner, which is why people want to embrace the relative security of causality (channeling the Frenchman from the Matrix sequels). I’m not quite ready to reject free will just because I can’t prove it.
Wow. A Cecil column based on assertion without backed reasoning.
Without invoking dualism, free will is a nonsensical concept. Ontologically, no one knows why anything is or happens, e.g. why gravity exists and acts the way it does or how. Ultimately, science and human knowledge is description. But the fundamental actors that make up the mechanism of all physical activity involve matter, energy and forces (or whatever the current framework is). There are no “mind particles” or “moral forces”. The change that occurs in your brain from time T = 1.000 to 1.001 to 1.002 and so on, are due to the above actors.
Could you do this, for dualism?
which is why people want to embrace the relative security of causality
What security? With free will, I can choose. Not everyone makes bad choices. Smart people would fancy having free will, and for poor people, lack of free will would be depressing.
Free will hangs around (among monists) because lack of free will is depressing to the person’s esteem and personality.
Worse, it’s oversimplified. But that may be Daniel Dennett’s fault (duh). From the column:
OK, the “input” is assumed to be in some form of energy. I’ll buy that. But the argument ignores the almost certain possibility that there should be some sort of output to the mind, some sort of interaction, feedback. The mind is making decisions based upon some perception of the other realm. If that output is also in the form of energy, then it could balance the energy of the input–and there isn’t necessarily a violation of the conservation of energy. That seems to be the single linchpin of the argument, and without it there is no argument left.
If the output to the mind is not in the form of energy, then there is no reason to assume that the input from the mind must be in the form of energy either.
There is nothing to be scared of.
Everyhting you do, think or say is inherently effected or effects something else. You do however have the ability to filter or accept what your belief constructs are. You can decide which memes you involuntarily respond to. Or perhaps I’m just responding to some meme that is making me think and type this.
I do find it amusing that despite your concern about your free will you are all to happy to reach for that overly sweetened carbonated beverage. Did you make the concious decision to prefer those to tea, coffee, water, speed, coke, etc.?
Strike that. It’s none of my business.
what is not knowing?
ask a sailor or a boy scout…
Ummmm . . .
Welcome to the SDMB, Milesy.
How’re things in Delphi?
All? Prove your “all” contention or withdraw it.
My beverage of choice is iced tea, thank you very much, and sweetening varies highly depending upon my mood.
So, prove your “all” contention or withdraw it.
Oh, goody; solipsism is now “advanced” thinking…
What fun! :rolleyes:
What perfectly ghastly rubbish!
In the first place, this is pure, laboratory-grade petitio principii. Assuming materialism, materialism must be true. Thank you, Dr. Obvious.
But on another level, it fails even to do that. As long as quantum mechanics are in their current state, the materialist philosophy has an unpluggable leak in it.
condsider it withdrawn. poor choice of words.
I’m pleased to hear of your healthier means of stimulation.
I’m an all of the above man myself.
cheers
Some people seem to think that physics has solved everything to the point where we know enough to make a judgement about our own consciousness, when we really know just about jack shit about how it works. The thing is, if people accept the idea of causality, then it seems extremely unlikely that we are in control of our actions at all, since every action must have a cause. On the other hand, I doubt that most people would reject causality, and that’s where the problem arises. Free choice and causation don’t really make sense together, unless one wants to believe in some sort of dualism that separates our ‘mind’ from the physical world and from the effects of the physical world so that it can make independent ‘choices’. I suppose one might want to consider some sort of hybrid universe wherein certain entities can make ‘choices’, but that’s been tried and it sounds kinda like someone trying to bail water out of a sinking rowboat.
Some great points all around – the Dennett quote obviously begs the question – denying a metaphysical theory because it dosen’t obey a physical principle doesn’t even begin to tackle the question. Also he will run into a problem of language. What is his definition of energy exactly? I’ll bet it is based in either sensual (perceptive) language or in reference to its effect on other objects that can only be described with sensual (perceptive) language. All of which is based on his perceptions – all of which occur in the mind.
And yes quantum physics does pose some serious problems to materialists in its refutation that the physical (or perceived) world is a predictable mechanistic realm of solid bodies. It further supports the ideas of immaterialists (perceptionists) in its discovery that the (quantum level) unobservable is meaningless and unpredictable.
And by the way, immaterialism is not the same thing as solipsism necessarily. In fact I would say that it usually is not the case that they are the same thing. A rejection of absolute materialism does not imply the rejection of a reality outside of one’s own perceptions – it simply rejects material existence as separate from perception. Idealism (Berkeleyean) is certainly not solipsism.
That doesn’t follow (affirmative support for immaterialism). It just leaves the question open. Maybe we can’t formulate mechanisms for quantum events not because they’re inherently meaningless or random, but because we just can’t observe at that scale (All our tools of observations are themselves physical matter).
My mistake – a negative for materialism does not help prove immaterialism necessarliy. That was poorly worded.
Also to clear it up - by “the unobservable is meaningless” I did not mean to imply that as a general axiom. It was meant to refer to physical theory. Meaning this: In formulating physical (material) theory the unobservable offers no help and can be considered useless because of its unpredictablity (of behavior and form). This is the idea that supports immaterialism – we only know what we observe (perceive).
What do you mean by “tools” in your final statement? Laboratory tools and the like or our bodily sense receptors? And how do you know that they are material?
It’s funny… We’ve been hashing over this one for millenia, and we never get any closer to working it out. Now we have the brain chemists making a new argument for materialism, except for that nagging little ‘quantum physics’ problem, which reopens the door for dualism. (if “decisions” are ultimately a matter of conflicting probabilities, then the “soul” need only be an observer - no extra energy is created; Newton is happy) Back and forth every century or so.
Ultimately, the materialists will be materialists and the dualists will be dualists, and it’s incredibly improbable that either side will ever win the debate.
So just pick the cosmology that makes you happy and go with it.
Both.
And I don’t know. It’s an (educated) assumption. Frankly, all human knowledge is assumption-based.
The thing is, dualism and materialism and immaterialism are as provable with certainty, as invisible supernatural unicorns. Just because you can conjure up a counterfactual imaginative scenario, does not give credence to its existence. Dualism has its roots and support derived from religious and spiritual concerns. Most of those earlier beliefs and attitudes are no longer subscribed because they cannot be reconciled anymore and seem absurd today. The non-materialism that remains today are the remaining vestiges of those approaches. With time, they’ll likely disappear as well.
Note that this is different from metaphysical truth. Metaphysical claims are airtight. Just like angels dancing on a pin or supernatural pink unicorns are no longer subscribed to. Not because they are disproved (they can’t be) but modern thinking recognizes them as imagination-fuelled devices created among people with outdated schemas of “how the world works”, which have been replaced by the much more demonstrably successful scientific method of thinking. Non materialism is the same, not because of its metaphysical unviability, but because of being the product of psychological fallibility.
If you accept that quantum physics has some direct relevence (ala’ Penrose) to how our minds and brains function, then one could imagine some trans-natural phenomenon (a “soul” or “spirit”) with the ability to influence what would otherwise be completely random quantum events being the basis for free will. This would not require any energy in the classical definition of the term. Of course then you might have to ask in terms of some higher-order reality what a spirit is, and how it works, and what if anything forms or influences it. It seems like the choices are ultimately either random or causual (“free will” or “predestination”).
Still, as C.S. Lewis said, too many scientists overuse the words “merely” and “only” when offering explanations of how the natural world works. Suppose for example that what we think is “our free will” is ultimately the product of some classically causual process. Saying that we are “only” automatons doesn’t tell us anything useful because “our free will” is what shape and form that process takes. The confusion comes with mistaking a more shallow level of mental processing with the (possibly unobservably) deep level that actually is what a “will” is.
A true automaton would be incapable of perceiving it’s own programming; perhaps that’s what free will is. Ultimately, we will be what we are and will do what we do. In other words, there’s no point in worrying about it.
I just wanted to say that Cecil’s column was great & sums up a healthy reaction to all this. Yeah, you’re an animal. Yeah, you’re conscious, but you already know that. (If you don’t already know that, maybe you’re a Cartesian soulless automaton, in which case, never mind what I just said & get out of the way, mud boy–but I doubt that seriously.)
Christianity & Descartes convinced a lot of educated people that the physical universe was mindless, & that our conscious minds were extraphysical. The refinement of physical sciences & rise of materialism convinced some of those same people that only the physical was real. Somehow this got twisted into “the mind is not real” because of heldover Cartesian prejudices. (I’m convinced that no Western tradition thought the mind of man or beast an illusion until Descartes.)
Relax. Sometimes a thing is exactly what it seems to be. The more speculative a “science” is, the less it’s science. (Science means knowledge, remember?) Most of this thread is speculative, & a lot of what’s been said is a priori assumption by those who’ve forgotten that human knowledge is rooted in empirical experience, not assumption. If any theory of physics is disproven by actual experience, then no matter how useful or elegant, it is untrue.
I am self-evidently here, & conscious. I don’t have to prove it to you logically, & you can’t convince me I’m not. Because I am.
(By the way, my favorite posters in this thread so far include Lumpy, Miles, & John W Kennedy.)