That’s the title of a new article at the Patheos website, which describes itself as “the world’s homepage for all religion”. The article is the first in a series by Ted Peters, emeritus professor of theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, who understands the threat that materialism (aka physicalism) poses to traditional religious views regarding the self.
There are quite a few misconceptions in the article (and in the others in the series), but I think it’s a good springboard for continuing the discussion we’ve been having in CharlieM’s Body, Soul, and Spirit thread.
A taste:
Did I lose my mind to science? Actually, it was stolen. Who are the thieves? The thieves are the scientific materialists who have eliminated from our cosmology everything that is mental, conscious, meaningful, spiritual, and ideal. You’ll recognize the thieves when you hear them mutter, “the mind is only the brain, ya know.”
Peters:
Materialism (physicalism) does not entail the nonexistence of consciousness. I am a materialist, and I accept the reality of consciousness, but I think it is inextricably linked to the physical. It has no independent existence. This is not a fringe view.
Peters may be conflating materialism with eliminative materialism.
I suggest we move our discussion in the Body, Soul, and Spirit thread here.
A link to the last comment in that thread:
Copying this from the other thread.
CharlieM wrote:
And:
CharlieM:
True, but you’re making the mistake of assuming that what is true of a system at one level must necessarily be true at another.
By way of example, consider a self-driving car. It is a physical object whose constituent particles blindly follow the laws of physics, with no exceptions. The car understands where it is and what its destination is. The individual particles don’t. It understands the road network and can come up with alternative routes. No individual particle can do that. The car can decide which route will minimize the travel time. There is no law of physics governing the minimization of driving time.
Just to forestall any misunderstanding, I am not claiming that the car does any of this consciously. My point is that the car can demonstrate flexibility despite being composed of particles that inflexibly follow the laws of physics. The properties of the system aren’t necessarily the properties of its components.
The goal-seeking behavior of the car is not the result of goal-seeking at the level of the particles. It’s the result of how those particles are assembled to make the car. Self-drivning cars typically try to minimize the travel time, but we could easily (if perversely) construct a car that refused to follow any route requiring less than one hour and would drive in circles if necessary to keep the travel time up. The particles would be following the same laws of physics in either case, but the behavior of the cars would be markedly different.
The principle is the same with human beings. We are physical systems, but the fact that our particles can’t plan ahead doesn’t mean that we can’t.
CharlieM:
Ironically, that’s actually true if you regard us as entirely physical beings. Assemble particles in a particular way to form a person (a physical system), let the particles follow the laws of physics, as they inevitably will, and the system can exhibit foresight and planning. Assembled differently, those same particles could form a person who is utterly incapable of foresight and planning. The systems are different in behavior, but the laws of physics are not violated in either case.
The trouble arises when you posit an immaterial (that is, nonphysical) soul, spirit, or whatever that is in charge of making decisions and guiding the body to carry them out. In that case the laws of physics will be violated.
To see why, imagine that we assemble a person in a precise physical configuration. The laws of physics predict how that person’s body will move. If the laws of physics dictate that the person will stand up and walk to the refrigerator, then that is what the person will do. Now suppose that there is an immaterial soul in charge of this person’s body. The immaterial soul decides not to get up and walk to the refrigerator, and it directs the body accordingly. Yet the laws of physics already dictate that the person will get up and walk to the fridge. Therefore, the only way that the body can follow the soul’s directive and not get up is if the laws of physics are violated.
You’ve acknowledged that the laws of physics are invariably followed, but in so doing you have inadvertently ruled out any role for an immaterial soul/spirit/etc.
It was in Charlie’s “The Rediscovery of Meaning” thread that I learned about the disenchantment thesis. The ever diligent Kantian Naturalist wrote an informative comment explaining its history.
Unfortunately, I appear to be incapable of spotting this disenchantment myself. I spent the entire thread pressing Charlie to articulate what meaning the current scientific understanding fails to provide that “Goethean science” apparently showers us with, alas to no avail. To my great disappointment Ted Peters is equally incapable of explaining this peculiar loss of meaning caused by the mere act of providing scientific explanations. I understand him as saying that if our consciousness is explained by reducing it to physical processes in the brain then it is somehow suddenly lacking in meaning, since this explanation deletes the concept of consciousness from reality. Why on earth would that be the case? Well, because physical particles are themselves mindless and meaningless and Ted Peters wanted a meaningful explanation, which I suppose is one that does not involve physical particles.
Maybe I am just thick, but I don’t see any loss of meaning in being able to explain some mental processes in physical terms. Rather, this I view as an enrichment. If anybody would be so good to explain to me when “meaning” was lost, then I would be ever so grateful.
I don’t have time to get too involved with this at present. Hopefully later! But I hope it inspires responses from a wider range of readers than there has been of late.
Regarding disenchantment, this is from Lamia by John Keats, written in 1819:
Yes, how detestable it is that “cold philosophy” tells us not to believe in mine gnomes. What a loss.
Corneel:
He’s making the same mistake as Charlie in assuming that the properties of a system (a person, in this case) cannot differ from the properties of its components (the particles).
People sometimes find this hard to grasp, but we all know of analogous everyday examples. A car can move; an alternator on its own cannot. The car’s properties differ from the alternator’s properties. A system’s properties can differ from the properties of its components.
Peters, quoting John Searle:
Peters comments:
It appears that Peters stopped reading too soon. Just a few pages later, Searle writes:
I though I would just randomly look through the ‘Body, Soul and Spirit’ thread to see what caught my eye and I thought the post below worth discussing. And I hadn’t got round to replying to it there yet.
So through the use of your thinking mind you have assumed that this organ in your skull has the ability to understand. By what process does your brain combine all of the received information, sort out relevant from irrelevant facts taking physical laws into account, to come up with your (your brain’s) understanding of the reality of the situation?
Which statement do you think is more accurate? “I am an organ” or “I am an organism”
Have you never used a phrase such as, “I see what you mean”?
The error is not in the perception, it is in faulty thinking, it is in the incomplete understanding of the laws of optics. The eye is receiving the image as it should given the laws of refraction
I don’t see any scraps of evidence that the brain creates thinking. My evidence is that I know my own thinking directly and without this thinking I would not subsequently know, with a very good degree of certainty, that there was a brain inside my skull and a heart inside my chest.
There’s a mountain of evidence that thinking requires a brain and brain activity. Anaesthesia, brain trauma and disease all affect the thinking process temporarily or permanently.
On the other hand, I’ve not heard of any evidence suggesting thinking happens outside the brain.
Corneel replied to my comment below in the Body, Soul and Spirit thread:
Goethe’s observation of how red and blue colours affect us visually is not contradicted by the Doppler effect on light. He was commenting on the feelings that artists convey in their paintings when the viewer looks with intent at, say, a landscape which uses these colours.
That Peters article is so terrible. He can’t even decide if the problem is that scientists are ignoring consciousness or that they’re explaining it. And he just treats free will, subjectivity, and consciousness as if they are equivalent (they aren’t) and as if there aren’t serious neuroscientists interested in exploring these issues (there are). His real complaint is that neuroscience is not permitting Christian theology to be the sole arbiter of truth and meaning about the human mind.
Exactly. The fact that one could imagine thought going on without the brain doesn’t show that this can actually happen.
Alvin Plantinga makes exactly this mistake: he argues that it’s possible for thought to be the activity of a soul (a simple substance, without any internal composition or parts), therefore materialism is false. And also that it’s just not possible for intentionality to be a relationship between material objects For Plantinga, when theology conflicts with cognitive science, it’s cognitive science that loses. (See his “Against Materialism” for more of this mishegaas)
CharlieM:
The evidence is so mountainous that we could spend all day (and more) discussing it.
Let’s discuss a single ‘scrap’ for the moment. You believe that thinking is carried out by an immaterial (nonphysical) something-or-other; let’s call it the soul. A person, Nancy, develops Alzheimer’s and her brain begins to deteriorate. It gets worse and worse over time; eventually her brain is suffused with plaques and tangles.
The good news is that Nancy’s cognition is unaffected. After all, she possesses an immaterial soul. This soul does her thinking, and being immaterial, it is not impaired by the plaques and tangles. It’s the same for all Alzheimer’s patients. Their brains may be a mess, but they are just as sharp as they were in their prime, thank God.
Oh, wait.
If the immaterial soul does the thinking, Charlie, then why is thinking, which is a nonphysical activity, devastated by Alzheimer’s disease, which is a physical malady?
It makes perfect sense to a physicalist. The brain does the thinking, so when the brain is damaged by Alzheimer’s, thinking is impaired.
How do you explain it?
CharlieM:
You’ve made this argument before, but I’ve never been able to grasp the logic behind it. You point out that you know your own thinking directly. That’s compatible with physicalism. You note that without thinking, you wouldn’t know that your skull contained a brain and your chest contained a heart. That’s also compatible with physicalism.
If those are compatible with physicalism, then why do you think they constitute evidence for an immaterial soul?
KN:
It’s interesting (but also sad) to read Plantinga. He’s a smart guy, but he ties himself in knots trying to defend dogma that in the end just isn’t defensible. His entire career has been like that. What a waste.
Thank you for ‘mishegaas’. My Yiddish vocabulary just expanded!
Perhaps, but there is something else at play as well; According to Ted Peters, science did not just fail to explain but it actually took away something. Something was stolen.
But what did we lose? I wish I understood.
CharlieM, in the old thread, regarding our ability to ‘see’ that the spectacular Mario illusion is in fact an illusion:
DNA_Jock responded:
CharlieM, now:
I addressed that in the old thread:
(For anyone new to the discussion, Charlie believes that our souls are out there in the world, sensing things directly, and that this is a ‘higher form of seeing’. The lower form of seeing might be fooled by the Mario illusion, but the higher form knows better. This view is not tenable, though I won’t rehash the arguments here unless necessary.)
Let’s not pollute TWO threads with off-topic Goethe colour theory. Here are my last remarks and then I will be silent on this: 1) My comment was meant as a playful joke and 2) If you still meant this to work as an explanation for the moving mario illusion, then you are wrong: The colours are optional: At this page you can see examples of the very same optical illusion in grayscale. Oh, AND an explanation that actually makes sense.
Here’s an easy way to understand, Charlie. However you imagine that your ‘thinking mind’ is able to achieve these wonderful things, that’s how I want you to imagine that my brain does it. You are adding an entirely superfluous extra explanatory variable for which there is no evidence. William of Ockham wants a word…
The latter
Often. However, I would not use “see” in its metaphorical sense when I am discussing visual perception. “Understand” or “comprehend” would be far, far better word choices in such circumstances, assuming that I was aiming to communicate clearly. If OTOH my goal was endless equivocation, then sure…
What you write here is utter rubbish. You appear to be trying to discuss the mirage. If I see a ship that is over the horizon, then I am seeing a ship in a location where it is not. I fully understand the laws of physics that make this distant ship visible to me. There’s no faulty thinking whatsoever. I understand that the ship is not there. Likewise, I understand that the Marios are not moving. In neither case does my understanding the very different reasons for the illusions make the illusions go away. Please, please think long and hard about this, and what it means for your pointless ‘thinking mind’.
LOL
You only know SOME of your own thinking directly. And it’s your brain doing all the work, as evidenced by mountains of evidence, from Phineas Gage to the effects of solvents, hypoxia, and temperature. Amyloid plaque, too.
Corneel:
Thanks for that link. Definitely worth a careful read.
Charlie, I am posting both the grayscale version and a slowed-down version of it for your convenience. Sorry about the low resolution. That’s in the original, so I can’t do anything about it.
.
Corneel:
He’s pretty explicit about what he thinks we’ve lost:
He’s clear on what he thinks we’ve lost, but we haven’t actually lost any of that. The exception is free will, since the kind of free will he’s referring to is libertarian free will, which is incoherent. He’s “lost” that, but of course he never actually had it in the first place.
We lost a great many of our illusions, and some of these I must say I wish I had back.
Sure, but how does one lose something by gaining understanding of some of it workings?
Suppose I see a beautiful rainbow in the sky outside my window. Later, in a book on optics I read that the rainbow is caused by the fact that the amount of refraction of light is dependent on its wavelength. I look outside once again and the rainbow is still there and it’s still beautiful plus I now know how rainbows are formed.
Did I lose or gain something?
Yes, I suppose for some people the magic has gone. I never understood that mindset. The magic does not vanish when you learn how something works: it is amplified, enriched. I suppose Ted Peters prefers to savour the mystery. Tough beans for him!
Corneel:
Consider consciousness. In Peters’ view, those thieving neurocentrists aren’t actually trying to explain consciousness; they’re trying to explain it away. That is, he thinks they’re arguing that it doesn’t exist at all. He’s wrong about that, of course, but that is his view.
Given that view, you can see why he thinks he loses something if the neurocentrists are correct. His consciousness, which he took to be real, doesn’t exist. It was merely an illusion. He’s lost it.
Amusingly, if he were right about all that, the only thing he would end up losing would be the illusion of consciousness, not consciousness itself. You can’t lose something that you never had.
The whole misunderstanding is due to shoddy scholarship on his part. Had he been a little more diligent, he would have discovered that most ‘scientific materialists’ do not deny the reality of consciousness and aren’t trying to ‘steal’ it from him.
Peters is clinging to a convenient straw man. It makes his argument a lot easier. He can tell his audience that “those egghead materialists claim that consciousness doesn’t exist, but you and I anyone with a lick of sense knows from direct experience that it does.” Who wants to listen to a bunch of idiot eggheads who can’t see what’s right under their noses?
As an example of how tendentious this guy is, check out the following passage:
He is so determined to flog the straw man that he completely misrepresents her statement. She isn’t calling the conscious mind a delusion. Instead, she’s actually affirming the reality of thoughts and feelings.
Steiner advises us against believing in mine gnomes or any other utterance of his. If we have no experience of these things why should we believe in them?
We should be forever questioning and never blindly accepting anything he or anyone else tells us.
Where did I say that the properties of a system and its components cannot differ? I would ask myself in what way do they differ and in what way are they similar.
A car cannot move on its own. Without a surface to react against it is going nowhere. One essential quality that both a car and an alternator have is that they are the products of human creative minds.
We are certainly become conscious because we have brains and senses and bodily systems. And our sense-bound thinking depends on these things. We need to experience the outer world in order to develop consciousness. As we become awake after sleep, so our life is an awakening on a higher level. But I don’t think any of us can claim to be fully awake. We are still asleep regarding most of our bodily processes.
So where within your brain does your mind reside? I presume there were pixels on a screen being activated as you thought about what to write in your post. Does this mean your device created your thoughts?
Thinking is brain activity. The mind is what the brain does.
Not sure if you are joking but in case you are not, no.Does this mean your device created your thoughts?If by device you mean the phone or laptop I would most likely to have used, no. If you mean something else you’ll have to explain.
I’d prefer to keep “consciousness” for medical assessments, how deep a coma is etc.
I agree awareness and self-awareness depend on interaction with the environment for full development. Sensory and social deprivation are hugely damaging, especially in the early years for humans.
Thinking you have as an immediate experience. You believe you have a brain because of the fact that you can think. The act of thinking is guaranteed through this direct experience. But the contents of this thinking can be mistaken. Your thoughts can be wrong. One of the contents of your thinking is the belief that your brain produces your thoughts. How do you know that this isn’t a mistaken belief?
Thinking invokes feelings, and feelings produce brain activity. Could it be possible that the brain activity that accompanies thinking is in fact the result of feeling, and if we could achieve pure thinking there would be no accompanying brain activity?
It is wrong to assume that just because brain activity is coincident with thinking we can claim that thinking is caused by the brain. Our complexity does not warrant such a simple assumption.
Round and round we go …
CharlieM,
Not to butt in but thinking about how we think and being able come to any meaningful conclusion is met by the brick wall of Fox’s conjecture.. I don’t understand how my thinking activity works in terms of neurones firing and all else that is happening physically and I assert that this a limiting factor for all humans trying to understand how hunan brains/minds work from either a first or third person perspective. I’d be more than happy to be proved wrong.
No, I do not.
First, the linguistic ambiguity: “I believe” because I can think: for example “I believe that today is Thursday” because I am capable of thought and there seems to be a consensus on the subject. However I believe that I have a brain for all sorts of reasons, only some of them thought-related: I can see, hear, experience pain, my heart rate and breathing increase upon exertion, lots of reasons. I observe other humans and animals and my own reflection and the evidence indicates that there is a brain inside my skull. As a thought experiment, if I had never observed another animal of any sort, then I might not reach the conclusion that I had a brain…
Well thank heavens nobody assumes that “just because”! There’s all that evidence that you keep determinedly avoiding regarding insults to the brain and their wild correlation with their effect on thinking. Hypoxia, temperature, MDMA, …
Yawn.
CharlieM:
Give us some credit. Our reasoning is a hell of a lot more sophisticated than that, as you know perfectly well. It isn’t ‘Oh look, she’s thinking and her brain is active at the same time.Therefore her brain is doing the thinking’.
I spelled out one line of reasoning in my Alzheimer’s comment above. The disastrous effects that Alzheimer’s has on thinking make perfect sense if thinking is a physical process. They make no sense if thinking is carried out by an immaterial soul.
How do you explain that?
Alan,
Your link is broken. Here’s the corrected link.
Alan:
What you”ve dubbed ‘Fox’s conjecture’ is actually three conjectures, none of which you’ve succeeded in justifying. It’s a bit of a stretch to describe it as a ‘brick wall’.
Fixed, thanks
Nonetheless, it remains unbreached.
In my opinion the soul is immaterial but it is energetic. So by your reckoning it is physical. Do you accept that something can be non-material but have energy?
Deterioration of the brain affects sense-bound thinking, feeling and willing. A lifetime of connections are rapidly breaking up, which must be very confusing for the sufferer.
Because it is only compatible with a physicalism that comprises both material and energy. It isn’t compatible with pure materialism. There is a reason why the term physicalism is preferable to materialism. But how far are physicalists prepared to take the inclusion of energy into their worldview?
CharlieM:
We’ve been over this before. ‘Immaterial soul’ is the standard term, but in practice it is taken to mean ‘nonphysical soul’. That’s how I’m using it here. You’ve told us that the soul is nonphysical, so when you speak of it as being ‘energetic’, you aren’t talking about physical energy. So no, the soul is not physical by my reckoning.
Alzheimer’s affects more than just “sense-bound thinking”. It affects thinking in general, including abstract thought. You attribute those to the soul, so why are they affected by damage to the brain?
If those connections were established by the soul, why are they broken up by physical damage to the brain?
At most, in your model, the soul should be receiving confusing sensory data from the brain. That shouldn’t affect someone’s ability to name 10 animals or explain how to tell the time from a clock. Alzheimer’s does affect those things.
Alzheimer’s produces cognitive deficits. In your model, that should be impossible. Patients should be as sharp as ever, just reporting that they’re having trouble seeing or hearing.
keiths:
If those are compatible with physicalism, then why do you think they constitute evidence for an immaterial soul?
CharlieM:
That’s what physicalism is.So again, if those things are compatible with physicalism, why do you think they constitute evidence for an immaterial soul? (Meaning, as I keep stressing, a nonphysical soul.)
Physicalists accept the existence of energy, for which there is ample evidence, but the energy they speak of is physical. You seem to include something nonphysical in your definition. So yes, physicalists accept the existence of energy, but no, they do not accept the existence of a nonphysical component of energy. There’s no evidence for it, and it isn’t a logical necessity, so why maintain that it exists?
keiths:
Alan:
What remains unbreached? You haven’t established the existence of a limit.
Let me try to be a bit more clear. Through sense perception we observe objects in space. The ‘higher form of seeing” is a perception in time. Goethe developed this form of perception to a high degree. The archetype for him was a being in time.
In the Mario illusion the interplay of light and dark edges in time gives the impression of movement in space.
It works because of the properties of the edge colours. The greyscale version, as in the coloured version, works because of the manipulation of light and darkness. Black and white are equivalent to blue/violet and yellow/red taken to the extreme.
CharlieM:
Motion is a phenomenon in both space and time. Our senses are able to perceive motion, so it’s incorrect to limit them to the observation of objects in space while reserving ‘perception in time’ for your higher form of seeing.
Also, you’ve changed your story regarding this higher form of seeing. Now it’s ‘perception in time’. In the previous thread, it was the mind’s awareness that the Mario phenomenon was an illusion, and its understanding of the causes of that illusion:
The discussion will go nowhere if you keep changing the meaning of your terms.
You just told us (in the previous paragraph, no less!) that the higher form of seeing is ‘perception in time’. Now you’re giving us an example of perception in time, and the example you’ve chosen is one in which the illusion occurs.
You are therefore (presumably inadvertently) telling us that the ‘higher form of seeing’ is subject to the illusion, which undercuts the point you’ve been trying to make all along — namely, that while ordinary sense perception is vulnerable to the illusion, the higher form of seeing is not.
It’s not an assumption. It’s a warranted conclusion from the past two hundred years of scientific psychology and neurophysiology.