Why does the soul need the brain seems like a logical question especially in the context of the belief held by the leading ID proponent of the Discovery Institute Michael Egnor. He has written extensively on the theme of the immaterial soul that, in his view, is an independent entity, separate of the human body. What Dr. Egnor consistently fails to acknowledge is the obvious connection or interdependence between a functioning brain and self-awareness or consciousness. I wrote about it here.
If certain parts of human brain are damaged or disabled, just like in case of general anesthesia, the human brain loses the sense of consciousness or self-awareness either permanently or temporarily. The immaterial soul fails to make up for the damaged or disabled brain…
Dr. Egnor’s personal experiences (and he has many) as a neurosurgeon convinced him that many people, including many of his patients, with the great majority of their brains missing have developed and function normally. Egnor is convinced that an immaterial soul makes up for the loss of brain mass that is responsible for normal brain function in people with normal brain size or no damage to any of the brain parts.
It appears Dr. Egnor believes that unlike a computer software that can’t function without the computer hardware, human brain has an ability to make up for the loss of the hardware with the computer software – the immaterial soul.
Is Dr. Egnor’s view consistent with the readily available facts?
I personally see Dr. Egnor building and supporting a strawman by his selective choice of facts…Hey! That’s my opinion and that’s why we have this blog full of experts to disagree with me or Dr. Egnor…(I kinda like the guy though).
Let’s see…First off, not all cases of patients with missing parts of their brains experience the supposed miraculous saving powers of the immaterial soul. It appears that the amount of the missing part of the brain mass doesn’t seem to matter… What seems to matter more is which part (s) of the brain is missing and not how much of the brain mass is actually missing. Some parts of the brain seem essential for consciousness and self-awareness and others do not.
However, the main point of this OP is:
<strong> Why does the soul need the brain? Or why would human body need a brain at all, if the immaterial soul has an ability to compensate for the brain losses?
If the software (the soul) can operate without the hardware (the brain) why do we even need the brain in the first place?</strong>
It seems like a faulty or at least a wasteful design to me…
fifthmonarchyman,
What’s the contradiction?
fifth:
That’s incorrect. No surprise, since you don’t understand physicalism or its implications.
Competent physicalists understand that “identical” does not have just one meaning. You are baffled by this. Hence my earlier explanation in terms of snow tires:
Even your own example makes this obvious:
The two Bruces are in distinct locations, fifth. Thus they can be distinguished even if they are (momentarily) atom-for-atom duplicates. They’re compositionally identical, but not numerically identical.
This is not difficult.
Different causal histories are physical differences.
Yes. Numerical differences between physical objects are physical differences, because the objects occupy different places in space and time. Space and time are physical.
That’s a good point, and it’s a reason why a science-based philosopher wouldn’t have much truck with examples like Black’s, where the spheres would just have to have always been there.’
For many philosophers that’s a kind of gobbledygook from which we can’t draw any useful conclusions. I personally think Black’s argument is persuasive, but, I mean, so what? If you happen to be interested in metaphysics, maybe it’s an intriguing result. Or maybe it tells us something about our concept(s) of identity. But again, physicalist types are not likely to care a hell of a lot, and fmm hasn’t actually shown any contradictions in their claims.
Kantian Naturalist,
Can you expand on this? I know they are mathematical properties but how are they physical? Maybe a definition can clear this up.
I don’t really understand that, but I’ll take your word for it. Black just takes the position that, there being no absolute space, positions have to be individuated via physical objects, not the other way around.
J-Mac:
I made my point quite clearly.
You wrote:
My response:
J-Mac:
Oh, the irony.
KN:
Not quite.
Two objects could be atom-for-atom duplicates despite having wildly different causal histories. Their properties going forward would be the same despite those different histories. So in that sense, the different causal histories are not physical differences. An object’s physical state at time t does not contain enough information to allow us to uniquely determine its causal history.
KN:
colewd:
Crack a physics book, maybe?
Are you familiar with the term ‘velocity’, which captures the change in position — position in space — per unit of time? Or do you think there’s no physical difference between one car hitting another at 70 mph vs 10 mph?
Transporter malfunction, two Captain Kirks…
ETA
here
That depends on whether the physicalist says there is one mind or two and whether he takes mind to be synonymous with the self.
Like I said before, I have the impression that there is a brazen contradiction but need more clarification to flesh that impression out.
peace
I am interested to hear KN on this one as well.
It seems that we might have some disagreement as to what actually qualifies as physical. If relational attributes are physical I think we have expanded the definition somewhat.
peace
Is that an attempt to enter the conversation or a drive by quip?
If you are serious about interacting I have a ton of questions for you
Peace
I’d like some clarification on this one as well.
Otherwise indistinguishable objects say two photons are physically different if one came from a star and another from a laboratory experiment?
peace
I think you can make a case for that philosophically, but I have footnoted it* since I think it is not something most scientists would care about in their research.
As I understand it, causal history is important for philosophical approaches to concepts like meaning, personal identity, correct versus ersatz (eg implanted) memory. Causal history is also important for those interested in forgery like art buyers and US Treasury agents. In all causes one could do thought experiments where there are exactly identical items but conclude they differ because of causal history (eg counterfeit versus real coin, as in Dennett thought experiment).
But scientists do not use causal history as an input; rather they draw conclusions about it. (eg evolution). Once they have those conclusions, they can use them for further work, eg definition of a species.
That role of causal history in science is one reason I became uncomfortable with Teleosemantics. Scientists look at current causal powers. I think philosophers should be wary about defining concepts to support naturalism which are not consistent with how science is done.
Piccinini (!) and Maley have a paper
A Unified Mechanistic Account of Teleological Functions for Psychology and Neuroscience which makes this argument against etiological approaches to function. They argue instead for a definition which is compatible with the scientific approach. That can then be applied to determine when a biological mechanism is misfunctioning, when can be used in accounts of (eg) what makes content in a representation correct. That replaces the etiological approach of teleosemantics.
Here is their definition, although of course it needs the context of the paper for details.
——————————
* Here is how I think you could add causal history to the supervenience base available for physicalism: It is a core precept of physics that information is never lost. Therefore it is in principle possible to recover the causal history of some entity from all the information (eg photons) produced in its causal history. If you accept that “in principle” as good enough for physicalism, then I think you just include that available information in an expanded definition of “supervening on the environment” (which we exchanged posts about in defining supervening for the mind).
Right. We argued about the impact of this on externalism for meaning, of course. I don’t want to re-open that whole debate, but see my long reply to KN for one reason I don’t agree with the position I was defending then.
I understand the thought experiment to be an attempt at a reductio of physicalism. Since it needs two qualitatively identical but numerically distinct brains to even get started, I think you need to accept that possibility if you want to make the argument.
If I was somehow involved in proposing the thought experiment* , then I hereby apologize to the TSZ community for any hint of this howler.
—————————-
* not the causal history I recall
Not sure what I changed my mind about but I will take your word for it.
You are right about Einstein and math. Minkowski had to convince him to unify space and time into 4D spacetime for SR. Grossman taught him the Riemann work on the geometry he used for GR.
The mathematician Hilbert almost beat Einstein to announcing GR because Einstein got sidetracked by an error he made related to the math used in GR (but to be fair, Hilbert was working from preliminary ideas he got from Einstein).
Not altogether! If you follow my link, you should be able to find most current participants views. (Though I see BruceS has changed his stance). I’m not sure going over the same ground would be useful.
Just to be clear, I changed my mind about teleosemantics because it is claiming to be a naturalistic account of content of representations, but it is not aligned with scientific practice.
Nothing to do with Swampman arguments, which I see as continuing to pose a challenge for some purely philosophical concerns about meaning in general.
That type of philosophical puzzle, however, is why I now am of the opinion that any purely philosophical approaches to meaning are pointless without further progress in cognitive science including linguistics. That’s Jackendoff ‘s view as I understand him (and probably that of others like Chomsky).
This a very interesting post, and the paper you liked to sounds important.. Prior to seeing your comment, I had intended to write something to the effect that philosophers have long distinguished between intrinsic and extrinsic properties, so if if one wanted to make it easier to hypothesize qualitatively identical, but distinct items, one could restrict the properties to the intrinsic kind. Black took the harder road and included relational properties in his test, but denied that there are really any such properties as ‘being at position x’ that are not actually reducible to ‘being in such and such relation to physical object Y.’ That’s why I don’t know what to do with KN’s claim that spacetime IS physical. (Maybe you’d just recast Black’s sphere’s as pieces of spacetime? Or, perhaps better as quanta, which I guess is what the authors of the other paper you linked in this regard do. Because it is quanta that somehow constitute time on some theories.)
But perhaps the more sensible way to look at this stuff is as you have suggested in your comment. I.e, just note that scientists–who I take it are the important physicalists here–have the kind of fish to fry that taste bad in causal history grease.
Otoh, I don’t think you could have gotten FMM’s reductio strategy right, since he has denied many times that two objects can be qualitatively identical yet physically distinct, and has simply made fun of Black and me for suggesting the possibility. I mean, I’d be happy to make that supposition if it’s part of his argument, but he says he doesn’t want us to do that because it’s inconsistent with God’s omniscience. So I really don’t know what his argument is.
I need to take some time to digest the main body of your post.
But on FMM, I don’t know what his argument is and he does not seem willing to present one.
I thought he was saying that physicalists could allow Qualitatively Identical but Numerically Distinct brains but then somehow have an issue with QIND for minds supervening on such brains (but he is vague so who knows).
Now he seems to be complaining about the very idea of QIND for physicalists. But then if this thought experiment is assuming physicalism for the reductio, then you need QIND for the brains, so you have to accept it to get started. If you deny it only for minds, you have to provide a reason that does not beg the question against physicalism.
I’m tired of intellectual whack-a-mole with FMM, so I am not going to confront him with that.
ETA: typos, several attempts
I agree that an account cannot purport to be naturalistic if it is at odds with scientific practice. But I’m struggling to see how this is a problem with teleosemantics. Hopefully the new paper you linked to will help dispel my confusion.
They are physically different if physicists say that they are different. Otherwise they are not physically different.
All of this is entirely a matter of social convention.
Yes, that’s a briefer way of putting Bruce’s point.
Read the paper, that is just an assertion. There is no knowledge that a being who has all knowledge could gain by logical means , a being who has all knowledge has no need for reasoned proof.
It also seems a bit presumptuous to believe one’s thought processes are akin to an omniscient, eternal being’s thought processes in some sense. We have a hard time with members of our own species.
Now I can understand the practical advantages of that belief.
“Subsequent : coming after something in time; following.”
“the principle of contradiction) states that contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time, e.g. the two propositions “A is B” and “A is not B” are.
If time does not exist, is the law of contradiction useful ,logical, or necessary axiom?
What use does a deity have for a means of proof for that which it has always known is true?
Rather it seems dependent on human’s need to make sense of the world. If the deity is logical then all the seemingly illogic occurrences are logical. What is needed is to find the premises that result in that logical conclusion.
What meaning does subsequent have without the concept of before and after?
It is hard to avoid the concept of time.
Very poetic, is Logic the only path to truth?
end quote:
Define logic then because for humans it is a tool to gain knowledge or provide evidence for knowledge, neither of which an omniscient being needs to do. How does his mental character use it?
Seem like a limiting view of a deity, the emphasis on logic and thinking part. Do you also view the mental character as emotional? The Biblical God is described more often in those terms rather than coolly logical. The story of Jesus is a classic emotional narrative. From miraculous birth to graphic death. And heroic triumph over evil and death.
Just saying.
peace
It’s worth noting that there’s no definition of “physicalism” up and running here. Here’s an attempt, based on my reading of Ladyman and Ross’s Every Thing Must Go and Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.
Physicalism consists of a commitment to all of the following claims.
1. Definition of “fundamental physics”: a hypothesis H belongs to fundamental physics if H could be confirmed or disconfirmed by any measurement taken anywhere in the history of the universe, at any scale.
2. In the actual world, all real properties, events, relations, objects, etc. are either (a) posited by some theory of fundamental physics or (b) reducible to the entities posited by fundamental physics.
3. If some concept or category cannot be explained in terms of the entities that conform to (2), then it is “empty”: the concept has no referent.
Note 1: The supervenience has be local and weak because global supervenience and local strong supervenience require possible worlds, and it’s not clear how a physicalist would accommodate possible world discourse.)
Note 2: I’m taking (1) from Ladyman and Ross and (2) from Rosenberg (“the facts about fermions and bosons fix all the facts”).
Note 3: I’m uncertain how best to parse out “reducible to.” There are competing accounts of “reduction,” and I don’t know which one the physicalist needs in order for her metaphysics to work. My own prejudice is that there aren’t any successful cases of intertheoretic reduction — at least not in the sense that we can do any real work in metaphysics with. The reason why I’m not a physicalist is because I don’t think the sciences can be reduced to fundamental physics.
Kantian Naturalist,
Don’t like that. It seems much too much like verificationism to me. I mean, physicalism’s own claims seem to be empty given that definition.
It always cracks me up to see theologians make so much out of the law of non-contradiction, without any awareness of alternative logics (past and present) in which the law of non-contradiction is rejected. That’s not God that they’re worshiping, but just Aristotle — the only philosopher more wrong than Plato.
Yes, that was my reaction.
However, I don’t much care for physicalism, so I’m not going to be troubled by that.
FWIW, the Garson (2016) book on Biological Functions that the Piccinini paper cites appears to agree with you, at least insofar that “selection effects” are valid as part of a definition of biological function. I have only skimmed it, so that is why I am hedging with “seems”.
A related concern is reconciling externalism about mental content with mental causation and cognitive science. For example, if your externalism about meaning says terms get their reference from causal history (I think it has to?) then you would seem to have these issues.
There’s something to verificationism that I’m not opposed to, but it would a much more subtle and modest form that anything historically defended. But you’re right that physicalism would be empty by its own lights, because it would have to say that there are no genuinely normative phenomena — no values, no meanings, no thoughts.
But I’m with Neil in this respect — I’m not a physicalist, so this doesn’t bother me too much. I take physicalism about as seriously as I take theology — which is to say, not very.
I’ve skimmed their paper, and I think it’s clever. I do have a little issue with it though. They want to distinguish their own view from the etiological/selectionist position. And to do so, they rely on a counterexample to that alternative position that depends on what we have been discussing here: a qualitatively identical entity (say a counterfeit coin or swamp tiger) that does not have the appropriate history to make the etiological position true, but arguably has the same function as the non-counterfeit.
The thing is, when they make the argument for their own position, they say,
What seems to me a problem for them is that that a swamp tiger is not a god-like or immortal creature impervious to damage but is nevertheless an example of an organism that did not require survival and inclusive fitness in order to exist. But if we rule out such miraculous beasts, it’s not clear me that their position will really be distinguishable from selectionism.
Also, I was not entirely convinced by their critique of perspectivalism, but that’s a story for another day.
KN,
I don’t see why.
I am a physicalist — and a reductive physicalist, at that — yet I don’t reject the existence of values, meanings, or thoughts.
They’re physical phenomena, so they fit just fine into a physicalist ontology.
I read the Morgan and Piccinini on “Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of Intentionality” and I’m so grateful that I did while writing this paper! They talk extensively about Sellars and give a very helpful explanation of why cognitive neuroscientists are justified in talking about representations even in dynamical systems terms! Very helpful!
And it helps me bolster my case why Sellars needs to distinguish between intentionality and picturing: picturing is what the theory of neurocomputational representations has to be because Sellars follows Chisholm and others (C. I. Lewis, Firth, etc.) in holding a linguistic theory of intentionality.
And this is because when it comes to intentionality per se, Sellars follows Kant (and to some extent Hegel and Husserl) rather than the Early Modern empiricists. That is, it is because Sellars is a post-Kantian rather than an empiricist about semantic content that he cannot accept that structural resemblances and functional homomorphisms (which picturing does have) are sufficient for intentionality.
Indeed, one might even point out (and by one I mean me) that the worries about the empiricist Myth of the Given kick in at precisely this point, where we cannot attribute full-fledged semantic content as such to merely naturally occurring mental or biological states without running afoul of something like the naturalistic fallacy.
Well, it looks like I have some major re-writing to do this afternoon! Thank you, Bruce!
Neil,
No. If that were the case, then physicists could never be mistaken in their judgments regarding physical differences.
Neil,
They are physically different if physicists say that they are different. Otherwise they are not physically different.
I think what he was intending was shorthand for something like
Could you thumbnail what a reductive physicalist holds?
Violent agreement there! 🙂
The worry is that the physicalist’s ontology is a world of what is the case, whereas values, meanings, and thoughts are involve what ought to be the case.
Let’s be clear: I’m a naturalist, too, and I do think that there’s plenty of room for a naturalistic explanation of normative phenomena. I just think that lot of the worries about the semantics and epistemology of “reduction” have made it a problematic notion. And I say that even though I do like Bechtel’s way of thinking about reduction in terms of multi-level mechanisms.
I think their argument is based on what it takes for the organism to continue to exist, not how it came about.
BruceS,
Just deleted my erroneous post. Sorry for confusion caused. So you think by “to exist” in the excerpted quote above they actually meant “continue to exist”?
You may be right, but if swamp tigers are in play it’s also false that organisms need fitness to continue to exist, since if you can have one, why can’t you have 1000? There would thus “continue to be” tigers.
Yes, I see their argument [ETA:] to be about what it takes for organisms to continue to exist. For example, that is the driver behind including homeostatis.
Given that, I don’t follow the next part of your post. Each of the tigers needs fitness to continue to exist, and of course even though they are Qualitatively Identical, they are Numerically Distinct.
BruceS,
Yes, each tiger–but not tigers.
So what is physical and what is immaterial is purely in the eye of the beholder?
Interesting. That is yet another piece of information that I was unaware of.
By that standard you could simply define the immaterial soul as physical and defeat the dualist in one fell swoop.
On the other hand the dualist could if he chose to define the materiel brain as immaterial and defeat monism.
simple stuff
peace
Man, you are taking a beating for speaking in shorthand, Neil!
I’m pretty sure I have made it clear that I don’t have an argument. What I have is an impression.
Exploring this impression has been very rewarding. A small sampling of what Ive learned
1) I’ve learned that it’s there is no agreed on definition of the physical
2) I’ve learned that relative properties are physical
3) I’ve learned that numerical identity is physical identity
4) I’ve learned that it’s supposedly not a contradiction to say that there are two distinct minds but only one person.
5) I’ve learned that according some folks two objects can be identical and physically different at the very same time.
This sort of thing is way better than presenting an argument. You all should try it sometime.
peace
Are you really going to open up that can of worms again?
In those “alternative logics” the law of non-contridiction is rejected and accepted at the very same time and the very same respect.
Is that correct………and not correct?
LOL
peace
I will! It’s a cool idea: you just make up nonsensical stuff and attribute it to unnamed adversaries. What’s not to like?
Where did I suggest that?
I was referring to a consensus of physicists, not to individual preferences of individual physicists.
And when I say that it is a matter of social convention, I do not mean that it is chosen on a whim.
If we actually could see two different worlds with two Captain Kirks who appeared physically identical, we might ask about those worlds. If those worlds have apparent quantum randomness so that they begin to diverge, we would very likely prefer to say that those are separate minds. And if those two worlds seemed to be tied together such that they could not diverge, we would probably prefer to say that there is only one mind.
And if this is settled by social convention, then why do we argue about it? That’s because these sorts of arguments have a lot to do with the establishing of such social conventions.