Ilion, a regular poster at Uncommon Descent, linked to an argument for God that he makes on his blog, here. I found it interesting because it was exactly the argument (though more succinctly expressed, I think) that kept me a theist for most of my life):
The reality of minds in a material world (thus, every human being who has ever existed) is proof that atheism is false. If atheism were indeed the truth about the nature of reality, then we would not — because we could not — exist. But we do exist. Therefore, atheism is not the truth about the nature of reality.
My position was that as every one of us (I assume) has the experience I have of being aware – being a mind – and thereby of being a unique self – there must be something unique to me, that inhabits me, that is not simply a material body, which, I assumed, could carry on perfectly well, zombie-fashion, were that essential self to go on vacation for a bit. Which made an after-life perfectly reasonable: (I knew my body would cease to function, but as my self seemed to be unarguably independent of the body it inhabited, there seemed no reason to assume that it would not continue to exist independently once that body ceased to function).In other words, the conceivability of Philosophical Zombies seemed to me to be a powerful argument: if a body can exist without a mind, then minds and bodies are somewhat independent, in which case it’s reasonable to postulate that a mind can exist without bodies. I wasn’t sure how much they could actually do of course, because it seemed that bodies have important information-gathering, decision-making, and executive functions, but I figured that the entity morally responsible for those the body’s actions (which would otherwise be merely mechanical outputs from a morally neutral, if complex, machine) must be this self thing, and must have some sort of control – at least emergency control – of the levers. And, if morally answerable beyond the grave, answerable to some comparable mega–self thing, the self of the entire universe, perhaps, the self whose body was the entire universe but whose mind pre-existed it (if you can use the suffix “pre-” in the absence of time), even transcended it, but kept it in being and was responsible, ultimately, for its actions, in an analogous fashion to me and my body. So there was my starter-pack God, which seemed to work pretty well in most theologies.
As I say, Ilion puts it more starkly, but in so doing so, I think, he exposes the flaw more clearly than I did to myself.
He goes on to say:
GIVEN the reality of the natural/physical/material world, IF atheism were indeed the truth about the nature of reality, THEN everything which exists and/or transpires must be wholely reducible, without remainder, to purely physical/material states and causes.
and adds, in an edit:
But, since there exist entities and events in the world which are not wholly reducible, without remainder, to purely physical/material states and causes, then it is seen that the denial that ‘God is’ is a false proposition.
So the proof that “God exists” depends on the existence of “entities and events in the world that are not wholly reducible, without remainder etc”.
And his paradigm case of such an entity is: “our minds and all the functions and capabilities of our minds — including reason”.
Ilion’s argument takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum:
Now, specifically with respect to reasoning, what inescapably follows from atheism is that it is impossible for anything existing in reality (that included us) to reason.
When an entity reasons, it chooses to move from one thought or concept to another based on (its understanding of) the content of the concepts and of the logical relationship between them.
But, IF atheism were indeed the truth about the nature of reality, THEN this movement from (what we call) thought to though (which activity or change-of-mental-state we call ‘reasoning’) *has* to be caused by, and must be wholely explicable in terms of, state-changes of matter. That is, it is not the content of, and logical relationship between, two thoughts which prompts a reasoning entity to move from the one thought to the other, but rather it is some change-of-state of some matter which determines that an entity “thinks” any particular “thought” when it does.
Now, I’m no philosopher, as will be obvious, so let me try to parse this in a way that makes it clearer, at least to me:
- Reasoning involves mental state-to-mental state transitions.
- Under atheism (or the position that everything is “wholely reducible, without remainder, to purely physical/material states and causes”), these mental state-to-mental state transitions must be triggered by the “change-of-state of some matter”, not the content of the thought itself.
- This is absurd because we would then have to say that reasoning has nothing to do with the content of the reasoning.
- Therefore atheism (or the position that everything is “wholely reducible, without remainder, to purely physical/material states and causes”) is false
Let’s stipulate that by “reducible to” we mean the postulation that if we start with a brain in physical State A, in which it is about to present itself with a problem, it will get to State B, in which it has just completed solving the problem, we can (assuming a deterministic universe, for ease of imagining, and no external inputs between State A and State B) reproduce that process simply by starting again with a brain in State A . In other words, we can “reduce” the reasoning process to a reproducible cascade of brain states in which each state automatically follows the previous one, until the final state (“State B”) spits out the answer.
So in what sense would “content” be missing from such a process? Let’s say we made a robot that could do this, in just the way we propose that brains do it – we set the starting state of the robotic brain in such a manner that it is just about to formulate our problem, and switch it on, so that after a few milliseconds it reaches State A, and outputs the words: “hmm, if I had five apples and I gave away 2 what would happen?” and then we wait until that state cascades through another series of states until the robot reaches State B and outputs the words: “I’d have three left”.
Now, clearly, State A and State B have <i>content</i> in a straightforward sense – we set the robot so that it will articulate a problem “with content” for us and we will later receive answers “with content”. So I have to assume that Ilion means that the cascade of states that the brain in question (whether robotic, or the brain as conceived by an “atheist”) undergoes cannot have “content” from the point of view of the entity-with-the-brain. If so, Ilion has, in effect, reposed the zombie argument as:
- If we subtract from a person all the things that a zombie/robot could do (e.g. a reasoning task), we are still left with something for which the results of reasoning have content i.e. a remainder. Therefore atheism (or at least reductionism) is false.
And presumable that remainder is the thing I call “I” or “me”. But is it really a remainder? To assume that, is to assume that the mechanics that enable an entity-with-a-brain to spit out the answer to a reasoning problem are inadequate to account for any experience a thing-with-the-brain has of posing the problem to itself and figuring out the solution, and we know that people, namely things-with-brains, to have this experience. In other words, it is to assume that those mechanics cannot explain why there is an “I” who can appreciate the content of a person’s reasoning, even when nobody else is there. To assume, in fact, that producing a self-conscious robot is impossible.
Which seems to me to be assuming the consequent, and is thus fallacious.
This is always a problem with reductio ad absurdum arguments, of course, which are, essentially, arguments from incredulity. It’s easy to miss a bit, and think you’ve exposed an absurdity, when all you’ve exposed is your own unchallenged premise, and rendered your syllogism circular.
But is Ilion’s conclusion nonetheless correct? Is there a “remainder” when you subtract from a person all the mechanics that result in the cascade of mental states that follow the presentation of a reasoning problem to the states in which she spits out the answer (at least to anyone who cares to listen)? Or can we postulate a cascade of physical states in which a thing-with-a-brain can pose a question to itself, work through a reasoning process and appreciate the answer?
Well, yes, I think we can. But maybe we can figure that out, below 🙂
I’m not sure where to begin with this. But I’ll try, anyway.
There’s a kind of mechanical conception of the world that is said to come from science. According to that mechanical idea, there are some fixed laws (often called “laws of nature”), and the world itself is the mechanical system that you get by virtue of everything following those mechanical laws.
I think I have always known that the mechanical conception was wrong. I think I already knew that in high school. I certainly knew it by the time that I was an undergraduate. However by now, as a result of my study of human cognition, I have a far better understanding of what is wrong with that mechanical conception. I won’t try to present my current understanding, because my experience is that I fail when I try.
I will comment on that mechanical conception. Firstly, we can ask where it comes from. And, as best I can tell, it comes from an ID (as in “intelligent design”) style of thinking that is deeply entrenched in philosophy, including philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. So my take on this is that what Ilion takes to be a logical implication of atheism, is actually a logical implication of ID assumptions.
To put this in perspective, while in high school and as an undergraduate, I was in an evangelical church and I considered myself a born again Christian at that time. However, I never allowed religion to influence my understanding of science. I did become interested in science at around 11 years of age, due to the influence of an elementary school teacher. I spent a lot of time in the local public library learning about science. Perhaps my early start to studying science is why I was able to take a view different from the usual mechanical conception.
Let me get back to Ilion’s perspective. He is pointing to what I consider to be a failure of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. As I see it, the failure is because they philosophers and cognitive scientists have attempted to impose a design model. We see this imposition most clearly in AI, which is roughly a study of “how can we intelligently design a cognitive system.”
My own study of cognition could roughly be described as this: suppose that I am a homunculus locked up inside a body and present in a strange world. How can I find out what kind of world it is that I am living in? I looked at it that way, because it seems to me that is about the situation for a newborn child.
Let me leave those background comments behind for the moment. You can raise it in other questions. As I see it, the mechanical conception does fail, as Ilion argues. But why we have that model, and why it fails, is because it is based on ID assumptions. So my tentative conclusion is that an intelligently designed system cannot have our kind of mind or our kind of consciousness. Only an evolved system can have that.
Now I’ll get to some of Elizabeth’s points.
That sounds rather analogous to “combustion involves the loss of phlogiston.” Maybe “mental states” are part of a rather inadequate theory of mind. For sure, they are very slippery things, in the sense that nobody is able to give a clear definition.
But why? And what does that have to do with atheism. Reductionism comes from the mechanical conception, particularly as seen by philosophers. When John Wilkins recently posted a defense of reductionism in his blog, I was tempted to comment “reductionism is the creation myth of philosophy.” I cannot find any basis for reductionism. Moreover, reductionism comes from philosophy, not from atheism.
I’ll stop there for now, and await requests for clarification.
Neil: “So my tentative conclusion is that an intelligently designed system cannot have our kind of mind or our kind of consciousness. Only an evolved system can have that.”
I see that assertion as being unsupportable for the same reasons as the ID assertion that the mind, is not an “emergent property” of the brain. I can see no reason why a man-made brain, with the same physical capabilities as our own could not be just as conscious.
If I have a few hundred billion gates/cells to play with, I cannot imagine any road-block to attaining the same functionality as a “living tissue processor”/human brain.
I might make a lot of mistakes programming it, but I can’t see any reason why it’s not doable.
There’s a rather fundamental assumption in Illion’s argument which really needs to be dragged out into the light for a good looking-at. How does “there ain’t no such thing as Mind” follow from “there ain’t no gods”? I don’t think the former does follow from the latter, myself, but Illion’s argument only works if it does…
I have my own opinion of Ilion but I will confine myself to comments about the arguments.
All I see here is the claim that the existence of self-aware minds in a material world necessarily means atheism is false but there is no argument or evidence to show that the existence of a deity is logically entailed by the existence of minds.
Again, even if everything which exists is entirely reducible to material causes it does not necessarily follow that God does not exist. There is nothing in that claim which precludes an all-powerful deity from creating a self-contained, self-sustaining Universe which includes beings with minds.
There exist entities and events in the world which are not explicable by us as yet in terms of “purely physical/material states and causes”. That is not the same as saying they are not materially caused. They may or may not but for the present the best we can say is that we do not know.
Ilion’s conclusion may or may not be true but it does not follow from an unsubstantiated claim for the existence of an immaterial mind. Perhaps there is an immaterial residue of ‘self’ once all the physical substance has been subtracted but we have no evidence that the mind or consciousness or self or whatever else you want to call it is able to exist apart from a physical substrate. Quite the opposite, in fact, since what we observe is that damage to – or destruction of – the physical brain coincides with alteration or loss of mental capabilities or their complete and apparently irreversible cessation.
As I read it, Ilion has made two leaps of faith. Firstly, from our observations of our conscious minds to the belief that they are partly or wholly immaterial and, secondly, to the existence of a God and thus the falsity of atheism. But he has yet to provide evidence or arguments which are able to bridge the two gaps.
I don’t see the mind as an emergent property of the brain. Identity theory “mental states are brain states” seems to me to be obvious nonsense. If a brain could be sustained in a vat, I would not expect there to be any associated mind emerging.
A man made brain, if at all like our brains, would soon change itself in ways such that it could no longer be consider a man made brain.
We obviously have a very different views of the brain. I don’t consider the brain to be a “living tissue processor.” I see the “brain is a computer” metaphor as seriously misleading.
Neil: “If a brain could be sustained in a vat, I would not expect there to be any associated mind emerging.”
Why? There’s nothing preventing that from happening.
Neil: “A man made brain, if at all like our brains, would soon change itself in ways such that it could no longer be consider a man made brain.”
But that’s fine with me. If I constructed a brain that became as conscious as yours, I would have no problem with that. The fact would still remain that I made it.
Neil:” I see the “brain is a computer” metaphor as seriously misleading.”
But that’s what the brain does, it computes and nothing else. The fact that we “feel” or think we do, doesn’t chage the fact the brain has made millions of tiny little decisions that led to that feeling.
What is missing from this process that leads you to believe something else may be involved?
You say that as if it were a known fact. It isn’t. Rather, it is a widely held hypothesis (i.e. a guess).
I’ll grant that I am disagreeing with the majority opinion.
Neil Rickert,
Neil,
For a long time, I’ve tried to find out what is required to allow me to say, “I”. Is it simply the physical workings of our brains or are we logged into a giant stellar “internet” that provides us with what is lacking in simple brain activity.
I don’t see anything outside of ourselves that could help lead me to that feeling of “I”.
What else do you believe is required?
Toronto,
There’s a world that we interact with.
The brain in a vat does not have a world to interact with. A computer interacts with symbols, not with a world.
Dr. Liddle, the so called ‘apology’ from barry arrington is a ruse. The only reasons he wants you to keep posting on UD is because there has been more traffic there (more ad revenue) since you started commenting and because he and the other IDiots want someone there that they can ridicule, insult, and accuse of being a liar. Your participation there is like walking right into a trap. Remember, arrington is the one who posted several articles just to put you down.
Look at ilion’s responses. The accusations and insults toward you will continue, including from arrington. What kind of message are you sending when you allow yourself to be treated like that? When will you stop being UD’s doormat?
Isn’t this just a God of the Gaps argument? “We don’t know what minds are, therefore God”?
There’s clearly something interesting and different happening with human (and maybe other entity) consciousness, and I see no conflict with “materialism” or “atheism” that we can’t explain it yet.
To me, it sounds a lot like a claim that could have been made prior to any understanding of gravity:
In a draft version of the post, I did consider that second question – if there is a “remainder”, does that mean “therefore God”? Obviously, it doesn’t, but for me, it meant that God was perfectly possible, in the sense that if minds are essentially non-material, but interact with matter, then why can’t a God do the same? Why can’t the universe have a Mind?
So when I saw (or thought I saw) how matter could create mind, then I no longer entertained the idea that mind could create matter 🙂
I don’t know what kind of message is being received, obviously, but the one I send is simple: I take people’s words at their face value, because I find that communication works a whole lot better that way 🙂
Sometimes the system fails, but it more often fails when you make the opposite assumption, at least in my experience.
The whole truth,
I think you are being unfair to Lizzie, in that I see no hint of her modifying her comments to accommodate the denizens of UD. I am sure she would not tolerate any restriction as to what she should post there for an instant. Sure, I was equally sceptical (what’s this with the K,s,) that Lizzie could achieve anything in the face of UD moderation but Barry Arrington seems to have decided that the old secret moderation policy was counter-productive. With Lizzie being given free rein, it seems to have been a tactical error for UD. And a hugely enjoyable one! 🙂
PS to the whole truth:
Also your
is unfair to UD readers. I doubt even the most ardent genuine pro-IDer can fail to notice the quality of comments from the likes of Ilion, mung, upright biped etc. A few of the more thoughtful (oxymoron, if you like) ID proponents have not been commenting lately. Gpuccio and Paul Giem come to mind. Maybe they are embarrassed or disenchanted. Either would be good though I suppose it would be better if they said so.
Its amazing that simple protons, electrons and neutrons can be a cat, a car, a star, you and Château d’Yquem.
But they are. That’s emergence for you (Hi, Illion!), as is this:
Neil Rickert,
Request for clarification incoming 🙂
Can you be just a bit more specific on what parts you want clarified.
Neil Rickert,
I’ve got to disagree with you here. The brain does not interact with the world EXCEPT through a set of symbols generated by our sensory nerves and interpreted by the brain.
Our brain, in that respect, is exactly like the CPU of a computer. The CPU does log onto the internet, the CPU just takes two strings out of a memory block and compares them or adds or subtracts them. That’s pretty much it. Everything else is interpretation of those processes to make it easier for us to understand.
In the same way, the brain just compares nerve impulses and memory blocks. It then sends a signal to muscles or glands or whatever it has learned is an appropriate response to those nerve impulses (whether local learning or evolutionary learning).
I’m no philosopher either, so maybe I’m one of those reductionists that llion is talking about. But I fail to see anything that is not the result of material interaction.
To convince me that there is some ‘thing’ beyond what is material… that is the “I” that is me is something more than emergent behavior of a highly complex network of cells that has simple rules… one would have to deal with the following:
1) The fact that behavior can be altered through chemical or physical changes in the physical brain. Further, that changes to specific regions of the human brain have similar effects in all humans.
2) The fact the religious ‘experiences’ have the same effect on the brain as drug induced experiences. Further, that religious experiences can be induced by both altering the chemistry of the brain and by specific physical processes (i.e. rituals).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20388013
Since it is has been demonstrated that drugs, low blood flow to the head (by standing during a religious event or concert for that matter), and other similar processes result in user described ‘religious experiences’, I can’t see how anyone can separate the causes of such events.
This isn’t just a minor question either. As far as I’m aware, no one has been able to conclusively demonstrate that any religious experience was the specific result of an outside entity (and even if it was, they can’t actually say that the outside entity is God, Satan, Zeus, aliens, or Amanda Tapping). Without that kind of evidence and with the provision of the biochemical and physical changes to the brain already mentioned, simplicity suggests that the physical brain really is all there is and the ‘I’ is just emergent behavior of that complex brain.
Personally, I’m OK with that. As usual, reality is much more fascinating than fantasy. And besides, it’s much more plausible that it is drugs that have convinced Rick Perry to run for president than God.
I can’t believe that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage didn’t put http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind) and “my brain is a mind radio” to bed. People with brain trauma change. They don’t get ‘interrupted signal’ from their brain radio. They are diminished in that regard, sadly. If the mind existed *elsewhere*, then damage to the brain wouldn’t create the spectrum of outcomes that it does.
Neil Rickert,
I think this is key. That’s why robots are a much better model than computers.
The thing about brains is what we data we receive is hugely influential on what data we receive next. At its simplest – if something “attracts our attention” – perhaps a movement in peripheral vision – we look at it. Or, at least, we can. Brains are data-seekers in a way that a PC isn’t, or scarcely.
Let’s cut to the chase. What I would like to know – and what should be researched – is why do some smart people believe in stupid ideas, i.e. there actually exists a god or gods?
The whole religion concept might have made some sort of sense when we were still living in caves, but any honest examination certainly reveals that there is no proof of any magic sky father/leprechaun/Intelligent designer!
J-Dog,
Since the effect of religion is similar to drugs, I suspect A) addiction and B) feeling good.
There’s also a large element of socialization (at least as long as you are in the correct clique of the local religion).
Falling back on definitions is a lame debating tactic but I have to wonder what we’re talking about when we discuss the mind.
Many of the cognitive faculties that I (in my amateurish way) identify with the mind – such as self-awareness, the ability to recognise and use symbols, abstract reasoning etc, are found in varying degrees in other mammals and in some cases birds. That alone tends to make me suspicious of claims that the human mind has unique attributes that could not have arisen through natural processes. I tends to suspect that we have the benefit of a more developed congnitive and processing abilities, not supernaturally endowed ones.
But that’s just my ill-informed and no doubt prejudiced view. Please continue the discussion, it’s very interesting.
PS Thank you for opening and running this blog, Lizzie. I’m looking forward to visiting it more in future.
J-Dog: have a read of Pascal Boyer’s book Religion Explained (how’s that for a humble sort of a title!).
His thesis is that the human tendency towards religious beliefs and supernatural explanations can be explained as a by-product of instincts we developed for other purposes. It’s been criticised by plenty of scientists but it’s interesting to see how he derives the argument and links it to empirical evidence.
Well, this part, I guess:
Amadan – Thanks – and this is kinda cool, like running into a guy from work at the grocery store. Come on mate – I’ll buy you a Guinness.. we’ll sort it all out 🙂
ps: Lizzie – You too!
It’s a long story. Perhaps I should sometime start a new topic on it.
I participated in the usenet group comp.ai.philosophy for a number of years. At that time, David Chalmers (then a grad student at Indiana U.), Marvin Minsky and several other well known people would post there. We had some pretty good discussions.
It seemed pretty clear, at least to me, that Chalmers “hard problem” was based on his looking at things from an AI perspective. And that is an ID perspective, in that the AI people want to intelligently design an artificial person. It is rather obvious to AI people, that the type of computational model they were designing would give you a zombie. Some thought that consciousness might emerge if they got enough of it working. Others were not so sure. As best I can tell, Dennett’s “Intentional Stance” is based on the view that intentionality doesn’t really exist, but is merely an attribution. Many AI people take that view of intentionality as attribution, because the AI perspective provides no explanation of intentionality or of consciousness.
My own attempts to understand cognition (or, really, to understand human learning) were from the opposite viewpoint. I started by asking “how could the ability to learn have evolved, and what exactly would have evolved?” I finished up with a view of cognition that is very different from that of most AI people and very different from that of philosophy of mind. From my way of looking at it, there is no zombie problem, there is no intentionality problem and there is no free will problem. It seems to me that those problems arise from the way that AI and philosophy of mind look at cognition, and I have already suggested that is a designer’s way of looking at it.
The upside is that I have a pretty good idea of how it all works. The downside is that I seem incapable of explaining it to people who have a background in AI and philosophy of mind.
That at least partly addresses why I suggested that it is ID thinking that has failed. But I have probably raised more questions than I have answered. I’ll stop here for now, and we can see where this leads.
J-Dog asks:
Let’s cut to the chase. What I would like to know – and what should be researched – is why do some smart people believe in stupid ideas, i.e. there actually exists a god or gods?
Hi J-Dog,
I think it’s because critical thinking is an acquired skill, and an unnatural one to boot. Many otherwise smart people never learn to think critically. They have ample mental horsepower, but lacking critical thinking skills, they apply it in an undisciplined and ineffective way.
I remember reading about a study a few years ago that found a correlation between higher education and paranormal beliefs. Someone (I think it was Michael Shermer) suggested that because smart people are good at rationalization, they are ironically better equipped to defend (and cling to) their own bogus and irrational beliefs.
If I could change only one thing about American public education, it would be to increase the emphasis on teaching critical thinking skills, starting at an early age.
keiths,
Exactly. In education the Three R’s should be four: reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic and reasoning.
You seem to have noticed how rare the evolutionary way of thinking really is. That’s my problem too. Sometimes it seems that people have only changed “God” into “nature” or even “evolution”. What you call AI/ID perspective I’ve used to call engineering – it smells more of production and, consequently, of reduction. I think that the biggest barrier to understand our biological brain is our logical mind.
I’d be interested in your viewpoint of “how it all works”.
My general view is that evolved beings have separated from their environment. All their constituents come from the environment including the information which define their relation to the environment. That’s all, we don’t need any remainders from elsewhere.
Another thing is, if we speak especially of human brains, that gradual evolution has produced several different structural and functional layers. No single logic or explanation is enough to explain the whole system. That’s the problem of philosophy of mind and .. hmm… engineering. There still exists both hard and easy problems.
Congratulations on your blog! It’s great that you finally decided to do something like this.
Seversky,
And spelling. But that would mess everything up.
Neil: I started by asking “how could the ability to learn have evolved, and what exactly would have evolved?”
I believe the key to learning is curiousity.
A tiny little kitten sees a spider for the first time, approaches it and with great care, starts to sniff it, then walk around it, and then maybe a quick feint to see how it responds.
So, why are we, and other life forms curious?
It seems to be a built-in behaviour, as is fear, and appears in every life form very early. The fear and curiousity seem to be instinctive and internal, while everything new that is learned, comes from the environment.
That’s why I believe that if you duplicated a brain in a vat, that built-in curiousity and fear would be there, but no pathway to the external environment would exist.
Once you provided that, the brain in the vat would act like our own, whether biological or man-made.
But what is curiosity? For example, how would you program a computer robot so that it exhibits curiosity?
But how does the kitten even see the spider? Don’t we have to solve that first?
You already take for granted both curiosity and seeing.
I tried to start out by not taking anything for granted. I have tried to find ways of accounting for all of what is usually taken for granted. And when I try to account for those, I find that I have accounted for far more than just what is taken for granted.
It seems impossible to explain this in detail. If I try to give a detailed account of what people take for granted, they see me as not saying anything at all (because they are already taking it for granted).
It isn’t particularly hard to think that way. But it is contrary to the kind of thinking that comes from the culture.
Yes, that indeed is the problem.
Descartes gave us dualism. According to that view, there is a material substance and physical things are made from that. And then there is an immaterial substance (thinking stuff), and thoughts are made of this thinking stuff.
So now, look at epistemology, which is central to philosophy. They define knowledge in terms of beliefs. And beliefs are presumably made of thinking stuff (the immaterial substance). So we have the entire discipline of philosophy built out of the immaterial substance of Cartesian dualism. Most philosophers say that they reject dualism. But they cling to their own use of immaterial substance. Some of them come up with identity theory (mental states are identical to brain states). But they haven’t a clue as to how to connect mental states to brain states. In effect, they are sticking to their immaterial substance, but simply asserting that it is actually material.
It is no wonder that many scientists have no use for philosophy. AI is an attempt to mechanize epistemology, with the AI people coming up with their own way of connecting the mental to the physical. Based on their achievements, it looks like a failure to me.
I’ll see if I can start a new topic on that over the next few days.
I mentioned that I started with learning. I took learning to be physical change of an organism that enhanced its performance. That at least avoids the trap of dualistic thinking.
A Recipe For Curiousity:
1) Take a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS.
2) Create peer-level Task1 to find known food.
3) Create peer-level Task2 to avoid the unknown .
4) Create peer-level Task3 to arbitrate/bias the results, and therefore run-time behaviour of Task1 and Task2.
That’s very simplistic but I think it would exhibit behaviour that appears as if the life-form/robot is curious.
I don’t see how that follows from your statement. If mental states are identical to brain states, which seems to make sense to me, then there is no need to “connect” mental states to brain states — they are one and the same. Nothing immaterial needed. Am I missing your point?
Yes, you are missing the point.
Suppose somebody had told Thomas Edison that luminous states were identical to electrical excitation states. Do you think that would have helped him design the incandescent light bulb?
As I see it, saying that mental states are identical to brain states is just identifying two pieces of useless gobbledygook.
I’ll give you what I think would be a better way.
Think of an auto-focussing camera. One way to build an auto-focussing camera would be to build in lots of AI, so that it could recognize say, a tree, in the image and recognize how well focussed that is. However, as far as I know, auto-focussing is far simpler – it simply attempts to maximize the contrast of the image with no AI abilities at all.
My tentative suggestion for curiosity, is that it is a psychological drive to maximize the contrast (or amount of detail) available to us as we attempt to perceive the world.
But if a brain remains in “brain-state X”, the mental state will also remain in whatever state it is in, until such time as the brain-state changes.
If you believe that the mental-state can change despite the fact that the brain-state has not, just what is responsible for thought?
We would have a “mind” that continues to think without regard to the workings of the “brain”.
I don’t see that as a possiblility
I think what you have described is the “effect” or even “added-value”, or “advantage” that curiosity gives us, but it is not a way of describing the “process” of curiousity.
If the brain is what gives rise to “mind”, then it is the processes going on in the brain that makes someone watching say, “My little boy is curious to know where worms go at night, so he follows them!”
It is that process and others I think, that you seem unable to accept as being solely the result of the workings of the brain.
I am saying that “brain state” and “mental state” have no actual meaning. They are words that we can use so as to sound sophisticated while talking nonsense.
You want to use curiosity to explain learning, and thus implicitly to explain knowledge. However, your “definition” of curiosity contained a reference to “find known food” and to “avoid the unknown.” So you explain curiosity in terms of knowledge and knowledge in terms of curiosity. That seems circular.
I don’t have a problem with circularity, as long as there is a way to enter the circle from outside. I was trying to give an account of “curiosity” that does not depend on presuppositions about knowledge.
The term state on its own has a meaning. It the case of a computer, it is a term that can be used to describe the current state of every transistor in the device. All on-board memory and registers will be in a particular arrangement of conducting or non-conducting transistors.
On the next clock cycle, the computer will be in a different explicit state.
If I stop the computer, and then store the on-off value of every transistor, I can restore the computer to this exact state every time.
If I do could do the same thing to a brain, you would be in the same mental state each time. If you believe this is not the case, what do you think causes mental activity if it is not the on-going changing state of the brain?
It is not nonsense to try and determine means by which things work. This includes the processes of our brains, which are not exempt from exploration.
Notice that I am not talking about “programs” at all, I am talking about mechanisms. In other words, what is the “process” of thinking.
Why do you require something more than the brain?
I would like to know what is missing.
Agreed. And, in a way, that makes my point.
With the computer we have a systematic way of identifying the states of interest.
With the brain, we have no systematic way of identifying states. Two identical twins have substantial differences in their brain structures, so that we cannot even find a meaningful way of comparing brain states between identical twins.
We could fall back on physical states. But every breath swaps out some oxygen atoms to be replaced by others.
So I say that talk of brain states is meaningless.
The point isn’t one of HOW to determine the physical state of the brain as much as saying that, IF it is in a certain state, that state, whatever it might be and whatever way we try to describe it, determines our mental-state, in other words all the thoughts in our brain, whether conscious or not.
What I’m trying to get you to explain is what you think is missing. Why are our physical brains not the cause of our mental state at any time?
I’m not suggesting that we don’t react to the external world, but rather that nothing else but our brains, with their aquired knowledge, is required for our mental processes, feelings, fears and ultimately, consciousness.
We have techniques for measuring brain states, though. They are objective, not gobbledygook.
Demonstrating the equivalence of brain states with mental states eliminates dualism as a viable alternative. That’s valuable.
The point isn’t HOW we determine the configuration of elves dancing on your head, as much as saying that IF those elves are dancing in a particular configuration that determines your mental state and your thoughts.
The same thing as is missing in that elf theory.
We don’t have a systematic way of identifying mental states. Talk of mental states and talk of brain states is no more useful that talk of dancing configurations of elves.
When people are thinking, they tense muscles, they move limbs. Thinking does not seem to be a purely internal brain activity.
Only at a very crude level.