This is a thread to allow discussions about how those lucky enough to have free will make decisions.
As materialism doesn’t explain squat, this thread is a place for explanations from those that presumably have them.
And if they can’t provide them, well, this will be a short thread.
So do phoodoo, mung, WJM et al care to provide your explanations of how decisions are actually made?
They interact so as to make decision making possible.
Matter alone can not accomplish this feat.
If it could rivers would decide which path to take to the sea
Peace
I did not, I asked if you would only accept materiel causes.
You still have not detailed what non materiel cause you would accept
in order for you to know that I “insinuate things” you need to know my intentions.
There can be no empirical evidence for intent because intent is a subjective thing.
You know subjectivity it’s what minds have that brains don’t
peace
Hypocrisy is notoriously hard to see in yourself. That is part of the reason we need other people.
peace
So you are saying that somewhere, sometime, Dennett has read something a immaterialist said (doesn’t matter who I guess), so he can conclude from that that he knows the motivation for how immaterialists think.
So its not even necessary that I have read Dennett (I have, I guess you are trying out your generalized hermeneutics bullshit as well) , all I have to have done is read something some materialists said, to know why Dennett thinks like he does.
Dennett isn’t being rude, he is being stupid-not that those are mutually exclusive. If you are going to call yourself a philosopher, understand the difference.
Yes, life would be awful without hypocrites calling other people hypocrites.
Perhaps if you stuck to the agreed definitions of terms we’d make more progress.
I already addressed that in detail:
—- begin —-
Let’s look at the definitions you keep eliding one more time:
Your definition of “decide” is “to choose between one possibility or another”. I provided a dictionary definition of “choose”:
a) pick out or select (someone or something) as being the best or most appropriate of two or more alternatives.
b) decide on a course of action, typically after rejecting alternatives.
Nothing in those definitions requires consciousness. This is exactly what I mean when I asked for definitions that do not beg the question. You are adding requirements that assume your conclusion.
It’s clear that a physical system consisting of computer hardware and software can both select among alternatives and decide upon a particular course of action among alternatives.
Does this also apply to a river? Water simply flows from a position of higher potential energy to one of lower potential energy. There is no explicit consideration of alternatives as is the case with software.
An interesting question is if the combination of terrain and water could be said to choose a river’s path. Again, I don’t think such a system can be reasonably said to decide on a course of action, but the result of water being in a particular terrain could arguably be viewed as selecting the most appropriate path for a river. The path can even change over time as erosion and other events take place.
This ambiguity does not, of course, change the fact that software systems are able to perform the behaviors of deciding and choosing per the definitions we’ve been using.
—- end —-
Based on the definitions we’ve been using, listed again in this excerpt, material processes, including software systems, can make decisions. If you don’t like the consequences of those definitions, feel free to modify them. Just be careful not to beg the question.
Alternatively, explain with detailed reference to those definitions why software systems do not exhibit the behavior they describe.
First off, you’ve not shown that you are conscious. Second, that would hardly prove your point anyhow. Quit equivocating.
Really. What would that prove, even if it were a reasonable statement? Can you even begin to make sense, or is throwing mindless cant your only capability?
Why are they so often stupid and mendacious?
Try making sense. It could change your life.
Complete nonsense. Your sort of “revelation” is hardly communication, and you certainly don’t communicate decently.
What’s an “exhibit”?
Nothing stands on its own. Have you ever made a straight answer?
Glen Davidson
What I’ve read thus far from phoodoo and fifthmonarchyman is “People decide stuff.”
Why dpn’t you deal straightforwardly with anything? Here’s the entire post:
I didn’t write anything that indicated that I would expect an immaterial thing (and claiming decisions are immaterial is just more BS from you)* to have a material cause, you just made up that disingenuous claim.
So yes, you did, and you’re being no more correct now than you were then, completely the opposite of correct.
You still haven’t justified such a stupid demand.
Right, like your intentions aren’t obvious.
First, what a senseless statement.
Second, if you really believe that, it is then highly disingenuous to demand specific evidence for anything that depends on intent, which you claim insinuation does. Try being decent for once, if you can.
Have you ever thought of not writing really stupid and evidence-free garbage as if it were golden truth that we all share?
That would be necessary if you wanted honest communication.
Glen Davidson
*Since “material” and “immaterial” aren’t even terms that I normally use, I’d note that “material” as I use it here (since the issue is being bandied about, however incompetently) basically means “physical,” or, “according to physics.” I don’t think conscious thoughts as we experience them are actually “matter” at all, rather, quite probably energy acting within electric fields. The one thing “immaterialists” generally get right is that thoughts as we experience them would not be “merely chemical,” as they are highly labile and may be ephemeral, much as the matters of “spirit” or “soul” are supposed to be, and as energetic phenomena in fields may actually be. “Materialism” or what-not is rarely understood today to be merely about matter, rather about matter, energy, and the non-material (even in the sense of energy) phenomenon of space-time, so if we’re using a term like “material” for thoughts it certainly doesn’t necessarily mean (merely) “chemical” or “atomic” or any such thing.
And it’s really magical.
Glen Davidson
No you didn’t. You’re simply trying to handwave the obvious issues with your argument from ignorance/godofthegaps.
In point of fact, there’s absolutely no difference between the immaterialists’ arguments found here and the arguments folks used to rely upon to support the concept of Luminous Aether. Those folks admitted that light moved in waves, but could not fathom a way for waves to move without a medium. So they invented one. That space-time itself could be a medium just was beyond them.
Your argument is no different: you can’t fathom how decisions could occur without some medium distinct from mechanical matter. So you’ve invented one. There’s no evidence for the “immaterial”; it’s got no properties or characteristics; it has no specific effects or even indirect effects on the material world, but decisions won’t work without it according to you.
I’m happy to see that actual scientific research in neurological function and AI isn’t being hindered by such fallacious thinking.
LOL! No they’re not.
What I have heard from your side about how decisions are made is….crickets?
Maybe materialists believe there are crickets in their head? It would explain a lot.
Translation: I am right by fiat because I can’t accept you could be right.
LOL! Yeah, sure Fifth…whatever…
There is another thread for discussing materialism. This thread is for you to explain how decisions are made in your world. Thus far I’ve seen a lot of attempted distractions but no direct answer to the question. It’s almost as if you don’t have one.
That analogy is a bit unfair. Ether was a perfectly reasonable posit at the time, given the background beliefs that were widely shared — namely, if light consists of waves, then there must be a medium in which to propagate. The posit passed a consilience test — it wasn’t just a random conjecture. And when it was finally abandoned, it was because ether failed a test of empirical confirmation.
The anti-materialists aren’t giving us anything nearly as reasonable as ether.
They surely don’t. All they have is
1. People make decisions.
2. Nothing material can make a decision.
3. Therefore, there must be something immaterial about a person that makes the decision.
That’s it. Going beyond (3) to explain how the immaterial soul makes a decision, let alone how the immaterial soul interacts with the material body, is completely beyond their pay-grade.
And that’s why all they do here is insist on (2). They have nothing else to offer.
In other terms, the whole substance of their position is the anti-materialism. It’s a purely negative position, defined entirely by the rejection of a caricature.
Kantian Naturalist,
Your position is, We haven’t explained to your satisfaction, the problem of consciousness, therefore, your sides position of..well, nothing…is reasonable.
Patrick,
Do you believe that there are decisions made by humans that involve thinking?
Do you believe that computer software is capable of thinking?
Chemicals don’t possess intelligence. Therefore for a materialist to explain the existence of intelligence, you either have to accept that any concept of intelligence is an illusion, or “Poof emergence did it.”
And you criticize our position of divine, immaterial consciousness.
What a laugh.
I read that (long, meandering) article. I found it interesting that Talbott quotes David Bohm over and over in it. Whether or not he was right to do so, I’d like to point out, FWIW, that Bohm’s position on “decision-making” seems to be absolutely contrary to the “agent causation” picture being pushed here by phoodoo. Here’s a relevant passage from the wikipedia page on Bohm:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm
CharlieM,
I think its worse than that Charlie. They are surely aware that any so called “decision making” that a computer makes is in fact the computer programmer’s decision about what to tell the computer it must do. So what they are doing is putting their hands over their ears, and closing their eyes, and saying, you can’t see me, you can’t see me….
Beyond infantile, its dishonest infantilism.
I try not to commit sloppy mental behaviors like believing. I do, however, hold some positions as provisionally true or useful pending further evidence.
That aside, I’ll be happy to answer your questions if you’ll provide an operational definition of what you mean by “thinking”. If your definition is good enough, you may end up answering the questions yourself.
I like this line of thought, but here I think that it’s crucial to distinguish “the order of understanding” (how one constructs one’s concepts of the phenomena that are to be described and explained) and “the order of being” (the descriptions and explanations of phenomena).
The former is governed by a norm of coherent conceptual explication and the latter by a norm of explanatory coherence. A good deal of bad philosophy (and bad science) has come about by ignoring the distinction between those projects and their inter-dependence.
In the order of understanding, it is tempting to suppose that thoughts cannot be material because all the physical stuff is present to me in ‘outer sense’ (enduring substances in causal relations located in space and in time) and my thoughts are presented to me in ‘inner sense’ — that is, introspection. My belief that I have a doctor’s appointment today does not appear to me as something that has spatial location or mass. It functions for me as a reason to leave my house; I don’t experience myself as caused to leave, as I would if there were an earthquake or fire.
I make these perfectly banal points in order to highlight what I see as the central flaw in the anti-materialist reasoning. The flaw is this
The Veridicality of Introspection: If I am introspectively aware of X as Y, then there really exists an X that is Y.
Thus, if I am introspectively aware of my thoughts as non-physical, then my thoughts really are non-physical. Likewise for desires, beliefs, memories, sensations — anything of which we are in the first instance aware of through introspection or ‘inner sense’, as distinct from ‘outer sense’ (using our senses to locate objects in space and time, etc.).
This in turn bears on
If we reject the principle of the veridicality of introspection (as I think we should), then “as we experience them” is one thing; “as they are” is another.
I think it is likely true that thoughts as they are — in “the order of being” — are high-level, top-down, complex patterns of synaptic activation. That might in turn require some complex lower-level story about voltage spikes, ion flows, and so on. (Even here we should be a bit cautious about how smoothly our knowledge of single neurons allows us to make predictions about the behavior of neuronal assemblies.)
And yet I do not think that I am introspectively aware of my thoughts as being high-level, top-down, complex patterns of synaptic activation — no more than I am perceptually aware of heat as being mean kinetic energy or of the sun as a massive nuclear explosion.
To the extent that I can really specify the phenomenology of thinking, I would say that thinking is very much like talking to oneself, and thoughts are something like inner speech.
Conjecture:
No entity is capable of understanding or explaining anything more complex than itself.
Alan Fox,
Don’t tell Daniel Dennett that. Or KN.
Kantian Naturalist,
Do you believe that matter thinks?
Do you believe that energy thinks?
Or do you believe that it is some other entity that thinks, if so what?
Do you believe that the concepts of matter and energy are arrived at through thinking?
What about a group of entities?
newton,
What about “Poof the Magic Emergence?”
Oooo…vitalism as articulated by Deepak Chopra…
newton,
In that case the group of entities is classed as the entity that is doing the understanding.
CharlieM,
I think highly of Talbott’s work, though he is often not quite precise enough for my taste. He’s been strongly influenced by Coleridge, which is not too far from my own influences in Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and Hans Jonas.
But I see Talbott as being on my side as giving us reasons for rejecting both materialism and immaterialism.
I think it is simply a sloppy, false dichotomy to think that just because Talbott is opposed to materialism/mechanism/reductionism, he must therefore be on the side of immaterialism, Neoplatonism, emanationism, idealism, etc.
Good point. I sit correct.
How about phrenology?
I don’t really care what Chopra has to say on the subject. All I will say is that certain words evoke deep prejudices in our thinking and prevent us from even considering certain possibilities.
Talbott is on the side of Steiner.
IMO neither Talbott nor I are opposed to materialism/mechanism/reductionism in their proper place.
Rivers do choose based external factors which path to take. The Corps of Engineers spends millions to keep the Mississippi from choosing the Atchafalaya basin.
Not all “matter” (whatever that is). By which I mean, thinking is not correctly ascribed to all systems that can be described entirely in terms of fundamental physics. I put it that way because fundamental physics does not posit the existence of very small rocks; it posits the existence of fields. What looks to us like very small rocks is just how our senses and imagination lead us astray when it comes to understanding quantum phenomena.
If there’s one thing we should have learned from general relativity, it’s that energy and matter are interconvertable — so everything that I said above about “matter” also applies to “energy”.
I ascribe thinking to living, ergo minded animals. Although animals are comprised of molecules, looking for the thinking in its constituents is like looking for the enigmatic beauty of the Mona Lisa by examining it one paint-fleck at a time. But I explain thinking in terms of the feedback loops between brains, bodies, and environments.
I suspect that there’s a crude sort of “folks physics” that’s part of our innate or nearly innate cognitive endowment, and that many primates have a similar module or model for estimating differences in size, weight, force, etc. Of course these concepts are, in humans, revised as our theories are revised in light of evidence.
Hahaha. (On so many levels. E.g., is believing a “mental behavior”?)
This isn’t about the veridicality of introspection, it is about the possibilities for producing one’s “subjective experience.” There has to be something that can actually support one’s subjective experience that is adequate to produce it. I already rejected the veridicality of introspection by rejecting “spirit” or “soul,” either or both of which may fit well with both introspection and a certain naive empiricism, but which make no sense within current physics.
Thoughts are entirely dependent upon the physics, whether they’re “high-level, top-down,” or however one might characterize nervous activity (it’s hardly just synaptic activation–why you seem to reduce nerve activity to that I wouldn’t know).
First, the sun isn’t anything like a nuclear explosion. Is it exploding? No. Novae and supernovae may be nuclear explosions (some supernovae are primarily driven by nuclear reactions, supernovae II are not, although much fusion does take place), the sun is a nuclear reactor of sorts, although extremely energetic in its various convective and electromagnetic phenomena (damned noisy, too).
Second, to be sure you don’t experience introspection as high-level, top-down, complex patterns of synaptic activation. One reason is likely because nervous activity is hardly mere synaptic activity. But more importantly, why are these all thrown together as if they were equal to each other in terms of understanding either “subjectivity” or “objective” discoveries? Do you experience thoughts as high-level, top-down, and (often at least) complex? I think one could make arguments in favor of all of these, although the “complex” bit might be a bit more difficult to really pin down adequately. I often see the “immaterialists” arguing how it’s obvious that mental phenomena are high-level and top-down, contrary to their caricature of what “materialism” ought to be. So although we’re hardly experiencing our thoughts as being determined by nerves–or even as fields–it’s hardly as if introspective knowledge is unrelated to the structure of the brain and its activities at all.
I would say that the same information that is encoded in nerve (and field) activity appears within the phenomenology of thinking. Which isn’t to disagree with what you’ve written, it just seems that you’re failing to relate conscious experience to the activity underlying it, even when there seems to be a fairly close relationship to it. What you’re saying is basically circular, thinking is like thinking (talking to oneself, etc.), which is indisputable, but failing to reach beyond a kind of closed-off subjectivity.
Glen Davidson
So?
GlenDavidson,
Firstly, I appreciate your correction about characterizing the sun as a giant nuclear explosion. A nuclear reactor is slightly more accurate.
Secondly, I’m just using synaptic activation as a short-hand; I’m not intending to dismiss the modulating effects of neurotransmitters, or how signals are modified within neurons, or whether there are electrical field effects across the whole brain or parts of it. (However, I am skeptical of the idea that we can reduce biology to physics!)
Thirdly, the circularity you detected is just the circularity of all conceptual explication, which is precisely why one needs to go beyond explication to actual explanations. (I assume we agree on this point, as well as on the importance of verifiability for good explanations?)
Fourthly, I think that understanding the principle of the veridicality of introspection is crucial to rejecting it for good reasons, and that’s important because the anti-materialist position depends on that principle.
Kantian Naturalist,
I’ll respond that it would take some pretty good evidence for me to accept that biology is not physics. “Reducible to physics” is a notorious trap of endless arguments about emergence and properties of systems, so I’m not going there, but I see only physics the whole way throughout biology.
Subjective conscious experience only needs to be understood as what some of the physics of the brain is “really like,” rather than as understood as abstractions of mere observation of that physics. Walto had an OP on this view a while back. I see no need for anything but physics.
If you disagree, well, there you go. I only have to say that I can see no reason to doubt that physics reigns throughout biology.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
I certainly don’t think that anything in biology (or psychology) violates the laws of fundamental physics.
But any claim stronger than that will have to engage in the details of what “reduction” means in philosophy of science and the debates about whether and to what extent the sciences are unified.
GlenDavidson,
What law of physics organizes the genetic code in order to build animal body plans including the brain?
Well spotted! 😉
In other words, in Phoodoo world there is no (and can be no) answer to how decisions work. It’s just taken for granted that humans make decisions – no one knows how.
Tide comes in, tide goes out…You can’t explain it!
LOL!
The same laws that organize atoms into molecules.
What is it about the physics of causality that makes people suppose that long sequences having similarities above those expected by chance actually come about via reproduction? Mechanical reproduction, human copying, or biologic reproduction.
Should we give up physics, or should we assume that reproduction by the means existing in the past is responsible for the repetition of the similarities above the level expected by chance?
We do expect physical causality to continue into the past. No one has ever seriously proposed a law of physics organizing the genetic code to build animal bodies. That’s a creationist canard.
Glen Davidson
Operative word in your post: “to”.
As in “in order to”
The problem with colewd and all other creationists is the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.
Some consistent with known regular processes happened, therefore a deity intended it to happen.
Chemicals don’t possess jet airplanes, nuclear fusion, or radio signals either, but oddly no “immaterialist” disputes chemicals can be configured to make them all. No illusions or “poof” required.
Well, when silly immaterial assumptions are all you’ve got…
All those things you mentioned are physical things, we can measure or weigh or touch. That is why we call them material.
Is intelligence material?