The scientific evidence for immaterial mind defeats materialism – claims Dr. Egnor, a neurosurgeon affiliated with the Discovery Institute… Not so quickly – says Dr. Faizal Ali, a psychiatrist affiliated with CAMH and University of Toronto, who describes himself as an anti-creationist and a militant atheist. He believes that neural networks can be responsible for the emergence of the human mind, naturally…
Let’s look at their evidence…
“I often ask people who insist their mind is immaterial to put their money where their mouths are, by scooping out their brain and pulverizing it in a food processor, then continuing our discussion with their mental faculties still intact, as they should be if they were correct. No one has ever taken me up on this.”
Dr. Egnor does the scooping of the brains often by surgically removing the great majority of the brain… If Dr. Ali’s neural networks theory is correct, how come the mind is often not effected by the majority of the neural networks missing after surgery? This evidence would seem to support Dr. Egnor’s theory that the mind is immaterial and therefore unaffected by the majority of the brain tissue missing…
However, just like Dr. Ali seems to imply, not the whole brain can be discarded. Moreover, it is a well known fact, and both neurosurgeons and psychiatrists are well aware of the fact, that even a small damage to certain parts of the brain can shut down the entire neural networks and the immaterial mind…
So, who is right? Who is wrong?
Material lawyers.
But why would someone take care to avoid damaging healthy tissue, if the true mind is immaterial?
And why would brains need more than the sensory and motor areas, if the part that thinks and wills is immaterial? Why are human brains larger than cats’ brains? Cats see better and are more agile.
And why do dolphins and elephants need large brains?
But not necessarily so careful to avoid collateral intellectual damage when making arguments on the Internet.
phoodoo?
I have a very hard time accepting this premise in Egnor’s argument. What does it mean to comprehend, or imagine something, and how it is possible to comprehend something you can’t imagine? I can’t think of something off the top of my head.
phoodoo,
You’re looking for an excuse not to answer my question — because you can’t.
But notice that I didn’t even mention the paper in my question:
Nor in this one:
petrushka,
Egnor accepts that the brain has a role in things like sensory processing and concrete thinking. He just thinks there’s something above and beyond the brain that comes into play when we think abstractly. (And of course he completely sidesteps the question of how the brain interacts with this immaterial thing.)
His position is a mess, but he’s not being inconsistent when he strives to avoid damage to healthy brain tissues during surgery.
ETA: I’m still laughing about J-Mac’s statement in the OP:
Rumraket,
He’s really talking about the difference between conceiving of something versus accurately visualizing it. He uses the example of a 1000-sided regular polygon. The concept is simple, but accurately visualizing it is difficult.
Ah, this is easy — I know this part of Egnor’s view because I teach this stuff all the time.
To see his point, first consider that imagining literally means constructing a mental image. (Notice that this point doesn’t apply to people with aphantasia.) To imagine a double rainbow or a jazz solo is to construct a mental image in one’s visual or auditory consciousness.
Now, consider the difference between a chiliagon and a myriagon. (Descartes uses this example in the 6th Meditation but I wouldn’t be surprised if the example is much older). We know that the chiliagon has a thousand sides and the myriagon has a hundred sides.
But when you construct the mental images, can you really sure that they are different? Can you really be sure that one of them has ten times the number of sides than the other? Or do just imagine “a polygon with a lot of sides but I’m not sure how many there are in the thing I’ve imagined.” And how could you be sure? Could you imagine the polygon and count its sides one by one as you hold it steady in your imagination?
Yet despite not being sure if one has correctly imagined the polygons and their differences, one can be sure that one adequately and completely understands the conceptual difference between a hundred-sided polygon and a thousand-sided polygon.
This example, Descartes and others have argued, shows that understanding is a mental activity distinct from imagination.
To this Egnor adds that one can understand concepts such as justice, beauty, equality, fairness, goodness, etc. even without being able to imagine them. We cannot construct a mental image of what justice looks like though we can comprehend what justice is. (Or so the story goes.) So what we grasp, intellectually, is not a concrete particular thing — some particular act of justice, performed at such-and-such a time and place — but rather the concept of justice itself, which is an abstract universal.
Then there’s some additional argument for why no biological computer could be aware of abstract universals, so our awareness of abstract universals requires some mental capacity that goes beyond any biological computer — hence, an immaterial mind.
Bear in mind here that Egnor is happy to insist that biological computation is sufficient to account for awareness of concrete particulars — he’s happy to allow that non-human animals can perceive, imagine, remember, learn through trial and error, even infer — but always and only with regard to concrete particulars.
Consider it this way: my cats know where their food is, and when they are hungry they can intentionally move their bodies to the place where they are always fed and deliberately produce the vocalizations that elicit the dispersal of food from the resident primate. But they do not know what it is for something to be food — they cannot define “food” — they cannot reason as to whether better or worse ways of eating are integral to the best kind of life for a cat to live, etc. They cannot deliberate, reason together, about what the best kind of life for a cat might be like or how to pursue it.
What Egnor wants to say here is that we have mental abilities that cats lack because the mental life of a cat is confined to concrete particulars and we can be aware of abstract universals. And therefore we have something — an intellect — that can’t be explained entirely in terms of biological computation, whereas the mental life of a non-human animal can be. And that therefore our intellect is immaterial and can survive the death of the body and brain.
Interestingly, even if Egnor were entirely right about all of this, it still wouldn’t show that there is personal immortality. If the argument for immateriality applies only to the capacity to grasp or be aware of abstract universals, then it is only the intellect that survives the death of the brain. But then memories and personality do not. So while there could be a kind of immortality, given Egnor’s premises, none them establish that there is anything unique to an individual which persists after the death of that person’s brain.
Which could well be true. But how does he get from that to concluding that these differences are immaterial, and not due to the rather large and obvious physical differences between our brains? As other have pointed out: Why do our brains have all this stuff that no other organism has, if these cognitive differences are “immaterial”? Is he making or alluding to some argument I have overlooked?
Faizal Ali:
It’s all in this passage:
His reasoning is atrocious, but it boils down to this:
1. Types are abstract; tokens are concrete.
2. Abstract things are immaterial.
3. Therefore, by #1 and #2, types are immaterial.
4. Thoughts about immaterial things must themselves be immaterial.
5. Immaterial thoughts cannot be produced by material things.
6. We have thoughts about abstract types, which are immaterial (by #3).
7. Those thoughts must be immaterial (by #4).
8. Those thoughts must be produced by something immaterial (by #5).
9. Therefore, our minds are partially immaterial.
The reasoning is terrible, but that’s Egnor.
phoodoo,
You’re still falling into the trap of circular reasoning. Without realizing it, you assume that dualism is true, and then you conclude that dualism is true:
You keep thinking of the self as something that is separate from the physics and being dragged along by it. That is a dualist assumption.
QED
Of course it is the position of the materialist, if they are making any sense at all.
Its like if you said, “The earth is made up entirely of blue cheese.” Then someone said, “Oh, so the geologists are wrong, its not made out of dirt and rock and has a molten metal core….” and you responded, “No, that’s not my position, I am just saying it is made up entirely of only blue cheese.”
You don’t understand the implications of your position. You want materialism but also not materialism.
keiths,
You have got this so wrong keiths. Its is the materialist who is assuming dualism is true for no reason other than they have no explanation for their position. Of course I think there is a difference between the physics and the self, but since you think it is the same, you can’t claim the physics makes decisions about the physics. Its makes no sense.
That’s why your position has a problem, and the solution for you is..”Well, the physics just chooses chocolate.” Which is the same as saying you believe the Earth is made up only of blue cheese, but not only blue cheese.
I would say the two positions are coextensive with each other.
This sounds counter intuitive to many, but if everything is determined (perhaps stochastically), and you have a ‘spiritual world’ that determines the physical world, then there is not a big difference between the two. And if you really look at materialism, it is really just determinism dressed up with physicalist language.
And, of course, a deterministic reality is incompatible with libertarian free will, even if you add randomness to the deterministic reality to make it a stochastic process.
That’s why I would say as long as everyone is a staunch determinist, there is no real fundamental difference between your neighborhood materialist, Calvinist, neo-Platonist or Muslim (all deterministic ideologies in this broad definition by one stripe or another).
Which also makes the interesting conclusion that the strict dividing line between spirit and the physical is libertarian free will. With the further implication that if one loses their free will, then they lose their spirit. This is why Dante’s hell is populated by automatons who have lost the ability to know and choose truth.
EricMH:
That’s like saying there is “no real fundamental difference” between different types of theists, since they all share a belief in God(s). Theists share theism and determinists share determinism, but that hardly means that there are no fundamental differences among the members of each group.
Libertarian free will can’t be the “strict dividing line” since Calvinists and Muslims accept the spiritual but deny LFW.
ETA: Also, identifying the spiritual with LFW is a losing proposition, because LFW is incoherent even if dualism is true.
phoodoo,
I’m a physical system. I consider the alternatives and I choose chocolate because I like it better than vanilla.
What’s the problem? I certainly don’t have to assume dualism to make sense of this.
phoodoo,
I’ve noticed that you are avoiding my questions:
If the will is immaterial, why does it vanish when certain kinds of brain damage occur?
If the will is immaterial, then why is moral decision making affected by certain types of brain damage?
Animal cognition work contradicts this: animals have concepts, even abstract ones like sameness and difference.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognition-animal/#Conc
Also. cognitivist linguistics claims that basic abstraction depends on embodiment.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/#MetCog
So with regard to concepts including abstractions, there are multiple strands of empirical work pointing to continuity between the minds of humans and of other animals. Human languages can give us unique capabilities, but these are based on characteristics we share with animals.
On a lighter note, a fun article on Friston, Markov blankets, and religion:
Free Energy, the Brain, and Religion
I think this is meant to be funny, although I am not 100% certain of that…
keiths,
i don’t buy that conclsuion at all, but even if I did, I could just answer with the same silliness as your answer-It just does, just is, just chooses, because that’shttp://theskepticalzone.com/wp/algorithmic-specified-complexity-in-the-game-of-life-revisited/#comment- the way it is.
Utter nonsense.
BruceS,
if the physical system is a state of being, and each state matches each outcome exactly, then if you choose chococlate you can only choose chocolate, because only one state can match with one choice-one state can’t match with two choices, that makes no sense at all.
So since there is only one choice the state can make, you can’t call the other things alternatives, because you can only be in one state at one time.
No alternatives means no choice. You just got killed by your own definition.
So, how do we escape this conundrum? It seems you are satisfied with pointing out that other people are robots without explaining what the alternative way of thinking is.
In this regard you are remarkably like WJM.
What alternatives do you have that I do not? Are you not designed? Are you not following the designers will? It seems to me you are more constrained then I, as I am constrained by mere physics and you are constrained by an an old testament mandman.
Your first sentence refutes your second.
One of the characteristics of a losing hypothesis is that emerging facts eat away at it.
The assertion that only humans can think abstractly is eroded by any number of facts about animals.
One that we take for granted is recognition of individuals: mates, mothers, caretakers, friends, enemies. If you think this is just “concrete” thinking, try programming this ability.
Birds make tool. Not merely using found objects. They shape the objects to the task.
Crows have been observed dropping nuts so that the shells are broken by passing cars.
The major problem with Egnor’s position is it ignores the continuum of abilities.
And it ignores the steady progress being made in machine learning.
What does Egnor make of false or incomplete abstractions?
Prejudice, superstition, conceptual errors, over-generalizations, approximations?
Are they Platonic?
The history of science is full of grand formulas, like Newton’s Laws, that have very precise and even useful forms, but turn out to be less than complete descriptions of reality.
Or Euclidean geometry.
How are these ideals ideal?
You are stuck in the same machine metaphor that thinkers like Newton were trapped with. Only whereas people such as him saw reality as a giant clockwork mechanism you bring it up to date with your use of computer language. Reality is conceived in terms of human inventions.
The way you put things above it seems as though you believe we are made to act by inputs from without. Do you see any of your impulses to action coming from within yourself? I would agree that most of our actions are determined by external causes. But we do have the potential and the ability to act from within our own being.
You talk about human nature as something that can express itself in various ways depending on the circumstances. From this I have gone on to contemplate animal nature in comparison. An animal’s nature is not so easily changed. Human nature is more individualised. We all have a very wide spectrum of individual natures. Animal nature, on the other hand, is more in line with the nature of the species to which it belongs. Take a walk among a pride of lions and try to persuade one of them to hold its breath or to get a tattoo and see what happens.
It is in our nature to act as individuals whereas it is in an animal’s nature to act as a member of a species. This is an expectation of the evolution of consciousness. And this could not be achieved without the feeling of separation that physical life gives us. The feeling that we are separate individuals, separate egos.
Prove it.
I choose to act motivated by feeling. I perceive an occurrence and am motivated to act or not depending on feelings such as pity, rage and suchlike.
Do you deny that you have an “I”, a sense of self? Why look behind it for something else when you have it as a direct experience.
Humans are always poking around to see what’s behind the curtain.
I experience my own “I”, but I infer yours.
And my cat’s.
What is to prevent me, or a descendant, from inferring I-ness in a computer?
By which, you mean, causes that are not directly visible to others, or even to ourselves. This house is built on sand.
A philosophical blind spot that insists that only de lard can infuse souls into things? A while ago I got FMM to say that no matter how hard a computer program pleaded for itself not to be deleted he’d delete it anyway because computers can’t have souls by definition. No matter what it said or how intelligent it seemed. Deleted.
We all extrapolate.
I question the current state of progress toward AI, but I do not question the direction, or the possibility of AI.
The problem i see with the no soul argument is that I doubt we will ever be confronted with the sudden appearance of Star Trek androids.
AI will creep in millimeter by millimeter.
If we are smart and lucky, we will never create anything that demands rights. But I am not optimistic.
I don’t need to try to prove anything, but I can give specific examples of this difference between us and other animals.
Do you think that your cat has the same sense of self as you do?
If we act out of nothing but love for the deed then we do have an extreme sense of the cause of why we act.
Congrats. I can give them between various humans.
But yes, on average. human beings are smarter than blobfish. Let’s plan a parade!
If motivations or feelings are causes, then the question remains, do we freely choose our feelings? What would that even mean?
I’m thinking the people who invented the concept of predestination must have given this some thought.
I’ve nothing to add to my posts in Keith’s List thread (unless I forgot to mention Ismael’s book “How Physics Makes Us Free” there, in which case consider that added).
Keith did not agree with my take. So maybe this is one case where you and Keith agree?
Then again, who am I kidding?
I suspect Egnor would point to this old Penn paper (Darwin’s Mistake) in support of his claim that non-human animals can only judge similarity and difference with regard to perceptual features and not more abstract categories such as functional role.
However, I am very much persuaded by “The Mismeasure of Ape Social Cognition” that we tend to downplay how intelligent apes are because they don’t do well at tests that are designed for humans.
I was persuaded immediately upon reading The Body in the Mind back in the late 1990s but I have no idea what a Thomist might say in response!
In terms of the science, that’s clearly right. What would be needed philosophically is just an argument that all of the cognitive differences between humans and non-human animals that so deeply impress Egnor (and also have long impressed lots of philosophers: Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, etc.) are just the result of having acquired a language.
If our ability to think abstractly is the result of having acquired a language, then Egnor is basically forced into conjecturing that the evolution of language in hominid evolution required that an immaterial intellect was supernaturally grafted onto a biological computer. (As a Catholic he probably believes that anyway but it would be nice to see the commitment made explicit.)
On a lighter note, a fun article on Friston, Markov blankets, and religion:
Free Energy, the Brain, and Religion
I think this is meant to be funny, although I am not 100% certain of that…
Interesting though my very limited understanding of the free energy principle makes me suspicious of any attempt to apply it to organizational levels above that of individual organisms. A cell or brain may be self-evidencing in Friston’s sense but I don’t see how a society could be. Societies aren’t organizationally closed and thermodynamically open in the way that cells and organisms are. Then again it might have been an attempt at humor.
I don’t know what it would mean to freely choose our feelings, but we can act in ways that modify our own motivations, if acting on those motivations is destructive to our health or relationships. That’s what good therapy does. But it takes time, effort, and collaboration — it’s not a mere fiat.
Yes, I believe I mentioned that upstream. We can learn to delay gratification and to act in anticipation of future rewards. We can also act for the benefit of others, to our own discomfort.
However, these are not unmotivated, or even actions against interest.
Interests can be in conflict. Humans do have a trait that does not exist in other animals, or is less developed. We have culture. We pass on knowledge about how the world works through language. That complicates our motives, but does not change the fact that we have motives.
Maybe I am hanging out in the wrong places, but a lot of the philosophy I see seems to be concerned with whether or not concepts require language, not with how language enhances conceptualization abilities, already found in other animals or in children.
But here is a fun paper that does address the question.
How language programs the mind (preprint)
Of course, I have done a lot of computer programming, so my idea of a “fun paper” may differ from the norm.
I agree that that extension of FEP seems ill founded. I think the blog post I linked was meant to be humorous, but the work it refers to is not.
Nice point.
Bruce,
Alex the parrot even had a concept akin to zero:
That’s good. And how does that compare with intra-species differences in animals? What is interesting about humans is the way they behave as individuals, what is interesting about animals is the behaviour of the species. For example we might find it interesting to study and compare two people, one a hermit and the other who enjoys socialising with their friends. We could also study and compare lions and tigers, the former a social animal and the latter generally preferring to lead a solitary life. That is not to say there are no individual differences between animals of the same species, it is just that on first encounter with a species it is the species level behaviour that is of interest.
This is worth thinking about more closely. Being able to get ones energy directly from sunlight is pretty smart and plant have been able to do this for millions of years. Vespid wasps are very smart when it comes to paper making and beavers are excellent damn builders. Animals have an innate wisdom that modern humans have lost. Go to a random house where there are resident mice, take one human occupant and one mouse and dump them both in the wilderness and observe which of them fairs better.
This is just a thought exercise, I’m not advocating actually kidnapping a stranger 🙂
Animals have this built in wisdom instinctively. Humans, on the other hand, have reached the stage where we have been left more to our own devices, having to take more personal responsibility for our further development.
Here Stephen Farah, gives some advice, quoting Steiner:
Going the other direction empirically, there are humans who lack all but the most basic of number concepts
https://www.sapiens.org/language/anumeric-people/
But Egnor and his intellectual cohorts prefer arguing from the armchair to recognizing how these scientifically based ideas bear on their claims.
Egnor, like EricMH, is at heart a philosophical rationalist: he thinks we can understand the nature of the world (including us) through armchair arguments, possibly expressed in obscure mathematics.
ETA: But I do find the math underlying Eric’s arguments to be fascinating, even while denying its applications to biology. I just learned of Solomonoff Induction; here is a paper I ‘ve added to my reading list:
A Philosophical Treatise of Universal Induction
i would not say that feelings are causes. We see a disaster on the news and we may feel pity for the victims but we do not always act on this feeling. For us to act thinking has to be involved. We think of a way in which we can help and we choose to act on that thought.
Anyone who agrees with the quote from my post above will not believe that our lives are predestined to follow a specific trajectory. We have a potential which may or may not be realised.
A thistle seed has the potential to form a new plant but it may not achieve that potential. It may end up becoming food for an entirely different life form. In which case it could be said that it has sacrificed its life for the development of life in general. Its journey through life is not predestined.
As Steiner sacrificed any quest for real knowledge to influence cult members instead.
Pretty, but….you can’t actually tell that from the fact that some thistles have kiddies, some get eaten and some get stuck in my foot. You’re mixing up the the individual and the species there. Whether or not one or the other is “predestined” for this or that is not an empirical matter that can be determined by looking around and noticing there’s a thistle on your porch step. In fact, it can’t be determined at all. That’s why theists like to talk about it.