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…
You mean like this?
If you’re a designer, yes. If you’re doing evolution, then not so much.
There is no fitness without a history. This is why we write tests.
Well, why some of us write tests. keiths doesn’t need tests.
That’s perspectivalism. The authors denounce that view.
Agreed, but M&P make it the only determinant of function. As I’ve said, I think the way they do this is to sneak in selectionism. Based on your last post, I take it that you’re not on board with that either.
Anyhow, I could be wrong in my assessment of that paper. If both keiths and Bruce think so, I’ll take that as a consensus and piss off.
I don’t care too much about this issue.
ETA: and if you add in mung–it may be a super-supermajority consensus.
Let the grownups talk, Mung.
ETA: Phoodoo moved away, but maybe Billy Cole would like to play. Why don’t you ask him?
walto,
I’m not defending the paper, which I haven’t read. I’m just
a) disputing the relevance of swamp tiger preservation by continual zapping; and
b) disputing your characterization of fitness as dependent on causal history.
Sure. I’ll listen while you explain to walto how fitness is not a selectionist idea. Because I like to learn, and you are using it exactly that way when you’re not mangling it into something unrecognizable as fitness in order to hide what you’re doing by conflating fitness and function.
KN:
Norms are themselves physical phenomena, so they fit quite easily into a physicalist ontology. The notion that abortion is immoral and ought not to be performed, for instance, is a reflection of the physical states of certain brains and the physical configurations of certain written texts. It has no independent existence apart from its physical manifestations.
If they are not physical, then what are they? What is this other category that you include in your naturalist ontology?
Mung,
Who said fitness wasn’t a selectionist idea?
This topic is over your head, Mung. Go play with Billy.
here
I would defend their reliance on causal powers as justified in the first place as being aligned with how science reliably infers function without using causal history. They bring in counterfeit coins and tigers after that main justification.
OTOH, I think you may have a point about fitness. Their argument is that survival is part of being an organism, and there would not be any organisms without reproduction. They do consider immortal organisms as a counterexample, but reject those as non-biological.
If spontaneous generation became a reliable way for tigers to survive, then you might not need to include fitness as part of defining a function, as long as you were willing to still call such tigers “organisms”. But if you stretched the thought experiment that far, I think it would call the science of biology itself into question, and not just a particular in this paper.
But no need for fantastic thought experiments. Consider the case of dinosaurs created by us through genetic manipulation. If that was to be the way for them to continue to exist, then they would not need fitness and so it may be wrong to include fitness as a criterion for function.
However, I would be tempted to say that if dinosaurs relied on humans for reproduction, they would be artifacts, not organisms.
In fact, you can argue that (spoilers!) the whole plot of Blade Runner 2049 revolved around that point: if replicants could reproduce, were they now humans, not artifacts, and so eg deserving of same moral treatment as humans?
I leave whether that extends to Westworld as an exercise for the reader.
Anti-perspectivalism is also justified on scientific practice. But after that long post, you definitely deserve a bathroom break. I don’t plan anymore on it unless someone else thinks it is worth discussing.
If you have to ask then I did not do a good job communicating or the gap is too wide.
peace
I think Dretske/Neander and Papineau also rely on function. They differ in how they view correct function: Millikan based on the function of the consumer of the representation; Dretske/Neander on the function of the producer; and Papineau on successful action/functioning at the person level (which is sort of a top-down analog of Millikan).
But they all depend on causal history to define “correct”.
Another weakness is, although they may solve the correctness problem for representations by considering function, then do not solve the problem of how content, and not just the structure of the vehicle, has causal powers for the brain.
The problem is their approaches separate vehicle and content from the start, and there does not seem a way to put them back together.
That’s why I now prefer the structural/similarity approach. It avoids that separation. (It reminds me of identity theory to solve the general mental causation issue). The material I’ve read is able to recover an approach to “correct” function, but it involves treating correctness as a continuous variable, and not just a yes/no indicator.
The idea reminded me of the Wright paper Explanation and the Hard Problem regarding why we find the hard problem hard. He used various ideas of successful explanation from philosophy of science, along with some results from psychology about why we preferred certain types of explanation according to circumstance.
Mung,
You’re making my point for me. That quote doesn’t conflict with anything I’ve said, nor does it address the question at hand, which is whether fitness depends on causal history.
It doesn’t.
Now go ride your bicycle over to Billy’s. I put the training wheels on for you.
Come on walto, you had just called the Bible irrational and Christianity nonsense.
Then you said that the music and setting was nice at the funeral but you did not like the talk that went along with it about the person that was obviously very important to the deceased’s community. Most likely Jesus was the very person they turned to for comfort in their time of grief and you were calling him Jeebuz or some such tripe.
Was that supposed to be a concession of some kind?
It struck me as the height of condescension. and frankly it pissed me off. I’ll bet it would have pissed off the folks at that church as well.
I sorry if my response upset you. It was meant to get you to perhaps see your comment as others saw it.
peace
keiths:
newton:
I hold that
a) there is nothing other than the physical;
b) all phenomena can in principle be reduced to fundamental physics; and
c) strong emergence and downward causation do not exist.
Like any scientific position, it’s tentative. I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s incorrect, however.
I really like the recent work that’s come out of Boone and Piccinini (“The cognitive neuroscience revolution“) and Williams and Colling (“From Symbols to Icons: The Return of Resemblance In the Cognitive Neuroscience Revolution“), together with that Morgan and Piccinini paper, that focuses on structural resemblances or functional homomorphisms as the key to representations.
I like that a lot!
But how different is that from a teleosemantic story? Is it because there’s no appeal to causal history for the explanatory work?
fifth,
What are you pissed off about? The fact that their beliefs might be important to them doesn’t obligate walto to share in those beliefs.
Agreed.
In what sense is it not, if God is Logic?
If you don’t mind assuming your conclusion, a logical fallacy.
Again, it’s not about what’s useful or necessary it’s about who God is.
Or it is what you need God to be to justify your presuppostionism. Hard to say.
God is thought to be unchanging and eternal, not sure there was a before from God’s view.
The question is does characterization of divine nature as Logic limit the infinite nature.
Exactly my point, you need the premise to make sense of the world. Your argument is dependent on it. And so far you only have an assertion that it is in fact the case. Something about too good to be true makes me skeptical.
The Christian God.
Not a fan of attributing human emotions to a deity either.
peace
Thanks
Whatever, keiths. I appreciate your defense and FMM’s semi-apology–regardless of any reluctance that may have been involved in the posting of either.
And while I’m here, let me also thank mung for his support of my remarks on selectionism, dazz and Neil for their comments on my funeral experience/report, and Bruce, for his awesome final post on the m&p paper–a lot to think about there.
Ok, I think I’ve now sent all my thank-you notes. (Wish my daughter would send hers!!)
walto,
No reluctance on my part. What you wrote was perfectly fine: you expressed an appreciation for the ritualistic richness of the Greek Orthodox funeral service while rejecting the theology.
In Fifth World, evidently, one is not allowed to attend (or appreciate) a funeral service without mindlessly adopting the theology being preached. That’s just silly.
walto,
What about thanking me for all the typos I’ve caused?
🙂
And all the punctuation I have mangled. Thanks
Most churches welcome unbelievers as potential believers. Seemed they got him hooked on the ambiance at least.
Is it a concession for you to attend a funeral where there is no talk about Jesus?
I bet the folks at the church would say the ceremony was to honor the departed and provide comfort to his family and friends, not to be a litmus test of Christian belief. Knowing some Orthodox Christians ,I would also bet they would be welcoming to all faiths and to those who had none. And the food.
That is a Trumpian turn of phrase, defecting responsibility of a comment on unnamed others.
peace
No, I attended a funeral of a friend a while back. He had been a star baseball player in high school.
He blew his arm out in the minor leagues and his bitterness lead him to alcoholism which lead to his very premature death.
There was good music and tales of his baseball heroics but no Jesus talk. It was the saddest hour I can remember. I haven’t felt the need to share that experience here until you asked. Certainly not in a thread about the relationship between the mind and the brain
All the more reason for a non believer not to be bothered by the references to Christ.
That is what made walto’s comments so infuriating.
The funereal was completely innocent and the people were undoubtedly welcoming and not judgemental but walto felt the need to critique the religious content of the service for some reason.
Why can’t folks just leave other folks alone?
peace
fifth,
If he had run around at the funeral telling people to stop talking about Jebus, then you might have a point. But he didn’t do that. He criticized the Jesus talk here at TSZ, where it’s entirely appropriate.
You’re completely off-base, fifth. Attending a funeral does not obligate one to feign respect, forever after, for the deceased’s religious beliefs.
fifth:
Oh, the irony.
Which, as far as you and anyone here knows, he did at TSZ, not during the service.
Indeed. I ask myself that all the time.
newton,
Thanks very much, newton.
And thanks, again kn for making leave out words and spell Schnauzer worng all the tim
walto,
That made me think of the Evelyn Woodhead Speed Reading Course.
KN,
I’m still curious to hear your answer to my question:
And if they are non-physical, then how do they influence the physical world, including brain states?
After that post, I realized that the thought experiment calling for ongoing swamp-tigers did not specify the source of each swamp-tiger’s genotype. Were they all clones of one tiger? Or was the genotype selected at random from all living tigers, including any existing swamp tigers?
I don’t think the single clone idea is interesting or fun, so suppose the genotypes are selected at random (with equal probability for each tiger/swamp tiger, not each genotype). To make the rest of my post work, limit the population of tigers used for random selection to those who have reached reproductive maturity.
Also suppose swamp-tigers are released in the wild resulting in a mixed population. That means all tigers compete. We have a single population of tigers/swamp tigers from which the next generation combining both types arises, either by sexual reproduction or by spontaneous generation of genotypes sampled from existing tiger/swamp tiger genotypes.
What will be the distribution of genotypes in this next population?
A standard definition of fitness is “the probability that the individual will be included among the group selected as parents of the next generation.” We might also believe that, at least to a first approximation, the relative frequencies of genotypes in a population depends on their fitness (more specifically, that of the parents, which includes the source for swamp-tiger genotypes as well). A key point is that fitness is a causal power which is not dependent on past history, even for swamp tigers (assuming powers can be probabilistic).
So the statistics of the genotypes in a mixed tiger/swamp-tiger population gene depends on fitness. In particular, the survival of tigers/swamp tigers as an organism depends on fitness — for if all tigers of all types died out (eg from hunting), then there would be no tigers to provide source of genotypes for spontaneous generation.
So the paper’s definition of function applies even under the conditions of the thought experiment.
Now there are issues with my argument. What happens if the swamp-tiger reproduction is high enough to prevent any die out? There are also complications with the genotypes of swamp tigers: if swamp tigers are created as mature adults, that may break my argument, since fitness does not affect whether such tigers reach sexual maturity. But starting to consider those would be tedious, so that’s enough for me, and likely way more than enough for anyone who read this far.
My ideas come mainly from these papers, especially the first two:
Predictive Processing and the Representation Wars (Williams 2017)
Predictive coding and Representationalism
Representation in the PEM Framework (Kiefer & Hohwy 2017)
I skimmed the paper you linked, and there is a lot of overlap with the papers I list. They all cover iconic/structural representation, its role in the PEM framework, and Ramsay’s Job Challenge. But the ones in my list add ideas on misrepresentation that I did not see in the one you cite.
Rather than using selection history to pick out the correct function/representation, these papers rely on the degree of resemblance of the PEM model to the causal structure of the world and its resulting effectiveness in guiding action and control for the organism.
(As I recall, the Hohwy paper ties that to an inferential role semantics in the connected PEM hierarchy, but I found that section of the paper harder to follow).
Bruce, fwiw, I really think you should consider trying to publish some papers in these (and other!) areas if you haven’t yet. Not only are you totally up on the lit, you’re wicked smaht!
I cite the Williams paper and the Gladziejewski paper in the paper on picturing I sent you, but I do need to read that Kiefer and Hohwy paper today! And just when I thought it was ready for re-submission!
I very much like how Gladziewjewski and Williams emphasize that the “wars” between classical cognitivism about representationalism (e.g. the early Fodor, where mental representations are static symbols governed by rules) and anti-representationalism (Dreyfus, Varela, Chemero) can be superseded once we see what kind of concept of representation that predictive processing requires. That’s the main reason why I use predictive processing in my paper as a way of fleshing out what Sellars meant by picturing.
My main qualm about predictive processing is this: we have pretty compelling evidence from neuroscience that the brain is organized in terms of families and superfamilies of dynamic attractors, with lots of whole-part and part-whole reciprocal constraints, and a lot of endogenous activity, which is perturbed by incoming sensory flux.
It’s really not clear to me how a system this robust and complex can be usefully modeled in terms of a hierarchy of Bayesian operations!
To go back to the Boone and Piccinini point about the difference between classical cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, predictive processing looks more and more to me like a version of the former. It’s more as if someone had said, “let’s design a computational architecture that can emulate our phenomenology” than anything else.
That’s clearly right, as far as that contrast goes. But selection history isn’t irrelevant, either. I think we need to take selection history here precisely because there’s a real danger that predictive processing is too Kantian: you’ve got the priors and hyperpriors generating the model, and the model is corrected whenever the prediction errors are too great to be ignored. But what counts as “too great to be ignored”? And how systematically biased are the priors?
There’s even a slight divide within the PP camp about this . . . within the free energy framework that Friston develops, predictive error minimization is just a formalization of how to get to homeostasis. But what counts as satisficing homeostasis is itself a matter of the organism-niche relationship which has an evolutionary causal history. By contrast I worry that Andy Clark’s version of PP, in Surfing Uncertainty, is basically naturalized & neuralized Kantianism — it’s Helmholtz updated for the 21st century. (Clark would agree with this characterization, I’m pretty sure.)
I worry that the more that predictive processing is held captive by a conception of the brain as a Kantian agent, the more it will be vulnerable to Nietzschean criticism of Kant. That’s the argument I run rather quickly towards the end of the paper.
Where we disagree isn’t about whether they are physical in some loose sense (concrete particulars located in space and time) but about reductive physicalism. We’ve tussled about this before.
You want to use a concept that makes me very nervous: “in principle reducibility.” I don’t quite understand what you mean by this, and to the extent that I do understand it, I worry that it involves giving free rein to our imagination and what we imagine some possible future science will do, rather than what we can make sense of given our actual scientific practices.
In short, I worry that “in principle reducibility” is an attempt to turn science fiction into metaphysics.
I leave the vast majority of folks alone the vast majority of the time. 🙂
I take it that you consider, say, the ideal tetrahedron to have no intrinsic reality, that it is just a representation “in our heads” of any physical tetrahedron?
Any physical tetrahedron is limited in size, imperfect in the exactness of its edges, planes and angles and changes over time. This physical tetrahedron you consider to have a reality which is greater than the ideal tetrahedron which is not physical but is perfect in form and not limited in size. It remains the same for all time.
For these reasons I would say that the ideal tetrahedron can be considered more real than any physical tetrahedron.
Sad.
I can imagine. What kind of music?
Actually the thread is about why the soul needs the brain. But to get back to your comment on why the soul needs the brain thread, if it is not a concession for you why would you imply it was for Walto?
I guess that would depend on the non believer and what form the references of Jesus took. Everyone should be on their best behavior and at the minimum you just have to look like you are paying attention. It is simple. If you can’t do that ,don’t go.
No Fifth ,what made Walto’s innocuous comment so infuriating was his earlier comments. It primed your anger, you just picked this story as an outlet. Unfortunately for you ,you choose unwisely.
It happens. I expect sometimes you feel piled on. Sure you bring a lot of it on yourself, but still, it can bother a person.
It seemed more of a review, loved the setting, the smell,the music .In fact he personally would like the same bon voyage just without the religious philosophy. Lots of religious people feel the same way, they want the preacher to put an amen to it.
But a captive audience can be a overwhelming temptation to a preacher.
He did, he just said for himself he would prefer less what he considers bad philosophy. You seem to be “ the folks” who can’t leave Walto’s choice of funeral alone. You seem to be the only oneupset and telling someone else what to do to make you less angry.
As an aside, I could do without both the church and the preaching. My only desire would be for Patty Griffin to sing.
peace
I would always choose to less than ideal tangible glass of whiskey over the intangible ideal glass.
It is always about you.
KN,
No, our disagreement is over physicalism itself. You wrote:
And:
Your mistake is pretty obvious. Your rejection of physicalism, while retaining naturalism, puts you in an awkward dualist position. It requires you to posit some magical means by which non-physical norms exert a causal influence over the physical. It’s very similar to substance dualism, and it fails for the same reasons.
You also wrote:
You’re certainly confused about physicalism, but that isn’t a reason to reject it.
CharlieM,
Right. The ideal tetrahedron is a fictional entity that does not exist in reality.
The representation is not of a physical tetrahedron, since physical tetrahedra aren’t ideal. The representation is of a fictional, ideal tetrahedron.
Then you have a strange definition of “reality”. The ideal tetrahedron doesn’t exist anywhere, including in our brains. All we have is a representation of it.
The ideal tetrahedron doesn’t exist. It isn’t real.
All you’ve give n us is a list of assertions. You’ve given no reason for anyone to believe that you are correct and that CharlieM is wrong.
We should just trust you because you are an authority?
Mung,
If you think my position is wrong, you are welcome to explain why.
Does the thought frighten you?
I see neural dynamics and PEM as complementary, not conflicting. Different levels of mechanism in neuroscience are subject to different types of successful explanation. Here are my thoughts, although the best I have is a list of loosely related ideas:
1. Emergence, AKA Effective Field Theory, is a standard approach to explaining different sciences or different conceptual models in the same science (eg QM and condensed matter physics).
2. One example of emergence involving chaotic dynamic equations is thermodynamics: the attractors of the dynamics of the underlying Newtonian equations are macrostates in the emergent thermodynamics explanations. The attractors can be chaotic.
3. As an example of the linked mechanisms leading to linked explanations in neuroscience, Piccinini’s intentionality paper discusses work that views attractors resulting from the behavior of neural systems as environmental maps of the spatial layout of an organism’s environment. It seems reasonable that a scientific theory and explanation of those spatial map representations would use the PEM model and I recall this example being used in some of the papers referenced in earlier post.
4. Dynamics sytems with their attractors may predict but, without mechanisms, they do not do an adequate job of explanation. (The linked Kaplan-Bechtel paper covers the much of the same ground as I am gesturing at).
5. Although he rejects loose usage of “representation” by neuroscientists for what are really causal detectors (which are understandable via dynamic models), Ramsay does accept that representations are valid scientific concepts when they are structural. So-called representation-hungry cognitive situations require representations, and emergent theories like PEM provide them via structures.
6. Downward causation via constraints on the phase space of the trajectories of the lower level dynamics may be exemplified by the reverse of the spatial map example: the possible spatial maps resulting from a PEM explanation will constrain the available attractors which realize them. An example from thermodynamics: the Past Hypothesis (ie the universe started in a low entropy state) constrains the dynamics Newtonian dynamics in order to explain what we see macroscopically.
7. And as a closing Hail Mary, perhaps cognitive linguistics mechanisms and representations might somehow emerge from PEM, although that is pure speculation, and may be a bridge too far*.
—————————————-
* (theory reduction pun intended!).