There’s a lot of (mostly very obscure) talk about “the soul” here and elsewhere. (Is it supposed to be different from you, your “mind,” your “ego” etc.? Is it some combo of [some of] them, or what?) A friend recently passed along the following quote from psychologist James Hillman that I thought was nice–and maybe demystifying–at least a little bit.
By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment — and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate — an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence — that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives one the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy — that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.”
James Hillman — Re-Visioning Psychology
That mind-brain identity theory directly entails brain-reading.
sean s.
After all, you said you already did this:
So, again, can you please forward the link? Please?
sean s.
I demonstrated it by that Patrick’s thesis (the statements that I kept quoting from him) made him walk right into it.
What is your thesis so I can engage with your theory? Thus far, you have said, “We can’t even read off every physical property from those physical properties we know about.” This is directly contradictory to Patrick’s “The idea of an ideal triangle is represented by physical states and patterns in your physical brain.”
To me it looks like you don’t hold to mind-brain identity theory, walto.
Erik,
So could you please send the link?
sean s.
Erik, Oh, Erik.
{Note to self: Why do I bother?}
So mind-brain identity theory is indefensible? Good that you arrived at the same realization.
From the fact that you have claimed that patrick can’t separate something from something else? You know what?–it might be!
People should get on that right away!!!
It took a while for you to respond Erik, but then you did with this:
Unfortunately, that does not constitute any demonstration of your view nor a refutation of Patrick’s.
Your comment there included a quote about brain-reading, principally of the visual cortex, and that it is possible to brain-read that way, but it does not prove what you claim: that the two are inseparable. In fact, it’s the opposite: we currently have a crude ability to “brain-read” without any ability to “mind-read”; not yet.
I had some time so I did my own research. It all seems to have begun with this:
This is phrased in the present tense, are there neuroscientists who claim to be able to do this now? Not yet.
This appears to be the first time the idea of “reading” was raised, and by you, Erik, not Patrick.
Patrick said that he believed ideas were “represented by physical states…”; the idea of reading them is yours, Erik’s.
One can observe Linear B texts without being able to read them. I can stare at Chinese characters all day without being able to read them. Observation is needed to read, but observation does not mean you actually are reading.
You moved the goal posts. Before it was “why can’t we do this”? Now it’s “shouldn’t this be possible”?
Maybe we can’t now because we don’t know how. But some day we might. We may be pretty close to this now.
Patrick is correct here. He did not bring up the idea of “reading”, you did that, Erik .
sean s. [edited]
Thanks. I’m more than willing to rephrase when I don’t make myself clear, but I don’t recognize anything I said in Erik’s claims about mind reading.
1. I know that neuroscientists CANNOT mind-read.
2. Nevertheless, they assume they will be able to, as the article linked by Patrick UNAMBIGUOUSLY shows. It says ‘brain reading’. That’s what they are attempting.
3. Patrick’s claim is, “The idea of an ideal triangle is represented by physical states and patterns in your physical brain.” What do you think it means? Either it means what it says – and is false – or Patrick is obfuscating. In an attempt to back up his claim, he linked to the article that said brain-reading. I didn’t.
So I’m a little behind the discussion (mind-brain identity theory?? WTH?!?!?), but I thought I’d try to put the whole “I can envision an ideal [insert whatever object here] in my mind” thing to bed.
Clearly I have (happily) no idea how or what other people think exactly, but the word “ideal” has certain implications to me.
So here’s the thing…a geometric archetype cannot be visualized by definition.
“WHAAAAA?!?!!? But…but…I just did! I can envision I triangle! It’s right there in my imagination!!!!”
Uh huh…
So….can you envision said triangle in a different color? Slightly larger or smaller? Thicker or thinner lines perhaps? As scalene? Isosceles? Equilateral?
Soooo….which is the “ideal” version?
Try this little thought experiment: picture an ideal line.
Got something? BZZZZZT! That would be a fail.
An ideal line has no width…it can’t. An ideal line, mathematically speaking, is simply an an infinite straight distance. An ideal point is…nothing (no dimension at all), so any point along an ideal line would be…nothing, or at least nothing anyone can visualize.
And since triangles are simply three intersecting lines, well…
Anywhoo…fun little exercise…
Not currently. Someday, maybe; just not yet.
I have no particular disagreement with this.
Agreed.
It means what it says, and only what it says.
Agreed.
Ah, well, you have not proved that; I really haven’t noticed that you’ve even tried to prove that.
I see no evidence of that. He did not raise the topic of “reading”; you did that. Do you at least admit to that? Your accusations that Patrick asserted something about brain-reading are simply false.
This is true, but that was in response to your inaccurate accusations. I found nothing in the article about “mind-reading”.
sean s.
The problem is that it says, “…triangle is represented by physical states and patterns in your physical brain.” When a physicalist says that, he means that the representation can be detected, physically. In other words, the representation can be read off the brain.
To confirm the meaning, Patrick linked to the article that he linked to. It said “brain reading”. Yet you see no evidence of that meaning. This means we are done.
The article by Haynes and Rees is actually pretty interesting, but it doesn’t count as evidence for mind-brain identity. Haynes and Rees are showing that certain technically sophisticated neuroimaging techniques can discriminate between kinds of mental states, under specific conditions.
For example, if one knows already which brain areas are associated with perceiving faces and which ones are associated with perceiving objects, then a sufficiently precise measure of the brain will tell you which one the subject is probably thinking of (if they are asked to think of one, etc.).
Presumably the neuroimaging scientist can detect if the subject is seeing or imagining a triangle, if she has already established which brain areas are involved in doing that.
But there’s no way to know which brain areas are involved in seeing or imagining triangles without first assuming the reliability of introspection on the part of the subjects who are reporting on their conscious experiences of seeing or imagining triangles. If everyone who reports that they are imagining a triangle also have a particular part of the visual cortex fire at the time that they are reporting imagining a triangle, then that establishes the correlation — only then would any subsequent firing of that same area count as a detecting of a mental state of imagining a triangle.
My point here is that introspection is indispensable to the claims being made about what neuroimagining can do.
And of course a lot depends here on how fine-grained the neuroimagining is, the reliability of the algorithm that assigns values to voxels based on measurements, and so forth. Plus, neuroimaging is done in artificial situations: the subject is stationery, horizontal, etc. We really have no idea if what brains are doing while we run, drive, cook, and argue is that much like what our brains are doing while we are subjects in neuroimagining experiments.
There’s a really nice criticism of neuroimagining studies in Noe’s Out of Our Heads, which I also recommend quite highly. Much like Rockwell in Neither Brain Nor Ghost, Noe argues that mindedness is a matter of brain-body-environment interactions.
That seems to be eminently well-supported by both phenomenology and cognitive science.
Of course it doesn’t. But what do they themselves think? “Such ‘brain reading’ has mostly been studied in the domain of visual perception, where it helps reveal the way in which individual experiences are encoded in the human brain. The same approach can also be extended to other types of mental state, such as covert attitudes and lie detection.”
They think they are already doing it.
Oh, and needless to say, the accuracy of neuroimaging and the correlations between cortical activity and reported subjective experiences have no bearing at all on the metaphysics of mind. The metaphysics of mind is an important topic — it’s what I do! — but it’s not something that can be definitively settled by pointing to any specific piece of empirical research.
It means what it says and is supported by all available evidence.
Obfuscating what? You seem to think I’m asserting something I’m not.
That article shows that mental states are associated with physical brain states, as expected based on all other available evidence and the lack of evidence for anything “immaterial”.
In principle, perhaps, but not necessarily in practice. What I mean when I say it is that all available evidence supports the idea that consciousness is the result of states and processes in a physical brain. If you know of any evidence for an “immaterial” component, please present it.
This is a confession that Erik was responding to a stereotype instead of to Patrick. Erik should have confirmed his assumption before acting on it, and he should have questioned his assumption when Patrick pushed back; but Erik is trapped in his bias. Even when it’s pointed out that the article Patrick linked to said nothing about “mind-reading” Erik insists that it does because that’s the conclusion of his bias.
All this explains a lot; Patrick’s actual words were irrelevant, Erik brought the argument with him.
sean s.
Thanks for the references. I can see consciousness being related to the whole body and its interactions with the environment. That still provides no support for any “immaterial” (whatever that might mean) component.
Erik will never be able to do this; I doubt anyone can tho’ I’d love to see someone at least try.
sean s.
But it does mean that the philosophical objections to mind-brain identity, e.g. Kripke’s and Plantinga’s objections to identity based on modality, can be conceded without opening to the door to “immaterialism”.
I think the answer to KN’s question is yes. Mind-brain identity does not seem a necessary conclusion if we accept that the mind is physical process(es) in the brain. I’d need to read the objections from Kripke, Plantinga, and others (Chalmers? Putnam? Descartes? Ryle?) to have a better grasp of them.
sean s.
I love you walto.
😀
This is nonsense. You don’t know what is physical and what isn’t physical any more than you know what is material and what is not material. Question-begging anti-intellectualism is not a virtue.
You can’t even begin to make a case in favor of your atheism because your atheism doesn’t consist of anything identifiable.
How did you observe this? How would you even begin to evaluate such a claim? Can you prove one single “evidence” that the mind is a physical process? Just one.
Your demand for “evidence to the contrary” is vacuous. You’ve no idea what such evidence would or could look like.
Are you moving the goalposts? It looks like you’re moving the goalposts. Do you think mind and consciousness are the same?
Typical “skeptical” logic. It just doesn’t follow Neil. Yet another TSZ fail.
Funny. You’re the one who claimed that you KNOW it is POSSIBLE that God does not exist. Which FACTS did you rely on to gain that knowledge?
In a nutshell, Kripke’s objection to mind-brain identity is that identity is necessary relation: if X and Y are identical, then X is Y and Y is X in all possible worlds. But X and Y are identical in all possible worlds, then one could not conceive of any world in which X is not Y. But clearly we can conceive of minds that aren’t brains. So the mind and brain cannot be identical.
Chalmers makes a related point, but only about consciousness: we can conceive of beings who have all of our neurocomputational processes, but who lack consciousness. So consciousness cannot be identical to neurocomputational processes.
Ryle, on the other hand, is an odd duck who doesn’t line up nicely with any of the established views. He rejects dualism, but he has nothing to say about the brain. (This is where Ryle’s best student, Daniel Dennett, thinks that Ryle’s position is deficient.) Ryle thinks of mind in terms of mindedness, where that in turn cashes out in terms of disposition to behave. (And language too is a kind of behavior.) But he’s not trying to say anything about ontology or science — it’s strictly a ratio cognoscendi explication, of our understanding of the concept of mind.
There aren’t many new books in philosophy of mind that elicit my interest these days — I’m mostly reading philosophy of neuroscience now — but I’m very excited by this forthcoming collection: Giving a Damn.
You made two mistakes.
1. Assuming Patrick actually read the article he linked to. It’s pretty obvious he didn’t, or he would have been able to grok your reference to brain-reading.
[Patrick’s defenders obviously didn’t read it either. You know, because they are “skeptics.”]
2. That Patrick was actually prepared to defend his claim. The burden of proof is always on the theist. Always.
[Neither Patrick nor keiths have to defend their claims.]
So it was Patrick using a literature bluff. He got called and folded.
From my highly prejudiced perspective, the challenge to non-naturalism is to say, “we can describe mindedness in terms of intentionality, consciousness, and caring — and, for some minds, also rationality. We can explain mindedness in terms of dynamics of brain-body-environment transactions. What aspect of mindedness do you think cannot be explained in these terms?”
By keeping the explanatory focus on facts of biology (neuroscience + ecology + evolutionary theory), we don’t need to worry about whether biology can itself be reduced to physics, let alone to fundamental physics.
And by keeping the relationship between phenomenology and biology to one of explanandum to explanans, we avoid all the problems of the modality of identity.
(Unless one thinks that explanations always involve identity relations, which seems really weird to me and intuitively false. After all, I can conceive of a possible world in which rainbows are not best explained in terms of how light is refracted as it passes through millions of transparent spheres!)
I think the prospects are extremely good for being able to explain non-sapient cognition in terms of neurocomputational processes, and pretty good for being able to explain sapient cognition (reasoning) in terms of neurocomputational processes. But I have no idea what to say about consciousness!
Well, to be honest, I only skimmed the article. I’ve been busy today. But I’m familiar with the exaggerated metaphysical claims often made by incautious neuroscientists.
Development of any new organ is a slow process, it does not happen overnight. I would not say that I have progressed very far in developing these higher organs, being the weak person that I am. I do know the path that needs to be travelled but in my opinion it is far from easy to keep to that path.
Do you believe in evolution? Do you believe that at some point in the evolutionary past there were no visual senses present in any creature? Evolution involves expansion of awareness and it is an open ended process. Who are you to say that present human awareness encompasses the full reality?
How would a being with one type of sense explain that sense to those without it? How would you explain sight to someone born blind?
None of them. What you are asking us to envision above are mental pictures of triangles. The ideal triangle is not a version of anything. If you think that any of your examples correspond to the ideal triangle then you have no idea what the ideal triangle is.
It takes little effort to envision these triangles, it takes a great deal of mental effort to perceive the ideal triangle.
You may think its a fun little exercise but you have not given it sufficient thought. An ideal line is not simply an infinite straight distance and a point is not simply a contraction to nothing. You have not taken into account the principle of duality. There is a duality between the point and the plane with the line mediating between the two.
Any three planes not in a line determine a point. And an ideal line can be thought of as an infinite number of points but it can also be thought of as an infinite number of intersecting planes.
Your thinking is biased towards point-wise definitions but plane-wise definitions are equally fundamental. You have omitted half of the reality.
Sorry. I only have half a brain.
Asked and answered. Move on.
sean s.
” The ideal triangle is not a version of anything. If you think that any of your examples correspond to the ideal triangle then you have no idea what the ideal triangle is.”
You realize that you are thinking of an ideal triangle, and when you are thinking about it, there is an arrangement of neurons and electrical signals in your brain corresponding to that, don’t you?
(I just got silently banned from Uncommondescent.com by Barry the Coward and I have nothing better to do)
BTW, how much longer does that site have? News reposts by Dense O’Leary, and psycho idiot ramblings by Gordon and Phillip can’t be that much of a draw for ad bucks.
I moved to confirm it. It got confirmed. That Patrick is a relentless physicalist for whom everything is either detectable or doesn’t exist is known from prior experience – experience, not untested assumption.
“I see lots of material stuff. Therefore everything is material.”
Non sequitur.
But if that’s not what you’re saying, then stop saying it.
You realize that when we are talking about an ideal triangle, we are talking about the same thing, namely the ideal triangle, independent of anyone’s arrangement of neurons, don’t you? We all could have (and would have) different arrangement of neurons etc. in our brains while talking about the same thing. And we wouldn’t even have to talk about it, just think about the same thing with our distinct brains and the examination of the brain patterns would not tell that we are thinking about the same thing. The brain-reading assumption is that it should be easily detectable what people feel and think, but in reality this has not been confirmed. Of course, you can take the optimist route: “Not yet, but soon!”
I would hope that my brain is active when I think because after all the brain is the organ of thought. But by training our thinking the brain can become an organ of perception, we can “see” the essential nature of an entity. Goethe was able to do this with plant life. Robin mentioned colours, size and thickness of lines in relation to triangles; these features have nothing to do with what a triangles is in its essence.
You say quite rightly that there is a correspondence between brain activity and thinking. What you don’t tell us is your thoughts on their causal relationship.
“You realize that when we are talking about an ideal triangle, we are talking about the same thing, namely the ideal triangle, independent of anyone’s arrangement of neurons, don’t you?”
how are you thinking about the triangle without having the necessary arrangements of neurons?
AhmedKiaan,
Hi Ahmed, welcome to TSZ.
Earlier you said, “…when you are thinking about it, there is an arrangement of neurons and electrical signals in your brain corresponding to that…”
Now you are talking without the “corresponding” part. Any good reason other than moving the goalposts?
There’s no such thing as “the ideal triangle”. There’s just the definition of what a triangle is. That’s a concept, not some bizarre ethereal object.
😉 ………wait for it
peace