From the Thinking about Free Will thread:
If self is the [physical decision-making] system…and the system is all the component parts that collect sensory input etc…does that mean if I lose component parts of myself that I am no longer myself? If I lose my arms, eyesight, hearing, etc…am I somehow less of a self?
Which parts of the system are self and which parts aren’t? And why?
…In a any event, it seems to me that if one holds self is the physical system, then taking away/changing parts of the physical system would necessarily change the self in some way. One might consider an old home that is replaced one board at at time until it is completely new. In what sense is this the same home it always was? Is it the design or conception of the original home that retains the identity. But we know that in these situations the make-up of the home and some say the actual identity of the home changes. Which is why folks that remodel antique homes don’t like to “gut them.” Or one might consider a home where half of it was torn down. Is it the same home? The same questions are true for the physical self notion.
…Maybe these are not good questions… but wouldn’t a corpse have essentially the same physical configuration of atoms at least for a very short time after death? Also – what about two objects that theoretically are identical such as clones or identical twins? And would some one’s self really disappear, and then be revived, in cases where folks are revived (hearts shocked etc) back to life after say cardiac arrest. Or would they continue to exist the whole time?
And, even if a complete replacement of material, left the original design (or I guess I should say form) intact, it starts to seem to me then that the actual identify of self would reside in the form, or as you put it, configuration, rather than the particular material construction? I also am still thinking that the logical extension would also mean that if the physical components are the self then a loss of some parts of that construction necessitates a loss of self in some sense.
…in fact identity, or self, doesn’t reside in a specific form or configuration of atoms as earlier postulated – unless one includes in that conceived form a particular place in space and time.
Jackson writes:
This analogy does not really work for me. Apparently, I must be a Perdurantist. 😮
I have had (as of January of this year) five kidneys from five different people put into my body. At no time, at least as far as I’ve been able to determine, have I ever become any of those people. Further, I submit that aside from a rather dramatic health change, I do not detect any real difference in my “personhood”. That said, I have a feeling that on some very tiny level, I likely am a different person before and after a transplant. I think there are very subtle degrees of self that do indeed vary with a change in the physical.
Robin,
Jeez, Robin! I guess Nietzsche was right.
Why would changing something that isn’t the configuration of neurons even be interesting?
The only question worth asking is whether or not changes in the structure (or chemistry) of your brain make you a different person. Certainly we know that there are some specific changes that will result in a significant difference in personality. Strokes will often do the same.
But the bigger question is, if you experience any of these major changes, would you even notice a different “self”. Our brains change dramatically over our lives. Is my sixty year old “self” different than my ten year old “self”? I would argue, yes. The sixty year old “self” has been tempered by fifty years of experiences (and abuse) that my ten year old “self” did not have. An analogy (although not the best) is with the tree of life. If someone could talk to my ten year old “self” and my current “self”, it is unlikely that they would say that we are the same person, unless they asked some specific personal questions. But nobody would be able to detect a difference from one day to the next along the fifty year span. In the same way that we can clearly see a difference between a flat worm and a human, but if we followed each generation from our common ancestor to humans, we probably would not detect any significant changes from generation to generation.
Try cutting the corpus callosum.
But my larger point can’t be tested, because we are not the product of our wiring. We are the wiring.
Neurons aren’t much use without input.
I’d say what gives a person a continuous identity is memory.
ETA: not supposed to be a glib answer, but just back late from a long working weekend.
But what is memory other than the configuration and connections of neurons. I assume we don’t know the details, but it’s going to be physical and involve the entire nervous and endocrine system.
Well, it’s underpinned by neurons, but not just neurons – the whole system, including the motor system.
I wouldn’t say that memory *is* the configuration and connection of neurons. I’d say memory *is* the capacity to recall past events, and one’s role in them, and that capacity is a property of the whole organism.
It’s not invulnerable, of course, which is why disorders such as schizophrenia and dementia can be so devastating.
Somebody recently cited somebody (can’t remember who) who called us “Pan Narrans”. I like that. Another way if saying what I’m trying to say is that we construct and reconstruct a self with continuity from moment to moment – we narrate our lives, somewhat unreliably to ourselves (and others), with constant updates and edits.
I don’t think labeling a physical system as a capacity adds anything. An airplane may have the capacity to fly but it’s still a physical object.
Not really, no, as many of the living processes have ceased to function at that time, and the atoms involved are already shifting from the living condition. More importantly, a corpse especially doesn’t have the same energy configuration, energetic processes, at all. In particular, the brain almost certainly has failed by the time the person is pronounced “dead,” and lacks the important signaling that would cause life to maintain itself.
Is this essentially different from being knocked unconscious? My sense is that indeed there is not real continuity of consciousness from when it disappears and when it reappears, but it is easy to get it going again by basically restarting the nerve signaling that underlies consciousness. You’re just “off” for a while, at least consciously.
If it’s the brain, sure. Happens all of the time with strokes and from other sources of brain lesions. I’m not saying that the brain is all that matters, just that it’s what really holds the continuity of self, and while damage to the spinal cord or amputation will eventually change the individual in some manner, it’s not directly going to change the continuity of self, only subtly (or greatly, if the situation exists that it reduces well-being substantially) affect what the person is over time.
Glen Davidson
Maybe memory in the broadest sense, but clearly phenomena like the connectivity of the brain are going to be crucial, and connectivity is not normally considered to be memory as such.
Glen Davidson
I think that the point is the functionality of memory–that it does function to provide continuity. Yes, we’re “physical objects,” but serious loss of memory is going to reduce the continuity of self.
Glen Davidson
So memory is mental? In physical terms you might have to say something like memory is the ability to access memory, but that doesn’t make sense. 🙂
Does DNA qualify as memory? How does a cell type remember what type of cell it is?
I’d say that when we talk about memory (in the common or garden sense) we are talking about a mental phenomenon i.e. a phenomenon that takes place at the level of the organism, underpinned by neural mechanisms.
Just ocean waves, say, take place at the interface of water and air – it doesn’t make much sense to say that waves are something that water molecules, or air molecules do, even though they are involved in generating the waves.
In a metaphorical sense (i.e. by analogy with the common or garden sense) we can say that metal, or foam, or neural networks have “memory” in the sense that they can return to an earlier configuration after perturbation.
And neural networks (both artificial and real) undergo “hebbian learning” by which synapses that have transmitted an action potential close together in time tend to be more likely to fire close together in time in the future, and is the foundation of non-metaphorical memory, i.e. learning by the organism.
I do think that the key to making sense of questions like “how do you get from dead molecules to live people) is to rid oneself of the idea that any proposal that, say, memory arises from material processes “reduces” memory to those processes. “Reduces” is just another metaphor, of course, but it’s a very misleading one, IMO. You can’t “reduce” ocean waves to a description of the actions of air and water molecules – it only makes sense as a property of the interface, a higher-level concept. And yet nobody suggests that ocean waves have some additional substance that we are somehow leaving out of account if we describe them “materialistically”. They also have continuity; the tsunami that arrives at a shore many hours after an offshore earthquake is the “same wave” that was generated by the earthquake, even though not a molecule of the interface is the same. What gives it continuity is the pattern, which you could also see as a “memory” of the pattern generated by the displaced ocean floor.
I remember being very struck (and my small son equally struck) by the sight of our deck table covered by about 4 feet of snow. In the centre of the surface was a slight dimple, representing the hole in the table, four feet below, that in better weather held the sunshade pole.
That pattern was repeated in countless layers of snow, passing “information” from the table top to the top of the snow layer four feet higher.
A slightly oblique point, but I’m tired from five hours driving, but can’t sleep because I had a double espresso half way home to try to keep myself awake.
But the take- home point is supposed to be that continuity doesn’t depend on physical identity, but on information.
And for a person, that information can be consciously,and continuously assembled into a narrative, subject to regular updates and edits, in which the self is both narrator and chief protagonist: “the first person”.
I am absolutely not saying that memory doesn’t depend on the physical substrate of the organism.
I mean, I’m a materialist neuroscientist ffs!
I’m saying that memory is something done by the whole system. I remember, and construct the narrative of my life, not my brain, or my neurons, although they do lots of things that enable me, the organism, to narrate my life.
It’s the old emergence thing – it’s important to consider phenomena, and activity, at the level of the system appropriate to the phenomenon, otherwise we get in a complete muddle, and make category errors.
I certainly believe (because I have yet to see persuasive evidence to the contrary) that mental events are generated by systems of physical events. That doesn’t mean that a mental event IS a physical event, which I think would be a meaningless sentence. “I remember” is a systems-level description that makes no sense below the level of the system. As with the ocean-wave analogy. The waves are a property of an interface. Conceptually, an interface is neither water nor air, but the surface between the two, yet it depends on both the volume of air beneath the surface and the pressure of air above. It can’t be “reduced” to molecules. It can only be understood at a much higher level.
Connectivity is absolutely crucial, but the sense in which a set of synapses “remember” a past event is quite difference to the sense in which I remember the event that those long-term-potentiated synapses enable me to do so.
Thanks, KeithS for starting the thread. I haven’t forgotten…just was at a conference in Cambridge MA for a week (professional conference) and then in Ohio for the weekend (doing some music gigs)…with zero time.
I am going to read the thread carefully and then contribute…
Sure, I was just saying that it’s more than just what is typically called “memory.”
Not that I thought you think otherwise, but it could look that way in your “glib answer.” Yes, the caveat, still it said what it did.
Glen Davidson
Jackson Knepp:
No problem. I figured you’d join us when you had the time.
Could you explain what you mean when you say you are a materialist neuroscientist?
Or was that just the double espresso talking? 🙂
Memory as perception is a behavior. But it is the behavior of a physical system, and the configuration and connection of neurons et al is the system that behaves.
Mung, to Elizabeth:
I think she means that she is a neuroscientist who is also a materialist, in the relevant sense.
What do you think she means, Mung?
All this avoids the elephant in the room. The existence of a immaterial soul.
our soul is doing the observing.
Yes I agree the soul simply observes the memory machine we have. Our brain , i think, is only a memory machine. the bible calls it the mind.
You are right, as I see it, to highlight the memory.
Yet the memory is just a part of the material world. its a organ that all creatures have. I guess ours is better.
Yet its just storing information on something. YET we, our soul, reads it.
In fact all senses are read by us reading our memory.
All mental problems come from triggering problems in the memory.
Turning us into a memory machine only would require the idea of one level of memory watching another level and giving us a impression of being a separate self.
Or rather we don’t get songs stuck in our head but the song wonders who is complaining about the song. who is the self?
On wiki , under dreams, I saw one researcher quickly suggest se;f is just memorry dealing with memory.
Yes, I’m a neuroscientist, who, like all scientists, works within a naturalistic methodological (methodological materialistic?) paradigm, but who is also a philosophical materialist I guess (though I’m not a fan of ism). I prefer the term “monist”. I am not a dualist.
The purpose is to discover the truth. If one leaves out other options, non material, going on in the universe then one has already dismissed those options and already KNOWS there is ONLY the material option.
without doing nothing a lot has already been discovered .
Without doing nothing one is not investigating nature.
No way around it. All options are on the table and pure materialistic methodology is a interference with true science.
It doesn’t happen all that often, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out my agreement with Robert.
Like him, I think that methodological naturalism is a bad idea:
The unhealthy synergy between methodological naturalism and accommodationism
In practice it has made little difference, as we haven’t uncovered any phenomena that require supernatural explanations. They are logically possible, however, so we shouldn’t rule them out a priori.
Also, science is quite capable of accommodating supernatural claims as long as they are testable. That’s how we know that YEC and guided evolution aren’t viable hypotheses.
If they are testable, they are not supernatural claims.
That’s sort of the point of the term “methodological naturalism” isn’t it? It’s a method that is predicated on the assumption that the phenomena you use it to investigate are replicable properties of the world, i.e. part of its nature.
A “supernatural” phenonmenon would be something that is not part of the nature of the world at all, therefore untestable by the methods of “methodological naturalism”.
Elizabeth:
Only if you redefine everything capable of interacting with nature as part of nature. But that clashes with the ordinary usage of the terms ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. For example, the Christian God is regarded as a supernatural being, but he certainly interacts with the world — most notably by incarnating into it!
To insist that the Christian God, if he exists, is a natural being strikes me as a perverse and idiosyncratic usage of the word ‘natural’.
OK, then, according to the “ordinary” use of the terms “supernatural” and “natural” then it is wrong to define “methodological naturalism” as any kind of naturalism.
But that’s the problem with isms – you need to define the terms they are defined in terms of!
It’s why I try to avoid them.
The bottom line is that hypotheses about “supernatural” (in lay terms) phenomena are perfectly testable as long as they are hypothesised to have some element of predictability. This is true of ghosts, psi, and the power of prayer. It’s also true of certain hypotheses about deities (for instance that a deity created the world 6,000 years ago).
But if you define your “supernatural” hypotheses in terms that cannot make predictions, then you can’t test those hypotheses about them.
Being clear about this might help in the “materialism vs theism” debate.
Elizabeth,
Not at all. To practice methodological naturalism is to conduct science under the assumption that the supernatural does not exist, and that’s certainly a form of naturalism! Here’s Robert Pennock, who testified at the Dover trial:
That rule is unnecessary and actually pernicious. It has the effect of excluding science from areas in which it is perfectly competent to operate, and it allows creationists and IDers to complain — justly — that the supernatural is being excluded a priori instead of on the basis of evidence.
Accommodationists like the rule because it allows them to adopt Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria model and to assure believers that science is no threat to their beliefs. Science deals with the natural, religion with the supernatural, and never the twain shall meet.
It’s simply not true. Science is very much a threat to testable supernatural claims. It’s how we know that evolution is not guided, for instance.
Science is in the business of finding regularities. A reasonable operational definition of a supernatural phenomenon would be a violation of expected regularity. Not just a random event, but something that violates some deep regularity — gravity, thermodynamics, or such. Usually with some inferable purpose. Such as levitating a priest.
Science is rather helpless when the only evidence is eyewitness accounts. That might cynically account for the lack of any other kind of evidence for supernatural interventions.
petrushka,
Sure, but regularities can be supernatural as well as natural. They just need to have testable entailments.
If I believe that God showers wealth on everyone who repeats the Lord’s Prayer three or more times a day, that is an eminently testable belief — and a supernatural one.
We don’t know that.
We do know that the overall evidence fits theory lacking any intelligent guidance, and that the results are not what would be expected from any known “designer.” But if aliens or gods were experimenting, tweaking a bit here and there (maybe to see what evolution would do in unusual circumstances), while letting mostly chance plus selection build rather undesign-like organisms, that could still fit the evidence.
There seems no way to rule out guidance of evolution by intelligences whose purposes and methods we don’t understand. We can provisionally rule out guidance by any intelligence operating as intelligences that we do know, because we know what to expect from them. Gods or some extremely advanced aliens, not so much.
Glen Davidson
Pennock would have been exactly right if, instead of
he had said “cannot” instead of “does not”.
This semantic trap can be avoided by using “real” and “imaginary” instead of natural/supernatural. Scientific enquiry can observe, measure and hypothesize about any real effect. The only thing science can tell us about an imaginary effect is that it is not there. Nobody is saying science must not investigate the imaginary. But the only way scientific methods will work is at the interface, where God leaves her fingerprints.
Let’s investigate ghosts and ghoulies. What shall we look for? Noises in the night? Sound waves are real. Objects being hurled around? Could we measure the energy involved?
Well, if “methodological naturalism” means assuming that there is a class of phenomenona that are perfectly testable, but off limits because they come with the tag “supernatural”, then I am not a methodological naturalist.
I don’t think psi, or telekinesis, or faith healing, or telepathy, or the power of prayer, or farsight should be off-limits to science, just because some people call them “supernatural”.
The label is arbitrary anyway. Psi, if it exists, is no more, or less, “supernatural” than magnetism.
What IS off limits, intrinsically, are unfalsifiable hypotheses, and too many supernatural hypotheses are just that.
TBH, I think the underlying point is that the word “supernatural” is incoherent. Sometimes it just means “the unexplained” – in which case it can be investigated like any other unexplained phenomenon, and will shrink as the gaps shrink. Sometimes it means “something to do with God or gods, or demons, or ghosts, or minds” – which is far too vague to base an ism on.
Exactly.
Hence my question about energy in ID.
Yes, I agree.
And I think it’s worth unpacking what we mean by “guidance” in this context anyway. Evolution is very much “guided” in some sense of the word, for instance in the sense in which water is “guided” along a riverbed. And while it may be “blind” it is not without a sense of “touch”.
What I think lies at the bottom of what people mean when they talk about “guided” evolution is “guided by some agent with a distal goal”.
In fact the word “agent” almost implies “capable of having a distal goal” as opposed to a system in which what happens now is determined by the immediate past and present.
To get us long-windedly back to the OP: I think that’s the essence of self-as-agent – being able to choose courses of action that are not immediately obvious, or advantageous, but which may net benefits to someone, some time in the future. And that that capacity to make informed decisions about the future is highly reliant on the capacity to simulate that future based on past experience i.e. what actions resulted in what in the past.
That’s what evolution can’t do, and we can. And that’s why the products, and the patterns of production, of evolution look a bit different from typical output from human agency. Our output is cruder, faster, and and capable of serving future goals.
Just for fun, taking your example, what do we test? We find enough volunteers, separate them into two groups, ensuring group A repeats the Lord’s Prayer three times a day minimum and group B don’t. Then we observe what? Check their bank accounts? And how would you prove the increase in bank balance of someone in group A was connected to their reciting the Lord’s Prayer?
The best you can hope for is to discredit a false belief.
ETA I also think it would be truer to say that a belief is real even if what is believed is imaginary.
Indeed. Which is why I started to use the phrase “environmental design” at UD (and to take back their usurpation of the word). The niche is the designer.
I’m not sure evolution cannot. There are living things that have reproductive strategies encompassing many decades. In fact I would argue that bacteria are demonstrably better than humans at surviving over deep time.
What humans can do is talk about goals. I’m not convinced that is a winning strategy in the long run. In fact, human goals seem to be mostly short run.
As a mathematician, I must object.
There is nothing supernatural about imaginary numbers, though they can be said to be non-real.
</humor>
Glen,
Science doesn’t deal in proofs. It only renders hypotheses more or less credible relative to their competitors.
Sure, there’s an infinitesimal probability that evolution is supernaturally guided, just as there’s an infinitesimal probability that (my old friend) the Rain Fairy is guiding every raindrop and snowflake to its final destination.
But no one takes the Rain Fairy hypothesis seriously, and neither should they take the guided evolution hypothesis seriously.
Not sure what you are talking about. Can you give an example of a “reproductive strategy encompassing many decades”?
If you are talking about “the evolution of evolvability” I agree that there is a (very attenuated) sense in which there’s an analog of intentional behaviour there.
So we probably need a more precise definition of intention!
Quick off the top of my head:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotiny
Intention is inferred. My understanding of recent research is that we may infer intention in our own behavior after the decision making fact. The decision may be made before we notice the intention.
I have never given this much thought, but I suspect that humans evolved from critters that acted without a lot of reflection. I suspect we still act mostly without reflection, but the specific mechanisms that enable language also enable talking to ourselves about what we have done, and perhaps allow us to talk to ourselves about what we are about to do.
I would bet that this is a package deal, language, reflection, intention, consciousness, foresight. But I suspect intention is pre-conscious.