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
Yes, it’s a concept. But we need to be clear that the concept is not a particular triangle of specific size or color or such. This was a manifest problem earlier in the thread.
and concepts exist………in minds
peace
I remind you that Donald Trump was just elected president of the united states.
Since minds do not exist, except as abstractions, that’s a rather vacuous kind of existence.
Are the marks equidistant from each other? Can you measure the distance between the marks?
Can you look at a board and then imagine it? If so how is that different from imagining the ideal triangle?
peace
S
I don’t think that concepts exist in minds. In fact, I think that’s completely false.
I don’t think it’s helpful to ask “do concepts exist?” or “where are concepts located?”, because those questions invite reification and bad metaphysics.
I think it’s much more helpful to ask “what is conceptual thought?” or “what is the role of concepts in thought?” — and also ask “what is the role of thought in life?” “What does thinking do, in animals that can think?”
Pursuing these questions, reflecting on what we humans are actually doing when we think and we observe other animals doing, leads to the idea that (1) the role of thinking is to mediate between perceiving and acting; (2) the role of concepts in thought is to coordinate perceptual inputs and motor outputs, so that multiple sensory inputs can have a single motor response or a single sensory input can have multiple motor responses; (3) so concepts are, in a word, habits or abilities of sensorimotor coordination.
This picks up on Kant’s thought that concepts are rules of judgment.
To possess the concept of “horse” is to know under what perceptual conditions it is appropriate to be disposed to say, “that’s a horse!” (a little kid who says “horsie!” when looking at a cow does not fully possess the adult concept), and to be prepared to endorse valid inferences (“since that thing over there is a horse, it is an animal”), and to be disposed to undertake the appropriate kinds of acts.
The difference between empirical concepts and “logical” concepts is that the latter have no perceptual conditions of appropriate use. The language-game is self-contained.
(There’s a further question here about the best theory of neurocomputational processes for understanding how conceptual abilities are causally realized, but for the time being, I can leave the neuroscience to one side.)
This makes no sense. There is no evidence whatsoever of anything “immaterial” being involved in consciousness. If you disagree, present it. Note that it is incumbent upon you to operationally define “immaterial” since it is your claim.
Atheism is simply a lack of belief in gods. Given the lack of evidence for any such entities, it’s an eminently reasonable position to take.
I suggest you hit yourself in the head with a hammer repeatedly and observe the effects.
Trauma and drugs are just two mechanisms for demonstrating the effects physical changes of the brain have on the behavior of the mind.
So close. It is, in fact, the claim that something “immaterial” is involved in consciousness that is vacuous (or incoherent). Those who make such claims have the obligation to define their terms and provide the evidence based on the entailments of those definitions. Care to try?
I can certainly imagine a mind arising from a non-organic substrate. I can’t imagine a mind with no substrate.
I don’t agree. It seems to me that consciousness arises from the complexity of our brains. It strikes me as an empirical claim to say that it is possible to have a normally functioning brain without consciousness, and one that I strongly suspect is false.
I don’t know what I confirmed for you, but if you’re happy I’ve banked my karma for the weekend.
That sentence deserves mercy killing.
If you think there’s something involved in consciousness that is in principle undetectable, a) how do you know? and b) how can it affect consciousness without being detectable?
Is there such a thing as introspection or not? If yes, what is it?
For me the role of thinking is to add concepts to the objects of perception and thus obtain knowledge.
Steiner had this to say about the central role thinking plays in human life:
Thinking is not just the mediator between perceiving and activity, it is the very activity that leads us to reality.
Of course the fundamental origin of your post here is not concepts, it is not sensorimotor activity, it is not percepts, it is your thinking activity. You arrive at concepts though the activity of thinking. A child could stare at a horse for long enough and no doubt this could be shown to be accompanied by brain activity, but s(he) would never arrive at the concept horse if it were not for the activity of thinking.
But the definition does not equate with any physical triangle. These are transient can only approximate the definition. The ideal triangle is a unity which does not come and go but persists.
There is no such physical thing as an ideal triangle.
Two responses:
1. while I share the intuition that consciousness somehow arises from the complexity of brains, no one has any clue about how the trick is pulled off. Without an explanation, there’s no way to arbitrate between our naturalistic intuitions and the non-naturalistic intuitions of neo-Cartesians like FMM.
Every single naturalistic theory of consciousness I know of — and that’s a lot of them — is a solution to what Chalmers called “the easy problem of consciousness”, and every single one ignores “the hard problem of consciousness”.
2. This is mistaken: “It strikes me as an empirical claim to say that it is possible to have a normally functioning brain without consciousness”.
To say that a normally functioning brain without consciousness is possible is not to make an empirical claim. Empirical claims are about what is true in the actual world. But the claim here is a claim about what is possible, i.e. what is the case in some possible world (but not this necessarily this one).
More precisely, there are many different kinds of possibility: physical possibility, nomological possibility, and logical possibility. Chalmers’ claim is that zombies (beings that are behaviorally and neurocomputationally identical to us, but without “qualia”) are logically possible.
One of the best things I’ve read on “the hard problem of consciousness” is this excellent article by Teed Rockwell: The Hard Problem is Dead; Long live the hard problem.
Introspection appears to be the mind thinking about itself. Why do you think that anything “immaterial” need be involved in that process?
We have limited data so far, but it remains an empirical question.
So long as the physical brain in question has enough in common with the physical brains we see in this world, it remains an empirical question. To say that one can imagine a different type of brain that did not manifest consciousness does not change the fact that the brains we are familiar with appear to manifest consciousness by their nature, given the evidence we have.
Understood. I still disagree. His position seems to assume dualism. If consciousness arises out of certain patterns of complexity of the substrate, it is not logically possible for non-conscious brains to exist. The claim that non-conscious brains are logically possible remains an empirical question.
Of course, what is it that persists? A mathematical definition?
What you call “the ideal triangle” is not an thing of any kind at all, neither physical nor “immaterial”. It is the concept of a triangle, i.e. the mathematical definition.
I’d like to know how one might test this allegedly empirical matter of whether something is or is not a zombie.
Yes, I think that Patrick doesn’t really understand what Chalmers is doing when he raises the logical possibility of zombies.
I do think that Chalmers’s position can be nicely criticized in a variety of ways (e.g. by pointing that it presupposes functionalism in cognitive theory and reductionism in philosophy of science, both of which are really problematic assumptions!), but it can’t be done by just saying, “show me these zombies of which you speak!”
Patrick just knows that he does not have the burden of proof when it comes to the possibility of Zombies and that is enough for him.
peace
CharlieM,
The thing is, I think Steiner is utterly wrong about both perception and thought.
He’s wrong about perception. It’s just not true that perception consists of scattered snapshots of subjective appearances. Perception is not a multiplicity that needs to be brought under a unity. The atomistic empiricism that even Kant inherits from Hume is just not a correct phenomenology of perception. It’s not the case that perceiving involves passive sensing to which conceptual judging is somehow added. Perceiving is itself a holistic and active process: there is a holistic figure/ground structure to perceptual experience that is partially constituted by bodily movement in response to the kinds of regularities and irregularities to which we are sensitive. We perceive holistically structured and meaningful affordances. Merleau-Ponty and Gibson show in extraordinary detail how very wrong classical empiricism (of the Locke-Berkeley-Hume-Mach variety) is. There’s no problem to be solved as Kant thought there was.
Steiner is also wrong about though. It’s just not true that thought has a power to disclose the nature of reality that transcends what can be perceptually disclosed. Knowledge of the noumena is just as much of an illusion now as it was when Kant first made the argument against rationalistic metaphysics two hundred years ago. Any attempt to legitimize putative knowledge of the noumena will always run afoul of the Myth of the Given, which is fundamentally incoherent.
Since we’re trading quotes from our preferred philosophers, here’s one in return:
“It has taken nearly the full span of the Western philosophical tradition to challenge effectively its most ancient assumptions: what is real is, or includes, the changeless; and what is real in the changing world depends, unconditionally, on what is changeless in the real. These are hardly defeated doctrines even now, but their authority has been profoundly shaken. They fit, almost without exception, the more than two thousand years that link Parmenides and Kant. After Kant, with the rapid rise to prominence of the concept of historicity and its remarkable penetration of all the seeming invariances of the accepted canon, what may fairly be called ‘the doctrine of the flux’ has gained a measure of parity so compelling that the ancient canon has had to look to its own defenses in an entirely new way. . . . if we divide the post-Kantian tradition along ‘pragmatist’, ‘analytic’, and ‘Continental’ lines . . . then pragmatism, nearly alone among the principal movements of our time, has embraced the flux full square, without clinging to subversive loyalties of any kind harking back to would-be older invariances”
and
“Pragmatism’s unmarked adherence to the flux confirms in a natural, remarkably modest way the sheer viability of conceptual economies larger than its own, prepared to dismantle what had always been thought to belong to ‘perennial’ philosophy: that is, the necessarily changeless nature of what is most fundamentally real and the assuredly foundational standing of the facultative competence by which we discern the fact. That is the conceptual confidence that has dominated Western philosophy for nearly the whole of its history; viewed thus, pragmatism remains the single most convincing experiment and demonstration that no part of the Eleatic Truth was ever truly indefeatable. Its immutable assurances were never more than the false buttresses of philosophical dogma.”
— from Pragmatism’s Advantage by Joseph Margolis.
That’s entirely possible, given that I based my response solely on the one paragraph you wrote.
Let me try to explain my objection more clearly. My understanding from your original comment is that Chalmers can “imagine” a possible world where brains exactly like the human brains we have in our world are functional but do not manifest consciousness. That is, he claims such a state is a logical possibility.
My objection is that such a claim requires support, not just imagination. I can imagine a world where water takes up less volume in a solid state than in a liquid state. My ability to imagine it doesn’t make it logically or physically possible. I can imagine a world where parabolic mirrors don’t focus light. Again, that doesn’t make such a world logically or physically possible. Chalmers claims to be able to imagine a world where dense collections of 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion synapses in a functioning body do not manifest consciousness. As with my examples, his ability to imagine something doesn’t make it either logically or physically possible.
What am I missing?
Well, the support is going to come from the argument, which in this case turns on Chalmers’s theory of meaning and how meanings are assigned to sets of worlds. It’s pretty technical stuff and I’d have to look it closely before I could teach it.
When the mind thinks about itself, what *material thing* is being thought about? Answer: None. If you disagree, take that material thing and post a photo of it. Because if it’s material, then surely you can snap a photo or at least draw a picture.
Chalmers arguments look straightforward to me, not too technical. His arguments against materialism, including the conceivability of zombies, are here http://consc.net/papers/nature.html
The materialist who has an answer to those arguments is a heavyweight champion of materialism.
This vastly oversimplifies the Chalmers argument.
There’s a certain view of how the brain works, using physical information picked up from the world. You might ask that guy Patrick, who seems to espouse that kind of view.
Many people believe that if we were to construct a system working on exactly those principles, we would get a zombie. Nobody understands how it could result in anything other than a zombie.
It is not just that one can imagine zombies. It is that if one looks at the standard view of how everything is presumed to work, it is hard to imagine anything other than zombies.
That sort of thinking is the background to the Chalmers zombie argument. It’s why Chalmers calls for some kind of property dualism and perhaps some kind of panpsychism to bridge the apparent gap.
Personally, I reject the standard view.
Maybe. Though one can also have good reasons for thinking that Chalmers’s arguments are flawed without being committed to materialism. Those aren’t the only options on the table.
One thing you’re missing is that you don’t seem to understand what ‘logical possibility’ means. First thing you should probably do is look that up before posting again.
If I can imagine that it’s not impossible then it must be possible. Being unable to imagine something is impossible, however, could just be a failure of imagination. That’s certainly a possibility anyways.
Maybe — maybe — this will help: X is logically possible if and only X does not entail a contradiction.
Not entailing a contradiction is both necessary and also sufficient for logical possibility.
There’s no need for evidence.
We don’t need evidence to know that there are no square circles in any possible world, and for the exact same reason, we don’t need evidence to know that there are zombies in some possible worlds*.
* assuming that explanations and intensions work the way Chalmers thinks they do. But they don’t.
And if I can imagine a world where it is possible that something is not necessary then it means that it does not exist in this world. 😉
peace
That’s false — or were you joking? I can’t tell anymore.
To help Patrick out, instead of getting hooked up on imagination, concentrate on what consciousness means. Something may appear conscious or really be conscious. People who appear conscious as if they had will and thoughts of their own but are in reality wound up by something else, they are zombies, whereas those with actual thoughts and will of their own are people of normal consciousness. The question is, what third-person verifiable material element or entity accounts for the difference? No evidence that it’s material. Human brain has been dissected in all possible ways already and there’s nothing on the table that would turn a zombie or a comatose person back into conscious human being. The best you can do is to continue be optimist, “Not yet, but soon!”
Perhaps we’re talking past each other, then. The question I’m trying to address is “Is there any evidence that the part of the mind we call consciousness requires some ‘immaterial’ (whatever that means) input.” That still seems to me to be an empirical question.
Wrong. The mind is, according to all evidence we currently have, the product of states, patterns, and processes in the physical brain. If you think something else is involved, please provide the evidence for it.
Really? I can’t imagine getting anything other than consciousness from a human level brain and associated sensors and actuators. That is, I can’t imagine getting anything other than what we actually observe when we see those components functioning normally.
On what basis would you expect to see other than what we do see?
My point is that you don’t know that it doesn’t involve a logical contradiction because we don’t know enough about neuroscience yet. “A 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion synapses in a functioning body with no consciousness” might actually be “a square circle”. When we learn more about consciousness we might find that it is the unavoidable emergent behavior of such systems.
I’m very wary of arguments of the form “I can imagine . . . .” That’s how you end up with religions.
Actually, the first question is “Exactly what is meant by ‘consciousness’?” and the second question is “How do we determine empirically whether or not it is present?” Can you answer those two questions without assuming your conclusion?
What evidence do you have that anything “immaterial” even exists? How would such a thing interact with a physical brain? In short, what the heck are you talking about?
The fact that dissecting people tends to make their consciousness disappear is more evidence of its physical nature.
As indicated you clearly don’t understand what a logical contradiction is. Only rationalists like Spinoza and Leibniz have held that natual laws are metaphysically necessary.
Again, look this stuff up before posting silliness.
Here’s a slight rewording of Patrick is getting at. This is my particular view on the subject:
The burden is on those who propose the existence of things that cannot be detected by the senses and that have no entailments.
Personally I just can’t accept claims for anything that either have no entailments or can’t be detected by the senses. It’s completely pointless to be to consider such.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love things like wizards, Valar, leprechauns, super powers and superheroes, angels, gods, ghosts, demons, and dragons to exist (yeah…even demons and dragons existing would kind of be cool in a terrifying, but exciting way), but beyond engaging in fantasy ‘what ifs”, it’s just silly to take any of them as anything more than fantastic myths.
And not on those who posit something that should be easily experimentally verifiable by anyone? You clearly got all that burden of proof thing wrong.
And by “all evidence” you mean the single failed link you gave?
The first question is indeed the question. As long as you haven’t answered it, don’t make any assumptions about the second one. But you manage to do that by the way you formulate the second one: “…empirically…” which presupposes that the answer to the first one is that consciousness is an empirical phenomenon. So you are assuming your own conclusion.
Keep trying.
When there’s something whose existence you can’t deny, such as imagination or consciousness or mind or (if you ever get that far) soul, but you cannot put it on the table or take a photo of it like you can with material things, then that thing is immaterial. And exists. But this is clearly over your head.
How can a material thing disappear? If it’s material, you should be able to identify it and pinpoint it by dissection.
Your still being obtuse Charlie. The point of my little rant was you can’t “visualize” an “ideal” anything. The moment you say, “the intersection of”, there can be no ideal, because any plane you envision is simply a model of what a “plane” is mathematically. In point of fact, anything you visualize is a model. That’s the point.
This.
That may be, but I’d just point out that it’s not entirely clear what actually IS detected by the senses. Some people say it’s physical objects. Some people say it’s “sense-data.” Some people say it’s qualia. These are theoretical/categorial choices and it’s not at all clear that the “correct answer” is empirically decidable. What would the empirical evidence be?
What will decide which theories are “best” are things like parsimony, fecundity, consilience with common sense, etc. And there is nothing particularly evidence-based about liking those things! They are pragmatic issues only.
So patrick says (with no evidence whatever–and contrary to many logical positivists with whom he agrees on so much) that what is empirically detectible are material (or physical) objects. Erik says, also with no evidence, that what we introspect are immaterial items. All we can do in such situations, I think, is try to see what people’s arguments are and to what extent they make any sense. Mostly on this site, they don’t. People just spout views that they find congenial over and over again.
I mean, patrick doesn’t even understand what logical possibility is, but somehow he just knows that he has empirical evidence on his side with respect to the mind/body problem.
Patrick’s view implies that everything can be determined from third-person perspective. On my view, the first-person perspective (introspection) is irreducible to complete the picture of a human being.
How relevant is it to demand third-person-perspective evidence about first-person perspective? Can anyone give one’s own ideas to another or is it so that we can only describe ideas as best as we can? From third-person perspective, Patrick must say that ideas are (identical to) their descriptions and verbal formulations, whereas from first-person perspective I know this is not the case – first I have an idea, and formulating it is a whole different event. How do you establish this from a third-person perspective? You don’t. You can yell evidence all you want.
I think what he’d actually say (if he thought about it, that is), is that they are identical to brain processes and your introspective experiences are not inconsistent with that identity claim. Again, to think they are is to confuse de dicto and de re knowledge. Go read your Plantinga.
There is no “my” Plantinga. I will never read a single book by him. Never have.
I know full well everything that Patrick might say, including if he thought about it. The point is that he will never have any physical evidence for it the way he illogically demands from me. He demands evidence (physical, apparently) for the immaterial. How much more ludicrous can one get?
Let’s suppose ideas are identical to brain processes. Now show me the empirical physical evidence that this is so. None has been forthcoming.
I find the problem of hallucinations pretty compelling for thinking that simplistic direct realism can’t be right, though I’m more inclined towards disjunctivism than you are.
At present I prefer a version of critical realism + a bit of Gibsonian ecological psychology: under normal conditions (i.e. cognitive functions are behaving normally, in Millikan’s sense), we directly perceive affordances by way of how sensorimotor abilities engage with sensings. Hallucinations rarely (ever?) afford anything; they are a kind of perceptual abnormality.
I’m not entirely sure that it’s not an empirical question as to what we perceive. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty are doing phenomenology, which could count as “empirical” on a sufficiently broad construal of that term (though I wouldn’t construe it that broadly myself). So are William James and John Dewey in their own ways. James, Dewey, and Merleau-Ponty all take seriously the psychology of perception as well. J. J. Gibson builds his theory of affordances from experiments on perception in his laboratory.
I don’t see any problem with the idea that we can use our senses in order to find out what our senses are really doing.
I’m not even sure that the old debate between physicalism and phenomenalism is immune to empirical considerations. Austin’s intervention (in Sense and Sensibilia) hinges on the pragmatics of ordinary language. Is that “empirical’? The Strawsonian argument from Individuals, picked up later by Sellars and then by Jay Rosenberg, is that any ontology must be able to explain the difference between perceiving two identical items at two different times and perceiving the same item twice. But we can only do that if we can track items in space as well as in time, which means that we cannot be perceiving non-spatial “sense-data”. (Though this argument only shows that space is, to use the Kantian phrase, “empirically real”; it takes a different argument to show that space is also “transcendentally real”.)
I agree, but I think that’s to be expected. Most people are really, really bad at arguing. I don’t see the value of chastising people for not offering genuine arguments if they’ve never been taught how to do that. Iterating views that they find congenial is just what I’ve come to expect from both anti-naturalists and naturalists. That’s why I confine myself to offering suggestions and corrections here and there. I’m not here to do real philosophy.