If there is nothing beyond the material universe, judgments of right and wrong are no more informative than pan-hoots.
says “news” at Uncommon Descent. Well, I have no idea what a pan-hoot is, but presumably it is a not-informative thing.
Denyse (I assume it is she) writes this as her very odd (to my mind) response to a piece of very old news (11 years old!) – some rather touching thoughts by David Attenborough reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (not that “news” gives a primary citation):
It might seem unusual that so many of his viewers insist on an Edenic worldview when Attenborough has spent 50 years showing them something very different indeed. Even more unusual, and not a little frustrating for Attenborough, is that viewers reject, often aggressively, his expositions on evolution in favour of Creationism.
“It is something I get frequent letters about,” he says. “They always start with sweet reasonableness, you know, ‘We love your programs, isn’t nature marvellous’, and so on. But they always go on to say, ‘We do wonder why it is that you don’t give credit to the almighty God who created each one of these species individually.’
“My response,” he says, “is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that’s going to make him blind. And [I ask them], ‘Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy’.”
It’s a very good question. It’s not an argument against Design (as it is often implied to be) its a simple question:, IF we found evidence parasitic worms were designed, why would we identify their designer with an all-merciful God?
But Denyse does not attempt to answer it. Instead we have this very odd assertion that “if the boy is just an evolved primate” that there would be “nothing noteworthy about his fate” – that somehow, failing to conclude that a Designer designed the worm logically entails not finding anything noteworthy about the child whose blindness is caused by it.
Because, apparently, “judgements of right and wrong are no more informative than pan-hoots” unless there is “something beyond the material world”.
Why? If a worm can result from material causation, why can’t moral judgements? Sure, Denyse doesn’t accept the former, by why assume that someone who does, must somehow logically reject the latter? Why should a material human being not be as concerned about the fall of a sparrow – or the blinding of a boy – as a deity from “beyond the material world”?
Blas,
And there we have the unassailability of your ‘position’.
Scientist: “Here’s some experimental data, there’s a computer model, here’s another attempt to deconstruct complex reality.”
Skeptic: “Huh. Your models don’t apply to the real world. I’ll tell you what happens in the real world … ”
Unfortunately, in your view of the real world, you take no account of genetics, or of competing strategies in finite populations. You intuit that selfish will always, in every circumstance in every species, lead to greater genetic output and … lo and behold. No point modelling it, because it won’t happen in the model. Only happens in the real world.
OK, what about social bees? Or wolves? What stops them from being purely selfish?
Unfortunately, “capable of conceiving and enacting a purpose” means something, under Darwinism, that makes such acts of conceiving and enacting in principle the same as the happenstance forces and interactions that shape a volcanic rock. You are apparently evoking a meaning for that sentence you do not have available to you under Darwinism – a stolen concept. A sense that “you” are separate from “the physical process” that determines the shape or conditions of a process-generated thing.
The event of “conceiving” is, under Darwinism, a process caused by preceding and contextual physical events. The formation of a purpose as a concept, then, is exactly (in principle) the same as the formation of a stone under vulcanism; whatever physical forces are involved, interact in perhaps an unpredictable way and the shape of the stone – by happenstance arrangements of matter behaving in regular fashion according to physics – is formed.
A concept (of purpose) is formed in principle the same way. Materials interact under the influence of physics (whether as basic or emergent properties) and produce a synaptic state where the “concept” – as a particular synaptic state – is formed.
There is no separte “you” that “has control” of the process any more than there is a ghost in the vulcanism machine that “chooses” the shape of a rock it produces.
Could you explain what make the difference?
William J. Murray,
That’s not what ‘stolen concept’ means.
Beating about the neighboring bushes here . . .
(1) Murray’s view would make a good deal more sense if one reads his use of “objective” as meaning “absolute.” My objection to Murray isn’t that objective doesn’t mean absolute, but that (a) it’s not obvious that these two terms mean the same thing, and (b) pragmatists (non-absolutists) have a perfectly good use for “objective”. (Unlike other non-absolutists here, I would strongly object to reducing “objective” to “consensus view”.)
(2) We should probably distinguish between (i) having goals; (ii) what sorts of things have goals; (iii) the process whereby goal-having beings come into existence; (iv) the difference between just having goals and being able to represent those goals in one’s cognitive system; (v) the difference between just representing those goals and representing oneself as having those goals.
(3) I take it that all (and only?) organisms have goals, and that only highly complex cognitive systems are able to represent those goals — and that probably (but not necessarily, and not obviously) the organism has to have a complex metarepresentational (metacognitive) system in order to represent itself as having goals. (The difference between representing goals and representing oneself as having goals might be one salient difference between animal sentience and genuine sapience. Proto-sapient or quasi-sapient animals, like chimps or dolphins, are a harder case.)
(4) One of the major intellectual hurdle that makes “design theory” seem so attractive is that it seems puzzling how a non-goal-oriented process (Darwinian evolution) could produce goal-oriented products (organisms). A different hurdle is how Darwinian evolution could produce organisms capable of representing themselves as having goals, and of being to modify those goals.
(5) Indeed, I suspect that the presence of full-fledged rational thought — making able to make inferences, draw conclusions, test those conclusions on the basis of evidence, and revise those conclusions in light of experience — is one of the things that makes evolution seem unappealing. How, it might be asked, could the same process that explains why bees are drawn to certain kinds of flowers also explain the human capacity for science, art, literature, poetry, music, and philosophy?
So you keep asserting. But I deny the charge. I stole nothing. You are merely asserting that what is mine (and indeed anyone’s) is yours.
You seem to have decided that “under Darwinism” (whatever that is supposed to mean) there can be no referent for the word “I”.
Well, I outright deny that. I know exactly what I mean by the word “I”, and by it I mean something capable of conceiving and enacting a person. I did not steal the word from you, or from anyone. I simply dispute your claim that unless it refers to some extramaterial piece of ectoplasm it cannot exist.
I am not a piece of volcanic rock, or even remotely like it. I have properties that that rock does not possess (and it has properties that I do not possess). And those properties include the capacity to conceive and enact a purpose. And I can even tell you what that purpose is, and you will be able to tell when I have enacted it.
And it is, indeed, to convey to you my view that you are utterly wrong on this 🙂
And if you really can’t tell that what wrote this post was Lizzie, and not a piece of volcanic rock, then I think we may have found the source of the problem!
Yes, I think that William does mean “absolute” by “objective”. The trouble is that he then uses “subjective” to mean more or less what I would mean by “subjective” (an antonym to “objective”, my meaning) rather than “relative” which would be a better anonym for “absolute”.
Is really conceive and enact a purpose is a different process as the oxisation of the elements of a rock, his disntegration and formation in a different rock. Are not that process changes due to the physical laws. And you will loose, I hope as late as possible, that capacity and become a corpse. Are you really different from a rock?
Is a fire different from wood?
Where do you get this stuff?
No, it’s not just an “assertion”. I’ve explained this. You use the terms in a sense that does not apply under your premise. They are a deceptive misrepresentation of “what is going on” if “what is going on” is Darwinistic/Materialist in its nature. It uses the term “I’ or “we” or “you” as if they are something other than the happenstance physical process that just happens to work the way it works and just happens to produce what it produces. You are using a term that evokes a “ghost in the machine” when your premise precludes it.
There is no ghost in the materialist machine. You being capable of thinking and saying “I chose this purpose” is absolutely no different in principle than if the happenstance interactions of materials made a sound when the rock formed that sounded like: “I chose to be this shape”. That you have those thoughts and feelings doesn’t change the nature of what thoughts and feelings are under Darwinism – the happenstance product of physical causes.
Like your argument about “selfishness”, you think semantics can afford you what your premise denies. You can no more call the purposes you acquire and compute “your own” than you can call your genetic code, gender or ice cream preference “your own”.
Physics produces all things. “You”, under Darwinism, are nothing more than a computed state of physical properties. The shape of your goals is as inevitable, even if non-determinable, as the shape of the rock. Saying that the goals are “yours” is no different than saying that the shape is “the rock’s”. Physics produced the content of your goals and the shape of the rock.
No.
try doing the computation. Let’s see it.
Blas,
My conscience will be no help in telling you what to do. Are you in the habit of seeking life coaching from strangers on the internet?
No. You, on the contrary, that the word can only refer to a “ghost in the machine” and not to what that machine is, and can only be if it has the material configuration it has and the resultant properties it has.
That is a restriction on the term that has no justification. I am a monist, you are a dualist. But you insist that my monism is half your dualism, and the half without the “I”, and that I have stolen you “I” to refer to my “I-less” half.
But I dispute your model of my model. My model is not half of your dualism. In my model the “I” is intrinsic to the configuration of the matter that constitutes my monodic existence.
And we can debate this. But we cannot debate the straw man that you insist my model is.
A thing can have properties that transcend its parts simply because the properties arise from the configuration, not the inventory. To reference a favorite ID trope: a Boeing 747 is not the same thing as a junkyard of parts. And yet a Boeing 747 can consist of the precise same list of material parts. What it has in addition is its material configuration.
If that makes me not-a-materialist, fine. It’s not a word I especially like. I don’t think the world can be “reduced” to the materials it consists of, any more than Michelangelo’s David, or the Boeing 747, or even a volcanic rock, can be “reduced” to its component parts – to describe each of them we also need to know their configuration.
Which means we can call a Boeing 747 and its parts a junkyard, David “David” and its parts “metamorphosed fossils”, and the volcanic rock, a rock and not a list of elements.
And I can call myself “I”, and not a heap of cells.
I must have missed where Darwinism defines that. Can you provide a citation?
Or are you making it up as you go along.
I’ve explained this several times to you, Liz. I have even used the term “absolute” instead of “objective” in debates with you so as to avoid you going off on a straw man using your idiosyncratic definition of the word “objective”.
Objective means something that has real existence outside of any individual mind that others can access. Because of the presumptive concept of “mind” assumed in the dictionary, I’ve pointed out that I consider some aspects of mind to be part of a universal structure, and thus some things that exist in mind indeed exist outside of individual mind as part of universal mind – like geometry, mathematics, logic, and morality.
“Objective” doesn’t mean “consensus”.
Lizzie and Murray:
there would be no patents if inventions were obvious from their constituent parts.
Nor any designer, nor any need for one.
I know that “objective” doesn’t mean “consensus”, William. But in my field, and in many, it means “can be confirmed by independent observers”.
I contend that claiming that an abstract principle is “objective” in the sense of having some kind of reality outside of the minds of people, is incoherent. Just as the sun would give no light if there were nothing with light-sensitive retinas to see by it. It might still radiate, but “light” would have no meaning. I contend that “morality” is the same. Without people to make moral judgements, it can have no coherent meaning.
However, it may well, and I think it is, that human beings, collectively, and independently, tend to concur on moral principles. That suggests that human minds have a common property, that could “objectively” discernable, for instance, by visiting Martians. “Interesting”, they might say: “humans appear to have a tendency to try to look after each other, even when it conflicts with their own welfare, and to censure those who do not”.
And in that sense, which is not “consensus” but an independently observable characteristic of our species, I’d say that morality is “objective”, by my definition.
What an “absolute” morality would mean I have no idea.
William uses “Darwinism” and “materialism” interchangeably, meaning, mostly, I think, the latter.
The phrase “the ghost in the machine” was, as is well-known (I hope), coined by Gilbert Ryle in his classic The Concept of Mind (1949). He coins the phrase to describe ironically the Cartesian conception of mind — what he calls “the Official Doctrine”.
But Ryle does not argue that, since there is no ghost in the machine, it’s all just machine. (Ryle is not La Mettrie!). He aims to show that the Official Doctrine stands in the way of understanding the nature of mental concepts — concepts such as remembering, perceiving, acting voluntarily, hoping, wanting, feeling a pain, discovering, inventing, pretending, and so on.
Towards the end of his book (and here I’m paraphrasing from memory, as I’m at a cafe and my book is at home), he says, “Many have thought that if a human being is not a ghost in a machine, then he is a machine. Few have concluded that a human being is an animal, and even fewer have dared imagine that a human being is a higher animal of a certain kind — that is, a human being.”
Ryle (and, following in his footsteps rather more closely than they usually acknowledge, Sellars and McDowell) have revived the Aristotelian notion that a normal mature human being is a rational animal. A rational animal is a not a ghost in a machine.
A rational animal does not consist of two different substances, one material and one mental. It is a single thing, an animal with various capacities. Some of those capacities are shared with non-rational animals (the capacity to perceive, to act, to take objects in its experiences as bearing significance for the animal, and so on). Some of those capacities are not shared with non-rational animals (the capacity to judge, to assert, to infer, to test conclusions with regard to experience, and so on).
Rational animals are not ghosts in machines because rational animals are animals of a certain kind, and animals are not machines. And we should prefer the rational animal over the ghost-in-the-machine conception of mind for the following reason. According to the Official Doctrine, a normal mature human being is metaphysically split, having a wholly physical component (one describable entirely in terms of basic physics) and a wholly spiritual component (one that has no spatial properties, though it has temporal properties, at least while embodied). And this makes it completely unintelligible — an utter mystery, something basically magical — how perception can furnish us with reasons for our beliefs, or how we can act on the basis of reasons.
The Official Doctrine, the ghost-in-the-machine conception of mind, makes perception and action completely incoherent notions — notions that we cannot make sense of, because they would require that causal interaction between two radically different kinds of substance,and that simply does not make sense. This was obvious to Descartes’s earliest critics, and every major modern philosopher — Locke, Berkeley, Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz — took a stab at avoiding the casual interaction problem. None of them — and certainly not Hume or Kant, who basically got rid of it by casting doubt on the entire enterprise of metaphysics — were able to solve it, because it just cannot be solved.
The correct alternative is to recognize that Descartes was wrong and Aristotle was right. We are not ghosts in machines; we are rational animals. The only thing left to do then is figure out how to make the Aristotelian conception of normal mature human beings consistent with a Darwinian explanation of speciation. That problem was pretty much solved by John Dewey and Wilfrid Sellars, and I hope to make some minor improvements to their solution over the next few years.
I’m not insisting any such thing; I’m pointing out that you only have physical, material interactions available by which to explain what “I” is, how it came to be, what it can do. Emergent properties are not magical under materialism; those properties are lawful and can be modeled deterministically or stochastically like any other physical regularity modeled under the science of physics.
Emergent properties are still just physics in action; they are caused events and have caused properties, caused by that which precedes and contextualizes it. Material interactions may cause emergent behaviors, but those behaviors are still caused. That some property is different (like wetness) when materials interact doesn’t mean that property wasn’t caused by the interaction.
Under Darwinism, even if thoughts and goals are emergent properties, they are caused. If there is a sense of “I”-ness, it is caused by the interaction of physical commodities. You have nowhere else to look under monism. Calling something an emergent property doesn’t change the fact that the property, and all aspects of it, are caused by something else.
Your “I”-ness is caused by something else. Your thoughts and goals, even if emergent properties of matter, are caused by material interactions, “governed” by regularities described by physics, even if unpredictable or indeterminate. Your choices and deliberateness are caused sensations and concepts.
If your particular interactions of matter “emerge” into the state of “I-ness” that includes being certain of theism, you will be certain of theism. The emergent property of “wetness”, and what materials will soak up or resist water, is not decided on by the I-ness of the water deciding what it will soak into or not; it is determined by physics. Matter under the influence of emergent properties are not magic – they do what the physics dictates. The position of water molecules in a turbulent system are determined by physics.
And so, your goals and your I-ness and your views are determined by matter interacting under the influence of physics, whether it is the physics of an emergent property or not. And so you have no foundation under which or means by which to assert that your goals are “your own” in any sense other than the shape of a volcanic rock, or the position and behavior of water molecules in turbulence are “their own”.
Your “I-ness” and your goals are produced by matter and physics. That’s all you have under material monism. Magical appeals to emergentism cannot change your “I” or your goals. The shape of you, and the shape of your goals, are equal to the shape of a rock.
Awesome. Can you summarise?
There’s not magic, Murray. Iness is a property of the configuration.
The problem is your defective notions of matter and physic.
If your concept of matter excludes the potential fir Iness, so much the worse for your concept.
Well, in principle, yes. It’s what I do, essentially.
Define “caused” in this context. It matters.
I don’t dispute this, but what I do dispute is that “caused” has a simple, single meaning. There are proximal causes and distal causes, and I see nothing incoherent in the idea of a volitional agent emerging from material configurations. I realise you find this idea incoherent, but equally, I find your “libertarian free will” concept incoherent. For me, in order for us to say that A willed B (as opposed to A merely caused B) we need to know that A was able to consider alternative course of action, weigh up the outcomes, and decide on the one that was mostly likely to achieve her goals.
Sure, A’s capacity to do this is caused by her material parts , but it is not her material parts that weigh up the alternatives, it is the whole. So it makes no sense to say: these chemicals, or this Big Bang, decided to help the blind child. The willing agent was the entity that assembled the information and enacted the decision. No “ghost in the machine” can do this without interacting with the material substrate – both to receive the relevant information, and to command the muscles to move. And if it does so, then that “ghost” is simply another way of describing the emergent capacity for willed action of the material entity. If it does not, then the action cannot be informed, and if it cannot be informed, it cannot be willed. A blind choice is no choice at all.
Yes. But that makes no difference to my case. Indeed it is precisely my case.
Physics “dictates” precisely nothing. Your language is misleading you. The only thing that can “dictate” is a dictator – some entity with the capacity to make an informed choice between options. “Physics” is not such an entity. It’s just a word we use to describe the laws that govern the material substrate. It is the configured entity that has decision-making properties, not the material bits and pieces, which are at the mercy of their configuration.
Yes, I have. Because as I have said, the referent for that word “I” is the emergent person from my material configuration. It is perfectly coherent. More than that – it is the onlycoherent referent that stands scrutiny. An immaterial ghost cannot receive or transmit information. If it could, it would not be immaterial!
It’s precisely not a “magical appeal”. It’s a rejection of magic. I do not think the “I” I refer to as “I” is a magic thing. I think it is a perfectly real, flesh-and-blood-and-neuron thing, capable of receiving information, filtering out what is relevant, figuring out what its options are, and picking the one best suited to its current goals.
I reject the notion that this job is actually done by a ghost. It’s not only an unnecessarily multiplication of entities, but by definition it can’t do what it says on its tin.
If one accepts that other human beings have ‘I-ness’, and it is implemented in the same way as one’s own (leaving the question of that implementation open), how about
a) chimps
b) mice
c) fish
d) wasps
e) octopuses?
On what basis can we divide the living world into entities that experience this state (whether or not ‘I’ resides somewhere other than the realm of material causation) and those that don’t? Or do we just save brain-cells and dichotomise: “people” and “everything else”. Or even “The Saved” and “everything else”?
Not that I need the help of your conscience just I wnat to know if your conscience tell you something and if yes wat kinds of thingd it says.
” I think it is a perfectly real, flesh-and-blood-and-neuron thing, capable of receiving information, filtering out what is relevant, figuring out what its options are, and picking the one best suited to its current goals.”
And make all that things because the physical laws make that things happen.
So which is the difference with a rock that is formed changed and destroyed by the same physical laws?
And returning to the argument of the post why do you experience “empaty”? Why is better if you are not selfish?
And I should say that I have some sympathy with William’s view point, which I essentially held until a few years ago. I was somewhat horrified when it dawned on me that it didn’t actually make sense.
Corrected for Darwinism:
Physics makes this system ouput that this material system is producing some neural-state sympathy for William’s computed output; which was the state of this system until a few years ago when whatever happenstance inputs and state-changes generated a sense of being horrified along with a different computational state.
You see, under Darwinism, both your old state and your new state are just two different states generated along with commensurate senses of “understanding” to go along with them. Your state may, for happenstance reasons, flip to an entirely different state for no more reason than that you happened to eat a bit of cold pizza one night and the cascade of cause and effect changes the state of your emergent-property “I-ness”.
No, your habit of not interpreting charitably and getting hung up on euphemisms and colloquial expressions, like “caused by chance” is derailing the discussion.
You seem to me not even to be attempting to see my point 🙁
Can you not try to rebut it, rather than keep lampooning a position I have explicitly eschewed?
Words matter. Sloppy wording can lead to very sloppy thinking. I’m always prepared to interpret charitably – charitableness isn’t the issue. It’s when no interpretation makes self-consistent sense that I try to pin down the definitions more tightly.
“Physics” doesn’t make my decisions for me. “Physics” isn’t a decision-making construct. So what is? Well, I’d say that the coherent decision-making entity is me, the organism Lizzie, not “Physics”. And the name I give to the decision-making entity you call “Lizzie” is “I”.
If you want to make a guess as to what Lizzie will decide, it’s no good asking “Physics”. It won’t tell you. Not in any sense. It is a completely useless level of analysis for addressing that question. However, you will be able to guess pretty easily by the simple expedient asking me what my thoughts are on the matter, and what information I am taking into account.
That’s because the coherent level of analysis when considering volition is the organism, not the “Physics” – the chemistry, the sub-atomic probabilities, or even the cells or neural networks. They are only parts of the system and you won’t get the answer unless you address the whole system.
Which is me.
This statement is only remotely coherent if one assumes materialism true AND that information – whatever it is – can only be “transmitted” in some material manner.
Says the ruler to itself – or, in this case, the computer to itself. The computed machine has checked its output by the same system that produced the output in the first place, and has found it “pefectly coherent”. I bet you said/thought that before – you know, when you were a theist.
Unfortunately, under Darwinism, “emergent property-ism” computes the output X with as much sensation of validity and understanding as it produces output Z, or 23, or chocolate, or p;ow[‘oedjieijf. There is no difference in principle between your claim of “perfect coherence” and the “perfect coherence” claimed by any street-corner “the end is near” preacher. You are just saying and feeling and experiencing what material interactions happen to produce in your case. You are not independent or objective; you are entirely a subjective product of happenstance interactions. So is everything you say, do, believe, and think.
You assertions of “perfect coherence” is the ruler claiming it has checked it’s markings against itself and found them to be accurate. So? From Darwinism, such an remark is insignificant.
If Darwinism is true, all that you are is just the happenstance shape of a rock spewed from a volcano, and all you think and say is nothing different than the sounds leaves make when the wind blows through them – the happenstance effects of physics.
There is no “you” other than the interaction of matter as described by models. You are nothing more than physics in action. It doesn’t make any decisions “for” you; it is you, and it is your decisions.
Nope. It only requires a definition of “materialism” that includes forces as “material”, which of course any sensible definition does. If your “ghost” is going to affect physical processes – move stuff around, it’s a force, so it’s material. If it isn’t, it doesn’t matter how loud it yells “Stooooppppp!” to the muscles that are about to pull the trigger, it will be powerless to do anything. In contrast, an organism, by virtue of its senses, is able to receive sensory input from the world around it, and have that data inform the output action.
This isn’t helping.
I have no idea what any of this means. For a start, what are “happenstance” interactions?
As I say, this isn’t helping.
Obviously not. As I’ve said, and surely you’ve read – there are vast differences between me and a rock spewed from a volcano, and those differences include the exquisitely tuned capacity to make informed decisions and act on them – not by “happenstance” (which means, according to a dictionary nearby, “by chance”) but in accordance with a selected goal. IDists are very fond of pointing out the difference between “happenstance” things and “designed” things, the “designed things” having features that a “happenstance” thing doesn’t have. Well, my output is the output of a “designed thing”, not the output of a “happenstance” thing. As presumably you can tell.
So why would that be any different “under Darwinism”?
No, there is no “me” other than “the interaction of matter”. There doesn’t have to be – that is quite enough for me. And “I” am not just any “interaction of matter”. I am the specific configuration of matter sitting here in front of this specific computer screen typing this particular post. I am not, for example, the “interaction of matter” that is you. And, as you say, the physics doesn’t make decisions “for” me – the configuration of matter that makes decisions is me, and the decisions are therefore mine, as you say.
And as I have been saying. I’m glad we now agree on what it is I am saying.
However, I am not sure what you mean by the part of your post I have bolded. We will never have a model that will describe a specific person. It’s a feature of non-linear systems (which we are) that no model can describe them that is not as big as the thing-itself. The best we will have are models that describe the general principles by which people make decisions, and the neural architecture that underpins those processes. And those models will always be very crude.
Fun, though.
There two important moves here. The first is about intelligence; the second is about normativity.
Dewey shows us how to naturalize intelligence, by thinking about intelligence as problem-solving. As an organism navigates its environment, it encounters problematic situations — a situation in which its habits don’t work. An unintelligent organism will (usually) die if it is not able to avoid problematic situations. But an intelligent organism is able to resolve problematic situations by developing new habits — that is, by learning. And even more intelligent organisms can communicate — they can share what they’ve learned. So this explains how non-rational animals can be clever, inquisitive, playful, resourceful, and so on.
The emergence of rationality is a different matter. Here the trick is to recognize, as Sellars and Brandom showed, that rationality consists in an ability to engage in a characteristic kind of activity: the activity of conforming to rules and not just habits. (Sellars again: “To say that man is a rational animal, is to say that man is a creature not of habits, but of rules. When God created Adam, he whispered in his ear, ‘In all contexts of action you will recognize rules, if only the rule to grope for rules to recognize. When you cease to recognize rules, you will walk on four feet’”.)
Following Brandom’s revision of Sellars, in light of considerations I’ll abstain from mentioning unless asked, the core notion is that of not (quite) that of a rule but rather of a social practice. A practice is a shared behavior governed by an implicit norm. (Though certain kinds of rational animals can also make the norms explicit — by representing them as rules — and thereby subject even those norms themselves to criticism and revision.)
So what is required to get from habits to practices? That’s the question I have not yet been able to answer. But it seems to me that a key part of the difference is that practices differ from habits in the following way: a practice is shared by virtue of how each participant represents him or herself as part of the community. Through such representations, his or her self-consciousness is partly mediated by group-consciousness (e.g. “We are Fox Tribe”).
It is not clear to me that primate social groups are structured this way; that looks more like a case in which there are habits that all the members of the group have, but the sharing of those habits doesn’t structure how the members understand their relation to the group. In a practice, it’s not just that there is an “I” and a “We,” but that each “I” understands itself in relation to the “We” as well as to each “You”.
Thus put, the key step in the transition from the habits of non-rational animals to the practices of rational animals — and so the emergence of rationality itself — would be the evolution of language. And while we don’t have a complete theory of the evolution of language, I think we know enough to say that this seems like a place where the intervention of a personal and loving deity is superfluous.
Oddly enough, Chomsky argued for a long time that language was irreducibly complex and could not have evolved incrementally.
KN, what seems oddly missing (or perhaps it’s there but I missed it) from your account is any reference to “forward modelling”, which is crucial to learning – the idea that we make a model of what we expect to happen, and get a squirt of dopamine when what we expect differs from what actually does (unless what actually does happen is the omission of what is expected, in which case we may get a dopamine dip! In other words, the learning signal is the error between expectation and data. Which of course require learning a rule (either explicitly or more often implicitly) so that violation of the rule is a noteworthy event.
I think the missing concept in general descriptions of learning is a description of the phase space and the subset that represents function or reinforcement.
Function must be within reach. Even with the added dimensions accessible to humans, the leap is restricted. We can stretch and leap, but cannot fly, and most of us are not MacGyver. We cannot invent magical things on the spur of the moment. We cannot do math that we have not learned, nor speak languages we have not previously learned. We learn incrementally.
What I find interesting about human and animal learning is the need for bridgeable islands of function. I don’t know who originated the island metaphor, but I like it. I think it helps understand why people experience blocks in school subjects. The needed step is just too far away in phase space.
Lizzie,
That’s a good point. I agree with everything you say there. Dewey, unfortunately, knew nothing about the neurophysiology of learning — he died in 1952 — but that’s no excuse for my ignorance.
Liz,
Yes, we’ve agreed that the same thing in principle has created both the shape of your views and the shape of the rock: whatever materials happened to be involved in interactions described by physics. The physics of the interacting materials can as easily result in false conclusions as true; in mad ramblings as easily as wisdom. The physics can make you bark like a dog and believe you have offered a valid scientific conclusion. The physics just produce what “I-ness” qualities they happen to produce, from Dahmer to Gandhi, from Einstein to a delusional madman.
This makes everything about your “I-ness” a manufactured computation of physics – just like the shape of a rock.
You’re assuming your conclusion here – that the reason matter behaves as it does (like, say in terms of the gravity model) is because gravity is a material phenomena. Can you point gravity out to me? No, all you can do is model how matter behaves and then call that behavior “gravity”. You might as well call it “the will of god” or “pink faeries” or magic.
Just because you call it a “force” and not “magic” or “the will of god” doesn’t make it any the more material. You have no idea why matter should behave the way it does or why it does, or what causes it to do so; you can only describe that behavior and model that behavior. A mental model of how matter behaves is not necessarily a material “force”.
For that matter (no pun intended), matter may not be matter at all, but rather just an observational illusion generated by interacting information/interpretation vectors.
in principle, even if they constrained their terminology. I don’t see how this props up dualism.
William J. Murray,
So you haven’t read “The Grand Design.” 😉
No, I’m not “assuming my conclusion”.
In fact, I’m picking my jaw off the floor, here.
What on earth do you mean by “material” if it doesn’t include forces?
A model is not a “force” at all. This is yet another example of sloppy language leading to apparently sloppy thinking.
Perhaps you mean that we can model phenomena in terms of mental causation (“I wrote this post”) as an alternative to physical causation (“Lizzie’s cells metabolised stored energy and activated her finger muscles to depress the keys of her computer), which is true. We can model phenomena at many levels, and this is exactly my point – that it makes much more sense to locate the causal agent of a willed act in an organism than in the parts of that organism, or in the stars that exploded to provide the elements of that organism, or the Big Bang in which matter coagulated to form stars.
Of course we don’t know “why” matters behaves as it does. What is interesting about it is that we can derive general rules that have extraordinary predictive power as to what it will do, at least at a fundamental level.
Which is a little like the joke about Shakespeare’s plays not being written by Shakespeare, but by another man living at the same time with the same name.
What do you think “materialists” think matter is?
In fact, I’m wondering what you think “materialists” think at all!
I think you need to unpack the phrase “a manufactured computation of physics”.
Blas,
I feel happier if I’m honest, both in the intellectual and in the more general sense. For the former, if I’m wrong about something I am honestly wrong. I don’t stick to a position for any reason other than I think it is factually correct. I’m not into useful fictions or politically expedient lies.
I’ve never killed anyone, but I’m sure I’d feel awful if I did. I feel bad if I realise I’ve hurt someone’s feelings. I find myself wanting to set a ‘good example’ to my kids – to be honest for them. Always squeaky clean In relationships? Mind your own business!
But yes, I have a conscience.
Here’s a story. I was driving to the East Coast (UK) with my wife and daughter. We stopped at a pub on the North York Moors for a meal. I went to the toilet and thought my wife was paying. She thought I’d gone in to pay. We drove on and thought no more about it until we discovered, accidentally, that neither had paid. I drove 20 miles out of my way to hand over the money to a very surprised waitress. I’d have done that even if no-one else had been involved. I didn’t do it to earn credits with anyone. But my daughter was there. That made it a no-brainer.
Nice story. Why did you that?
Matter: I do not think that word means what Murray thinks it means.
Blas,
Because I have a conscience. Are we going round in circles?