Folks who believe in an immaterial soul (also known as ‘substance dualists’) face a daunting challenge. Why, if our mental and emotional functions are carried out by the immaterial soul, are they so completely affected by changes to the physical brain?
A common dualist response to this challenge is what I call the ‘brain as radio receiver’ model. In this model, the brain is something like a radio receiver, with the soul as the transmitter. The brain is constantly picking up signals from the soul and converting them into nervous impulses that are passed on to the rest of the brain and the body. When the brain is damaged or temporarily impaired, say by drinking, then the signals are no longer received clearly. The transmission isn’t affected, but the reception is.
This is a woefully inadequate model, for reasons that I’m sure we’ll discuss thoroughly in the comments. However, it’s understandable why someone who wants the soul to exist (particularly for religious reasons) would be attracted to it. What’s surprising is that David Eagleman, a neuroscientist who should know better, sees value in the model. At the end of his book Incognito, he writes the following:
As an example, I’ll mention what I’ll call the “radio theory” of brains. Imagine that you are a Kalahari Bushman and that you stumble upon a transistor radio in the sand. You might pick it up, twiddle the knobs, and suddenly, to your surprise, hear voices streaming out of this strange little box. If you’re curious and scientifically minded, you might try to understand what is going on. You might pry off the back cover to discover a little nest of wires. Now let’s say you begin a careful, scientific study of what causes the voices. You notice that each time you pull out the green wire, the voices stop. When you put the wire back on its contact, the voices begin again. The same goes for the red wire. Yanking out the black wire causes the voices to get garbled, and removing the yellow wire reduces the volume to a whisper. You step carefully through all the combinations, and you come to a clear conclusion: the voices depend entirely on the integrity of the circuitry. Change the circuitry and you damage the voices.
Proud of your new discoveries, you devote your life to developing a science of the way in which certain configurations of wires create the existence of magical voices. At some point, a young person asks you how some simple loops of electrical signals can engender music and conversations, and you admit that you don’t know — but you insist that your science is about to crack that problem at any moment.
Your conclusions are limited by the fact that you know absolutely nothing about radio waves and, more generally, electromagnetic radiation. The fact that there are structures in distant cities called radio towers — which send signals by perturbing invisible waves that travel at the speed of light — is so foreign to you that you could not even dream it up. You can’t taste radio waves, you can’t see them, you can’t smell them, and you don’t yet have any pressing reason to be creative enough to fantasize about them. And if you did dream of invisible radio waves that carry voices, who could you convince of your hypothesis? You have no technology to demonstrate the existence of the waves, and everyone justifiably points out that the onus is on you to convince them.
So you would become a radio materialist. You would conclude that somehow the right configuration of wires engenders classical music and intelligent conversation. You would not realize that you’re missing an enormous piece of the puzzle.
I’m not asserting that the brain is like a radio — that is, that we’re receptacles picking up signals from elsewhere, and that our neural circuitry needs to be in place to do so — but I am pointing out that it could be true. There is nothing in our current science that rules this out.
Eagleman is wrong about that. The ‘brain as radio receiver’ model isn’t scientifically viable. In the comments, let’s discuss all the reasons why. Any intrepid dualists who would like to defend the model are also welcome to participate, of course.
To get out in front of this, I think that the radio example is decent but ultimately superficial and materialist-oriented. I think there are things that have to be considered ahead of any significant discussion/debate on the matter.
1) What is mind? What is soul? Are the two two different things? Perhaps mind is more than just “one thing”, but rather something much larger and more complex that the term “mind” initially promotes – especially to a .
2) What is personality, and where does it arise? How much personality is located in the mind/particular body relationship? What is the soul/mind/personality/body relationship? For example, in dreaming, my dream avatar can have an entirely different personality than I have, different memories, different reaction sets – yet, one can say that I am “beaming” all the information into the dream. During the course of the dream, I can change avatars and personalities. How is that possible, if all the information animating the avatars is coming from – ostensibly – one personality/mind – me?
3) The concept of a mind “beaming” information into the brain is, IMO, an extremely primitive conceptualization of dualism that sets up an easy argument for materialists. It paints the picture that there is a “you” somewhere else that is fully alert and holding a microphone telling some robot version of you to do and say things, and that when the robot malfunctions there is a frustrated, conscious “you” on the other end trying to get his/her messages and instructions through. Does any dualist really think that is the case? I doubt it.
4. What is physical reality to a dualist? As far as I know, most major religions/spiritualities consider the physical world a temporary world, or an illusion (maya) of some sort. Others consider it more of a product of mind than vice-versa. In order to make any significant arguments about dualism, brain and mind, one must first take into account the dualist’s view of the physical world. How can one make an argument about such things without first laying the groundwork for what the “brain” is?
If you’re going to argue against a dualist view, whether or not your argument means anything depends on the kind of dualism you are arguing against, and how that dualist frames the mind/soul/personality/body relationship.
Edit to include: TL;DR: I think the “brain as radio” analogy has far too many shortcomings, as keiths puts it, to make for a significant dualism debate in the first place.
My reading of the end of that book, taking into account the surrounding context which I briefly reviewed, is that Eagleman is not arguing for dualism at all. In particular, he does not put forward the radio model in an attempt to say the radio model itself might be right.
In the immediately preceding parts of the book, he emphasizes how much the physical brain affects the mind by looking at effects of physical injury and drug effects use.
He then goes on to discount a completely reductionist approach to explaining the mind and instead argues that we will need multiple levels of description to understand all aspects of the human mind and human experience.
In the ending, I understand that he wants to raise what he sees as an open question with the multiple levels approach: even if everyone agrees multiple levels are needed in practice, are the also needed in principle? Or is mind reducible to current physics in principle?
I take the radio example as his way of explaining that the answer MIGHT be no, the human mind is might NOT be reducible to CURRENT physics in principle. In the same way that having no understanding of EM radiation meant that one could never understand how a radio works, it could be that we are lacking some new laws/forces/fields of physics which will be needed to provide an explanation of the mind in terms of physics, even in principle. The radio story is an analogy to show his readers, (and the book is intended for a popular audience, of course), that this could be true.
On the other hand, Sean Carrol argues that we understand enough physics of how the everyday world works to make it a very good bet that current physics could explain the mind in principle, if not in practice.
Whether that is true and how one might argue against Carroll’s point of view are interesting questions, I think, but I suspect I have moved well off the topic that Keith would like to discuss.
I have not read Eagleman’s book, so I am taking that quote out of context.
Reading that quote, it comes across to me as if intended to illustrate the limitations of the methods currently being used in neuroscience.
A point of curiosity. In this post, keiths seems to be saying that the radio model can be refuted. Yet elsewhere, he has asserted that Berkeley’s idealism cannot be refuted. Those two views seem contradictory.
I don’t see the point in refuting dualism, because I haven’t seen a description of dualism that makes any sense.
By that, I mean, a description of what the immaterial part of the the mind does.
There is that, and I think this connects with what I see as the most serious shortcoming of dualism, which I talked about here:
The dualist who thinks of us rational animals as metaphysically split, with a purely immaterial mind and a purely physical body, must think of perception and action as causal interactions between these two metaphysically distinct kinds of being. Perception is the causal impact of the body (in particular, the causal impacts of photons and molecules on our sensory receptors) on the mind (consciousness and mental content), and action is the causal impact of the mind (volition and intention) on the body (bodily movements). But how can two things so radically distinct from each other have any causal interaction between them at all?
Without an account of the detailed causal processes that instantiate the interaction between mind and body, dualism runs the risk of making perception and action completely unintelligible, for the following reasons.
If there’s no solution to the causal interaction problem — if we’re basically in Locke’s position, epistemologically, with regard to dualism (e.g. “I don’t understand how minds and bodies causally interact, but clearly they do!”), then we are completely unable to understand the nature of perception and action. Once the person is metaphysically split between purely immaterial mind and purely material body, there’s no putting it back together again.
If we are metaphysically split beings, perceiving and acting would be unintelligible to ourselves — and given the central role of perceiving and acting to all of our norm-governed activities (language, morality, science) — we would be completely unable to make sense of themselves at the most fundamental levels. We would be complete mysteries to ourselves.
If youre looking for the reasons the ‘radio dualist’ position isnt viable it seems to me that you have to marshal observations or thought experiments that show its faulty.
The easiest way to distinguish between internally generated consciousness and externally beamed in consciousness is to block it external to the brain: could we put someone in a room made of a certain material, or surrounded by a certain type of field, that would cause them to immediately become unconscious where removing them from the room or field would cause them to instantly regain consciousness?
Second. Could we deflect external consciousness into the wrong person? Or better yet into an animal or object?
Third. Could we modify the brain to change the nature of the received signal, similar to what is described above for drugs and alcohol but in predicatable ways.
It seems to me that if this dualist view was valid many phenomena would have been documented that would support this view, and each of us would have a wealth of personal experience to support it…including well supported examples of ESPish experiences. Because none of this exists, and for other reasons, I think its overwhelmingly likely that consciousness is an emergent phenomena that arises from the workings of a brain
I’m with you on this point Petrushka. What is the “mind” to a dualist?
If one does propose a “radio receiver brain” system for how the immaterial “mind” communicates with the brain, how does such a dualist propose that the radio signals interact with the brain? If the answer is, “I don’t know”, I don’t see dualism adding anything to the concept that thinking is just what a brain does.
Bruce,
Take another look at his final paragraph:
He actually does believe that the model might be right.
IMO, those who are characterized as “dualists” do not – for the most part – believe that matter and mind are two entirely separate commodities, but rather hold the perspecitve that the material world is ultimately generated by mind/spirit (god created the world). IOW, they are ultimately mind or spirit monists, and consider “dualism” more of a practical perspective than technically true or defensible.
IOW, mind/spirit can interact with matter because matter, ultimately, is formed by mind/spirit.
While I like your ideas in principle Rod, I suspect most dualists would note that such conditions would not work because they hold that immaterial mind, while independent of the body, still exists within the confines or borders of the physical body. As such, the signal between the body and mind does not extend outside the body and cannot be blocked by objects outside the body.
Now, whether said “mind essence” can be influenced by other material outside the body is up for grabs. For instance, could I powerful enough electromagnet or voodoo chant distort or deflect the signal sufficiently to be detected in some manner? Can we make zombies and sex slaves by waving certain crystals around in certain ways and thus trapping or destroying the will of our neighbors? Aspiring Evil Overlords wish to know!
If this were the case, why would mind/spirit not be detectible by the five material senses?
Neil,
The two are orthogonal. The radio model is compatible with both realism and idealism, and so is its negation.
Obviously, if spiritual monism is true, what you are detecting with our “material senses” is mind/spirit. You just call one particular subset of experience “the material world”. I use the term “dualism” to describe two different general sets of experience – what is generally referred to as the material world and what we call the mental/spiritual world. They have different kinds of properties and are generally apprehended with different kinds of senses, although it appears that at times, for some people, there is overlap.
Just as you wouldn’t expect to see sweet or sour, or taste a C sharp note, you don’t expect to see a moral warning sign when it comes to certain things – you experience it with a different sensory capacity.
I commented on the radio model a few years ago at UD:
I guess you could read it that way, but given the context of the rest of the conclusion, I think he has a more subtle point to make.
In either event, for me arguments against basic substance dualism are like flogging a dead horse. I know there are some smart people who still believe in substance dualism, but that can only be because they have different priorities that outweigh staying consistent with basic science.
The basic problem with dualism is it creates a big unsolvable problem without being necessary.
Unless you think all brains, including the neurons of jellyfish, are dualistic. If you accept evolution, you accept a continuum of awareness. There is not and never has been, a demarcation between human self awareness and the self awareness of cousin species.
“Unless you think all brains, including the neurons of jellyfish, are dualistic.”
Or even plants! http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/24/mental-life-plants-and-worms-among-others/?insrc=hpma
It’s “unsolvable” only if you assume the two substances have a problem interacting in the first place. I see no reason to make such an assumption other than just wishing there to be one.
Bruce,
I don’t see how it’s possible not to read it that way.
This…
…is contradicted by this:
Another comment I made at UD:
I guess I don’t understand then what you mean by everything being mind/spirit. If the material world is an aspect of mind spirit and is detectable by the five senses, why are there properties of the mind/spirit that cannot be detected by the five senses. Frankly I can’t fathom what you mean by, “They have different kinds of properties and are generally apprehended with different kinds of senses” since I’m not aware of any actual senses beyond the five every human has. It would seem rather precarious to survival for some members of a given species to have “extra senses” that the majority of the members do not possess, but assuming that were true, how then would one explain being able to sense only those “mind/spirit” elements that appear material as opposed to the spiritual basis of reality in the first place?
Incidentally, I can see sweet and sour – the material receptors for such and the actual configurations of the molecules for things that possess a “sweet” quality are visually different from those that possess “sour” qualities. In the same light, I can taste a C sharp note as sound can and does register unique signatures across the taste buds. That’s the beauty of our five material senses; they all actually can be used for cross-interpretive reference and redundancy.
Yes, when you make stuff it can have any properties you desire. Just like the designer.
Actually there’s a huge reason to make the assumption – the Dirac Equation. I’ve yet to see any dualist address the issue the equation raises
For me, the following later better summarizes what he is trying to say. If it helps, I’ll gladly concede that the wording you quote on its own could be taken to poorly summarize the following point, which I think the more interesting one:
Actually that is a caricature of science. A better description would be that science builds models and tests them.
Quite different from naive reductionism. Real science is imaginative and creative. The difference between science and other approaches is that science insists that its imaginings be testable.
How do you deal with conservation of energy? How can something non-physical make a change in the physical state of a system without changing the physical energy in the system, which would violate conservation of energy.
ETA: clarification of wording to avoid repeating “change”
An argument easily defeat by being drunk.
Bruce,
Neuroscience is clearly incomplete, and I doubt that anyone here would deny that. However, the incompleteness of neuroscience doesn’t imply that the radio model might be true, any more than the incompleteness of physics implies that the phlogiston model might be true.
Contra Eagleman, the radio model isn’t scientifically viable.
It’s also worth mentioning that solving the interaction problem would not make the radio model viable.
In other words, a solution to the interaction problem is necessary, but not sufficient, to validate the radio model.
keith, can you explain why stuff like the tumor/pedophilia connection couldn’t be claimed to be analogous to, say, spilling a liquid on some transistor in the radio, so that it always picks up WSEX or something?
Sure, I’ll grant that. Yawn.
Not sure what you mean here. What system would be isolated if mind is moving it around from outside the system?
Do you mean without changing the total energy available in the system? Moving energy or making it change form doesn’t violate conservation of energy.
What does “non-physical” even mean today? Does it mean particulate matter? Waves? Superimposed quantum states? Theoretical states of quanta that are indefinite until observed? I suggest you need a more defined concept of what “physical” means, and doesn’t mean, before you use it in such a way do mark a boundary between “energy” and “mind”.
What do you mean by “energy” anyway? Is gravity an energy? How does gravity “move matter around”? Can you point me out some “gravity” energy?
The idea that “mind” and “matter” would have a problem interacting is just an invention of materialists who cannot even really define what “matter” means, much less “mind”.
Bruce,
It may be obvious and boring to us, but it apparently isn’t to Eagleman, and it definitely isn’t obvious to a lot of dualists who bring up the radio model again and again.
I started this thread in part because I’d like to have a place to send people when they bring up the radio model. Refuting it over and over gets tiring.
walto,
Sure. If the immaterial soul were responsible for our decisions, then the patient’s decisions would have been unaffected by the brain tumor.
However, his decisions were affected. As the patient described it, ‘the pleasure principle’ overrode his restraint. He chose to act because it was pleasurable to do so. Without the tumor, his choices were different.
Therefore, our choices are not the sole province of our immaterial souls, if such things even exist.
Eagleman’s analogy is about as profound as saying that we could be brains in vats. Yes, so what?
It doesn’t actually even work as an analogy, though, because if the bushman runs across some sort of Faraday cage (he found a radio, why not a metal structure with no holes he can enter?), clearly an intact radio doesn’t work within it. Even more likely, he could go into a cave or deep valley and it wouldn’t work. That would suggest that something has to get to it, even if that were still not the only possible explanation (quite likely the best, even so). There’s nothing similar with brains. And brains don’t manage to get signals from other “souls” or whatever, so they’re not like radios in that way either.
It’s another strange attempt to pretend that dualism makes some kind of sense, when the brain knows what it takes in via the senses and nothing else (a certain amount of “programming” logic and the like exist that are not from the senses per se, but what I’d call “full knowledge” comes through senses and processing of those data).
What is left over to need to explain, save the details of brain operation? I mean, there could be something, but we have yet to know of any sort of lacuna (like lack of function in a cave) that suggests something coming from non-sensory sources.
Glen Davidson
I understand current science to have a very basic principle that the total energy in the universe cannot be changed. But it seems that non-physical mental stuff would need to do that to interact.
Energy is just what the best physical theories define it to be. I’m no physicist, but I understand all the cases you mention are covered by the theories.
I take your last paragraph to mean science cannot define these things properly, at least in reference to matter and energy. I doubt that I could argue with such a position, since my view is that science is the only way to do so. As for mind, I am only asking that one define it in a way that is not inconsistent with how science defines matter and energy.
The central problem with the radio model is that what changes under the influnce of drugs, brain disease or brain damage is the part that shouldn’t be affected, the personal identity and self image.
If I lose a finger or hand, chances are I will be aware of the change.
If I lose the part of my brain responsible for perceiving the limb, no amount of rationating will enable me to to think of it as there, even though I may be able to use it.
This is the color vision problem I keep returning. What changes when the brain is damaged is not simply the ability to see color, but the ability to conceive the property of color, even if I had made my living manipulating color.
Until dualists come to grips with the conception problem, the radio problem is minor.
This is precisely the kind of problem that science addresses in model building.
No one can see or conceive wave/particle duality, but we have constructed mathematical tools to deal with it. Such mathematical models are the intellectual equivalent of microscopes and telescopes. Instruments enable us to see things outside the spectrum of our unaided senses. Mathematical models enable us to conceive relationships that we cannot imagine.
keiths,
I don’t understand your response. I take it that the radio-analogist would claim that just as the broadcast would be largely responsible for the WSEX tunes playing on the radio, so too would the mind for whatever decision this person makes. But the spilled liquid and the tumor could be claimed to have their effects as well. The former might limit the reception to WSEX or make it crackly or whatever, and the latter might turn an otherwise normal guy into Peter Lorre from M.
Can you elaborate on why you think that kind of analogy must fail?
I don’t get why a radio analogist has to hold that there are particular “parts” that can’t be affected. I’d think they’d just have to bite the bullet there.
If changing the brain changes the self, what parsimonious function is attributed to the self that is distinct from the brain?
Beats me. I don’t see why you’d need it in either case.
I think dualists need to explain what the non-brain does. What aspect or mode of selfness is not an aspect of the brain?
walto,
Suppose the mind/soul is broadcasting ‘pedophillia’ on WSEX and ‘restraint’ on WGUD, and that the tumor causes the brain to “tune in” to WSEX instead of WGUD.
If so, then the mind/soul isn’t making the choice to molest. The brain (perturbed by the tumor) is making that choice.
I’ll let some substance dualist handle that one, petrushka. Maybe it’s supposed to provide the “elan vital” or something?–I really have no idea. But my question is, if you happen to be such a one (for whatever good or bad reasons) , what makes the radio analogy particularly faulty?
I agree with you, though, that the whole thing is hard to make sense of. It is for me, anyhow.
keiths,
I agree, but why can’t this dualist just say “Yes, this pedophile is not rightly called a free agent” (or something along those lines)? Dualists don’t have to believe in free will. Occasionalists didn’t and parallelists don’t have to.
I’m sure Eagleman would agree. What he would question is whether we could build the tools which fully explain the mind without introducing some concept not covered by current physics. And he only claims this is an open question, he does not claim will certainly will have to find new concepts.
Now clearly there is stuff that current physics cannot explain: the integration of quantum theory and gravity is the standard example. But these problems seem to be far from the day-to-day world of human bodies and minds.
Sean Carroll says we already have enough science to cover the day to day world. I suspect he is right. But it is a much more interesting question to me than trying to refute a die hard substance dualist.
Here are some quantitative numbers to work with.
Chemical binding energies are on the order of 1 to 2 eV (electron volts).
Binding energies of solids such as iron are on the order of 0.1 to 0.2 eV.
Binding energies of the soft matter of organic molecules of living systems are on the order of 0.02 to 0.05 eV.
The soft matter of living systems exits very near their melting points in which the thermal kinetic energies of the molecules are comparable to the binding energies among them.
Room temperature kinetic energies of molecules (kT) are on the order of 0.025 eV.
Hypothermia takes place at approximately 60 Fahrenheit or 15.6 Celsius (kT = 0.025 eV)
Hyperthermia takes place at about 108 Fahrenheit or 42.2 Celsius (kT = 0.027 eV).
Atomic force microscopes can measure forces on the order of piconewtons (10^(-12) newtons). A potential energy gradient of 0.01 eV over a distance of 1 nanometer is a force of about 1 piconewton. Voltage measurements can be done easily into the picovolt range (10^(-12) volts).
EKGs can measure down to microvolts (10^(-6) volts).
All this stuff is easily measurable with modern technology; including fMRI and other imaging technologies.
If a brain is in, say, a hypothermic state, the energies required to open and close ion channels are on the order of 0.025 eV. That is roughly the threshold energy at which a “nonmaterial life force” would have to operate in order to make a brain work.
All of these energies and forces are easily measurable with current technology. So the question comes down to explaining how a nonmaterial life force or “mind” can escape detection.
walto,
Dualists don’t have to believe in free will, but many of them (and especially the religious ones) do, because they want us to be morally responsible for our actions. It seems unjust for God to send souls to heaven or hell for actions that weren’t freely willed.
The larger problem, though, is that there isn’t much (if anything) left for the soul to do once you’ve subtracted out all of the functions that seem to be dependent on the brain. Occam’s Razor slices it right off.
No. It says that the energy in an isolated system remains X amount – it says nothing about energy not changing form – obviously energy changes form every time you light something on fire without violating “conservation of energy”.
IOW, energy is a table of equations? No, I hardly think so. Energy is what it is, science describes it and calculates things from that model. Can you tell me what energy “is”? Where it comes from? What causes the values for various forms of energy to be what they are?
IOW, you have no idea why there should be a “problem of interaction” for dualism in the first place.
My point being, the “interaction” problem for dualism is nothing but contrived rhetoric.