So, Muad’Dib am I correct in my interpretation that you had an “epiphany” which essentially affirms that you are right and correct about everything, but has imbued you with the “tolerance” to realize that people who are different than you are simply misguided, and should still be considered human.
Okey dokey then. Yup, the secret of life. Good on you.
Is now a good time to bring up the glorious Andrew Jackson?
Well, this is not really witnessing.
On the other hand, there is not really anything that could be considered a debate, here.
It is not a poll, but it does seem to be a sharing of opinion.
Off to IMHO.
(And as for the request to delete one postr, replacing it with another, I am afraid that we are not actually permitted to mess araound with posted remarks in that way. Anyone who reads far enough through the thread will see your restatement.)
[ /Moderating ]
Countries with no poverty? Really? Or who don’t have ANYONE worrying about healthcare? Here we have a system of healthcare for everyone, yet lots of people still worry about it.
?!
I *honestly *can’t figure out how this applies to my post. Are you arguing that the only things which we deem significant are related to fighting, fleeing, and sex?
I am consistently fascinated by people who believe that complex, enduring philosophical problems can be solved by the latest advance in neuroscience.
I thought there were seven levels.
good on you for your insights, Muad.
Don’t forget to come down to Earth, soon. And don’t expect everyone to want to hear your Truth. (they are busy figuring out their own, or they want to discuss the SuperBowl)
You said "Knowing that events which we deem significant trigger a certain part of the brain tells us little about why these events are meaningful or significant ". I asked you whether you really couldn’t think of a reason why these events are significant. It seems that you really can’t, which I think shows a collossal lack of imagination.
No. I’m saying that a mechanism for finding things significant is an evolutionary necessity since the organism which can’t distinguish its mother, a predator and an inanimate neutral object will lose out to the one that can, all other things being equal. That is the reason why mothers and predators elicit significance outputs while umbrellas don’t. That other things do as well, such as “God” for some (but not me), isn’t surprising given the existence of that significance-judgement mechanism in the first place (indeed, Rama was talking about temporal lobe epilepsy wherein that physical apparatus is damaged such that everything elicits a similar output).
Which, if I may say, makes you sound like a 19th century vitalist bemoaning how the latest advance in biology doesn’t explain the complexity of life.
Whoa, a heated IMHO philosophy battle. Yes!
Allow me to take my tone down a notch… There. Ok.
*IMHO *, the reason this philosophical question is interesting is because we seek to know what life is all about–what is truly meaningful, and what is just window-dressing. Muad’Dib was arguing that cultivation of the mind is what is truly meaningful. This says something about what we ought to do to obtain a meaningful good life.
Your response to the question is that our mind deems meaningful that which our brain reacts to in a certain way. Well that’s nice. But from my perspective, that adds nothing to the conversation. It’s as if someone asked, “What is the meaning of life?” and your answer was, “that which turns your hands blue.”
And what struck me even more is that you seemed fully cocksure and satisfied with that answer.
Ok. We find significance in things because of our evolutionary design. I’m with you there. It’s clear, in an evolutionary context, which things we will probably find significant: stuff that has to do with life and death. I’m with you there. So are you saying that only these evolutionary life/death stimuli are meaningful and significant? As I’m sure you’re aware, evolutionary explanation of behavior are notoriously ad hoc. And I have little doubt that an evolutionary explanation of the significance of laughter, justice, altruism, etc., will be similarly ad hoc.
Oh come now. Are you so thoroughly entrenched in your philosophical position that really believe biology is to life as neuroscience is to meaning? You can’t claim that the scientific/philosophical community is with you on this one–a tiny minority of each are pure materialists like you.
Um, combining all of the major insights in this thread we get,
[spoiler]If a brain were to fall in the forest, a homosexual tree would be there to hear it.
And that would be meaningful.[/spoiler]
And jolly good for old Muad’Dib, but unlike me he is utterly silent on why the cultivation of the mind should elicit the reaction of significance it does in him, which is why I sought to help him with his sellotape.
You really think that the neuropsychological mechanism whereby meaning and significance are output from a human brain are not relevant to the question of what is meaningful to a given human? To suggest an alternative simile, I think I’ve answered the question “What is blue?” with a quick description of how light of wavelength 420-490 nm, incident on the photosensitive cells of the retina causes an action potential in the optic nerve, chiasm, tract and lateral cingulate nucleus which is received and processed at the visual cortex, whose activity is what we call “blue”. If you consider this a non sequitur of an answer, then like the Monty Python sketch in which a man looks for an argument but finds only mindless automatic naysaying, it’s difficult to see how a cognitive scientist could debate you at all.
I am not fully satisfied with any answer in science - how dull that would be, and how sad that universities worldwide could close their departments of that science because there would be no more answers to find! But to swing so far the other way and propose that cognitive science is irrelevant to the question of what humans find “meaningful” is as backwards as Amish computational physics.
For the second time, no. But evolution is ultimately all about life and death, statistically. And the move from the significance-judgement mechanism only working for inputs like mothers and predators to working for other things is also easily placed within an evolutionary framework. What if I were to show experimentally that a similar significance output also arises when we work out the right answer to some problem? That would demonstrate that creatures who get a neurological “reward” from the temporal lobe for solving problems with their frontal lobe would have an advantage over creatures with no such “right answer output”, who thus struggled to distinguish the “right” answer from other answers. We could then look for patients in which this mechanism was damaged, and see how they performed on simple tasks such as working out where the food source might be in a natural environment. If they performed extremely poorly, we could justifiably conclude that they wouldn’t last long in the wild (or, at least, would be strongly disadvantaged). Thus, finding even abstract things “significant” could be shown to be literally a matter of life and death in certain contexts as “satisfyingly” as other evolutionary features such as the function of the spleen or thumb.
It is necessarily the case that explanations of behaviour are trickier, due to the lack of historical evidence (behaviour doesn’t get fossilized!). But I think the neuropsychological nature of “significance” is rather easier than the three examples you gave (and even then, the Cheater Detection Module hypothesis really does have testable consequences which are currently being researched). Again, there must be a reason why physical damage from a stroke makes everything meaningful, and that can be explored experimentally with great rigour.
Absolutely. Do read a bit about vitalism: these weren’t just superstitious idiots, but often highly respected philosophers whose arguments even now are very convincing: can we really explain life fully using only the fossil record and experiments in a lab? Why then, surely we could build an amoeba out of proteins? Of course, it’s the word “fully” that causes the trouble. We understand life well enough in terms of physical elements that a nonphysical element is unnecessary, but many details are still unclear. And I would indeed argue that cognitive science understands the brain well enough in terms of physical elements that a nonphysical element is unnecessary, but more[ of the details are still unclear than in the case of life.
On the contrary, the overwhelming majority are on my side, and have been since Gilbert Ryle in the 1940’s. Dualistic alternatives like panpsychism are described as “ludicrous” and “absurd” even by fence-sitting philosophers like McGinn and Searle. Like any other science there are competing models and schools of thought (or should that be schools of thought of thought?), but monism and materialism are almost universal, academically speaking.
SentientMeat, while I respect your scientific understanding, your treatment of philosophy is troublingly superficial and dismissive. The mere existence of a material explanation for our experiences does not prove their materiality, any more than the existence of an immaterial one proves their immateriality. Science must necessarily be silent on the meaning and origin of subjective individual experience.
Yes, that is my position. I think the reason it seems improbable to you is that you’re not using the same definition of “meaning” as the OP and I. The question is not “which things does our brain tag in a certain way?” It is “which things are truly meaningful?” Our brain might tag penis size as being meaningful in your sense of the word, but that doesn’t make it meaningful in a how-should-I-live-my-life philosophical sense.
FWIW, I don’t mean to discount cognitive science. I think it is both useful and fascinating, and I enjoy reading your writings on the subject. I just think that to view neuroscience as the ultimate solution to deep philosophical questions is naive. Will it help? Certainly; some of the questions in philosophy are empirical–but many are not, and cannot be answered by science alone.
I’ll defer to your superior knowledge on this one. It seems to me that the position that the brain supervenes on the mind is, as you and your cites claim, a majority position. But the claim that all aspects of the mind can be reduced to neurons firing in the brain is a stronger claim of physicalism—and one that is not accepted by the majority AFAIK. Is that not so?
[QUOTE=rkts]
SentientMeat, while I respect your scientific understanding, your treatment of philosophy is troublingly superficial and dismissive. The mere existence of a material explanation for our experiences does not prove their materiality, any more than the existence of an immaterial one proves their immateriality.
[quote]
I quite agree. I merely wield Ockham’s Razor just as I do after any material explanation of UFO’s, ghost hoaxes or crop-circles: the immaterial one is unnecessary. Not wrong, merely optional. Anyone can take that option if it makes them happy, and I will not trouble them.
I absolutely disagree. Subjective individual experience is a phenomenon to be explained. Cognitive science seeks a scientific explanation whose consequences can be falsifiably tested. You are telling thousands of respected academic researchers worldwide that they must necessarily shut up.
Oops, try again:
I quite agree. I merely wield Ockham’s Razor just as I do after any material explanation of UFO’s, ghost hoaxes or crop-circles: the immaterial one is unnecessary. Not wrong, merely optional. Anyone can take that option if it makes them happy, and I will not trouble them.
I absolutely disagree. Subjective individual experience is a phenomenon to be explained. Cognitive science seeks a scientific explanation whose consequences can be falsifiably tested. You are telling thousands of respected academic researchers worldwide that they must necessarily shut up.
I didn’t talk about “tagging”, I talked about the feeling of significance, such as one might get when “it all makes sense” during an epiphanic experience. And that is accessible to neuroscientific study.
I’d suggest reading some of that science before you state its limits so categorically. We should all at least entertain the possibility that science could explain the range of subjective experiences as well as it has explained the range of species and biological functions.
You are talking about reductionism, not materialism/physicalism. This is indeed a stronger position: can a cell really be reduced to amino acids? Or a computer game truly reduced to individual RAM switches? Or the weather to water molecules? I don’t think so, given that the computational limit of the entire universe to date is around 10[sup]120[/sup] flops and even simple life, or the neural network in a bird’s brain, requires more flops to “reduce” it in this way. But that is quite another issue entirely.
Subjective, personal experience cannot be falsifiably tested; at least, not in any objective or independently reproducible way. Do you disagree?
I absolutely disagree. The tests depend on people telling us what they’re feeling (Dennet’s “heterophenomenological method”). Let’s take the example of using drugs, oxygen deprivation or magnetic fields to act on a very specific part of your brain to induce ‘cosmic’ personal experiences. Of course I can’t experience what you’re experiencing, since I didn’t take the trip, climb the mountain or don the helmet, but that’s as irrelevent as me being unable to live the amoeba’s life or compute my PC’s computations. If you say that you are having an epiphanic or divine experience under these stimuli, that is a valuable scientific datum to plug into our study as carefully as any other scientific study of what happens to X when we instigate Y. If the drug, mountain or helmet could consistently and independently reproduce “people saying they had epiphanic experiences”, that would be an objective datum about subjective experiences.
And even more simply: One doesn’t have to be the subject to test the subject. One can propose falsifiable tests of personal experiences.
I fail to understand how this is a response to my point.
I am allowed to apply logic to something before being an expert on it. Science answers empirical questions. If we have a question that is not empirical (i.e. what is justice), science cannot answer it alone. I don’t have to be an expert on any particular science to make that claim.
I’m quite sure there is a distinction between the position that the brain supervenes on the mind, and the position that there is no such thing as the mind. Are you not taking the latter position?
Muad’Dib, I suggest you print out this thread and file it away somewhere. Look at it in 5 years, and see if you think you really had it figured out in February of '06.
When you realize how little you have figured out, then you’ll be getting somewhere. Then you’ll be on the path to wisdom. These moments of suddenly figuring it all out are good exercise for the brain, but they are merely a waypoint.
I wish you good fortune in your journey. This week’s prominent Epiphanny is a young basketball player who set a new scoring record for most points in a single game. Even at her tender age, she has the humility to know her record is not that big a deal. I have to admire her for that.