The Human Question

Dawkins speaks of our reading personal agency into nature as the source of the delusion of a personal God. But earlier in this blog I pointed out that the very basic notions used by science, such as causality, are not perceived in nature but interpreted on the basis of an analogy with our experience of our own agency. In other words, the interpretive pattern that leads us to think of nature as involving causality also leads us to regard a personal Being as its source. And one who attacks the latter as Dawkins has done may well undermine the former.

In a debate that now escapes my memory, one of the contra ID guys said that Behe's book on the Edge of Evolution, while arguing about the limits of mutation, doesn't take into consideration sexual recombination, gene duplication, and lateral gene transfer. Some day I hope to understand what all this means...

Peter Clarke (in a July 2009 lecture on brains and machines) points out that one can change the lower level without changing the higher level, comparing it to how different spellings of the same word can convey the same meaning (e.g., color, colour). The only problem with this analogy is the fact that the same word can have different meanings: this facet of language makes the analogy limp rather awkwardly...

Baars talks about higher symmetries in the less-apparent components being the foundation for more apparent but lower symmetries in the whole. As in marbles (higher but less apparent) being the components of hexagonal patterns (lower but more apparent). I think I've heard of group behaviors and fractile patterns being described as if a kind of emergence. Maybe the two are related. Maybe some forms of so-called higher-level emergence are really manifestations of the previously-hidden higher-symmetry in the component parts. Perhaps, Plato has something like this in mind when he says that the city is the soul writ large. Cities are orderly only because the human soul is.

Would an emergentist (uh, awkward word of my own creation that'll have to do for now) say that there is no human being until distinctively human activities occur? The reason why I suspect that the answer might be yes is because, it seems likely to me that for emergentism (why not make up new words?), ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (old fallacy by Haeckel). Why do I think that is likely? Because otherwise one would have to give an Aristotelian priority of being over action (as in the Medieval adage "action follows being"). But emergentism, as I see it now (i.e., as of December 19th 2009) seems to see higher-level properties as arising from complexa of lower-level properties. If so then emergentism lacks a sense of being as a kind of springboard for operation. Resolved: to learn more about how emergence is understood before I criticize/praise it any more.

I am not sure that I get Penrose's argument, but it goes something like this. If one thinks that the mind IS a kind of algorithm (sounds like functionalism), then one cannot maintain that all algorithms exist only in minds. Otherwise, one would have to agree that any algorithm necessarily exists in an algorithm, which necessarily exists in an algorithm, etc. Something circular here... or maybe an infinite regress. Penrose's solution is to posit Platonic mathematical entities, including algorithms. But to get this right, I suppose I need to read this argument instead of just listening to an audio version of the book.

Assuming for the moment that Dawkin's idea is correct, then maybe it should be called the altruistic gene, for it seeks to generate another. If one insists that no, it is selfish because it helps only its own kind, then "gene" here would not be a concrete thing but an abstract pattern that is striving to instantiate itself in concrete individuals. In such a case Dawkin's reductionism would be somewhat Platonic, for gene-forms would be abstract entities striving to be instantiated in matter. Ockham's Razor, anyone? Another interesting thing is the fact that if the gene, qua selfish, "could have its way," then it would duplicate itself exactly : no mutation would occur. Mutation is, from the anthropomorphic perspective that allows us to call the gene "selfish," an accident that frustrates the achievement of the gene's only goal.

Roger Penrose says that thought can occur without language, and he points to flashes of insights as examples. You might, in an instant, "see" something that would take hours to explain. Maybe he's right: maybe language is what reneders intelligibility communicable.

http://markshea.blogspot.com/2009/12/scholars-aim-to-disprove-darwin.html

Once or twice I've heard a scientist talk about the greater complexity of the human brain as if the complexity itself were sufficient to explain why it can think of things that lower animals cannot consider. Penrose points out the irony that the cerebellum is very highly complex yet not even conscious. This at least makes one pause before expressing confidence in the thesis that greater physiological complexity suffices to explain the capacity for subtler thought.

Roger Penrose talks about an experiment, reported by scientist Donald Wilson, with a split-brain patient (one w/ two hemispheres of their brain cut off from each other at the corpus collosum), in which both hemishperes learned to speak, but expressed different preferences (one side expressed the desire to be a draftsman, the other, to be a racing driver). This is troubling, but not entirely Certainly, if both hemispheres are generating two different expressions at the same time (I suppose that they would have to engage in handwriting rather than using the mouth at the same time), then the very concept of the unity of the soul becomes problematic or meaningless. But to express different preferences at different times would not be all that problematic, for it wouldn't be much different from the way we experience having even mutually inconsistent desires (to exercise, to diet, to work, to goof off, etc.) . A study of the brain as it expresses these desires might find that they origi

Goedel's theorum may be good for more than AI-bashing: we may be able to apply it to emergence (understood broadly enough to include my Aristotelian or rather neo -Platonic conception of higher/lower levels of being/operation). Think of how we can posit a set of mathematical operations and terms and use these operations and terms to formulate rules/algorithms that can be used in term to determine the truth values of the expressions that use those terms. Goedel showed that the set of all possible rules that we might formulate will be able can determine the truth values of SOME BUT NOT ALL of the expressions that could be created using those terms and operations (I'm not sure I said the Goedel thing 100% right but hopefully closely enough)... If you keep the above in mind, then you might consider how all of that math stuff might have the following analogy in nature: i.e., the laws or properties that attend a lower level of being can somewhat determine many but not all of the

He makes a lot of points on the basis of Goedel's theorum (which implies that are knowledge of the truth of mathematical propositions is not algorthmic). His points make me think: doesn't belief in a deterministic universe come from thinking that the necessity found in math exists in nature? And isn't that necessity found in math oh, so ... algorthmic? Uh, I haven't figured out how to put this all together, but it's as if there has to be something not governed by a rule in our brain that enables us to figure out how rules govern. Weird (ever notice that "wired" can be constructed from "weird": hmm).

Couldn't God have made a world in which evolution of bodily forms takes place through random variation? (followed by questions about whether really believes that God is omnipotent)

Actually, he doesn't mention zombies at all, but he does talk about the possibility that we could have evolved so as to be able to interact but without having evolved consciousness of those movements: our brains would be a cerebella without a cerebra. Another thought: Aristotle thought that even clams had rudimentary sensation and imagination. Nowadays, scientists doubt whether fish have any awareness whatsoever. Zombie fishes: rather fishy, don't you think?