Barry ‘Banny’ Arrington has a new, rather confused post at UD:
On Invoking Non-Physical Mental States to “Solve the Problem” of Consciousness
Many of us are banned at UD, and those who aren’t banned are in danger of having their comments purged at any moment. Let’s avoid that cesspit and respond here at TSZ, where open discussion is encouraged and Arringtonian censorship is anathema.
Barry’s post is in response to a comment by Reciprocating Bill, who writes:
To my ear also. I’m amazed that most dualists fail to recognize the problem.
It’s the “soul of the gaps” argument. Need consciousness? Invoke an immaterial soul that just happens to be conscious. Need intentionality? Invoke an immaterial soul that magically possesses it. And so on.
When in doubt, invoke magic.
God can do anything.*
Consciousness is a thing.
God can cause consciousness. QED
Glen Davidson
*Unless he can’t–but you’re not supposed to question it.
Okay, I’ll respond here.
(all quote blocks are quotes from Barry’s post)
I take “mind” to be a metaphor. Does that mean that I am saying that mind is not a material thing, or does it mean that I same that mind is not any kind of thing? I’d say the latter.
Barry is trapped by language. We find it convenient to use the noun “mind”, but it does not follow that because there is a noun, there actually has to be an object to which that noun refers.
A little later, Barry asks some questions about thinking:
Okay. I am thinking about a horse.
There is no thought in my head about a horse.
Again, Barry is being trapped by language. We might find it useful, for purposes of discussion, to talk of thinking as if it were constituted by a sequence of thoughts. But it really isn’t. Thinking is a behavior. It isn’t a sequence of discrete objects. There’s no obvious way to chop up my thinking behavior into a discrete set of units that could be called thoughts.
So thoughts don’t really exist, except perhaps as convenient fictions to allow certain ways of talking about the behavior of thinking. And if thoughts are convenient fictions, then the question of whether they are material or immaterial seems absurd.
I have no idea how to do that. I’m only a mathematician. I can think about “4” as a numeral. So I can think of it as pencil marks on paper or chalk marks on a blackboard, or a group of pixels on the screen.
I’m a fictionalist. As best I can remember, I was already a fictionalist as a child though I did not know the term “fictionalist” at that time. I take numbers, and other mathematical objects, to be useful fictions. But how do I think about the number 4? I am often thinking about mathematics, but my thinking seems to be about behaviors, not about objects.
A final note
I’m pretty sure that some of the posters here at TSZ will disagree with the view that I have expressed. They have different views of “mind”, “thought” and “number”. And that’s Barry’s real mistake. His confusion is to assume that we all think alike. We are all different. We all have different styles of thinking. We all have different concepts and meanings. We do try to find consensus ways of talking about our ideas, so as to make communication possible. But that consensus is never complete
Precisely.
You put it much better, but it’s what I was trying to say to Barry earlier about consciousness being something we do rather than something we have.
If you think of mind as a thing, you have an irreducibly dualist model. Only if you let go of thinking of mind as a thing can you think of it as something matter can do, and the conflict between mind and matter disappears, without rendering mind, absurdly, into matter.
It’s a linguistic problem, really. Language inclines us to think in terms of “subject + predicate”. We parse the Cartesian cogito as ‘I (the agent) think (perform an action)’, as if the two were separable.
Yup. That’s why the idea of re-entry, or recursivity, as account of consciousness, is such a hard sell. Either it sounds whacky, like Hofstadter’s Strange Loops, or “obfuscation”.
Is there a language in which it would be easier? Latin even?
Hofstadter is right though. He has said that the book really should have been called I is a Strange Loop. Or “I” is a Strange Loop. But it’s a lovely title as it is. The aporia is Hofstadterian in itself!
I think I’m in love with eigenstate.
I find that when Arrington does philosophy, he teeters between saying all sorts of things that are quite correct and putting a slight gloss on them which I find deeply objectionable. This last post of his is no exception.
He is quite correct in describing the phenomenology of intentionality, consciousness, and subjectivity. We do indeed experience ourselves (and indeed others) as capable of intentional action; of experiencing moods, pains, aches, emotions; of having thoughts about actual and possible objects, and of course also thoughts about abstract objects.
From this promising beginning, Arrington asserts that the only way of explicating our phenomenology is it something like Cartesian dualism is true (though Arrington might advert to a more Aristotelian form/matter dualism if pressed): that our conscious experience is somehow “inner”, or even “inside our heads”, and only contingently related to our bodies.
At the same time he also seems to assert that naturalism must be reductionistic, which is why he scores cheap points by talking about rocks and chemicals. If he were talking about chimps, dogs, lizards, tuna, earthworms, jellyfish, sponges, amoebas, and bacteria, I think he would have had a far more difficult time driving a wedge between the mental and the material.
Reductionism will, alas, always be with us, but it’s not the only game in town. A far more promising candidate is enactivism, which might especially interest Elizabeth, as I think of her views as enactivist in everything but name.
It’s particularly difficult in languages such as English, where an overt subject must be present (even in impersonal constructions with a dummy pronoun, like it is raining, as if something different from the rain itself were involved). Latin isn’t much easier: cogito has no subject pronoun, but the verb is in the first person singular, implying a personal agent. Chaucerian me thinketh ‘methinks’ has no grammatical subject, but the 1sg. me is its logical subject: thinking is happening to a thinker.
I wonder if any language normally describes mental states in a completely non-dualistic way without separating the thinker from the thought conceptually (something that could be paraphrased as there’s a thought here). There is some controversy as to whether (or to what extent) the subject-predicate dichotomy is universal/innate in humans.
Piotr Gasiorowski,
Buddhist philosophy is, I know, non-dualistic in just this way. Perhaps Sanskrit, Chinese, or Japanese do not impose the subject-predicate structure on thought?
The bible explains these things.
The mind is a minor thing. Man has a soul and THINKS with his heart. Not with his mind. The mind is a material thing. Therefore it could only be that its just a memory organ.
To think of a horse ONLY can work if the horse is in the memory. so its our heart thinking of the memory of the horse.
Our soul first noted the horse and simply put it into the memory/mind.
UD makes a good case how a real thinking being must be going on here.
Mere thoughts must have a nest.
There’s a lot of double-talk in Buddhism. I think it’s fundamentally a matter of logic, not language. Graham Priest had a fantastic article in Aeon last year, “Beyond True and False.”
Lizzie, if not others, will recall that Barry laid down the laws of thought, and banned a bunch of commenters whom he would have preferred to have beaten and burned.
Barry Arrington is nothing remotely similar, but surely has a lawyerly argument that he is vastly superior. Erudition destroys the capacity for straight thinking — even if it leads to mathematically rigorous paraconsistent logic (Priest is the lead author of the article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
I feel bad about departing totally from the topic. So I’ll toss in a remark that my experience of myself experiencing is utterly private. It’s not surprising that our means of communicating with one another should work only for the sorts of experience we share.
The thought occurs that we’ve been enabling Barry when posting at UD. I think reclaiming dialogue is a great idea.
Eigenstate has taken Barry’s argument and has torn it apart, point by point. Barry is falling back on his standard rebutal. Insults, name calling and attempts to ridicule. I wonder if Barry will pull an Aurelio Smith on Eigenstate.
I already saved that thread as it was last night, in anticipation.
I think he needs Eigenstate to go away ASAP. He’s having trouble engaging with the argument, and won’t accept any result he can’t consider a personal victory. Banning Eigenstate would feel like a loss unless there’s a good pretext for doing so, so he needs to provoke Eigenstate into giving him one or walking away. Thus I predict additional new threads attacking Eigenstate personally, insulting and belittling him without engaging in a serious discussion.
Colin:
It’s happening already:
LOL. You’re not fooling anyone, Banny.
To be fair, I saw that before I commented. I’m predicting additional entries beyond that one.
Barry has already made the first ritual step, which is “Leave the original thread and start a new one, insulting and demonising your main opponent already in the OP” (emphasis mine):
Poor Barry — he has to face a raving, eye-rolling, spitting madman again!
But so it goes when you’re the caretaker of the asylum.
Glen Davidson
“Shop steward”, not “caretaker”.
I find it revealing that Arrington finds it absurd to think that a rib-eye steak could be conscious, but never stops to ask whether the bull had “subjective self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, and the perception of subject-object duality”. (Short answer, KN-style: no, but it had something very much like those.)
(There is, of course, a vast literature on animal minds and how they might be similar to and different from human minds — a literature that Arrington never considers might even exist. That’s quite typical for the UD crowd these days: they don’t know it, they don’t know that they don’t know it, and they don’t want to know that they don’t know it.)
I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but I really do think that the way to make philosophical progress on “naturalizing” intentionality, consciousness, conceptuality, and affect is by considering what an animal is and then, in those terms, what a rational animal is, as well as how rationality evolved and what differences rationality makes to cognition and to action. (It should go without saying that philosophical progress is impossible without taking science seriously. I also think that the same point holds in reverse — that it is impossible to make scientific progress without taking philosophy seriously — but I expect that will be a far more contentious claim at TSZ.)
Here’s Ryle:
Oh, and for the mildly curious — it must be pointed out that Ryle coined the term “category error” in his criticism of dualism. The categories Ryle is concerned with here are not, however “the mental” and “the physical”, but rather the difference between occurrences and dispositions. Ryle’s argument is that the vocabulary of mental terms are all dispositions of behaving, rather than occurrences in some weird non-physical stuff. Arrington is quite fond of the term “category error” — he uses it fairly often — but it would seem that he does not understand how Ryle uses it.
I agree – but it’s hard to take seriously, sometimes, philosophers who don’t take science seriously. David Chalmers, I’m looking at you….
If there’s interest, I can say something about why I don’t find Chalmers convincing — and I read The Conscious Mind cover-to-cover a few months ago, since I’m in the process of re-inventing myself with an specialty in philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology. (My background in Continental philosophy serves me well intellectually and pedagogically but not otherwise.)
In related news, one of the founders of enactive cognitive science, Evan Thompson, gives us a nice quick exposition of his views with “Spring Forward or Fall Back? Changing Times for Neuroscience“. Some highly relevant quotes to whet your appetite:
which seems almost like something a mind-body dualist would say. But then notice that Thompson goes wider than the brain, not other than the brain:
on this basis — which I find eminently reasonable — we should conclude that “the mind is the brain” or the slightly better “the mind is what the brain does” are not quite right. Rather, “the mind is what the brain-body-environment-culture does”.
I wonder what mind-body dualists think of sensory deprivation experiments.
petrushka,
I have no idea. I doubt it would be a serious problem for them; one can always toss in an ad hoc to make one’s hypothesis consistent with the evidence. (The real difficulty lies in knowing when it is no longer reasonable to do so!)
As I see it, the Achilles’s heel of substance dualism (SD) — that mind and matter are different “substances” — has always been that it cannot explain how something that is non-physical can causally affect something that is physical (and conversely). This is a disaster, for the following reason.
According to SD, perception involves something physical causally affecting something non-physical; action involves something non-physical causally affecting something physical. But if we cannot understand the kind of causation involved — how the physical and non-physical can effect each other — then both perception and action become utterly mysterious. Perception and intentional action — along with judgment and inference — are the essential cognitive capacities of human persons. But if we cannot understand what perception and action are, then we cannot understand what we are. This is not so much a refutation of SD, but an illustration of what SD logically entails, and that’s a bullet that one might not be willing to bite.
That said, I think that Arrington tends to vacillate between sounding like a Cartesian dualist and sounding like an Aristotelian dualist. Aristotelian dualism is not a dualism between substances but one between “form” and “matter” — or, if you prefer, between structure and stuff. It’s a much more plausible position and one that requires a very different treatment than Cartesian dualism.
Indeed! What would that interface look like? These interactions between the material and the non-material would surely defy the laws of the universe! If such is going on continuously inside all our heads, there ought to some way of spotting it.
Barry has a hidden circular definition. (Not very well hidden) He simply defines matter as that which cannot be conscious. Start with that definition, as his conclusions follow.
Kantian Naturalist,
I like those quotes. They illustrate why I am skeptical of the “brain in a vat” thought experiments, and why I say “the brain doesn’t think; the person thinks and uses the brain while thinking”. Yes, the important issues are on how we relate to our environments (and communities).
Just a little thought here because I’m sure its coming even if it hasn’t surfaced already: KF / Through a glass darkly / Plato’s Cave
1. Okay, but doesn’t Occam’s razor slice through Plato’s Cave?
2. Functionally it is irrelevant and with no epistemic access to the rest of the Cave we should disregard the concept: We can imagine more things that might be than are so it is likely this thing is not.
I’ll see your episiotomy and raise you one Lewontin.
Is that with or without an epidural?
Absolutely. As neuroscientist, it really bugs me when my colleagues talk about the “brain” doing stuff. Sure it does some neat stuff, but it’s just an organ – and it’s the organism that does the stuff, not some discrete organ.
If it’s going to operate in a vat, it’s going to have to be one hell of a vat.
This is in partial response to Barry’s post at UD. This needn’t be very long, as one of his early remarks promptly sinks his argument. It also illustrates how shallow Barry’s thinking is on these matters.
Barry opened with the following:
So, Barry cites the “interface problem,” and sets the standard: arguments founder that postulate the interaction of material and immaterial “things,” yet fail to show how it can be “possibly true” that material things interface with immaterial things.
(Do I really need to do state what follows?)
The problem for Barry is, of course, that he postulates an immaterial thing (the immaterial mind) that interacts, in two directions, with a material thing (the human body) – yet he has no notion of how this could possibly be. In fact, among my questions in an earlier post I asked:
Barry dodged then, and so far as I can tell still has “not the slightest.” And, I’ll bet he continues to pass on that. But by his own standard, his dualism has “foundered” until he provides a solution to this genuine conundrum.
[Although this was addressed to Vince Torley, I think RDFish/aiguy’s comment addresses Arrington dualism too. The rest of the comment is aiguy]
Hi VJTorley,
Meyer’s position is that “standard materialistic evolutionary theories” fail to account for the attributes of living forms that we observe. On one hand, Meyer is correct that we cannot account for the existence and characteristics of biological systems. However, the use of the term “materialistic” is a pernicious red herring.
The term “materialistic” is anachronistic, referring to a view of the physical world as bits of matter in motion that no physicist has believed for more than a hundred years. The notion of a field of influence has been part of our understanding of reality since early in the nineteenth century or even before, subsequently developed into the various classical and modern field theories (gravitational fields, electro-magnetic fields, quantum fields, and so on). Fields are not bits of matter in motion; they are not material in this sense. The reason they are considered part of the physical world is because they can be measured using physical instruments, not because they are composed of matter. And of course even matter itself does not exist as we experience and intuitively understand matter – the fundamental particles of physical theory are not bits of matter that move around in space.
As Heisenberg famously said,
Some have attempted to replace the outdated notion of materialism with the term physicalism, which Popper described as the claim that everything real can be (at least theoretically) denied by observation. But other philosophers have different conceptions of the nature of physical reality, and the only common thread is really that physicalism is monistic – it has no separate ontological accounting of conscious mental phenomena.
So the first step toward clarifying Meyer’s claim is to eliminate references to “materialism”. The proper way to understand his claim, then, is that we have no scientific theory that explains the origin and characteristics of biological systems. This statement doesn’t commit to any particular metaphysical position, but simply distinguishes scientific theories that can be tested against our shared experience from non-scientific theories that cannot be empirically tested.
One can make up various non-scientific theories that account for biological systems. Perhaps there is a huge or an infinite number of different universes so that everything that can happen does happen somewhere. Perhaps there is only our one universe and there exists some sort of tendency intrinsic to nature toward complex dynamic systems of the sorts that we find in living things. Perhaps physical reality is illusory, and there exists only consciousness, in which we only imagine the existence of biological systems and everything else. Perhaps physical reality is a simulation produced by living beings in another dimension. Perhaps physical reality fundamental does exist and was somehow created by an unknown type of conscious being from outside of spacetime. Perhaps biological systems were produced by some unknown sort of thing that exists inside our universe that was not conscious of its actions. Perhaps……
I am not interested in non-scientific theories; anyone can make them up, but if we have no way of determining if they are true, then I see no point (except perhaps to write science fiction stories). Most people feel very strongly about one particular non-scientific theory or another, because people are very uncomfortable admitting that we actually have no idea what caused the universe and living things to exist as they do.
So now we reach the crux of Meyer’s argument. Meyer claims that he presents a scientific theory of origins – one that can be justified via our shared experience. His argument is this:
But this is just the old semantic trick that misleads so many people into thinking that ID is actually a scientific theory. What we know from experience is not at all what Meyer claims of course: What we know from experience is that such attributes are produced by complex living organisms called “human beings”, with the ability to sense the world using various sense modalities, physically interact with the world using our hands and bodies, form intentions and generate action plans using our complex brains, and also experience conscious awareness in a way that remains utterly mysterious.
The semantic trick that Meyer uses – and ID proponents fall for – is to pretend that what we know from experience is something entirely different. Instead of saying what we actually know, he says we know that “conscious rational activity” is itself something that exists independently of human brains and bodies, and thus could be responsible for the origin of biological systems and even the physical world itself.
Now, it could be true that this is the case: Mind/body dualists believe that consciousness is an irreducible, causal thing that exists in the world, and could thus conceivably exist independently of a complex living organism. But Meyer does not provide any evidence that this is the case, nor does he ever even acknowledge the need to provide such evidence.
When faced with my arguments, ID proponents typically begin providing what they consider evidence for minds existing independently of bodies: ESP, near-death experiences, metaphysical arguments about how thought is “immaterial”, and so on. These debates drag on without resolution, just as they have for thousands of years! – because there is no way presently to empirically test the claims of dualism.
But whether or not one believes in dualism, what is clear is that Meyer’s argument rests solidly on the belief that dualism must be true, and that his claim that our experience reveals a known cause that could have been responsible for the origin of living things is specious. ID rests squarely on the metaphysical claim of dualism, and is merely dressed up as a scientific theory.
In summary, materialism is a red herring – it’s time ID folks realize that their belief that defeating “materialism” somehow makes ID into a scientific theory is terminally confused. If you’d like to pick some particular non-scientific theory and claim that it is the “best available explanation”, that’s just fine, but it doesn’t somehow mean that there is any scientific justification for it. That goes for fans of multiverses, of supernatural gods, of self-organization, of idealist monism, or any other speculation of how life came to exist.
Cheers,
RDFish/AIGuy
If mind can change the direct of moving matter, then it’s a force.
If it can’t, then what use is it?
Alan Fox,
That’s a really nice analysis. But I’m not sure I totally accept it.
The ID theorist doesn’t have to say that biological designs were conceptualized and implemented by a wholly disembodied rational agent, only that they were conceptualized and implemented by a non-human, differently embodied rational agent. The ID theorist can still happily say that aliens were responsible for the Cambrian explosion, or that the creators of the universe were beings like the Greek or Hindu gods.
In other words, I’m not convinced that Meyer’s view presupposes mind-body dualism. But I agree that mind/body dualism is empirically vacuous, so it would be a huge problem for Meyer’s view if that were the case.
Reciprocating Bill,
Yes, nice catch! One of the big problems with Platonism is that it would have to be case either that
[a] there are abstract, immaterial objects that we have no way of apprehending;
[b] there are abstract, immaterial objects that we apprehend with our embodied cognitive equipment in ways that no one comprehends (if there’s some magic fluid in the brain, no one has found it yet!); or
[c] there are abstract, immaterial objects that we apprehend with our immaterial minds (or, if one is an Aristotelian, with “the intellect” — the part of the soul that does not require any material substratum in order to be actualized).
So both [b] and [c] are different versions of the interaction problem, depending on whether one places the problematic interaction between concepts and minds or between minds and brains.
This is not to say that Platonism about abstract objects might not be, at the end of the day, still better than nominalism. Nominalism has considerable problems as well. But it is to say that no version of Platonism can be accepted unless it has an answer to either [b] or [c].
Life of the spoon bending party.
To choose what to do with the information we have.
Blas, if people “chose” in any meaningful way, children would not resemble their parents in any important way, such as in religion, politics, social inclinations. We would not have Christian nations or Muslim nations or Hindu nations, because freely chosen ideas would not adhere to regions or political entities.
For you freedom is an ilusion.
We are not absolutely straitjacketed by language — just biassed. Even Latin (as well as Sanskrit and Ancient Greek) has the grammatical means to express focus on a state or activity (physical or mental), ignoring the experiencer or agent. It’s the mediopassive voice (inherited from Proto-Indo-European). For example, it would be possible to use Latin cogitatur in the sense ‘there’s thinking, it comes to mind’; it just so happens that it isn’t the usual way of talking about mental states. If actually used, cogitatur means ‘(something) is considered (such and such)’, that is to say, has a strictly passive rather than “middle” sense.
And you, no doubt, are an exception to my hypothesis,.
In that case it is moving matter, right?
KN,
Few if any ID proponents would be satisfied with a materialist version of ID.
For example, Dembski writes of his BFF Rupert Sheldrake:
I would resist that particular move. Yes, our beliefs tend to be shaped by the cultures in which we are raised, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as genuine freedom or autonomy. Nor does it mean that we lack an ability to reflect critically on our beliefs and determine which ones to reflectively endorse and which ones to discard.
Put that way, I would endorse those two ambitions myself. My quarrel with the intelligent design movement lies primarily in how one characterizes “materialism” and “teleology”.