Teleology important for science

[Peter_Plato]

First, you probably know but just to be sure, the homunculus idea is a fallacy, because it leads to an infinite regression (if “you” is explained as a little guy in your head, he can only be explained by a little guy in his head, etc.).

I would argue that the homunculus fallacy is an even bigger fallacy than the argument it attempts to reduce to an ad infinitum because it completely misrepresents the original issue by conjuring up a fictitious “little guy in the head” as if that even comes close to what was proposed or referred to in the first place.

It is never explained, either, why a little guy in the head “can ONLY be explained by” another little guy in HIS head, as if that proposition runs smack against some necessary logical principle or other.

Admittedly, self-consciousness is something like the “little guy” being aware of his own awareness or consciousness, but it isn’t clear why THAT entails a different “little guy” or that the little guy actually resides in the head of the first, assuming as it does that consciousness is necessarily restricted to a particular location in space/time.

Now of course if you are desperate to promote a certain point of view about the problem you might try to misrepresent it and reframe it in that way, grasping as it is at straws.

 

[o_mlly]

So back we go to the BIV. You have your brain removed and placed into a vat. There are zero external sensations. And none even from the brain – there are no sensors so you can’t sense your brain in the same way as you do your foot, for example (and, incidentally, no pain – you can cut open someone’s brain when they are conscious and they will feel nothing). So where do you actually exist? Well, Tony asks why your mind needs to ‘be’ anywhere. But it is plainly obvious that ‘you’ are now in the vat. Disembodied yet conscious and thinking. You know you are ‘you’ because you have your memories. You remember your wife. You remember going to work this morning. You remember your first bike.
Now the evil doctor starts to remove matter. Neurons and dendrites and everything else that physically makes up your brain. So what is going to happen?
If ‘you’ are a non-physical mind, then removing the physical components of the brain shouldn’t matter at all. You might find yourself thinking at some point: ‘Hey, I can’t seem to imagine colours any more’ or ‘why can’t I remember who I am’, but according to you, you should still be capable of rational thought. Right up to the point where all physical matter has been completely removed.

This thought-experiment simulates the real occurrence of amnesia. If one hits one’s head hard enough damaging the brain then some or all memories are lost. If the brain completely heals, the memories return suggesting that memories are matter dependent. Matter is, therefore, necessary but not sufficient for the existence of memories. The soul animates (potentiates) but is limited by the disposition of the matter in the body which actuates.

… But then again, I am not familiar with HD, but there’s an interesting write-up on it here by an Aussie philosopher, Dave Oderburg, which I will try to read tonight: newdualism.org/papers/D.Oderberg/HylemorphicDualism2.htm

Thanks for the link. It appears the good professor is quite Catholic in his philosophy (the soul is immortal because it intellects, that is actuates concepts independently of the mortal body) and his ethics (“If persons die when their souls leave their bodies …] then can any sense be made of a soul’s bearing any responsibility for the acts of the whole person of which it once was a constituent? To pursue the gory analogy of the bodiless head, there does not appear to be anything repugnant to reason in the idea that a person existing solely as a head should be punished for crimes committed while the head was connected to a body.”)

 

[Wesrock]

As neither of us is bothered about scoring debating points, I’ll answer you with some actual experimental results. This will take a bit of work on your part, but will show what really happens, unadorned by any speculation or theory

I’m asking you to watch a couple of excerpts from an informal talk given by an experimenter, but he doesn’t use jargon (I’m no specialist and understood him fine).

Please watch the first 15 minutes, it will let you navigate the work if the concepts are new, and shows some important results: that language processing can indeed be analyzed, and that the meaning of each specific noun (at least) is processed in basically the same predictable way in all people studied.

The fMRI equipment apparently has high spatial but very poor temporal resolution, so his team also uses MEG technology. Watch from minute 38 for 5 minutes. This shows how the meaning of a noun isn’t a static memory, or even one single dynamic state, but is the progression of a thought pattern over time across all the areas concerned with the various semantics of that particular word. Perhaps nothing like what your intuition might expect.

He goes on to show some results for how this is modified by adding an adjective. Work in progress but will show you something of how meaning of chiliagon works.

Dr Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon (computer scientist, or “programmer” to some )
youtube.com/watch?v=pRBf8BWAG3k

I will watch, but I fear that you are continuing to miss the point. I understand I’ve been making simplifications in describing neuroscience, but that’s irrelevant to the point, which you seem to be missing. In a materialist worldview, the meaning must either manifest materially (over time, in a sequence, in a vast network, whatever) or it is never present and we can’t be said to have minds that actually refer to or think about things outside themselves. I’ll come back later after watching the video.

 

[Wesrock]

I’m pretty bloody certain that it would also be impossible to remove the brain as I described. But it IS a hypothetical. It’s a thought experiment. I’m sure you’re familiar with them. Oh, look. Here’s another one.

But c’mon, Wes. You…

My example is absurd, but that’s the point.

 

[Peter_Plato]

First, you probably know but just to be sure, the homunculus idea is a fallacy, because it leads to an infinite regression (if “you” is explained as a little guy in your head, he can only be explained by a little guy in his head, etc.).

Let’s be completely clear about this, lest we get diverted once more with accusations of fallacious thinking.

I am not proposing a “little guy in your head” as an explanation for anything. I am claiming that loci of consciousness, which is the most incontestable truth for any conscious human being (ask Descartes,) is, itself, what must be explained AND a purely physical or material explanation for it utterly fails precisely because matter or any other “objective” reality cannot explain the indisputable experience of subjectivity that any thinking, living, human being experiences first hand.

There is no reason to be found in randomly collecting molecules, amino acids, proteins, etc. that accounts for the indubitable, first-hand, experiences of being the loci of consciousness, that any (and every, I would suppose) human being has from the moment they get up in the morning to the moment they enter deep sleep in the evening.

Clearly, there is some relationship between consciousness, as such, and brain function, but what isn’t explained (nor explainable, as far as I can tell) is the fact that it is me (as opposed to someone else) that is the subject that is the centre or loci of my own consciousness in this body at this moment. That is what hasn’t been accounted for.

AND that isn’t proposed as an explanation of something else, but of what, itself, needs explanation because no reasonable person who directly experiences it can doubt it.

 

[Wesrock]

So back we go to the BIV. You have your brain removed and placed into a vat. There are zero external sensations. And none even from the brain – there are no sensors so you can’t sense your brain in the same way as you do your foot, for example (and, incidentally, no pain – you can cut open someone’s brain when they are conscious and they will feel nothing). So where do you actually exist? Well, Tony asks why your mind needs to ‘be’ anywhere. But it is plainly obvious that ‘you’ are now in the vat. Disembodied yet conscious and thinking. You know you are ‘you’ because you have your memories. You remember your wife. You remember going to work this morning. You remember your first bike.

Now the evil doctor starts to remove matter. Neurons and dendrites and everything else that physically makes up your brain. So what is going to happen?

**If ‘you’ are a non-physical mind, then removing the physical components of the brain shouldn’t matter at all. **You might find yourself thinking at some point: ‘Hey, I can’t seem to imagine colours any more’ or ‘why can’t I remember who I am’, but according to you, you should still be capable of rational thought. Right up to the point where all physical matter has been completely removed.

No. That’s not how the hylemorphic dualist views things. That’s more in line with substance dualism. Removing brain tissue, cutting connections, that seriously affecting the mind is all considered normal and a part of HD. There is not another person simply interfacing with the brain matter. The brain is an integral part of the operation of the mind. Really, in HD, the main point of the immaterial processes I’ve spoken up is mostly to take on the form of the concept. As words are on a page, the neural patterns are ultimately meaningless in themselves. The immaterial operations of the mind are where the forms are grasped. When I think chiliagon, neurons fire, and my mind takes on the form of chiliagon (not the SHAPE of a chiliagon, just the form as in the formal cause). When I consider triangularity, neurons fire, which cues my mind to take on the form triangle. The neurons are like words on a page for reading. It can also serve as a unifier of these disparate, compksite processes. But neither is this immaterial part some type of ethereal presence. That’s the point. It exists in no place. It’s not a separate substance, but a power of human being. To take apart the brain is like ripping pages out of a book. Any rational sense to it, understanding, etc… is going to be handicapped by someone reading it. Those immaterial operations are not a whole thinking being on their own, but just specific operations carried out by a human being in the process of thinking.

I’m not sure I’m even capturing the concept right, but maybe it’s a little clearer. It’s like if you have a bunch of code. The immaterial operations are just later downstream functions in there. You start removing earlier lines, of course you’re going to have problems. You strip away everything before and you’re left with something that, on its own, is going to be quite handicapped and in the dark, not just there thinking normally in the absence of all material.

Anyway, I only had the opportunity to quickly skim through everything since yesterday.

 

[Wesrock]

Anyway, while I’ve gone off on a tangent, my main point is that no meaningless patterns of material can generate meaning in themselves. A materialist worldview can be consistent, but it involves denying thoughts being about things, mental states, the self, etc . . . I’m not concerned with how people speak out of convenience; this is the philosophy board, though. I’m not walking around correcting strangers on the street in how they talk about the quark-gluon interactions as if it’s some type of self (it seems rather absurd to, anyway, as they don’t believe wrong or right, as there is no such thing as believing, or knowing, or reasoning, or intention – everything is just physical reactions from which nothing like any of that can arise under materialist assumptions).

 

[Peter_Plato]

So back we go to the BIV. You have your brain removed and placed into a vat. There are zero external sensations. And none even from the brain – there are no sensors so you can’t sense your brain in the same way as you do your foot, for example (and, incidentally, no pain – you can cut open someone’s brain when they are conscious and they will feel nothing). So where do you actually exist? Well, Tony asks why your mind needs to ‘be’ anywhere. But it is plainly obvious that ‘you’ are now in the vat. Disembodied yet conscious and thinking. You know you are ‘you’ because you have your memories. You remember your wife. You remember going to work this morning. You remember your first bike.

You do realize that Oderberg dismantles the idea of identity being dependent upon memories, no? Well, I suppose you will have by the time you have finished reading the article.

That the problem of personal identity is not primarily a problem about consciousness—at least in the narrow sense that dominates current debate—is also shown by the fact that consciousness does not constitute personhood; rather, it presupposes and reveals it. The point is well known from the classic objections of Thomas Reid and Joseph Butler to the Lock-ean theory of personal identity:[11] there is a vicious circularity in trying to analyze personal identity, as Locke does, in terms of memory or of con*sciousness in general, since these phenomena presuppose identity (i.e., that it is the same person who remembers or is conscious). Yet it is a point that cannot be repeated often enough. A person is not merely aware—he is aware of something, and that something is, fundamentally, himself. There has, of course, been an attempt to get around the problem by invoking non-identity-presupposing relations such as “quasi-memory,” but such notions are of doubtful coherence at best.[12] Any attempt to synthesize personal identity out of a manifold of conscious states will founder on the task of specifying just what the content of those states is supposed to be, and I take this to be a point extendable beyond persons to the identity of any conscious being, such as an animal. More generally, the circularity objection is a special case of the general one against all attempts to give a non-identity-presupposing, and hence noncircular, theory of diachronic identity (identity over time) for any kind of object—about which I will soon have more to say.

 

[Wesrock]

Please watch the first 15 minutes, it will let you navigate the work if the concepts are new, and shows some important results: that language processing can indeed be analyzed, and that the meaning of each specific noun (at least) is processed in basically the same predictable way in all people studied.

The fMRI equipment apparently has high spatial but very poor temporal resolution, so his team also uses MEG technology. Watch from minute 38 for 5 minutes. This shows how the meaning of a noun isn’t a static memory, or even one single dynamic state, but is the progression of a thought pattern over time across all the areas concerned with the various semantics of that particular word. Perhaps nothing like what your intuition might expect.

He goes on to show some results for how this is modified by adding an adjective. Work in progress but will show you something of how meaning of chiliagon works.

Dr Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon (computer scientist, or “programmer” to some )
youtube.com/watch?v=pRBf8BWAG3k

Okay, I’ve watched those sections. Maybe you could please explain how this is in anyway inconsistent with what I’ve said? It would be helpful if you did so, because then I can get a better idea of what you think I am saying.

 

[IWantGod]

Anyway, while I’ve gone off on a tangent, my main point is that no meaningless patterns of material can generate meaning in themselves. A materialist worldview can be consistent, but it involves denying thoughts being about things, mental states, the self, etc . . . I’m not concerned with how people speak out of convenience; this is the philosophy board, though. I’m not walking around correcting strangers on the street in how they talk about the quark-gluon interactions as if it’s some type of self (it seems rather absurd to, anyway, as they don’t believe wrong or right, as there is no such thing as believing, or knowing, or reasoning, or intention – everything is just physical reactions from which nothing like any of that can arise under materialist assumptions).

Wesrock, i like you.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

In all likelihood a fundamental truth is that we cannot explain the nexus between spirit and matter, brain and mind, without resigning ourselves to a mystery beyond solution. It is the same with Creation ex nihilo of the universe. How did God pull that rabbit out of his hat? We have no idea, and never will. God is entitled to his miracles, and we are not entitled to know the secret of his magic. The materialist’s insistence that all secrets can be made known sooner or later is simply an assumption without warrant and begs an act of faith equal to, if not greater than, the belief in in the power of spirit over matter.

 

[tonyrey]

…Well, Tony asks why your mind needs to ‘be’ anywhere.

I also ask:

1. Why does everything have to be located in time and space?
2. Where precisely are logical, mathematical, scientific, physical, moral and metaphysical facts to be found?
3. Do truth, freedom, justice, equality and fraternity exist solely inside our skulls?
4. Would they cease to exist if no one thought about them?
5. Why should things be more significant than persons considering that things don’t know they exist and we do?
6. Which form of knowledge is more immediate and direct: our knowledge of ourselves or our knowledge of inanimate objects?
7. What are the most valuable aspects of reality?

 

[tonyrey]

In all likelihood a fundamental truth is that we cannot explain the nexus between spirit and matter, brain and mind, without resigning ourselves to a mystery beyond solution. It is the same with Creation ex nihilo of the universe. How did God pull that rabbit out of his hat? We have no idea, and never will. God is entitled to his miracles, and we are not entitled to know the secret of his magic. The materialist’s insistence that all secrets can be made known sooner or later is simply an assumption without warrant and begs an act of faith equal to, if not greater than, the belief in in the power of spirit over matter.

The best test of any theory is whether it corresponds to the way we live. In practice no one behaves as if we have no power over ourselves or anything else…

 

[levinas12]

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

I agree with you. But have we gone beyond philosophy here? Are we now in theology?

And, again, I was only talking about Aristotle who did not have access to revealed truth.

And I think it’s a revealed truth that God has created the world out of nothing and cares for it like a Father.

But perhaps philosophy can still talk about a Master Craftsman who would be the source of natural ends.

However, Aristotle is disturbingly silent on this point. “Disturbingly” because he had precedents precisely for a non-human demiurge (Plato) or some other version of a non-human Nous which is “active” in nature (the Pre-Socratics).

 

[Bradski]

I’m not sure I’m even capturing the concept right, but maybe it’s a little clearer. It’s like if you have a bunch of code…

If I’m understanding HD correctly (and there’s a strong possibility that I’m not), then I’m not sure that I would describe it as dualism in any case. It just seems to separate the process from the material components of the process and then declare that there are two aspects. But there obviously has to be a process in any case. Would you say that dualism applies to your computer in that it uses physical components to run non-physical code to render an impression of whatever the code is designed to do?

I have just pressed a few key strokes which ran a few lines of code I have written resulting in the PC running through a physical process resulting in an impression on my screen of a circle (actually a circular piece of mechanical equipment). Just like us imagining a cat, the circle doesn’t exist. There is no circle in the code or anywhere in the stored memory of the PC. But the PC now has available information that represents a circle. If I tell the computer to change the circle to red (imagine a red cat), then there is no circle that changes to red. There is in fact no colour red. But it now has available the information that represents a red circle.

The computer doesn’t have to have a gazillion circles stored in memory comprising all possible shapes in all possible combinations of size and colour and material. It just runs the code: Circle, red, large, wood. That seems equally applicable to the mind. There are certain combinations of physical activity in the brain that represents each of those four things and when combined, give you a mental impression of a large red, wooden circle. Which, again, is simply physical activity in the brain, which we can actually see happening in a CAT scan.

Incidentally, there seems to be quite a few arguments from incredulity around on the dualist side of things. Lots of comments such as ‘I can’t see how…’ or ‘It doesn’t seem possible’ etc. Just saying…

 

[Wesrock]

Hylemorphic dualism is form-matter dualism, and form and matter are not really equivalent to the immaterial and material substances proposed by Descartes. Form and matter are just causes or principles that define a substance, really. That said, it is less restrictive than materialism, so there is room for non-material processes, and also, of course, for material substances to be described teleologically and actually being directed towards certain ends, outcomes, and effects, whereas materialism argues there is no such direction in reality and such relationships are, if we’re being strict about the way we speak of it, accidental.

Your coding example to try to capture HD is incorrect. Coding, programs, etc . . . are material, of course. It goes into chips with on and off switches, and a HD would argue that no such immaterial powers I’m describing could arrive in an artificial system in which the relationship between parts is accidental. Any meaning within a program or its outputs is imputed to it from our minds. An arrangement of on and off switches doesn’t mean 2+2=4. The (name removed by moderator)uts and outputs are cast into symbols and relationships that are meaningful to us but are of themselves meaningless. While I have tried to differentiate the way a HD views the human mind from the Substance Dualist, HD does view there being real immaterial operations carried out in a rational mind that are not reducible to material operations, even if it’s complementary too and working in tangent with them. It’s not simply… supervenience (kind of what came to mind from your analogy), if your familiar with that materialist philosophy (though supervenience is itself somewhat vague, and ultimately seems prone to break down into either reductionary materialism on one side or dualism on the other, but that’s another topic).

My battery is about to die, but if Innocente doesn’t speak to his video, I’ll be tempted to just give my own thoughts on it. He seems to think I’m missing out on the wonderful nature of the human mind and its complexity, but nothing presented is in any way contradictory with a HD’s description of the mind or what we’d expect.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Here’s the final rub.

No matter how sophisticated a computer may be, it pales in significance next to the sophistication of the human brain’s ability to create the most complicated computer system. No one would imagine any sophisticated computer system could evolve by accident into existence without being designed by a human. Yet many are happy to believe that the human brain, far more sophisticated than an computer designed by man, did just that … evolve into existence without being designed.

The scientist who entertains such a notion is a very bad philosopher.

 

[Wesrock]

I just want to be clear that HD doesn’t rely on improbability arguments. Such arguments can make a good point, but they can offer no confirmation and yes, it is technically possible that there could be a counter example. Me? I don’t like them, and my point, and that of many other hylemorphic dualists, is that a materialist conception of nature cannot, by logic, account for anything real that could be called a mind, mental states, beliefs, thinking, the self, etc… it’s not that it is extremely improbable but that it’s actually impossible to account for these things.

To be clear, this isn’t even to say we can’t account for things scientifically. Perhaps we can. It’s a matter of materialist dogma and restricftions about all we need (and what is specifically excluded by the materialism) to account for reality that is at issue.

 

[inocente]

It’s an occupational hazard of theoretical physicists to be opposed to religion, e.g. Steven Weinberg with his view that:

• wikipedia

As if Marxists in China and elsewhere never commit atrocities…

It’s an occupational hazard of religious people to believe hell is a place of fire and incessant torture:

The most common description of the levels includes the Chamber of Tongue Ripping, The Chamber of Scissors, …

I’ve sent you a PM .

 

[inocente]

Whether or not YOU remain identically the same or not, is neither here nor there. You remain YOU, the subject of your experiences. What you, nor anyone else, haven’t explained is why there is a YOU to begin with and why that YOU happens to reside in your particular body when it could just as well have resided in any other body. The particular set of molecules that make up your body do not explain why you are there, since YOU, as the loci of your experiences – whether you change or not being irrelevant – could just as mysteriously have come to exist in some other body at some other time and place.

This is why Bradski’s BIV is completely unhelpful. No one knows whether a BIV is even possible nor why it would or wouldn’t be, nor what it takes to ‘enliven’ the particular loci of experience that is you, just as you don’t and can’t know what it actually means for YOU to die until you personally experience it. It is complete and blind conjecture just as it is empty speculation to attempt to explain why any particular loci of experience that is me or you happens to take residence in any particular body or other. All speculation is unhelpful at that point unless it accounts for the uniqueness of each individual subject as the subjective loci of their experiences and why each subject exists at the time and place they do. No one here has even come close to addressing this problem, let alone even show they fully grasp or understand it.

Took me a while to work out what a BIV might be. That’s from Futurama isnt it?

Re YOU. Descartes was wrong, there is no ghost in a machine. And every other theory of mind which can’t be tested, even in principle, is also wild speculation. What’s known as Not Even Wrong.

There is no ghostly homunculus which can transport between bodies, that’s a logical falacy. All the evidence supports what was once a speculation - that the soul is the form of the body.

We can speculate on why some people have the subjective feeling that they’re a ghost in a machine, but we can also speculate on why, even though we no longer believe that heaven is a place beyond the stars, we still think of loved ones who have passed on, as looking down on us. Some philosophers of mind speculate that YOU is just an illusion, a kind of user-friendly feature to help navigate the world. I guess sort of Gin a body meet a body/Comin thro’ the rye. Others speculate different. Dunno. Now that equipment can gather evidence, these things will get sorted out.

Have you read Thomas, formally? If so, does he have a fully fledged philosophy of mind, and can there be a synthesis of hylomorphism with neuroscience? I mean is it just a question of different vocabulary or is there a brick wall?