Teleology important for science

[tonyrey]

Ultimately, the point is that materialist assumptions limit us to material, which means that any meaning within the mind is within the material, which means that you are claiming that an arrangement of neurons has real meaning beyond itself. THIS arrangement of THESE neurons means cats. We don’t need anybody to interpret it, mind, that is just the qualitative meaning of this arrangement! This arrangement, if we take these neurons firing in this sequence throughout the entire brain, that holds the meaning of love. It’s not a pointer to that meaning, it has that meaning in the material itself. (Or the other option is that it’s never there or anywhere)

That in itself probably sounds absurd, and for good reason. But materialists have a further issue in that everything is quantifiable and not qualitative, which makes the idea of the meaninv being in the material itself even more absurd.

Ultimately any regress you do runs into the same issue. It’s not just THAT neuron sequence, but put together with the whole something emerges . . . Well, that’s just material, too, and so you’re proposing this broader network of neurons truly holds this meaning within its material?

There’s no room for thoughts to be actually about anything, meaning that the mind (as something able to do that, without radically redefining thought, mind, etc . . .) can’t exist in such a framework.

One atheist on this forum seriously claimed that truth is an “isomorphism” of atomic particles! Perhaps it’s not surprising he is a programmer. It’s obviously an occupational hazard. Considering that we would be programmed by mindless molecules it would seem all our conclusions would be worthless… (including the “isomorphism” hypothesis

 

[IWantGod]

Ultimately, the point is that materialist assumptions limit us to material, which means that any meaning within the mind is within the material, which means that you are claiming that an arrangement of neurons has real meaning beyond itself. THIS arrangement of THESE neurons means cats. We don’t need anybody to interpret it, mind, that is just the qualitative meaning of this arrangement! This arrangement, if we take these neurons firing in this sequence throughout the entire brain, that holds the meaning of love. It’s not a pointer to that meaning, it has that meaning in the material itself. (Or the other option is that it’s never there or anywhere)

That in itself probably sounds absurd, and for good reason. But materialists have a further issue in that everything is quantifiable and not qualitative, which makes the idea of the meaninv being in the material itself even more absurd.

Ultimately any regress you do runs into the same issue. It’s not just THAT neuron sequence, but put together with the whole something emerges . . . Well, that’s just material, too, and so you’re proposing this broader network of neurons truly holds this meaning within its material?

There’s no room for thoughts to be actually about anything, meaning that the mind (as something able to do that, without radically redefining thought, mind, etc . . .) can’t exist in such a framework. If all things are quantifiably material, then any meaning in our thoughts must be quantifiable and material, not just in general, but pointed to and specifically, and not just interpreted as such by another mind, but meaningful in itself, buf that’s absurd given materialistic assumptions.

Good post. Theres no place for meaning in a materialist worldveiw.

 

[inocente]

You are deflecting again. You are attempting to sideline my point by directing it towards transubstantiation when I never even brought it up.

Reading the thread while waiting for something, sorry must have missed your post earlier. No, I’m not deflecting, As I said and as you quoted me saying, I wasn’t sure as I’m not Catholic.

This is merely the kind of standard Christology that Lewis would call “mere Christianity.”

I’ll respond tomorrow when I have more time.

Meanwhile, a thought.

Isn’t it a bit self-defeating to argue you’re more than physical and then write posts driven by testosterone? I mean fine, you can be the alpha male, good for you, well done, but didn’t you just prove you’re no more than your physicality?

 

[Wesrock]

Wow, not-so-veiled insult.

Anyway, the comment is very telling on many levels. One of them is that you have no idea what you’re even arguing against if you think we’re excluding hormones, neuron connections, etc . . . from the workings of the mind.

 

[Bradski]

We can allow for non-material powers of the human substance without requiring a composition of a material substance and immaterial substance. We could follow scholastic arguments for four types of causality, but really there’s no need. The logical necessity and evidence for a non-material power of the human mind is the human mind itself. As I wrote previously, materialist assumptions don’t explain it, from which it logically follows they are wrong or that, if correct, humans don’t have actual minds that can refer to things outside themselves.

At some point the mind understands something external to the material that makes up the brain or the body, but at no point does the material take on any such meaning. I think CAT, but my material brain doesn’t take on the meaning cat. Any such meaning is derived from something that gives it meaning, that interprets it, and whatever does that can’t be material, fir the same reason just discussed. If thoughts are about things, and thoughts are entirely reducible to neurons, then the neurons are about things, but that’s absurd, as no material pattern or sequence of neurons objectively means cats, and even if we say that the neurons really do carry such meaning, such an admission impljes that there is something qualitative and not quantitative to the material, which itself is not allowed under a materialist philosophy.

So how far down the animal kingdom be we find this ephemeral non-material god-given mind?

My dog did not get on with next door’s cat. And simply saying ‘that damn cat is in our garden again’ would result in a blur of fur as my pooch rushed into the yard to teach that tabby a thing or two about the concept of territory.

So he was doing exactly as you do. A word will conjure up an image and prompt a thought process which will result in decisions being made and action taken.

Now, I don’t know exactly what was going on in Taffy’s head when he heard CAT but it’s certain that he had a mental image of a fluffy black animal and came to a number of decisions in regard to it.

So dogs, from everything we can see about them, have this ‘dualism’ as well. Unless their minds work in an entirely materialistic manner.

So if dogs can do this for a simple concept like CAT, then why can’t we? Surely it cannot be that the simple concepts are materialistic and more complex ones require dualism?

 

[Peter_Plato]

So how far down the animal kingdom be we find this ephemeral non-material god-given mind?

My dog did not get on with next door’s cat. And simply saying ‘that damn cat is in our garden again’ would result in a blur of fur as my pooch rushed into the yard to teach that tabby a thing or two about the concept of territory.

So he was doing exactly as you do. A word will conjure up an image and prompt a thought process which will result in decisions being made and action taken.

Now, I don’t know exactly what was going on in Taffy’s head when he heard CAT but it’s certain that he had a mental image of a fluffy black animal and came to a number of decisions in regard to it.

So dogs, from everything we can see about them, have this ‘dualism’ as well. Unless their minds work in an entirely materialistic manner.

So if dogs can do this for a simple concept like CAT, then why can’t we? Surely it cannot be that the simple concepts are materialistic and more complex ones require dualism?

Do you really think a dog understands the concept of territory or the biological nuances necessary to disassemble a “simple concept like CAT?”

Sorry Brad, but when I attempt to carry on a philosophical conversation with my daughter’s dog – even with regard to “simple concepts” – she just tilts her head and looks at me funny. (The dog that is, not my daughter – well, I suppose my daughter looks at me funny, too.)

The dog sure does ‘respond to’ the word cheese. Whether she understands the concept of cheese, in any meaningful sense, however, is an entirely different question, I would think.

I suppose you think Siri should be accorded ‘dualism,’ as well, merely because it responds to simple words and phrases in an expected way? Heck, It even carries on a conversation – of sorts.

 

[Bradski]

Do you really think a dog understands the concept of territory or the biological nuances necessary to disassemble a “simple concept like CAT?”

There is absolutely no doubt about that whatsoever. And let’s keep it simple, shall we? No-one is suggesting discussing Sartre with a Golden Retriever.

But it is a fact that my dog instantly understood what CAT meant. If I dragged him to the back door and showed him the cat, then he would react in a particular way. He reacted EXACXTLY the same when you said the word.

He had an immediate mental picture of the cat and made decisions based on that. We are not talking Pavlovian instincts here. We are talking about conscious thought and conscious decisions.

Similarly, the word BATH would conjure up for him a mental image. He understood that the word related to an experience he would rather avoid so he’d make a conscious decision to hide under the house whenever he heard the word.

CAT: Furry black animal. Invading my territory. Need to protect my territory. I want to kill it.
BATH: Container full of warm water. Unpleasant memories of getting wet. Hide.

Same processes as we go through. So is a dog’s mind dualist?

 

[Wesrock]

So how far down the animal kingdom be we find this ephemeral non-material god-given mind?

My dog did not get on with next door’s cat. And simply saying ‘that damn cat is in our garden again’ would result in a blur of fur as my pooch rushed into the yard to teach that tabby a thing or two about the concept of territory.

So he was doing exactly as you do. A word will conjure up an image and prompt a thought process which will result in decisions being made and action taken.

Now, I don’t know exactly what was going on in Taffy’s head when he heard CAT but it’s certain that he had a mental image of a fluffy black animal and came to a number of decisions in regard to it.

So dogs, from everything we can see about them, have this ‘dualism’ as well. Unless their minds work in an entirely materialistic manner.

So if dogs can do this for a simple concept like CAT, then why can’t we? Surely it cannot be that the simple concepts are materialistic and more complex ones require dualism?

Well, dualism in a hylemorphic sense just means dualism of form and matter, which all material beings are, though a hylemorphic dualist does not limit reality to a scope of just material and efficient causes, which is why an immaterial power of the mind can exist.

Animals can certainly have cause and effect associations. The word cat is associated with particular experiences. The word bath is associated with certain experiences. There’s no doubt that such triggers can exist in a dogs mind, or pigs, or cats, or dolphin’s, or what have you. That a dog can hear the word “cat” and respond in such a manner is not contradictory with the stated position. That it makes the association between the sound of “cat” and the small, furry four legged thing is no surpise. The real issue is whether they can be said to grasp universals, or the essence of a thing. To actually understand what humanness is, or triangularity, or catness as such; the form of a thing shared across all instantiations of the form. This is something that the human mind can do, but which other animals cannot do.

Even if you dispute this point, even if you want to argue that you believe this power is due in other animals, my point about the inability of materialism to explain the grasping of said universals still remains an issue, no matter how many species we grant it to. The issue is that if thoughts are about other things, and thoughts are reducible to the material, the material itself must be about other things, in itself. On the one hand that sounds absurd, on the other such an admission is rather at odds with standard materialist starting assumptions. What those assumptions leave us with is simply some type of cause and effect chain of efficient causation in materials, which can’t carry any meaning, meaning that our thoughts are not about things. It doesn’t seem even to be necessary to admit universals in order for this to be evident, so even if you’re on the fence or reject universals, we still have an issue with aboutness being within the material. It’s a secondary discussion, as is the one about whether dogs can grasp such things. So either I deny my experience and claim any such aboutness to my thoughts is an illusion and ultimately reducible to quark-gluon reactions (or something more basic, and to speak of thoughts as being about ‘cats’, or “Paris”, or “triangularity” is simply inaccurate and not real; it makes as much sense to say a neuron firing sequence is about the previous neuron before which is about the previous neuron before it which is about the light that triggered that neuron as it does to say one billiard ball is about the other that hit it) or I reject materialism. There are some different schools of materialism, mind, and some are not so reductionist, but this issue of intentionality is not something that has been sufficiently answered by materialists who hold that intentionality is real and a power (even if they admit it only a material power) of the human mind.

There are atheist dualists in the world. Some atheists even believe science will eventually discover the immaterial (and that’s no longer materialism). It’s not just a theist thing.

 

[Wesrock]

A visualization or mental picture isn’t itself the issue. I can’t form a mental image of a 1,000 sided figure in my head, and I certainly couldn’t distinguish it from a mental image of a 1,001 sided figure. That doesn’t mean I don’t grasp what it is in a universal sense.

A dog may form a mental image of a cat from its experience. Maybe a conglomeration and even partly fictional mental image of multiple cats into one. That’s different than grasping what a cat is in the sense of me understanding what a chiliagon is.

And this is somewhat secondary to the issue of the aboutness of material, such as neurons actually having meaning or aboutness of a chiliagon to them when they fire.

 

[levinas12]

I am not clear that Aristotle actually comes out and says there is no owner of nous and no divine designer. That sounds like a later addendum.

But who could be the owner? Aristotle’s god is unaware of other beings … as such, he isn’t a creator, much less a designer.

This is the chasm between Aristotle and Aquinas.

But what about the agent intellect? Now this is a fertile topic. Especially if there is just one agent intellect for all human beings. Here we have a non-human intelligence taking an interest in us.

But could the agent intellect be the source of “nous” in nature?

 

[levinas12]

God must BE Nous or Mind.

But how/why did “nous” fall into nature? This question haunts philosophy from the Pre-Socratics down to modern philosophy (see Heidegger’s question to Hegel: how/why did the Geist get tangled up in time?) Or, what was the motivation of Plato’s demiurge?

 

[Bradski]

A dog may form a mental image of a cat from its experience. Maybe a conglomeration and even partly fictional mental image of multiple cats into one. That’s different than grasping what a cat is in the sense of me understanding what a chiliagon is.

Let’s keep this simple. A dog understands the concept of cat the same way as we do. We can conjure up an image of a cat when someone mentions the word. So does a dog. We know what cats do and where they can likely be found. Same with the word bird. My dog didn’t look for the cat up in the trees but that’s where he’d look if I used the word bird. He had, obviously, a mental image of a bird in his head when he heard the word – small creature that moves around in the air and generally sits in the tree. And this is NOT Pavlovian.

If you burst a balloon near a dog, it will exhibit fear. This is a natural instinct. But searching for a bird in a tree is a learned experience. The dog does it exactly the same way we do. Associating a visual image with a word. And where does this take place? Well, in the ‘minds-eye’. Within the structure of the brain. I’m not sure how far down the line you have to go before you get to an organism that is just instinct with no potential for learned experience, but it’s pretty far.

As to the ‘catiness’ or ‘birdiness’ of an object, that depends on your level of experience. Furry things that run around the garden are always cats. Unless there is enough experience (and education) to differentiate between a cat and, say, a possum. You get this with children as well.

This is something that the human mind can do, but which other animals cannot do.

I think you are going to have to offer more than just saying it is so. And please bear in mind that we are not talking about esoteric concepts such as justice of meaning at this point. Your example of the ‘essence’ of a triangle would do just fine. I’m pretty certain I could train any reasonably intelligent animal to differentiate between circles and triangles, for example. That is, they would have an internal representation of ‘triangle’ and ‘circle’ available to them. Just as they do with cat and bird.

This was earlier, but it’s applicable:

If thoughts are about things, and thoughts are entirely reducible to neurons, then the neurons are about things, but that’s absurd, as no material pattern or sequence of neurons objectively means cats, and even if we say that the neurons really do carry such meaning, such an admission impljes that there is something qualitative and not quantitative to the material, which itself is not allowed under a materialist philosophy.

Thoughts are obviously about things (skipping such things as concepts for a moment). You see a cat, someone says cat and you associate what you see with the word. When you see the cat, there is physical activity in the brain that allows you to experience it. If it’s difficult to grasp how all that info can be interpreted, then think of a basic organism that simply reacts to light. It can ‘see’ the difference between light and dark. It has a mental image of it (even some completely blind people can detect light without ‘seeing’ it).

Now keep adding neurons and improve the light receiving apparatus and you get basic sight. Which is simply the firing of neurons. And if a particular combination of activities in the neural network is repeated, then you ‘see’ the same thing. You have a mental image of it. Which is another way of saying that the firing of certain neurons gives you the experience of seeing the same thing.

And now I know what a chiliagon is.

 

[Peter_Plato]

But who could be the owner? Aristotle’s god is unaware of other beings … as such, he isn’t a creator, much less a designer.

This is the chasm between Aristotle and Aquinas.

But what about the agent intellect? Now this is a fertile topic. Especially if there is just one agent intellect for all human beings. Here we have a non-human intelligence taking an interest in us.

But could the agent intellect be the source of “nous” in nature?

The Father and the Logos through whom all things come to be.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Let’s keep this simple. A dog understands the concept of cat the same way as we do.

:nope:

As to the rest of your post…

…determinism eliminates the possibility of inquiry. A man who, for example, believes that fate or physics or deity or destiny, selects all his thoughts before he is born, and fixed all his conclusions beforehand, cannot trust the outcome of any mental process of deduction or conclusion. His thoughts are not trustworthy because they are not his. His reaching his conclusion is not something he does, it is something that is done to him by outside forces.

This includes all mental processes. There is neither truth, nor logic, nor morals, in a deterministic universe, nor even the possibility of any such thing.

Such a determinist cannot trust the outcome of his thought process for the same reason you cannot have a debate with a record player. If what the record says is determined solely by the grooves in the record, there is no way to convince the recording to reach a different conclusion and say something else instead. Determinism reverts to first case again: he is a man who says no truth is true, no knowledge is known, no logic is valid, no morals are imperative obliterates the process of inquiry whereby these thoughts can be supported as true.

Materialism or panphysicalism is in even a worse case, since it has all the problems of determinism, plus the problem that no symbols can exist in a panphysical universe. If no symbols exist, the words we use to describe the symbol-to-object relation, words like belief and doubt, true and false, accurate and inaccurate, fair and ugly, efficient and inefficient, moral and immoral, also have no meaning and also cannot exist. The statement ‘panphysicalism is true’ refutes itself.
scifiwright.com/2016/09/occam-and-atheism/

 

[Peter_Plato]

And now I know what a chiliagon is.

If your analysis is correct you don’t “know” anything.

A chemical occurrence was triggered in your brain, but that is all and it doesn’t amount to “knowing” in the sense you want us to suppose is explained.

 

[Bradski]

If your analysis is correct you don’t “know” anything.

A chemical occurrence was triggered in your brain, but that is all and it doesn’t amount to “knowing” in the sense you want us to suppose is explained.

No. That is just the sense I want to convey. It really is simply chemical and electrical changes in the brain. Just as the word conjures up a mental representation of an object for me, then in a dogs brain, electrical and chemical changes also give it a mental representation of an object. A cat, for example.

There is no difference. None at all.

 

[Peter_Plato]

No. That is just the sense I want to convey. It really is simply chemical and electrical changes in the brain. Just as the word conjures up a mental representation of an object for me, then in a dogs brain, electrical and chemical changes also give it a mental representation of an object. A cat, for example.

There is no difference. None at all.

Oh, there’s a difference alright. If there weren’t, dogs would be creating art about cats, writing novels about cats, conducting experiments on cats, playing instruments with catgut strings (yeah, I know), doing comedy skits about cats, and serving up a variety of cat dishes.

Serving up a “mental representation” of a cat is not all there is to thinking about cats.

 

[Bradski]

Oh, there’s a difference alright. If there weren’t, dogs would be creating art about cats, writing novels about cats, conducting experiments on cats, playing instruments with catgut strings (yeah, I know), doing comedy skits about cats, and serving up a variety of cat dishes.

Serving up a “mental representation” of a cat is not all there is to thinking about cats.

Indeed not. But I must insist that we keep this relatively simple. We aren’t discussing whether my dog could write a critique of post modernism. Just whether they have this mysterious non-material mind. Which doesn’t exist anywhere and can’t be detected.

 

[inocente]

You are deflecting again. You are attempting to sideline my point by directing it towards transubstantiation when I never even brought it up.

This is merely the kind of standard Christology that Lewis would call “mere Christianity.” Christians, including Baptists, as far as I know, believe that the second person of the Trinity (God) became the man Jesus. Jesus was fully human, fully divine.

I doubt Lewis would use that term to insult an individual though, as he would know that sheep don’t get to judge others, sheep belong to the Shepherd.

As I said, I’m not deflecting, and if you should imagine you’re precipitating anything that needs deflection, you’d be somewhat naive.

*The question isn’t “How can a physical man be Christ?” The question is: How can God become “fully human” if what it means to be “fully human” is reducible to nothing more than a specific agglomeration of neuro-chemicals? There is nothing for God to become because “fully human” is fully explicable as a formulation of those chemicals.

Catholics aren’t the ones claiming that to be a “physical man” is nothing more than being a collection of chemicals. You are the one claiming that, so you can’t deflect from answering by insisting that Catholics have to answer for YOUR problematic notions.*

I’ve not claimed that, and the dehumanizing nonsense that materialists believe man is a bag of atoms is just fanatical propaganda. As if any materialist believes the baby boy in her arms is no different from a bag of fertilizer. Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

*The other issue is that “bread is only physical” isn’t a proper depiction of Thomistic metaphysics because neither Thomists (nor Catholics) claim that the essence of what bread is is reducible to the mere physical accidents of what bread appears to be – its quantifiable properties. That is applying your materialistic framework to the theological understanding, which completely misrepresents it. *

As I said, I’m not Catholic. But for you to leap from there to the notion that just because we may not understand your particular take, all non-Catholics have a materialist framework, is to put it mildly, flawed.

The “mountains and mountains of evidence” is worth nothing more than squirrel nuts since it presumes only tangible physical evidence can serve as evidence in the first place. So discounting the “immaterial” as an essential part of your method will not even permit, let alone produce, anything immaterial within the process of collecting evidence. It is called turning your method into your metaphysics.

Then please be specific. Exactly which aspects of your mind do you claim don’t arise from physical processes alone?

Also please, the claim that the mind can be explained by physical processes alone has already given us insight on the human condition, and helped cure disorders, so why should we listen to you, what purpose does your claim serve? Do you believe Christianity will die if your specific claim about the mind is found to be flawed? Does my salvation depend on me believing your specific claim about my mind?

And as I said, if the tone of your answer is aggressive or condescending or otherwise emotional then it can be explained by genes and environment alone, and would therefore appear to immediately defeat your claim.

*Again, this is pure deflection because I am not asking you to explain how Thomists might explain things, I am asking you to explain how you can legitimately hold a materialistic metaphysic at the same time as claiming God became man in Jesus.
*

Do you believe the Word became flesh means baby Jesus was like Superboy, moving stars around from his crib and blasting mountains until he learned how to control his superpowers? Think about that and you’ll understand why there are various theologies on this point. Generally, Baptists don’t subscribe to Superboy theologies. Also, a bit mystified why you think your personal logic defeats God’s omnipotence.

 

[inocente]

I don’t think I’ve stumbled onto anything. These are arguments put forth by dualists (not necessarily Cartesian) against materialist philosophies. Some materialists even agree with the dualists on this point and so deny the mind.

So rather than just dance around the issue and post articles that do nothing to address dualist concerns with intentionality, perhaps you could try to understand the dualists’ point of issue, because materialists that continue to consider the mind and intentionality to be an emergent property have, far from addressing said concerns, have only said “we’ll discover it eventually” while not even addressing the dualists’ concern that it’s not just that they haven’t explained it, but that it’s logically impossible to explain the mind as an emergent whole given materialist assumptions. It’s that materialist assumptions are too narrow to allow for it.

We can allow for non-material powers of the human substance without requiring a composition of a material substance and immaterial substance. We could follow scholastic arguments for four types of causality, but really there’s no need. The logical necessity and evidence for a non-material power of the human mind is the human mind itself. As I wrote previously, materialist assumptions don’t explain it, from which it logically follows they are wrong or that, if correct, humans don’t have actual minds that can refer to things outside themselves.

At some point the mind understands something external to the material that makes up the brain or the body, but at no point does the material take on any such meaning. I think CAT, but my material brain doesn’t take on the meaning cat. Any such meaning is derived from something that gives it meaning, that interprets it, and whatever does that can’t be material, fir the same reason just discussed. If thoughts are about things, and thoughts are entirely reducible to neurons, then the neurons are about things, but that’s absurd, as no material pattern or sequence of neurons objectively means cats, and even if we say that the neurons really do carry such meaning, such an admission impljes that there is something qualitative and not quantitative to the material, which itself is not allowed under a materialist philosophy.

In Spanish, CAT = TAC (Tomografía Axial Computarizada).

I linked Sheila Nirenberg’s work, one example that it is now known for sure that all visual information entering the brain is encoded digitally. It’s also known that audio information, touch and (I think) other sense data is digital.

It’s known therefore that the mind is obtaining all its (name removed by moderator)ut from digital data, your perceptions arise digitally. So, if you believe in qualia (to me a clumsy notion) then the feeling of red arises mathematically out of digits. Unsettling. Back to the drawing board on qualia.

How does the mind do it then? Dunno. I think the general current hypothesis is that consciousness arises as the narrative between different brain areas. For instance, perhaps you dream you’re flying like Superboy because the brain areas which know you can’t are currently offline. In which case that might also happen abnormally when awake, and in psychosis the sufferer believes he can jump off a building and fly to the ground because no part of his consciousness is currently aware he can’t.

But those are speculations, it’s early days. Point is, when it comes to this kind of thing, the track record of armchair philosophers is they’re not nearly imaginative enough. The very notion that thoughts are reducible to neurons is obviously dead wrong, since thoughts are transitory, occurring only as brief patterns of activity, the instantaneous form of thousands on neurons firing. Did any armchair philosopher realize that meaning might not be stored but instead be in transitory activity? O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! And yet again wonderful (which I only know from Steve Martin in L.A. Story quoting the Bard ).