The Human Question

For a purportedly cognizant machine to be aware of causality, it would seem (given how it happens with us rational animals) that being aware of its own causal interactions is a necessary condition for its being aware of how causal relations exist in nature.  But to be aware of its own causal interactions, the machine would have to have a sense of its acting as a whole, as an individual, and as being acted upon at a whole.  It would not suffice merely to register information from this or that outside source: there would have to be a sense of the whole acting and being acted upon.   It seems that such awareness requires appropriation and that machines can't do that (at least not in the precise sense that I have discussed in this blog).

Dennett sometimes engages in what may be science fiction or may be science fantasy, coming up with scenarios which may or may not be impossible (who knows?).  Without establishing that they are even possible, he talks almost as if they already have happened and asks his interlocutor, triumphantly, "So what do you say to that ?"

Dennett argues contra Searle that the consciousness that we attribute to a computer is identical with the physical process as such rather than with the processing of a system of symbols.  But a computer program, inasmuch as it has multiple instantiations, seems not to be identical with any one of the physical processes that instantiate it.  In fact, these different instantiations may share no specific physical properties.  What these instantiations have in common is that they all function for us as a system of symbols. Searle's argument works only inasmuch as his opponent identifies thought with the operation of a program (with the program being a system of symbols), but that's enough to win the day, ... for Dennett's counterargument has the problem that the same physical process going on in a machine could be the basis for many different functions.  So it doesn't clearly perform this function rather than that until someone using the computer interprets its opera...

A non-reductive physicalist could say that he or she sees no evidence of God's existence, nor does he/she see evidence of any other immaterial being's existence; therefore, it seems that there is no God.  Or he/she might adopt a soft agnosticism (a soft agnostic is open, a hard agnostic says, "I can't know, and neither can you")    To either of these physicalists,  I would reply, "Here's my evidence/argument..." A non-reductive physicalist might say there is no God because of the problem of evil/pain.  To that I would reply, "You misunderstand what is meant by 'God': God is not thought of as an engineer or manager, but as an agent who is the source of our entire world's entire existence." A non-reductive physicalist might say that there can be no God because there can be no immaterial being.  To which I would reply, "Why not?"  The response would (I expect) belie the sort of assumptions that are proper to a reducti...

It might be a desire to know that you HAD to exist...at some point in time.  Your contingent existence is grounded upon a necessity.

If our consciousness always includes consciousness of our body in relation to our environment, then how can it be a that a computer program, which, according to functionalism, can run in precisely the same way in different computers, is ever conscious?  The differences in these machines are like the differences in bodies that are situated differently with respect to the same concrete object. The fact that they are not differently aware while their programs run in different machines with different characteristics and in different situations can be explained by the fact that they are not aware of their bodies at all, and that is not far from saying that they are not aware at all: they are just tools we use to understand the world.

What would happen to the problem of divine foreknowledge if the whole universe existed for only one instant? Well, God could be said to foreknow the condition of creation inasmuch as the atemporal eternal is prior to the temporal.  But this foreknowledge is not the sort that we have when we know, at 5pm we know or think we know what will happen at 5:05pm on the same day. The firsts sort of priority (of the eternal over the temporal) is more basic than the second (of one time over another time). A well-directed attempt to deal with the problem of divine foreknowledge must recognize this distinction, direct its efforts at understanding the implications of the first sort of foreknowledge while recognizing that the second sort of foreknowledge is a pseudoproblem in the case of God's knowledge.

These vague meanderings need a lot of polishing, but I'm spitting them out here before I forget them. His criticism of naturalism is, at the end of the day, a criticism of a certain kind of materialism: one that proposes to explain (or is it justify???!) the reliability of the faculties used by scientific theorizers by saying that these faculties are reliable because they have, over the course of time, enhanced the survivability of their possessors. I think that the type of functionalism that has appeared in other discussions (and which I associate with utilitarianism) comes into this picture as well: a functionalist approach to evolution looks at life processes instrumentally (hence the association I have made between it and utilitarianism).  "Enhacing survival" (of a gene), for example, is a functionalist explanation of why certain phenotypes endure in a population. I think functionalism is problematic in a manner analogous to the problems I find with utilitariani...

Perhaps a better name than "methodological naturalism" for the relation between natural science and theism might be "methodological silence." The fact that we are silent about something doesn't mean we are ignoring or denying that it is there.  Suppose the president or vice president were seriously injured, and surgeons, nurses and other medical professionals worked feverishly to save his (or her) life.  While engaged in this work, they would not talk about who  their patient is, even if they were quite motivated by this knowledge to do a good job.  At the end of the day, however, when they have taken off their gloves and masks and sat down, they will talk reflectively with their friends and colleagues about the significance of the task they have just performed.  Such reflections will not, strictly speaking, pertain to the practice of medicine; instead, they will pertain to the task we all have of understanding the point of our lives and how each episode fits ...

If genuine scientific inquiry can be practiced at all, then reductionism is false.  If reductionism is false, then criticisms of cosmological arguments that involve reductionist presuppositions are undermined, and the degrees of goodness in beings, the beauty that we find about us, make the universe ripe with evidence of God.

What is the object of mathematics?  Does it require that we posit a kind of fiction?  Does it direct us toward Platonic objects? The sort of functional analysis of theism that has been employed by some evolutionary psychologists would, if applied to math, treat it as dealing with fictions.  But it doesn't.  Less respect for theism begets less respect for math; more respect for math begets more respect for theism. Once upon a time I learned how Wittgenstein understood math.  Unfortunately that understanding has grown fuzzy.  But I think that for LW (Ludwig Wittgenstein, not Leo White :)), learning math is being initiated into a practicing community: it's learning "how we do things."  That's no problem to my thesis that more respect for math begets more respect for theism (and the contrapositive).  After all, knowing such truths may be a way of entering into a practice that includes other, higher rational beings...

Do they go together? Then what would be the virtue theory alternative to functionalism?

If the study of physics shows that nature is a closed system and it is, strictly speaking, a scientific fact that miracles and freedom are impossible, then it would seem that a theist could not do physics well. But what about the fact that there are and have been successful physicists who believe in God and freedom?  Apparently theism did not  keep George Lemaitre from discovering the big bang!  If, on the other hand, one's ability to do physics is not adversely affected by theism etc., then the exclusion of miracles and freedom is not so much a scientific fact as as a philosophical inference--or perhaps an act of faith.

If the organismoids found in Conway's game of life were plausible examples of what can happen in nature, then simple life forms without DNA or organelles would occasionally be found in nature.  But they aren't...

[I haven't decided whether or not this is a keeper] Daniel Dennett says it's simply impossible that there be a philosophical zombie, i.e., a creature that acts just like humans even at the neuronal level but has no consciousness.  I agree but would add that IF reductive physicalism were true, then such creatures could exist , and in that case consciousness itself would be causally superfluous. In order to show the truth of the hypothetical statement in italics, I propose that you apply one of the properties of reductive physicalism called reversibility to the scenario in which communication is used to direct behavior.  I propose, furthermore, that to make this point we use (a modified version of) the example used by Dennett to show that consciousness is not superfluous.  Suppose there are three individuals, Nestor speaks Navajo and English; Engelbert, who speaks only English, and Seth, who  can understand English and Swedish.  Nestor can see a pair of light...

Note to self: prosopagnosia would serve as a good example of what I'm calling 'appropriation," I got the notion from Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle's De sensu , where he points out that the common sense ( koine aesthesis for Ari,  sensus communis for Thomas) takes the act of the proper sense and makes it its own.  It doesn't repeat the act of sensing, say, color: instead, it perceives something about color.  Somewhere (methinks) in the Summa theologiae  (and in the other Summa ) Aquinas talks about the relation of the higher to the lower power in a similar manner (but while making more neo-Platonic sounding points). It seems to me that perhaps  what we know about the brain today largely corroborates all this.  There is an appropriation by one part of the brain of the act done in another part of the brain (all of these acts are acts of the ensouled body and/or the embodied soul, but never mind for now).  But it may be the case that th...

What if you program a computer so that it can win in chess and THEN discover that you can also use it to track packages: what was the computer thinking of when you used it for chess?  What if you find differences between the two functions and reprogram the computer to function differently in the two different situations.  But then you discover that there are at least two more quite different situations in which the new program can function: what was the computer thinking of in each of these situations?  Does it recognize its error? Is functionalism vacuous?

http://thomism.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/a-critique-of-aristotles-physics-in-aristotles-terms/

Daniel Dannett talks about design space as the set of possible designs (while deforming the meaning of the word "design" in a manner that would warm David Hume's heart, but that's another matter).  Why not convey the hierarchical nature of anti-reductionism by talking about "goal dimension"?  Perhaps that's too much like playing ball in your opponent's favorite field, with his equipment, etc.

Both Carol and Dennett are determinists and reductive physicalists. Dennett (or rather, at least Dennett) believes that meaning matters.  That is, the "aboutness" of our thoughts and perceptions is important and able to influence the world. He supports this belief with the parable of two black boxes.  One sends a signal via a wire to another black box.  One had two buttons (A and B) and the other had three lights: red, yellow and green.  Whenever you push the A button, the red light will flash.  Whenever you press the B button the green light flashes.  The signal to the wire is different each time.  Opening the black boxes and studying their operation, they found no similarity between the two.  Later they discover that the first box sends a message to the other in English: a message that is true (taken from its data base) if button A was pressed or false if B was pressed.  The second box then translates the English into Swedish Lisp and c...

This from http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/can-married-couples-much-sex When sex is “on the table” on a near-daily basis, a predictable pattern tends to develop. Men have a higher sex drive, and strongly associate sex with closeness and relationship health. Women comparatively place greater weight on other forms of interaction, and on a physiological level, their appetite for sex simply tends to be lower. Thus, when marital intimacy is perpetually possible, women can easily fall into the habit of putting it off, or even coming to see it as a chore. It’s also well known by now that hormonal contraceptives tend to decrease sexual appetite. So by preparing themselves physiologically to have sex at any time, women make it so that they rarely or never want to. Should we be at all startled that this does not add up to a recipe for marital health? Men start to feel that they are perpetually begging, which is hurtful and degrading. Women start to feel that they are forever badgered ...

[promising but fuzzy] Suppose there's a planet in a galaxy in which there are rational animals that seek survival on a day by day basis by competing with others in a manner strangely similar to the moves of a chess game on ours. They would employ a computer called Baby Blue to help them manage their struggles successfully. Baby Blue wouldn't know that it's solving this problem any more than the earthbound computer (named Deep Blue) that beat Gasparov on earth knew that it was playing a game called chess.  This would be true even if both computers had the same hard and software.  In fact, there might be a vast number of situations (let's say each is on a different planet) in which the same program might function quite well.  So it doesn't seem that knowing that a computer serves this or that function helps us know what the computer is thinking.  And that might be because the computer is not so much a thinker as an instrument that we use to think. (The weird thing...

Suppose you could write a program to represent all of the dispositions of a pencil (so that it would show algorithmically that if you apply force here and there, and thereby push it against a paper, it shall make lines). Suppose you also wrote a program to represent a person trying to write a sentence using an instrument. Suppose you were able to combine the two so that they represented, together, a person writing a sentence with a pencil. If both programs were well-designed, then you wouldn't have to violate the first program in order to apply the second. So it is in nature: writing a sentence with a pencil does not violate the internal dispositions of the pencil. Perhaps this fact is analogous to how the laws of nature are to be applied to individuals.  For in trying to understnd how an individual behaves, we can't just plug in the laws of nature in an abstract way: we have to translate those laws into internal dispositions, dispositions to act a certain way that can be...

Okay, there is an element of satire here, but here goes: Supposing you think that you have a PhD in mathematics (actually, an ABD will do).  But as a matter of fact, you are really just a brain in a vat being fed electrochemical signals: could it be that all of the mathematical truths you suppose that you know are merely fleeting impressions?  In other words, could it be that you do not really know that 2+2=4, for it merely seems that you do?  What would be the status of your knowledge of laws of nature if knowledge of mathematical truths were not really knowledge at all? What is the status of our knowledge of math and science if this thought experiment is informative? Seems to me that one who faces these questions must either grant that he can't really know the truths of math and laws of nature, or he must embrace dualism to preserve at least mathematical truth--OR he might look for a reason for rejecting brain-in-a-vat thought experiments altogether. I recommend...

Somewhere in the first third of Consciousness Explained , DD proposes that neurons or clusters thereof can do the operations proper to other (neurons or clusters).  I need to find out where he seems to say this as well as what he really does say there, because.... it sounds like the Aristotelian concept of appropriation (the last term is my name for what De sensu  has the sensus communis doing vis-à-vis the proper senses, comparing the former to a craftsman using instruments).

What if a biologist thought or pretended to think that an integrated circuit was an organism?  He would look for signs of life.  And what would he find?  No food intake.  No breathing. No chemical excretions.  No reproduction. No aging.  No death.  No life. He would find responses to stimuli, but they might be different than the sort of responses that a computer programmer would expect.  After trying many different levels of electrical inputs, he will note corresponding outputs.  Whereas the computer programmer will think of input and output in binary terms -- either on or off -- the biologist will look for non-linear relationships.  And he might just find some.  Of  course (no surprise to either the biologist/electrician or to the engineer), he will note that certain levels of input will be catastrophic. What if neurons perform their instrumental role in perception etc. precisely in virtue of their CAUSAL interrelations, A...

"Umwelt is really an engineering concept," says DD nonchalantly in Intuition Pumps.   What a sly sophist!

Reductionists take talk of the soul as another example of the positing of an entity in order to fill the gap in our knowledge with a purported explanation.  They might as well call their target the "soul of the gaps." On the other hand, David K Johnson (who argues the soul of the gaps) is perfectly capable of taking the question of identity through time seriously.  He calls this the problem of personal identity. What I don't get, however, is why he completely ignores the question of personal identity when discussing the soul, and vice versa.  It doesn't occur to him that the question of the soul and of personal identity are the same question from two different perspectives. What if the soul is not a hidden entity we posit to explain but simply our identity under a different description?

Isn't the very term "consciousness" problematic, as the use of it tends to reduce desire and effort to thoughts about representations? Might it not be better to think of an engaged human being as the concrete whole and "consciously" as an adverb modifying "engaged"?

If for each physical state there is exactly one mental state is true (which is not the same as saying vice versa), then the fact that different people at different times have the same mental state (inasmuch as they are directed toward the same concrete or abstract object) via different material conditions indicates that it's not a two-way street: for every mental object there is a plethora of possible physical states. If one denies the last statement then cooperation for a common good is impossible or illusory.  In which case, science as a public endeavor would be a collective delusion.  But it ain't.   Therefore...

It's worth noting that Neils Bohr was willing to dispense with the law of the conservation of energy (perhaps the steady state theory does as well--I gotta look into that).  And Sean Carroll proposes the same when discussing the inflationary universe (the latter is an especially striking example of special pleading). These points undermine Sean Carroll's appeal to conservation of energy to support his reductive materialism.  It's a case of "any stick will do to beat a dog," even if it's a stick you've denied others permission to use.

Reductive materialists claim that the laws of nature predetermine how every material thing shall move, including human actions.  One objection that might be posed to reductionism is the randomness scientists attribute to the behavior of individual particles  at the quantum level.  The reductionist reply (this time correctly, in spite of the incoherence of their philosophical position) that quantum fluctuations don't save freedom.  If we behave as we do simply because of a lawful relation between our behavior and its material preconditions, then determinism is not avoided by supposing that right before behavior x happens, a (random) quantum fluctuation happens, which ends up causing (think of the butterfly effect) us to act differently than we otherwise would have, had the fluctuation not occurred.  That is because our behavior, although not predictable in virtue of what happened before the random fluctuation, is predictable in virtue of what happened subsequentl...

I haven't a clear idea of his multiple drafts account, but it seems to me that according to DD, we take what we previously cognized and recognize it with some modification.  So instead of having an enduring ego, you have different drafts at different times of what you perceive and the later ones take into account what you perceived in the earlier draft. I would like to run a bit in a different direction with the draft metaphor by pointing out how drafts involve sentences, which involve words, which involve letters.  Among these components and sub components are elements that are related to each other in a founding/founded manner, with the founded being irreducible to the founding. Lemmee try to say that again, this time without (probably misusing) Husserlian terms: letters/words and words/sentences are related to each other as are part to whole, with the whole having something to it that is more than the sum of the parts.  This should be recognized in the "draft" me...

I've heard of someone functioning very normally even though most of their brain was crowded out by a large swelling that occurred very early in their development.  Apparently, the brain developed all of its functions with the neurons that remained. So this makes me wonder about whether some or all of the functions that we associate with different areas of the brain are where they are because their location, neuron-type and function have been pretty much pre-selected genetically OR whether activity/behavior affects or even directs development. Also, I wonder specifically about the frontal lobe: if that area of the brain were crowded out of existence even before birth by a swelling, then would some other part of the brain that remains come to perform the frontal lobe functions?  Would that part become fully myelinated only in the mid twenties (as is the case with us)?

Isn't the move toward connectionism a recognition that we are more like organisms as Aristotle conceived of them and less like machines as Descartes conceived of them?

It seems to me that the primary question is not whether one could engineer a percipient being, but what perception really is.  It is more than a physics-bound process, even if it's physical.  It's more than a physics-bound process even if one could engineer it into existence from inorganic material.  I don't think the latter is possible at all, but it would be helpful to grant its possibility so as to be able to make the point that even in such a case, reductionism would not be confirmed.  Rather, something more than physics-bound processes would be going on where none had been going on before.

What if neurons are lower level, fractile versions of what happens at the overall level? In such a case, the ancient and Medieval notion of the   sensus communis would not be entirely off target, and it might be helpful how its simple judgment is related to its complex of apprehensions.

I am writing this with unfair moves made by evangelical atheists in mind: Suppose the laws themselves may change through time: if they do, the way in which they change is itself a law of nature.  And if there are many such laws, then the way in which the laws themselves are related to each other might be a kind of law of nature.  So that there is one ultimate law of nature, the knowledge of which would explain everything else. Suppose the laws that we know do not change through time: then one arrives at the conclusion regarding one ultimate law even more quickly. To one who sees the connection between the laws we observe an this one supreme law, the following conditional is true: if the more obvious laws are true, then the supreme but least obvious one is true. The contrapositive is likewise true: If the supreme but least obvious law is not true, then neither are the purportedly more obvious laws. What is logically prior (what is known first by us) is the law or se...

The manifestation of being. No, that's too easy:  let's try "the manifestation of being, insofar as the manifestation itself can become manifest to the being to whom being is manifest." No, that's still too easy.  Let's try "the manifestation of being, with the horizon of the being of beings becoming manifest concomitantly with the manifestation of the manifestation itself of the being of beings to the being(s) to whom being is being manifest." Well, I guess that'll have to do for now: kinda reminds me of "How many woodchucks would a would chuck chuck..."

Does this apply to duelers? To wives who accept physical abuse? Or should we try to stop those things from happening?

Inferring is to interpreting as pumping water out of the ground is to steering the flow of water. We do not infer the intentions of others, we try to figure out what their intentions are like. Hmmn: needs more thought, dontchuhthink?