I’m starting a new thread to discuss what I call “the hard problem of intentionality”: what is intentionality, and to what extent can intentionality be reconciled with “naturalism” (however narrowly or loosely construed)?
Here’s my most recent attempt to address these issues:
McDowell writes:
Consider this passage from Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 41: “Dualism, the idea that the brain cannot be a thinking thing so a thinking thing cannot be a brain, is tempting for a variety of reasons, but we must resist temptation . . . Somehow the brain must be the mind”. But a brain cannot be a thinking thing (it is, as Dennett himself remarks, just a syntactic engine). Dualism resides not in the perfectly correct thought that a brain is not a thinking thing, but in postulating some thing immaterial to be the thinking thing that the brain is not, instead of realizing that the thinking thing is the rational animal. Dennett can be comfortable with the thought that the brain must be the mind, in combination with his own awareness that the brain is just a syntactic engine, only because he thinks that in the sense in which the brain is not really a thinking thing, nothing is: the status of possessor of intentional states is conferred by adoption of the intentional stance towards it, and that is no more correct for animals than for brains, or indeed thermostats. But this is a gratuitous addition to the real insight embodied in the invocation of the intentional stance. Rational animals genuinely are “semantic engines”. (“Naturalism in Philosophy of Mind,” 2004)
Elsewhere McDowell has implied that non-rational animals are also semantic engines, and I think this is a view he ought to endorse more forthrightly and boldly than he has. But brains are, of course, syntactic engines.
So it seems quite clear to me that one of the following has to be the case:
(1) neurocomputational processes (‘syntax’) are necessary and sufficient for intentional content (‘semantics’) [Churchland];
(2) intentional content is a convenient fiction for re-describing what can also be described as neurocomputational processes [Dennett] (in which case there really aren’t minds at all; here one could easily push on Dennett’s views to motivate eliminativism);
(3) neurocomputational processes are necessary but not sufficient for intentional content; the brain is merely a syntactic engine, whereas the rational animal is a semantic engine; the rational animal, and not the brain, is the thinking thing; the brain of a rational animal is not the rational animal, since it is a part of the whole and not the whole [McDowell].
I find myself strongly attracted to all three views, actually, but I think that (3) is slightly preferable to (1) and (2). My worry with (1) is that I don’t find Churchland’s response to Searle entirely persuasive (even though I find Searle’s own views completely unhelpful). Is syntax necessary and sufficient for semantics? Searle takes it for granted that this is obviously and intuitively false. In response, Churchland says, “maybe it’s true! we’ll have to see how the cognitive neuroscience turns out — maybe it’s our intuition that’s false!”. Well, sure. But unless I’m missing something really important, we’re not yet at a point in our understanding of the brain where we can understand how semantics emerges from syntax.
My objection to (2) is quite different — I think that the concept of intentionality plays far too central a role in our ordinary self-understanding for us to throw it under the bus as a mere convenient fiction. Of course, our ordinary self-understanding is hardly sacrosanct; we will have to revise it in the future in light of new scientific discoveries, just as we have in the past. But there is a limit to how much revision is conceivable, because if we jettison the very concept of rational agency, we will lose our grip on our ability to understand what science itself is and why it is worth doing. Our ability to do science at all, and to make sense of what we are doing when we do science, presupposes the notion of rational agency, hence intentionality, and abandoning that concept due to modern science would effectively mean that science has shown that we do not know what science is. That would be a fascinating step in the evolution of consciousness, but I’m not sure it’s one I’m prepared to take.
So that leaves (3), or something like it, as the contender: we must on the one hand, retain the mere sanity that we (and other animals) are semantic engines, bearers of intentional content; on the other hand, we accept that our brains are syntactic engines, running parallel neurocomputational processes. This entails that the mind is not the brain after all, but also that rejecting mind-brain identity offers no succor to dualism.
Neil Rickert’s response is here, followed by Petrushka’s here.
Do you mean that hurricanes, tornados and supernovae are matter not following the physical law and acting as agents?
No, not God, science. Science showed that matter tendo the state of less energy and maximum entropy. Nothing more. Unless you can show me otherwise.
I do not care to personal attacks.
That argument has been put forth to argue that life is impossible.
How does entropy make thought impossible? Let’s see the math.
Unless I’m very much mistaken, even the Second Law of Thermodynamics is just a constraint on what physical systems can and cannot do — it doesn’t tell us what physical systems will and won’t do.
The deeper problem with Blas’s conception of “matter” — and I think this is a problem widespread amongst “anti-materialists” — is that it isn’t grounded in a 20th (and 21st) understanding of physics and chemistry. It is, rather, a 17th-century conception of “matter”.
There are two principle influences. (1) the hule of Aristotle, which evolved into the prima materia of the Scholastics (under pressure to revise Aristotelian metaphysics in light of Scripture) and then taken up by Descartes in his concept of res extensa or ‘extended substance’; (2) the concept of the atom, derived from Epicureanism and taken up in “the corpuscularian hypothesis” of Gassendi, Hobbes, Boyle, and Locke.
What these conceptions have in common — for all their differences — is a conception of matter as essentially passive or inert. If this is one’s conception of matter, then it follows that all activity — motion, causal efficacy or power, vitality, and so on — must have a source other than in matter alone. (Whether God as the source of movement for the physical universe, or the soul for moving the human body and generating its own internal representations of the world.)
In contrast, the conception of ‘matter’ that we find in the 19th century onwards conceives of matter itself as essentially active; nothing is needed to push or pull protons and electrons into activity, because they are themselves essentially active and reactive. (This is why the interconvertability of matter and energy was so revolutionary — because we had thought of matter as essentially passive and energy as essentially active.) With Ilya Prigogine’s work in far-from-equilibrium chemical systems and Stuart Kauffman’s work in work-energy cycles and autocatalytic sets, I think it’s fair to say that the 17th-century conception of matter as inert or passive has been left behind by empirical discoveries.
Contemporary philosophical naturalism has many serious problems, but accounting for how immaterial activity interacts with material passivity is not one of them.
No. That would be a bad argument as life exists. May be the argument was that life do not follow the physical laws. And that is still debatable. Biochemistry ahowed us that life do not violate physic-chemical laws. But still, there is no evidence that life is only biochemistry. Still have to solve OOL, and consciusness.
Neil:
petrushka:
Neil, petrushka,
You’re both being hopelessly pedantic. Everyone (including you) knows that when we say a proton follows the laws of physics, we are not saying that it consults the rules and then decides what to do, or that violators are prosecuted.
“Following the laws of physics” is a metaphor, and a useful one. Like all metaphors, it has limitations.
Yes it does, any physical system will go to the lower energy higher entropy state. It will do not do other different thing. Heat will dissipate, gases will expand.
Can you give some examples of “active” matter?
Number 4 taken to the limit is what I would mean by an envatted brain experiencing a virtual world. No headsets or masks; instead direct connection between the brain’s input/output and the
demoncomputer.Of course, it is just a thought experiment, so to speak.
I am not being pedantic. Blas is attempting to limit the behavior of matter based on outmoded concepts of what matter is.
It is his concept of the laws of nature that needs correcting.
keiths:
Neil:
The electrical operations themselves are syntactic, not semantic, because they do not depend on the meanings assigned to the signals by the computer’s designers. The operations unfold mechanically according to the laws of physics.
Kantian Naturalist:
But you still must be able to appeal to some standard/process/? for distinguish good inferences from bad ones, right?
That’s helpful for me to understand why you often lose me. I have no real understanding of philosophy from a first person perspective and so would always start from the third person in trying to explain, eg, how inferences can be good.
Please, try to explain what matter is and the new concept of physical laws.
petrushka,
It’s his concept of what the laws of nature imply that needs correcting, not the idea that nature follows laws.
A virtual world then is one where the “true” signals from the “real” world” are changed by “fake” signals from the inside of your brain. Is that correct?
However, a syntax engine necessarily is following rules.
You make my case.
Neil,
Hardly. A syntactic engine follows rules in the same sense that a proton does. Not by consulting a rulebook and planning its actions accordingly, but by its very nature.
No, they are neither syntactic nor semantic.
The computer designers do not assign meanings to signals. They assign meanings to categories. And categories are cognitive abstractions.
I’m still not clear, though, on why you think that measurement and categorization cannot be modeled computationally. Is that not what some machine learning techniques do?
But even if you don’t think perception can be modeled computationally, once it produced data, is that data not used by the brain to do computations? Or at least, can that aspect of the brain not be modeled that way?
Of course, the punch line is that if (some aspects) of the brain can be modeled computationally, how would those computations implemented on a different platform differ in capability from what a brain contributes to intentionality (even though that contribution is incomplete in both cases and would need to be extended by interaction with a world).
Neil:
Only if you insist on an unduly restrictive definition of “syntactic”. As philosophers use the term, it is perfectly applicable. Here is Daniel Dennett:
Neil:
As a computer designer, I can assure you that you are mistaken. We routinely assign meanings to signals. (In fact, one of the most annoying things when debugging is when the name of a signal doesn’t match its meaning.)
Signals are signals.
True or false applies to the content of propositions.
The truth content of a given proposition referring to the real world expressed by a brain which was covertly envatted and linked to a virtual world, having grown up in the real world (which you are allowing me to assume exists), would change after it is envatted. Or at least that is what a content externalist would say, and that makes sense to me.
Nature does what it does. When we observe regularities we make formal statements describing the regularities. Nature does not follow our descriptions, and so far, our descriptions have proved to have limited scopes.
I am not disagreeing strongly with Keiths, but I am trying to make the point that laws are not what nature follows. I don’t know what nature follows.
I think nature has regularities and that we can find useful regularities. But we cannot say what nature can or cannot do. In particular, it makes no sense to say that matter cannot do something when we observe it doing just that every day.
Let’s look at Blas’ syllogism.
People think and feel.
Matter cannot think or feel.
Therefore, people are not made of matter.
(At least the part of people that thinks and feels.)
Now I don’t know of anything (nothing in my experience) that thinks and feels that does not have the appearance of being made of matter. I would reason this way:
People are made of matter.
People can think and feel
Therefore, matter can think and feel.
Now I could be wrong, but I think to demonstrate that I am wrong, you would have to demonstrate that there is some thinking and feeling part of people that is not made of matter. (I cannot help but call this a variation on vitalism.)
To argue that there is a non-material part of people because matter cannot think and feel is to assume your conclusion.
I hope you understand that this
and this
Are sophisms.
The correct sillogisms should be:
For naturalists
Matter cannot think or feel.
People are made only of matter
Therefore human think or feel is an illusion(metaphor?)
For theists
People think and feel.
Matter cannot think or feel.
Therefore, people are not made ONLY of matter.
Then, I do not understand what is a “virtual” world for you. Do us, brains not envatted know virtual worlds?
Blas,
Naturalists do believe that matter can think and feel when arranged properly.
To measure you need to undertand the concept of size and the concept of compare. To categorize you need to understand what define a category. All that task are madeby a machine if an agent “teached” how to perform that tasks-
We still do not know how the brain store the perceptions. There is no a satisfactory model for the memory. So you do not have the hard disk of your computer. Until now the brain is very big network of activating loops.
They can be modeled computationally. However the computational model is artificial.
We have many mathematicians and many computer programs. How many of them modeled the hanging chads from the 2000 election?
It is conceivable, but it seems unlikely.
Of course an accountant does computation with data, and uses the brain. But it seems more reasonable to say that the whole person is doing that computation, than to say that some brain circuit is doing it.
I’m looking at principles, which tend to be platform-independent.
I keep pointing to the role of categorization. As I see it, categorization is a process applied to reality that generates symbols.
For reasons that I fail to understand, almost everybody seems to think that intentionality is to be explained by abstract computations that are disconnected from reality. They want to avoid looking at the possibility that the categorization, the skillful production of symbols from parts of reality, might be involved.
Yes, off course everything at last is a matter of faith.
The stereotypical example of syntactic activity involves dealing with words and sentences. Using “syntactic” for arbitrary signals does not actually contribute to understanding the issues involved in cognition.
I am disagreeing with Dennett. Is that not allowed?
I’m retired. I don’t have to build up a resumé. I can concentrate on what might actually work to explain cognition. Dennett does a lot of busy work around the edges, but he does not get to the core of the problem. Perhaps he cannot. Perhaps he is too bound by thousands of years of philosophy.
It depends on what you mean by “signals”. It is common practice to name signals based on their source. But then you are not really naming signals. You are naming a category of signals, where the source is what characterizes that category.
keiths:
Blas:
Naturalists have the evidence on their side. See this thread, for example.
There’s a lot more where that came from.
Blas:
Prove your premise.
Easier still, demonstrate that it is possible to think or feel without matter.
In our case, it is evolution and fetal and early childhood development that does the teaching. I suspect you won’t agree with that but I am going to leave it there.
Agreed. But that does not imply we can never know. My further point is that the paradigm of brain/mind as computational is the only fruitful basis we have for scientific research, and, further, the only way to reject that paradigm is through such scientific research.
Science, not metaphysics, is how we learn about the the real world. I understand from previous exchanges that you reject this worldview. That is up to you and not something we could discuss.
Off topic: As I’ve said before, I admire your energy for basically taking on all comers in this thread. You must find the time worthwhile, although I am not sure why. Do you expect to change anybody’s mind? Or do you just do it for the fun of the exchanges (basically to my purpose).
Neil:
Sure, but like most words, “syntactic” has more than one meaning.
In your opinion. People familiar with the issues find it quite useful. What would you suggest in its place? Why should philosophers stop using a term they find useful?
Of course it’s allowed. What are your reasons for disagreeing?
Or perhaps you are bound by your own prejudices.
That’s why, in these debates, it is customary to present an actual argument, as opposed to simply labeling your opponent as a hidebound busy-worker who doesn’t get to the core of the problem.
keiths:
Neil:
No. Signals can be named based on their sources, or their destinations, or their functions. At my company, the preferred practice is a combination of all three.
Do you think it’s possible that an actual, practicing computer designer might know more about how computer signals are named than a retired mathematician and computer scientist?
I can´t prove that something do not happen,you have to prove it that happens.
Who said that it is posible. You always makes the arguments backward.
Proving that to think you need a functiona brain do not change the problem.
I’m not questioning how they are named. I am questioning what is named.
Take an old analog record. The track on that record is a signal. We can name it. But when you name by the source or destination or function, it isn’t the actual signal that is being named. Rather, it is a category of signals that can be characterized in the same way.
Well, saying that a process of trying and error like evolution will solve the
chicken and egg problem like the concept statement is illusory.
That is your metaphysical election and I has nothing to say. Only point that all the metaphysical elections maybe are equivalent except in his consequences.
It is your life.
I just want to keep trained and updated in this kine of discussions.
It happens because humans — physical objects — think and feel.
Edit:
Unless you are a vitalist and think there is some vital principle required.
Neil:
Consider a signal. If I give it a unique name X, then I have named the signal. It doesn’t matter whether X refers to the source of the signal, its destination, its function, or my friend’s father’s favorite soap opera character. I have named the actual signal.
I am not sure if that “almost everybody” was meant to include me, but to be clear, I don’t think intentionality can be explained solely by the functioning of an isolated brain.
But I do think that what the brain does is a vital part of the explanation of the intentionality of people (or any organism with a brain).
I think a computational model of the brain is by far the most fruitful for scientific research. I also think that only that scientific research will be able to determine whether the model is an accurate description of what the brain does.
Beside that pragmatic reason for a computational model for the brain’s role, I think it is also possible to argue from first principles that the neurobiological processes in the brain are a form of generic computation, eg see
Neural Computation and the Computational Theory of Cognition
I don’t downplay this, but I also think this aspect of perception could be modeled computationally.
On a related topic, I’ve now completed Coursera’s 8-week, whirlwind tour of functional analysis. I was looking back at your previous post on facts as human artifacts and trying to understand the mathematical references of your model of measuring and categorizing. I now have better, though hardly deep, understanding the mathematical terms you used (eg Banach spaces, dual spaces, topologies related to spaces of continuous functions), but that has not helped me much in seeing how the mathematics helps to model the brain. If you ever felt inclined to post on this on your blog (I assume it is too specialized for this forum), I’d find it interesting reading .
Blas,
The evidence presented in that thread doesn’t merely show that you need a functional brain in order to think. It shows that the immaterial soul, as conceived of by most believers, does not exist.
I recommend reading the OP and the comments.
I would prefer to say the vital principle or soul adds nothing to our understanding. If it adds nothing, we can say it is an unnecessary construct.
petrushka,
The immaterial soul as conceived of by most believers isn’t merely “an unnecessary construct”. It actually clashes with the split-brain evidence.
I think you’ll find that evidence or the lack thereof is not a problem for Blas and company. Matter can only do those things he allows it to. He wins because he says so.
Blas actually showed up in that thread and admitted that dualism “has some problems” explaining the split-brain evidence.
Perhaps he’ll tell us why he remains a dualist despite those problems.
Keith
I think your trolling accusation against Jeff Shallitt was unwarranted. I think what constitutes trolling is pretty subjective (I’m tempted to definition troll for a meaning of ‘troll’ 😉 ) I don’t want to make a big deal of it and would rather let it pass but suggest any discussion about issues such as rules, tone etc. be continued in the moderation thread.
You can´t explain how physical objects can think.
Yes? You have evidence that something that not exists? Are you in the list for the Nobel?
Win? Win what? Be right or wrong? Is that important to you? It is just a matter of models. right or wrong doesn´t exist. True if exist we cannot know it. So, Who wins? Are you confortable with your model. So do I.
Blas.
there are lots of thing I can’t explain. Not being able to explain stuff is why we do research.
But you assert a need for a non material soul because matter can’t think.
And you assert matter can’t think because…
Well just because you say so.
Configuration is important. Matter can’t lift itself against gravity, unless it’s in the form of a bird or insect or bat.
Alan,
We’ve moved on, and the discussion has proceeded quite nicely despite leaving Shallit’s questions unanswered, which kind of proves my point. 🙂