This would still contradict free will. You are claiming that our wills can “choose to affect brain states in a way that conforms to them” (paraphrased). This seems equivalent to dualism.
If you claim the soul and body to not be of completely different nature, then I ask you to point out one single thing that they have in common. Also, your second paragraph sort of dodges my argument.
So you are saying that we would not know that there is a spiritual observer, and so it would appear that materialism is true and we would still have free will? The only issue I see with this is that my claim could be generalized: if materialism appears true, then we would appear not to have free will.
If we take each universe to branch into “zillions of separate ones,” then doesn’t our body - and whatever drives our actions - continue in each of them? Why would our spirit have to choose one? If it chooses one, is it not in the others, or does it also branch and choose each? The latter does not seem to preserve free will.
This theory is perhaps internally consistent, but I don’t see any way for us to know whether it is true. (And if we have a spirit, then it isn’t materialism.)
The soul and body are both necessary components of any human substance.* It’s not that they have something in common; it’s that comparing them in the first place is a category mistake, since neither of them are distinct substances. The soul actualizes the matter of the body, and if it does not (ie. in a dead body), then you don’t have a human anymore.
Why stop at one particular instance of “freedom”? From your argument a much more general conclusion would follow, namely: “if one accepts the materialist view, then there is no creativity at all”. A composer cannot create a new musical score; a writer cannot create a new novel. They have been under the impression that they were “free” to choose one particular word, but it was all “written in the stars”. Of course this is a very misguided understanding of the materialist view.
A) yes.
That is not reductionism. It is the acceptance of the fact that the whole (sometimes) is more than its parts, and one should not expect to explain the properties of the “whole” by pointing to the properties of the “parts”. This is the exact opposite of reductionism.
Certainly. One can say: “Man, this is baaaad!” and in some instances it actually means “bad”, in other ones it means “good”. One can use the word “cool” to designate something with low temperature; or something that is fashionable, or great…
If spiritual energy doesn’t exist physical energy must explain all activity. So all our choices and decisions must have physical causes beyond our control.
When we make an effort to resist temptation or compel ourselves to do something unpleasant we are using a form of energy which seems to override natural events.
I mean, this is certainly not the only problem with the materialist view.
I did not claim that mixing oxygen and hydrogen gives you water, but hydrogen and oxygen with a certain structure are water. To quote from Wikipedia, “Reductionism does not preclude the existence of what might be called emergent phenomena, but it does imply the ability to understand those phenomena completely in terms of the processes from which they are composed.”
OK, but I don’t see why we should believe that this analogy holds for material phenomena.
I don’t think this is true. The computer screen displays according to what it’s told to do by the computer. It is not a “dream-world” - what it shows is a result of layers of programming that are occurring in the computer, and the image on the screen has no determinate meaning apart from our conception of it (which is why it’s not really a “dream-world” - it is a screen lighted up in a certain way).
Emergent properties are a big part of science, and lots of scientists are reductionists, because reductionism does not preclude emergent properties. Reductionists do not deny that the whole might be more than its parts; what they do hold is that whatever properties emerge can be explained by the aggregation of the parts.
This is a very simplistic view of thought. When I say, “This is cool” referring to a low temperature, I have a different thought than when I say “This is cool” referring to something fashionable. Thoughts are not just combinations of words. When we use different homonyms, we are aware of which meaning we intend.
Perhaps. But perhaps not. Under hylemorphism, our souls actualize the matter in our bodies. I do not think we can say prima facie that they do so without conserving energy. Hylemorphism is not reductionist, but it also does not think of the soul as an immaterial substance distinct from the body, so that its operations could be physical to all appearances does not seem implausible to me.
Ah, so they don’t have anything in common.
Then we are at am impasse. I don’t think that the analogy is perfect. However what it shows that the meaning of a sentence cannot be necessarily reduced to the meaning of the words. For simple instances such reductionism can be accomplished, of course. For other ones it cannot be done. (Example is: “this is bad” while the person means “this is good”.)
Somewhat like in a movie, but not quite. The movie is a static structure, and I am talking about a dynamic virtual reality environment, like in a game. You have your avatar, and your avatar has all sorts of “magical” powers, flying like superman, slashing a dragon, or using a lay-on-hands to resurrect a “dead” player. All that virtual reality is created by the “dance of the electrons” – and, of course the electrons will obey the laws of physics, but what they represent (the dragons, the magic, etc) have their own rules, and those rules have nothing to do with the laws of physics.
Exactly correct. The phrase: “the aggregation of the parts” is the key. Not by the underlying physical objects and their physical attributes. Your whole argument rested on the reductionist view that the “choice” or “free will” is impossible if one subscribes to the materialist view, since if the thoughts are physical products of the neurons and the neurons are “curtailed” by the electro-chemical laws of physics. But it is not. We are “free” to imagine anything we please. Our thoughts and decisions cannot be reduced to the electro-chemical “rules”. And there in no need to posit a “soul” (whatever that might be).
Don’t exaggerate. I did not say that the “whole” is alwaysmore than its “parts”. When piling up uranium atoms where their number is less than the critical mass – the whole is simply commensurate to the parts. The changes are all quantitative up until the point of the critical mass. That is then the proverbial substance hits the fan.
Since we have a couple of billion neurons, it is inevitable that there would be a lot of difference in many of them. What I was alluding to, that the affected brain states responsible for the utterance of “this is cool” are the same, and yet the meaning of the sentence is quite different. There is a set of neurons, which “fire” no matter which meaning we attribute to the sentence. Moreover, if someone is not familiar with this particular euphemism the sentence is totally confusing.
But the original question was whether the soul must act on the body (in a way that violates conservation of energy) and whether they are completely distinct substances because they lack things in common. And the answer, even if they don’t and couldn’t have anything “in common,” is still that the soul acts on the body by formal causality and is not a distinct substance but another part of the same substance.Ah, so they don’t have anything in common.
But the structure of syntax does not evidently relate to the structure of reality. I think you and I agree that concepts and words are mind-dependent (the phrase “this is bad” only has meaning if it is understood by an observer; scratches of ink on paper or sound waves do not have determinate meaning).
But a virtual reality environment is not actually creating another reality. It is arranging images to look like certain laws of physics are violated. The images are, of course, just images. Like scratches of ink or a sound waves, they do not have determinate meaning unless we ascribe it to them by our own understanding.
You have not succeeded in establishing this. My argument is that, even if we grant that mental content can supervene on the brain, the mental content is not free because it cannot causally operate on the physical, which means that our conscious experience (which supervenes on the brain) does not actually “choose” a course of actions (the course of actions is either determined or random). As such, even if it appears that we have free will, we cannot (on the materialist view).
I didn’t say that you said that. I stand by what I said, “If things have properties that are not a result of their constituent matter… we seem to have left materialism altogether.” Consider some emergent property X. The question for the materialist is, can X be accounted for materially? If the answer is no, then the materialist has ceased to be a materialist. If the answer is yes (as I suspect it would be, even if we let X be a critical mass of uranium), then the explanation is reductive, even though the property is emergent.
re: the bolded sentence
[/quote]polytropos;11313121* [QUOTE said:
Perhaps. But perhaps not. Under hylomorphism, our souls actualize the matter in our bodies. I do not think we can say prima facie that they do so without conserving energy. The problem is precisely how souls actualize matter. To do so implies a distinct form of energy because there is no evidence that physical energy is purposeful or directive. It never seems to take the future into account...Then in what respects are we made in God’s image and likeness? Do we have no spiritual power at all? Is free will an illusion?
Irrefutable - unless the principle of causality is mutable!Hylemorphism isn’t materialism, so it would not hold that material things (matter/energy) cannot be subsumed by the human substance to direct its actions. I am not saying that I know whether or not the activity of the soul violates conservation of energy, but it is something that could be studied empirically at the least.
No, we have free will, and are made in God’s image in the respect that we have intellect and will. I am just saying that the activity of the will as it is physically manifested need not violate conservation of energy.
The question then would seem to be, “Does God require energy of some kind to actualize matter or is energy simply a physical manifestation of God’s actualizing of potential?”
Of course I agree. The point is that the meaning of a sentence is not reducible to the meaning of the words, and the meaning of the words is not reducible to the nonexistent meaning of letters. It was just an example of the non-reducibility, nothing more.
That is again not the point. First, what “reality is” would be a totally different discussion (the question of the Matrix), but that is not important right now. The only thing that matters is that the operation of that virtual world is not limited by the physical laws of the underlying hardware. The virtual world is the analogy of our thought processes. The computer hardware is the analogy (equivalent) of the brain’s neural system. In neither case can you reduce the “working” of the “program” to the “working” of the “hardware”. That is all.
What kind of evidence are you going to present here? We know that being exposed to new stimuli our neural network (brain) undergoes modifications – we have memory of the event. We can conduct experiments where “modifying” our neural activity influences our thought processes (electrical stimulation of certain neurons). We can conduct experiments, when our thoughts will result in modifications of the neural network. Sitting in an environment of total sensory depravation, and contemplating a chess problem (or a math problem) we can find a solution, and remember this solution. That means a permanent modification of our neural network by “thinking” only. The truth is that I see no argument for your assertions. All you say is that “the mental content is not free because it cannot causally operate on the physical”… and that is not only a totally unsubstantiated assertion, but it is refuted by the actual experiments which have been conducted.
Are you familiar with self-modifying algorithms? Or the cellular automata, where the execution of the program actually modifies the underlying physical structure? This would lead to a very complicated and technical discussion, but you could study the von Neumann neural networks, or E. F. Codd’s cellular automata if you so chose. The trouble is that such an in-depth study would require quite a few years. However, the end result is that the “hardware” and the “software” in this environment are interconnected, the hardware “runs” the program, while the program – physically! -modifies the hardware. Your basic assumption – that the actual process of thinking cannot modify the brain’s physical structure – is not just not substantiated, but actually refuted.
You use the concept of “reductive” in a different meaning from mine. It is NOT reductive to the properties of an individual atom.
You seem to view materialism as a crude, simplistic mechanistic view, where properties are additive and transitive. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is unfortunate that for the last 3+ years there has been a moratorium on atheism and materialism, since your presented ideas show a dire need for in-depth discussion of these subjects. Too bad that even such a mild “criticism” might be taken as a “petition” to change the rules, and as such it might result in a banning, or a closing of the thread. But that is life.
the big difference is that in this theory, the will does not actually affect the brain states; those are entirely the result of determined or random processes.
I don’t think it can be generalized; as I see it, there is a distinct difference between that statement and the one in your thread title. The difference is that the former statement is concerned with whether free will can show physical evidence of its existence in a physically reducible universe, while the latter is concerned with whether free will can actually exist in a physically reducible universe, whether or not any physical evidence shows it.
It would need to if I were able to have free will. Otherwise, our consciousness continues in each body, and our actions are once again attributable to random physical events, as we can not choose which timeline to be in.
right. My theory supposes the former.
Right. we wouldn’t be able to prove the existence of a spirit, but there would still be a possibility of free will, even if the physical universe were shown to be entirely free of supernatural causes.
Oh, I see what you mean. I suppose, strictly speaking, that this theory doesn’t make free will and materialism compatible, it just makes free will and physical reductionalism compatible. spirits would exist have free will, but they would not affect the physical world in any way.
Well, yes, and I don’t think we are aware that we have a spirit. We are aware that we are conscious, but we are not aware of where that consciousness stems from. So we can judge the world to be physically reducible, and that it appears to be materialistic, while at the same keeping in mind the possibility that it is not.
The “virtual world” created by the computer does not actually exist. It is represented by images on the screen, and it appears to be a world in which physical laws are suspended. But it has no such meaning unless a human observer is watching it. And each image that it produces is reducible to the hardware of the computer. This is just how computers and graphics processing work.
I am still not sure how this is relevant. I have never denied that the neural network can change as a result of thought. That does not circumvent the problem I am bringing up. What these experiments don’t show is that the thinking which modifies the brain was genuinely free.
By mental content I mean the non-physical conceptual content of our thoughts (ie. the mind, which supervenes on particular physical brain states). Since the mental content is conceptual and non-physical, it cannot act on the brain in any way. The experiments, then, do not show that that the mental (which is conceptual) can act on the physical. It just shows that whatever complex pattern of neural activity is going on is physical; the conceptual content is just “along for the ride,” since it, being non-physical, cannot act on the physical brain. But then the physical activity of the brain can only be a). determined or b). random, whether or not it is determined along regularities that give an appearance of free will.
You will have to show that the “software” (thoughts) of the brain do modify the brain. This is not the same as showing that during the process of thinking, the brain changes, since the latter does not preclude the brain changing due to physical causes rather than by the software.