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?
No. The act of imagining is real. What one imagines is not necessarily real.
Bam. Much better. But not quite what you’ve BEEN saying. “Not necessarily real” is not only not the same as “immaterial,” it’s not even the same as “not real.”
walto, to Alan:
Alan has a bad habit of trying to define things out of existence, rather than investigating.
Thanks!
It’s what I think and should have been saying.
Let’s leave “immaterial” and “supernatural” to the theologians. But I included “not necessarily” to allow for the fact that my wife is all too real, just back home and expecting me to cook dinner! Commenting curtailed for the evening!
So the act of imaging creates something that is not real!
Or does the act of imaging do nothing?
That’s a reasonable description of one level of behavior, of course, but KN was responding to this question of mine to fifthmonarchyman:
I’m happy to agree to use a different term if you feel that “behavior” is unclear. The core point that I’m making is that all we have ever observed is physical processes in physical brains leading to behaviors like decision making, love, and consciousness. There is no evidence for souls, gods, demons, thetans, or any other entities. Those who claim that something “immaterial” influences or is responsible for the behaviors we observe have the burden of describing exactly what they mean and providing some kind of support for their claims.
I don’t see this as a particularly confusing or unexpected position to hold on a skeptical site.
“Laws” of nature are just the models humans have invented to describe regularities that are observed. The distinction between inventing and discovering seems almost designed to lead to confusion. I’d agree that the concepts of some consistent logics and mathematics are likely to be found useful by any intelligent beings that might evolve after humans become extinct, but that doesn’t mean that those exist outside of the patterns of thought that represent them.
Please stop peering in my windows at night. It’s creepy.
I’ve never rejected abstract concepts and figments of my imagination. I have no idea where you got that thought. I’m simply saying that all available evidence suggests that those are represented by physical material and processes in physical brains. No one here has supported the claim that anything immaterial is involved. I’m not even sure what people mean when they use that word.
Hah. That’s not what you’ve been saying at all. Pixies, chairs, round squares and quarks may be ‘represented by physical and material processes too. That doesn’t make them either ‘material’ or immaterial/imaginary. Now, in the hope that no one will notice, you’ve said something quite different. So what if they may be represented in brains–so can you be.
But wait! There’s more!
Really? No one? Are you sure you’re not imagining things now?
But that DOES mean that the patterns of thought, insofar as they represent the consistency of reality,* have something real to represent. Therefore the laws of logic, math, and nature, even as patterns of thought, cannot be equated with mere brain activity, but are all-pervasive. This also means that laws of logic etc. are not merely useful, but actually real and existent, and one ignores them at one’s own peril, just like with everything else that is real.
Moreover, laws of logic etc. are a prime example of immaterial as follows. They weigh nothing. They cannot be caught by hand. You cannot eat them for breakfast. You cannot excavate them or grow them in your backyard or purchase them in a souvenir shop and put them on your shelf. And you cannot detect them in a particle accelerator. You have to already have discovered them in order to be able to build a particle accelerator.
* Note that this reality involves both observing physical causality and training consistent abstract logical thought. Only then is the person fully realistic and rational.
I don’t have an issue with that. I would prefer that you credit it to the whole person, rather than the brain. We don’t have evidence that brains disconnected from bodies can still exhibit love.
…or any other behaviour except withering away.
So stipulated. Boring agreement.
There’s another option between discovered and invented: that the laws of logic evolved from more “primitive” kinds of animal cognition. This would make the laws of logic neither intrinsic features of reality nor arbitrary constructions.
There are two aspects to this thesis. The first is an “expressivist” view of logic (as Brandom calls it): the laws of logic are metalinguistic expressions of the norms implicit in rational thought. The second is a modest naturalism about rational thought: rational thought is a specific kind of animal cognition that evolved in specific circumstances and to play a specific function. Brandom develops the first thesis, and Tomasello develops the second.
I’m working on a minor revision of Tomasello’s thesis right now in order to establish more clearly the difference between inference, which is a generic feature of creative problem-solving in many animal species, and inferential practice, which is (probably) unique to humans.
The basic idea is that lots of animals infer, insofar as they can re-purpose tried-and-true cognitive strategies to novel situations, manipulate situations in order to satisfy their needs, and so on. There’s been a lot of nice work on chimpanzees as being able to make inferences about the physical and social environments.
But what they lack, if I’m right, is inferential practices: they can’t hold each other accountable to shared norms of correctness. Their inferences are subject to only strategic norms of satisfaction, not to norms of correctness about objective reality.
To get to that human-ish stuff, one needs to add a capacity to communicate similarities and differences in perspectives such that we can become aware of ourselves as occupying distinct perspectives on a shared world. And doing that in turn requires sensitivity to incompatibilies in our respective perspectives. That is why inferential laws such as modus ponens and modus tollens are rules about forbidding incompatible judgments.
I don’t expect anyone here to agree with my attempt to naturalize logic, of course. For one thing it’s far too sketchy at present. But I think it stands a nice chance of evading the dichotomy of either inscribed in the very nature of reality or mere subjective inventions.
It also gets away from the temptations of reductive materialism that would identify the laws of logic with any specific features of individual brains. I find that view quite strange and possibly incoherent. It loses our grip on the distinction between how one does think and how one ought to think. There is something to the Husserl/Frege critique of psychologism, and “neurologism” compounds the error.
Some of this is irrelevant, since laws and equations are similarly not things that can be weighed or purchased. But the last point is good — one needs to already be governed by norms of appraisal and evaluation in order to inquire into what there is.
Do I understand you correctly?
Are you saying that an immaterial concept can’t be documented in physical materials?
Are you actually claiming that if a single norm is recorded in two places we now have two norms instead of one?
Are you claiming that all copyright law is ludicrous because there is no immaterial song or story to steal?
peace
Actually the whole person includes consciousness which is an immaterial thing.
unless you want to claim otherwise without any evidence and contrary to the evidence that we do have
peace
We “carve up the world”. And then we carve up the parts. This gives rise to a tree structuring. Logic is a natural way of searching a tree structure.
Almost certainly, social practices developed along those lines. The laws of logic presumably arose as a codification of those social practices. In turn, the availability of logic increases the usefulness of tree structuring. So the two (tree structuring and the use of logic) tend to reinforce one another.
Are you are saying that it was once possible for a proposition and it’s negation both to be true at the same time and in the same respect?
peace
When I read you comment It does not sound to me like you are naturalizing logic. It sounds like you are personalizing it.
Now that is a project I can support.
peace
Actually, what would be crass of you, would be if you were selective or hypocritical about asking for claims to be supported. Are you either of those?
Stupid is as stupid does. The brain does what it wills to do.
walto, my brain.behavior loves you.
nevermind
Quite the exchange. Let’s see if we can follow it along.
Clearly, they are both observable behaviors of the brain, and you have objective empirical evidence to support your claim.
Did Patrick retract his unsupported claim?
I missed his evidence. Is it forthcoming?
That’s the evidence? Are you serious?
I’m sorry, but that’s just nonsense. Hand-waving, really.
What does it even mean to say that the brain “applies logic,” which, clearly, is not the same as the concept of logic. Surely logic, like love and decisions, is just brain behaviors. Nothing there to apply.
I predict further silence, accompanied by more hand-waving. Much better than retracting one’s claim because he cannot support it with objective empirical evidence.
How crass.
You’re such a jerk, Patrick. Please change.
Actually, since I mentioned laws of logic and laws of nature in one breath, there is just one option. Evolution of cognition may diversify and variegate the features and properties of the thing we are talking about, but it was immaterial all along.
Actually, since laws and equations are similarly not things that can be weighed or purchased, they all go as examples of immaterial. Yet Alan Fox will continue to say that he has not been rebutted (or maybe that he has to cook for his wife so he cannot follow up) and Patrick will continue to say that nobody has offered an argument for the immaterial.
Patrick’s last words in response to me in this thread are, “No one here has supported the claim that anything immaterial is involved. I’m not even sure what people mean when they use that word.” Observe the astonishing self-admitted ignorance that he thinks justifies and redeems him. Next he will fall back to demanding physical evidence again, I suppose.
I think the points you bring up here are worth elaborating on. I would agree that when we cut a rose blossom off at the stem it will not die immediately. Give it nourishment and it will continue to live for a while. Encourage roots to grow and it may develop into a new plant.
(as an aside, it is worth thinking about why it is possible to grow new plants from cuttings but the same thing will not happen naturally with higher animals.)
We have several roses on cut stems in our house and I can assure you they are dried up, dead and lifeless. Just like any inorganic physical object, they will only move if an external force is applied to them. A living rose has roots, stems, leaves, flowing sap and everything else that makes up the living organism that we know to be a rose. The rose cutting left lying on the table is no longer part of the living organism from which it was cut.
So can you elaborate on what you mean when you say I have contradicted myself?
You didn’t, if we allow that you changed the topic when starting your third sentence.
“Cut a rose blossom from the plant and study it. You have before you something dead and static. But let your mind behold the changing form of the plant from seed to blossom and back again, with its spreading roots, the shoots, the expansions and contractions.”
The first two sentences are about a dead/severed/prepared-for-microscope plant. The rest of the paragraph is about a live plant observing its entire life cycle. If the transition is understood, there is no contradiction.
One step at a time. Yes, I agree that thoughts in physical brains can be about or model patterns that exist in physical reality.
Again, the “laws” of nature are simply our models of regularities we observe. I suppose you can call nature “all-pervasive”, but our models of it are not.
There are also different logics and maths. Some are so useful and consistent that it seems reasonable to think that any sufficiently intelligent species would find them as valuable as we do for making models of reality. I’m not sure if that makes them “all-pervasive” by any reasonable definition.
Here’s where you go off the rails. When not in use by physical systems, where do these laws of logic exist? When the Sun grows past the orbit of the Earth and all humans are gone, where do the laws of logic run to? What definition of “exist” are you using?
No, I’m saying that you’ve provided no evidence thus far for the existence of anything “immaterial”, so your question is nonsensical.
The claim on the table from fifthmonarchyman and others is that consciousness has an immaterial component. All the observations we have to date do not support that claim. fifthmonarchyman has claimed to have “plenty” of evidence for the immaterial, but has not yet deigned to share it. Perhaps you have some to add?
When I annoy someone who’s opinion matters to me, I may.
You could simply explain what you mean by “immaterial”. So far I haven’t seen anyone in this discussion use it coherently. Definitions matter.
What Observations?
All of neuroscience, for starters. We know that drugs and trauma can affect consciousness and personality. We have no evidence whatsoever that anything immaterial is involved. Care to provide some?
Did you read the paper?
peace
No one is saying that the brain is not involved.
Do you have any evidence to support your claim that the brain is all that is involved?
peace
No, you are off the rails. If it’s true that physical systems use laws of logic (which you concede), then it’s presupposed that laws of logic exist. If not, then it would be impossible for physical systems to use them.
In this discussion, you have been provided an ample array of examples of immaterial, which grammar school kids understand, but you don’t. Deal with those examples.
You admitted you have no clue what is meant by immaterial. Therefore it follows that you have no clue what you are asking when you demand evidence for it. That’s kind of a self-made dead end for you.
Both, Erik, both. My problem is not being able to take the idea of dualism (in the sense of substance dualism) seriously. Souls etc are human constructs, the work of human imagination.
Alan Fox,
Is randomness real, or is it a construct of man Alan?
FWIW, I just discussed that issue a bit on the other thread.
OK, you prefer to say he equivocated. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt on that score.
How about human imagination? Is that a human construct too?
No, of course not. It’s a human attribute (though it may turn out not to be exclusive to humans). Why cannot the act of imagining be a physical process? Just because we can’t [yet*] explain brain activity in any precise way doesn’t mean we need to invent “non-material” explanations.
ETA*
When you define “observation” and “immaterial” such that “there are no observations of immaterial substances” becomes true simply by definition, it’s not quite the victory that you imagine it to be.
The question that Erik and others are pressing here is this: are there strictly logical grounds, independent of observations, for talking about immaterial substances? Is consciousness essentially immaterial?
Notice, for example, how seductive the argument from introspection is. My awareness of my own mental states seems radically different from my awareness of physical objects. I cannot assign spatial position or any empirically measurable properties to my own moods, thoughts, feelings, or sensations. They seem very different from my awareness of tables, trees, electrons, or brains.
Dualism, idealism, phenomenalism, and neutral monism have always traded on this very interesting point: the reality/appearance distinction cannot apply to appearance.
For if consciousness is “diaphanous” to itself — conscious mental contents and episodes are, qua conscious mental contents and episodes, exactly as they appear to be when I introspect — then what consciousness is is exactly what it seems to be. And since consciousness does not seem to be anything physical, then it isn’t.
Here, in a nutshell, is the problem. Much (though not all!) of Western philosophy is explicitly “anti-naturalistic”. This tradition begins very clearly with Plato’s criticism of Anaxagoras in Phaedo, where Socrates says that Anaxagoras gives causal explanations in lieu of rational justifications. Throughout antiquity Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism argued back and forth with the extreme naturalism of Epicureanism and the more moderate naturalism of Stoicism, though these debates came to an end when Christianity absorbed what it could of Neoplatonism and Stoicism, became the official religion of the Roman empire. (It was not until much later that Aristotelianism was rediscovered by Christendom and slowly integrated into Christian thought. And in many ways the advent of ‘modernity’ is really just the rediscovery of Epicureanism and Skepticism.)
Leibniz picks this tradition up explicitly in his criticism of the mechanism of Descartes and Spinoza, and Kant ups the ante quite nicely by focusing on how all empirical knowledge requires a priori conditions. In the early 20th century, Edmund Husserl and Gottlob Frege independently (but with some reciprocal influence) argued, against John Stuart Mill and others, that logic could not be reduced to psychology.
Taking this history up to the present time, the question is precisely whether our epistemological and semantic concepts — meaning, reference, intentionality, sense, warrant, justification, inference, reasoning, evidence, validity, and truth — can be understood in terms of the ontogenetic and phylogenetic histories of transactions within and across the brain-body-environment system, as explained by neuroscience, cognitive science, ecology, ecological psychology, and evolutionary theory.
Insofar as I am a naturalist, my response to that challenge is to face it head-on. And I do think that 21st century science, especially cognitive neuroscience, ecology, and evolutionary theory (in the ‘extended synthesis’), is uniquely poised to respond to this challenge as previous naturalists — Anaxagoras, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza, La Mettrie, d’Holbach, Nietzsche, and even Dewey and Sellars — were not. But it does no good for naturalists to pretend that the challenge isn’t substantial or that it can be satisfied with a bit of definitional fiat.
Excellent post, KN. Patrick isn’t actually interested in reasoned positions though. He’s made up his “mind”–on this matter as on all others.
I make that point too. It is a matter of definition. Without being clear what I mean when I say “imaginary” (and how else but to define it?) how can I discuss that idea with anyone else?
The definition should be the start of dialogue if only to avoid confusion. But I completely agree with you regarding the developments in science have changed the philosophical landscape. Some folks appear not to have noticed.
walto,
Where?
Patrick, the question being discussed is not does consciousness have a material component. If that was the question, you wouldn’t need a neuroscientist to answer it. Geez.
You said : “All the observations we have to date do not support that claim (that there is also a non-material aspect to consciousness.)” The observations we have right now have nothing to say one way or the other about an immaterial component. It doesn’t NOT support the claim.
Yes, it’s been discussed here before. There is no evidence for an immaterial component to consciousness in it. It has already been noted that your imagination is not evidence.
You seem to misunderstand the burden of proof. You’re the one claiming that something else is involved. You have the burden of supporting that claim.