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…
In this thread, I was only explaining how I think it could be added, not attempting to examine cases where you might want to do that.
But if you are an externalist about meaning, then I think that you must believe that causal history is involved somehow in the explanation of meaning for at least one of names, natural kinds, and socially constructed kinds. It would be either the speakers personal causal history or the causal history of (eg) the scientists responsible for the meaning of a natural kind in the speakers community. Maybe there is an approach other than causal history for externalists in all of these three cases, but I do know it.
Using the idea in supervenience post gives externalists who were also physicalists a possible way to maintaining a supervenience approach to physical ism. This assumes supervenience can refer only to the current environment (and the metaphysics involved is not subject to SR issues with time!)..
I agree it would make no sense to try to include such causal history in a scientific explanation of meaning, which was the reason I said there seems to be a conflict between externalist meaning and scientific explanation.
Then whatever it is, it is not an ideal tetrahedron.
As I have already explained to J-Mac, I lack the 3D imagination needed to parallel park.
Take a regular tetrahedron and distort it while keeping the tetrahedral form, Say you shorten one edge or extend an apex. The ideal tetrahedron encompasses all tetrahedral forms imaginable. Therefore it is not static. That is what I mean by kinetic.
Thanks KN. It will take me some time to digest that.
I did not mean to suggest anything about your views. I was trying to say that someone who was an eliminativist about social reality would have trouble with PEM modeling the causal structure of social reality.
One idea I’d like to pursue further is that semantic internalism is the right view to have about the content of non-linguistic animal minds, and semantic externalism is the right view about the content of minds once language comes into the scene. So the evolution of language is (among other things) the externalization of content.
It can’t actually.
To do that, your first step would be to define “reference” without any reference to anything other than the ideal tetrahedron.
Oh! Yes, definitely! Btw I sent you the latest draft of the picturing paper and will let you know if it gets accepted!
CharlieM,
Then you’ve undermined your claim that the ideal tetrahedron is “realer” than any physical tetrahedron due to its changelessness. If it ain’t static, it ain’t changeless.
So what?
The thing is you have no idea if such a realm exists, or what is there if it exists. You’re just making shit up. You made up a whole new realm to “explain” the physical one, with archetypes in it that are somewhat like the physical things but, conveniently, don’t need an explanation themselves. If anything, this represents the archetypical reasoning fail that theists tend to fall for.
I disagree with that.
I think we need some clarification of what you mean by “content”.
Here’s my current view.
We carve the world up into parts, and we give names to the parts. This is needed for language.
We each do this. But, to some extent we can see how others do it. Because we are a social species, we attempt coordinate the parts into which we carve the world and the names that we give to those parts. Our attempts to coordinate are imperfect.
There are two aspects of carving the world into parts:
(1) the parts into which we carve the world. Those parts are external in the sense that we can mostly see the parts into which others carve the world.
(2) the procedures that we follow, in order to carve up the world: These procedures are, unavoidably, internal. And these procedures are mostly not visible to others.
As I see it, “reference” has to do with the parts into which we carve the world, while “meaning” has to do with the procedure we use for that carving. So I see reference as external, but I see meaning as internal.
It seems to me that there is a tendency to conflate meaning and reference. Putnam’s “The meaning of meaning” does that. So he makes a cogent argument that reference is external, and then mistakenly concludes that meaning is external.
Externalism about meaning seems better than the philosophical alternatives to me as well. But I cannot reconcile that with naturalizing meaning, assuming naturalizing requires explanations consistent with science.
Scientific explanations of language-related behavior and neural processes will involve only the current causal powers of the brain/body. Sure, there may be a causal chain from those to the environment and the past interaction with it. But even under interventionist causation, those external influences will be blocked by a Markov blanket of brain/body states. So if meaning is external, how can it have causal influence?
It is the same issue that I have with the specific case of the teleosemantic explanation of content and with externalism in general and mental causation.
Which is why I am currently attracted to Jackendoff’s idea (along with others) that we need to make more progress in cognitive science and linguistics before trying finalize any philosophical aspects of meaning.
I don’t think that’s correct. The distinction has been clear since Mill, pretty much everybody knows that referents are (generally) external, and Putnam was interested in the controversial claim–that meaning is external.
I like this line of thought! At this rate you’ve earned an acknowledgement on my next paper!
I might need to hear a lot more about why languages can’t be treated as emergent entities with their own causal powers. There could be some puzzles about causation here that would need to be unpacked.
You’re definitely right that if predictive processing theorists are right about Markov blankets, then we’d have to accept semantic internalism “all the way up”, so to speak. In that case the difference between non-linguistic semantic engines and linguistic semantic engines would be just about the kinds of real patterns to which they are sensitive.
Andy Clark argues that language makes possible “top to top” information exchange, across the “top” of PEM hierarchies, so we don’t have to get information into the brains of other animals by training them from the ground up with reinforcement learning for every new behavioral routine. I like that picture but I don’t know how it squares with semantic internalism vs externalism as philosophers debate those terms.
I will say that Brandom-style normative inferentialism looks like a kind of semantic content externalism, so if it turns out that semantic externalism is inconsistent with scientific explanations of animal cognitive powers, my entire project thus far is in big trouble!
keiths, to CharlieM:
Mung:
No, I don’t. Do you? If so, what is it?
CharlieM, to walto:
keiths:
CharlieM:
I’m talking about any fictional world or territory for which an actual map exists. Middle Earth, for example:
The map is real; Middle Earth is not. The representation in your brain of an ideal tetrahedron is real; the ideal tetrahedron is not.
Even if it is the case that the map is real and Middle Earth is not real, it does not follow that the representation in the brain of an ideal tetrahedron is real and the ideal tetrahedron is not real, and at best your argument, such as it is, is based on a questionable analogy.
See above. I can only hope that you are just playing dumb.
As if there is some big risk that his family would think he wanted to be given a christian burial.
I don’t think he was expressing a wish for his own funeral I think he was attempting to show how magnanimous he was. He even said he liked me except for the Jesus talk just like the funeral.
I’d be willing to withdraw my question If he could only explain why his personal wish for a Christ-less funeral was at all relevant in a discussion about physicalism and duplicate brains.
Oh well. Till that happens you know my position on the matter you can take it or leave it, that is up to you.
peace
Mung,
Who said that it followed? Damn, Mung. Stop latching onto whatever dumb ideas pop into your head.
My argument is not that one follows from the other. It’s that neither is a contradiction in terms:
There is a process known as “reading comprehension”, by which brighter folks can discern the meaning of texts printed on paper or displayed on a computer monitor. It must seem impossible and magical to you, given your cognitive limitations, but it is actually routine for competent folks in many areas of expertise.
I’ve suggested it before, and I’ll suggest it again: take a reading comprehension course. True, the acquisition of such skills might be out of your reach, but isn’t it worth a shot?
fifth,
Stop whining. Walto is free to express his preferences for his own funeral, even if it offends you.
This is The Skeptical Zone, not The Snowflake Zone.
If you can’t take the heat, then get out of the kitchen.
It wasn’t any more off topic than many of your own posts.
Bruce,
I assume you mean “KN”.
No, the reality of socially-constructed concepts is actually something that he and I agree on. Each of us holds that they are real and that they are physical.
The main disagreements are:
1. Since values, meanings, and thoughts are real and physical, I hold that they are part of a physicalist ontology. To me, that’s a simple matter of logic. KN disputes it for some reason, even though he too agrees that they are real and physical. So he is denying that these real, physical things are part of a physicalist ontology, which seems bizarre to me.
2. KN dismisses physicalism one day…
…and then embraces it wholeheartedly a couple of days later, acknowledging that things like values, meanings, and thoughts are actually physical.
To me, this is an obvious contradiction. He doesn’t seem to recognize the problem.
These are offered as simple statements of fact. You’ve completely dropped the part about the lack of any contradiction. They are absent. Missing. Without mention. You want us to believe that you were just repeating yourself? Ludicrous.
It’s clear that you believe both these statements to be true as they stand.
I should stop latching on to whatever dumb statements come out of your mouth.
You changed your statement and now want to pretend that you didn’t. ok.
Are you admitting what you wrote is false?
You don’t really believe that though, right? And you really just meant to repeat in a new post what you had just said in the previous post, that they are not contradictions. That’s what you want us to believe?
Ludicrous.
But what do you mean by “physical”?
I’ve suggested two different ways of cashing how you’re using the word.
In one sense, what I called “physical-1”, all we get is concrete particulars with spatio-temporal location. That’s a version of nominalism sufficient to close the door to Platonic abstracta, immaterial consciousness, and libertarian freedom — but maybe not much else.
We’d have to add further constraints to get what you want — maybe a commitment to empiricism, though it would have to specified carefully.
That’s very different from “physical-2”, as I was calling it, which involves a commitment to the view that what’s ultimately real is what fundamental physics tells is real, and everything else that exists is just an arrangement of whatever is posited by fundamental physics — quantum fields or whatever we turn out to get from the physicists.
The reason why I don’t call myself a physicalist is because I think that physicalism is only a position worthy of the name if it’s something like physical-2. The term “physicalism” came into use when enough people realized that the postulates of fundamental physics involved more than just “matter”. Hence the change from “materialism” to “physicalism”. But physicalism is just as reductive (or eliminative) as “materialism” was.
In any event I don’t think there’s any whiff of dualism involved in the idea that sociology or biology are not reducible to quantum mechanics. (Not that anyone here has suggested otherwise but I wanted to be clear.)
Mung:
Yes. And they are true, of course.
Statement #1 is true:
…and so is Statement #2:
Your mistake is obvious. Because of your abysmal reading comprehension, you mangled statement #2 to mean
But that’s a pure Mungism. It didn’t come from me. The error is yours.
That’s a disappointment to you, of course. You were excited because you thought you had caught me in a Mungish mistake. How frustrating for you to realize that it was you who had blown it, yet again.
keiths:
CharlieM:
Sure. Here’s a counterexample to a):
Real french fries are limited in size, due to the fairly small size of the physical potatoes from which they are cut. Imaginary potatoes have no such limits. I can conceive of a potato one mile long or even longer, producing french fries of equal length. Due to its unlimited size, is the imaginary potato “realer” than the physical potatoes and their physical french fries? Obviously not. It’s imaginary, not real.
Here’s a counterexample to b):
Consider an actual rhino horn, imperfect and rough. Now consider a unicorn horn: a spiral without blemish, perfectly smooth at even the smallest of scales. Is the unicorn horn “realer” than the rhino horn, due to its perfection? Of course not. The unicorn is imaginary, not real, and so is its horn.
And here’s a counterexample to c):
Consider an imaginary unchanging unicorn as compared to a physical horse that changes over time. Is the unicorn “realer” than the horse? No. The unicorn is imaginary, not real.
KN,
Here are a few reasons why that’s silly:
1. If you want to work successfully in this area of philosophy, it’s important to understand and employ the terminology that the experts use. Don’t pull a fifth by insisting on your own idiosyncratic usages. There’s nothing wrong with the terminology that’s been established and accepted among the cognoscenti. Yes, there’s some effort involved in learning the jargon and the terms of art, but that’s the price of admission in any established field. And while it might be pleasant to indulge in your own terminology, that just signals your unwillingness to pay the price, learn the ropes, and communicate clearly with your colleagues.
The experts distinguish between “reductive physicalism” and “physicalism”. They understand that the former is a subset of the latter. That makes perfect sense, since there is a qualifier attached to the former but not to the latter.
They also understand that there is a separate term, “nonreductive physicalism”, that applies to the belief that while everything is physical, physical phenomena are not always reducible to fundamental physics. Nonreductive physicalism, like reductive physicalism, is a subset of physicalism. Again, the presence of the qualifier is your clue to the subset relation.
2. Your view is tantamount to insisting that nonreductive physicalism is not physicalism. But that’s silly, and the presence of the word “physicalism” in both terms should give you pause. “This is a nonreductive kind of physicalism, but it’s not physicalism” is a goofy statement.
3. Even when taken on its own terms, your idiosyncratic terminology leads to absurdities. We’ve already discussed one of them; namely, your claim that certain things that are “physical-1”, like values, meanings, and thoughts, are not part of a physicalist ontology. According to you, then, they’re physical-1 but not physical, which is absurd; or they’re physical but not part of a physicalist ontology, which is also absurd.
Why tolerate these absurdities when the standard terminology eliminates them with no downsides?
Bruce,
This approach fails, for reasons I gave in the earlier thread. It just doesn’t work.
It doesn’t just fail scientifically. It also fails philosophically, again for reasons I gave in the earlier thread.
I’ll quote the relevant comments below.
keiths,
You make philosophy sound like a religion.
Neil,
How so? The importance of terminology is hardly unique to religion.
Bruce,
For the sake of convenience, I’ve gathered some relevant comments from our discussion in the old thread — a discussion in which you were trying to defend an externalist, causal history view of semantics.
keiths:
Bruce:
keiths:
Bruce:
keiths:
walto:
keiths:
Bruce:
keiths:
keiths:
My comment was not about the importance of terminology.
Neil,
Mine was, and it was the one you linked to.
But are elements of social reality anything over and above their particular physical realizations? As I read him, Kaufman says they are.
One could ask if moral norms are anything over and above the dispositions of individuals in situations calling for moral judgement or actions. For example, if moral norms are social/cultural constructions, then presumably the dispositions of some individuals in the culture could be morally wrong or inapt according to their cultures norm. In what sense, if any, is that norm real?
I’m sorry but I have no interest in revisiting that discussion.
I’m not clear on what you think has failed.
1. Externalism about meaning.
2. The inference from externalism to the need for causal history for the reference of names, natural kinds or social kinds.
3. The attempt to make causal history supervene on the all the physical information emanating from the past light cone encompassing that history.
I think those are the only issues I have mentioned in this thread.
On language: linguists say languages exists first in people minds. They work with mental structures that combine or interlink phonology, syntax, semantics. (Jackendoff presents his version in his paper in the Philosophy of Daniel Dennett book, although I have not made it through that paper). The structures are claimed to have empirical justification. Linguists agree these mental structures are realized in neural systems, but Jackendoff is clear the relation is not understood. So there is no story about how the contents of the structures relate to brain/body causal explanations of behavior.
On PEM: I understand PEM as being about the action-perception loop. PEM says the brain builds internal models to capture the a probability (“generative”) model of the world. The structuralists say the relations those neural models have can be mapped to the relations in the generative model of the world. That resemblance simultaneously captures content and vehicle, which gives content the causal powers of the brain.
I don’t know of any work to try to relate the two models. Modern linguistics does see meaning as embodied, so perhaps there is some hope that there can be a relation, maybe built on the hierarchy of mechanisms idea, with different types of explanation obtaining for different mechanisms.
As I understand him, Jackendoff says something similar. I paraphrase him as saying that meaning is negotiated between speaker and hearer (rather than existing in each alone). Jackendoff thinks it must involve changing something in hearer’s head and perhaps even speaker’s head after that negotiation.
I suspect your point on Brandom was in jest. In any event, I don’t know how he wants to relate the social commitments of language users to the brain/body-based causes of their behavior, or if he even cares about such issues. No doubt there is lots of interesting work there, if that is part of your research.
Trial and error seems pretty close to natural selection.
Why would I?
Sorry, that was a bad choice of words on my part. When I said It remains the same for all time, I did not mean that it is changeless, I meant that it is consistent in that time does not affect the fact that it is a tetrahedron. The tetrahedron that Euclid described in his thinking is the same tetrahedron that you, I and anyone else are thinking about.
dazz,
Can you explain what you mean by “perfect representation”?
The senses give us a disconnected view of the world. It is through thinking that we acquire concepts and are able to apprehend reality in a gradual way. This we build upthrough experience. I look at the map you provided and I recognise it. Through thinking I am fairly confident that what this map depicts has its origin in the imagination of Tolkien. So I know what it represents. Everyday maps normally represent some physical place in varying degrees of accuracy. This map also has a real source, it represents something it was instigated by the creative mind of Tolkein. My thinking about map brings up certain concepts. The original map is physical, the concepts which are attached to the map are not physical but they are just as real as the physical map.
The concept tetrahedron is real and ideal. (obviously not real in the physical sense) It is numerically identical no matter who holds it. Look at a physical tetrahedron and what you see is subjective, but the accurate concept of a tetrahedron is objective.
No one accused Walto of being prejudiced against Christians because he thinks the Bible is irrational except you, hard to see any credit to be gained by relating his experience.
Would from a philosophical viewpoint be a good reason?
Too bad you took such a low and silly road in your defense of the honor of Christians and The Bible. And your analogies, oh my!
And this is the worst argument, if his post was a breach of the highly structured discussions we engage in because it was off the topic, responding to such a post is even more egregious, magnifying the derail.
Not exactly, it was wonderful except for the Jesus talk which he simply ignored. A practice I often employed during my more religious days.
You know nothing about the beliefs of the family, it is a bit insulting that you choose to speak for them. Especially since you already have said your motivations were personal.
Weak, it bothered you is what mattered. Not what if a hypothetical person who felt the same as you read it.
You didn’t defend anyone, you attacked Walto because you were pissed. No big deal. If you need to make it more than that, ok.
This from the keiths who says that the definition of creationism doesn’t matter.
ETA:
Have you considered taking your own advice?
I’ll ignore your phrase, “a potential thing”.
This counterexample just shows me that you are working on a limited conception of potato. If you want your thinking to accord with reality a potato cannot be conceived without the organism to which it belongs and the environment in which it grows. So obviously your imaginary potato does not accord with reality.
I’m not quite sure Kaufman would agree with that “over and above” part.
So you claim to be able to read the thoughts of dead people?
The concept unicorn horn brings up the concepts unicorn, mythical beast, human imagination. Thinking tells us that unicorn horns come from a source which has much in common with Tolkein’s map.
An imaginary unchanging unicorn is certainly less real than a physical horse. But this bears no resemblance to the concept tetrahedron.
And the reality of a physical horse is certainly far more than what we see when we look at one grazing in a field.