I’ve been listening to the infuriating Frank Turek. He’s got one argument against materialism which he seems to be well known for: those damn atheists are saying you’re merely molecules in motion, and you know you’re not, so therefore atheism is false, to paraphrase. Here’s an example from Turek’s debate with Hitchens. It’s an awful argument.
Christopher’s a self-described materialist but if atheism is true we have no grounds to know it because reason and thoughts are just chemical reactions in the brain. How can you have—even Einstein believed this. Einstein was a determinist. How can you trust what Christopher says if it’s just chemical reactions going on in his brain and chemical reactions in our brain? See, chemical don’t reason, they react. Now, I’m not saying there’s no connection between our thinking and chemicals, there is, but if it’s nothing but chemicals, how can we trust them? Even Darwin recognized this, it’s called Darwin’s doubt. He said, “If we are just the product materially of primates, why should I even trust anything, much less my theory of natural selection?” The next major reason is the laws of mathematics. Science depends on the notion that the universe is rational and mathematical at all levels. But how does rationality and mathematics arise from randomness? How do they come from matter? Rationality and mathematics are the product of mind, not matter. So you’ve got reason and the laws of logic, the laws of mathematics, and, number seven (or, seven in my list here, three in the addition) human freedom and the ability to make choices. Christopher is somebody who is very concerned about human freedom as I am, but again, if we are just molecules in motion, how do we have human freedom? William Provine from Cornell, he’s a materialist, a Darwinist, he points out that we don’t have any human freedom if all we are is molecules in motion. Now, Christopher ought not scold anybody for being a snake-handling, Bible-thumping, funny mentalist preacher because according to his own world view, that person is that way because these are just chemicals going on in his brain. Neither could you say that Hitler had done anything wrong if it’s just chemicals going on in his brain. I mean, what is the murder molecule? How much does justice weigh? These are questions that have no answer in a materialistic world view, but that is Christopher’s world view. It seems to me that it makes much more sense to say that reason and laws of logic and mathematics and human freedom come from a great mind that granted us these immaterial realities. The final argument is consciousness. Do you know that a heap of sand and a human brain have the same elements? Why are some carbon-based molecules conscious and some are not? Materialists have no answer for this. Daniel Dennett, another person who would agree with Christopher on many things, he’s a materialist, says that consciousness is an illusion because he’s a materialist. You’re not really witnessing this right now, it’s just an illusion. Now one wonders if he was conscious when he wrote this. But again, there is no explanation for this in an atheistic world view.
He has it all wrong.
You are not just chemicals in your brain; you are chemicals in your brain, isn’t that awesome?
The thing is that there are a set of facts on which Turek, his audience, and atheists would agree. You can think, you can make decisions, you can have goals, you can dream. You have conversations in your head, you replay memories, you feel. These are realities. Atheists do not deny them, but what Turek is doing here is playing with his audience, making a false emotional appeal by suggesting that materialists are saying you don’t do any of those things, because you’re a meat robot, and robots can’t dream.
What he’s missing is the real core of the difference. When we say, “you dream”, who is the “you”? We’re not denying either the existence of an individual or the process of dreaming, we are saying that there is a material explanation for the perception of self, and that that explanation involves cells and molecules and ions and currents and a complex trajectory of experience and learning to produce a functioning brain that does interesting, complex things. We’re actually pretty impressed with the power of ‘molecules in motion’, and we only attach the modifier “merely” to be ironic.
When Turek says “you dream”, he’s denying all the complex activity of the brain to say that there is a “you” that is not part of your physical body; that there is an invisible puppet master called “you” that lives in an invisible realm and somehow intangibly makes your body manifest the external symptoms of dreaming. It’s a weird and very common view that there is a “you” that is completely independent of your physical existence. He has no evidence for it, of course, while we have all the evidence of psychology and physiology and endocrinology that correlates the activity of the brain with the activity of mind.
He also asks, Do you know that a heap of sand and a human brain have the same elements?
That’s not actually true; there’s very little silicon in the brain, and very little carbon in sand. If you want similarities, a heap of sand and a computer have a lot more in common. Would Turek like to argue that computers don’t work in a material way? My laptop here is doing a lot of extremely complex stuff right now: it’s running a word processor, it’s making a cursor blink, it’s monitoring my keyboard and collecting key strokes, storing them and displaying their associated symbol on my screen; it’s also running a web browser in the background, as well as my email software, and it’s occasionally alerting me that I’ve got new mail (rarely worth bothering with), that someone’s tweeting at me somewhere, and that I’ve got incoming messages. It’s also playing music for me. Do I argue that all of that is an illusion? No. Does Turek believe that there is a spiritual cognitive force hovering in a different dimension, reaching in to manipulate all this silicon to do all this work, because a heap of sand can’t possibly be that organized? Probably not, but if he doesn’t, he’s inconsistent.
But he’s also wrong when he says materialists have no answer for how some collections of molecules are conscious and others are not. We do! They aren’t complete answers — complex phenomena are hard to understand and take time to untangle — but we certainly can sort out many material properties that are necessary to make brains work, which aren’t present in a heap of sand. The more accurate assessment is that the spiritualists have no answers at all. They have no evidence for even the existence of a disembodied soul, no idea how it would diddle a material brain, and not even the vaguest hypothesis about how this phantasmal wisp of guesswork would be doing the complex business of dreaming without any molecules.
“Merely molecules in motion”
That would make a great refrain for a (love?) song!!
Being the product of a 14 Billion year old universe involving complex and strange processes such as stars, black holes, magnetars, and supernovas isn’t enough for them. Being the product of 4 Billion years of continuously complexifying, utterly astounding processes we call life isn’t enough for them. Having that product be capable of self-reflection, and contemplation of that wonder that caused them to be, isn’t enough.
They also need a fairy tale telling them they are even more special snowflakes. Their egos are too fragile not to be the most important thing in the universe (or outside it).
Not that it entirely matters, but is that even a real quote from Darwin? I can’t find any source for it that isn’t Frank Turek.
FTFY
specialffrog, that was my first thought. It has the scent of bullshit, or at the very least, terrible paraphrasing.
On the other hand, my computer often exhibits evidence of a soul. An evil soul.
Whenever ideas like this come up I think of my grandmother. She slowly lost her cognitive abilities in the last couple years of her life. An early example of this was when she told my mom that my grandfather had died when his ship was sunk by the Germans. My grandfather served as a technician in the RCAF in WW2, and died in his 90s. Experiences like that make it hard to believe that there’s some existence after death where a “perfect” copy of everything you’ve ever thought, and of your personality, exists. It also makes me wonder if Turek has never encountered those kind of changes in his relatives or acquaintances.
The (idiotic) content aside, its form is amazingly unlike Darwin’s writing.
It appears that mere molecules are capable of Making Things Up!!!
Sorry PZ, but after your comment, “he has is all wrong” all I could think was “no shit!”
Correction…
Sorry PZ, but after your comment, “he has it all wrong” all I could think was “no shit!”
timgueguen, no one ever assumes a “soul” as a residue of a person’s mind is just a series of disconnected emotions, bereft of all reason and memory, and that the body was used for memory storage and as a control mechanism for reason.
Just as fanciful as the traditional view of the soul, but more bleakly believable, I think.
Turek’s argument makes no sense. How exactly does an immaterial consciousness independent from the material body, make our thoughts and feelings more reliable? Hoe much does justice woo?
That’s a pretty odd and misleading way to put it. If the universe didn’t exhibit lawlike features that can be represented mathematically, there wouldn’t be a reason for us to formulate physical laws that represent the way it is. But it does, so we do that. We wouldn’t exist in a totally unlawful universe, but the only thing you might say about it (about some other universe like that, which we don’t live in) is that there isn’t any rational or mathematical description which is any more concise or comprehensible than cataloging every last unique momentary bit of the chaos as it’s constantly changing into something different (if it even has a time dimension). So, yes: the universe is representable in a much nicer way — so what?
Already, some things we tend to think or care about don’t lend themselves (readily) to mathematical representations. You might say such things don’t exist, say that science doesn’t (try to) have any knowledge of them, say that we’ll get there someday eventually, or take some other kind of position on it (perhaps different positions in different cases). But whatever it may be, science itself doesn’t tell you that, and it doesn’t in any way depend on it.
Does anybody think this? What’s it mean? What’s with this association between “randomness” and “matter”? He was just complaining about Einstein being a determinist too … so how are we supposed to make any sense of it? Maybe it’s not just materialism but also reductionism — then what does that have to do with randomness AND determinism? All of the above, plus the kitchen sink? It’s all bad, if it doesn’t have magic?
Substance dualism writ stupid.
I seem to recall [being a plain old chemical process, whatever] that the Darwin quote is accurate, but incomplete. IIRC Darwin followed that sentence with his Theory (of Natural Selection) to explain the answer to the question.
I see Turek is baffled by the complexity of the biochemical processes in which we call “life”.
Turek:
clearly. (bio)chemistry is too complex for Turek to follow, so he concludes there is magic involved that biolists refuse to iclude in their explanations of life.
When Turek said the human body has the same elements as a pile of sand, he didn’t mean your ordinary Minnesota quartz sand; he clearly referred to coral sand from Hawaii, which at least gives us carbon and oxygen, plus calcium for strong teeth and bones. It’s a start, at least.
Has no-one told Turek about emergence?
#12, conciousness razor said
Yes, I have had it said to me by an otherwise well educated person that it is just obvious that God exists. If He didn’t, there would be nothing but randomness. The fact that molecules stick together and even that systems of logic can be coherent is due to God’s grace. Duh!
Yeah, so his opening gambit is a C.S.Lewis argument. We’re done here.
@davidnangle #5:
I’m off work this week but I’ll make an exception and offer you some IT advice: your computer requires exorcising. Half a pint of holy water tipped into its innards should do the trick.
I would not want to be in the presence of anyone so stupid as to believe that materialism requires there to be a different molecule representing every possible human impulse or emotion. No, surely it’s just dishonest rhetoric.
jaybee, #17:
Sure, but I meant people who do think it, not those who don’t and are beating up a strawman. Turek should give me the wackiest atheist / physicalist / reductionist / determinist / indeterminist / etc. that there ever was, and show me when that one person said “rationality and mathematics arise from randomness” and/or that they “come from matter.” At this point, it’s not at all clear what that could possibly mean, but even with that straightened out a bit more, I doubt anybody has ever seriously argued for it. To me, it just looks like a lot of stupid stream-of-consciousness bullshitting from him. (Of course, it’s not just him or originally from him; lots of woomeisters pull stunts like this.)
If we had six fingers rather than ten, would we have the concept of seven?
@18 That’s a large portion of Christian Apologetics. What C.S. Lewis said but more poorly written or said. Or Van Til… Though that’s already incredibly poorly written and someone whose name escapes me, and a random smattering of people from prior to modern times.
@22 If we had six fingers, the fabric of the universe would probably tear asunder, because six is a bad number that appears a lot as mathematical counterexamples.
@robertbaden
I’m not sure which way this rhetorical question was meant to be viewed, but yes a number for the quantity we call seven would still exist in base 6 just like a number for the quantity we refer to as thirteen still exists in base ten.
By the way, this worldview stuff is exactly what Richard Carrier deals with so thoroughly in his online and in-print writings. This Frank Turek person is completely ignorant of what that worldview is.
I really enjoy reading this stuff:
http://infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/naturalism/
http://www.richardcarrier.info/naturalism.html
“How can we trust them” is silly. We evidently can trust them. You can’t undo that. The question really should be “how can reliable reasoning occur naturally? Or is there a non-natural explanation?”
And that is a question for science.
But it’s silly to think the answer won’t be naturalism. The answer to everything in the world always turns out to be naturalism. And in this case we know that drugs and brain damage and such alter our ability to reason. So reason is evidently a natural machine that can be damaged.
Also see this detailed link that debunks the Argument From Reason:
http://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/reppert.html
So on the one hand, science works because the behavior of matter is “rational and mathematical” (whatever that mean), therefore the material universe must have been created by a mind, therefore God.
On the other hand, our minds cannot be material because the behavior of matter is not “rational and mathematical,” therefore God.
These two arguments seem completely inconsistent to me. If anything, an omni-theist should be more confident that matter can generate mind, since matter itself is created and ordered by the divine will. Presumably it can do anything that God wants it to do?
There’s a recent book called ‘The atheist who didn’t exist’ by a dumb Christian called Andy Bannister which has a whole chapter based on the notion that scientists think the brain is nothing more than atoms jiggling about. When is science education going to get past the idiot level?
That reminds me of a conversation I had with a guy who kept throwing Star Wars quotes at me as if they had some kind of relevance. In particular that annoying Yoda nonsense “Luminous beings are we. Not this crude matter.”
gee wiz I hate this kind of absurd shit. He just asks a bunch of questions in succession very old questions at that 1000 year old ignorant questions. It is as if he thinks no one has ever thought of that stuff before nor tried to answer it. His questions imply a truly medieval or even older world view or even. He has no interest in answers how ever that would require actual thinking and possibly a little humility.
uncle frogy
sorry
or evenuncle frogy
I tried reading the quote but all I saw was it morphing into “Explain love” and “What sound does yellow make?” and I got a headache and I stopped. I’m assuming PZ’s rebuttal was accurate.
“not even the vaguest hypothesis about how this phantasmal wisp of guesswork would be doing the complex business of dreaming without any molecules”
Ayup. Of the many problems that I had with theism, not least among them is that its purported explanations in fact explain nothing. The folks who disbelieve that a brain could think because the hows haven’t been completely worked out yet propose as an alternative a laws-of-physics-breaking magical immaterial essence, and are utterly silent on its mechanisms.
@robertbaden # 22
If we had 12 fingers fractions would be a damn sight happier!!
@30:
Hey, Yoda was *right*. And had empirical data to back it up.
Why did your friend think Yoda was talking about him? Or us?
Imagine a person is totally color blind but she knows the exact neurobiology of the conscious perception of the color red. Does she know red the same way that you or I perceive red? Of course not but it is neurobiology that ultimately leads to our subjective perception of red. If you oscillate a bar magnet with your hand in a pitch dark room, we know the magnet produces electromagnetic radiation. But it does not produce visible light which is the same as electromagnetic radiation. Turek makes the mistake that subjective experience albeit important (I couldn’t practice medicine without knowing a patient’s symptoms) is fundamental but indeed, it is not the final explanation. We don’t have brains. We are brains. Ultimately it is the reductionist explanation that is true.
That being said, notions of social justice dissolve the more we delve deeper and deeper into the nature of reality. It’s impossible to make moral claims about say genocide at the level of deterministic superstrings. Morality has to be based on the illusion that the self and mind are part of a separate domain.
And the man namedrops Dennett, but completely fails to engage that man’s philosophical arguments on free will, which are ever so much more interesting than “under materialism, free will is an illusion” – and of course also fails to address Dennett’s question of “how would non-materialism make free will any more real?”.
Written rigorously this is probably true, i.e.
“Science depends on the notion that the universe is amenable to rationality and mathematics at all levels.”
Chemistry is understandable (to the extent it is) because all electrons have *exactly* the same charge and mass. So what are the mass and charge of the electrons that make up gods?
@corwyn m(#36)
Yeah, Yoda was correct in the fictional Star Wars ‘verse. How this guy thought that applied to reality escaped me. He never did explain that. My guess is that once somebody accepts one piece of fiction as real, it doesn’t take much to accept any other.
If the Darwin reference is to this letter, it’s a hell of a bad paraphrase: https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/entry-13230
Though I must admit that letter is surely not Darwin at his best, either.
To add to that, we know that brain damage can alter personalities, thanks to the horrible accident survived by Phineas P. Gage.
This brings to mind a thought-experiment in a long-ago philosophy class on the nature of essence:
Assume we can remove parts from your body without killing you (say, replacing your heart with a machine that keeps your blood flowing, and/or replacing your blood with some concoction that isn’t made of living cells). Are you still you? At what point are you no longer you?
So, obviously, we could remove all the extremities, the skin, eyes, ears, mouth, everything except the brain.
Could we go further?
What if we could replace the meat brain with an identically-functioning machine, keeping the same electrochemical activity? Would that be the same person?
Is the brain required or is some state between meat brain and not-meat brain the essence of the person?
@ragdish #37:
Obviously you’re not oscillating it fast enough. Try using your wanking hand instead. ;-)
@Ragdish #37–
The color red is one of my favorite examples for all of this stuff; turns out you don’t need your person to be colorblind at all. Thing about red is, there is no single wavelength that gives you absolute red; it goes infrared after orange-red, and goes ultraviolet after purple-red. Every red you have ever seen has been a mixture of wavelengths, or an illusion brought about by a surround, or perhaps an afterimage. There are an infinite variety of stimuli in the world that can give rise to “red” (and of course, an infinite variety that won’t.) What is more, the people who taught us to name our colors were never able to point to their perception, or their brain, or our (perception or brain) to show us “this is the qualia we label “red”. You don’t need to posit a color-blind person; you have no idea what red looks like to *anyone* but yourself.
And that is one of the many reasons the Turek essay is so infuriating. Ok, he states that it cannot come down to brain activity, and people jump to disagree–but they rarely point out the way in which he is wrong. It’s not that we think there must be a molecule called perception, or a state of matter called consciousness (I’ve seen this! https://proxy.freethought.online/cuttlefish/2014/04/22/when-physicists-study-consciousness/), it’s that thinking, perceiving, remembering… all the things we collectively call consciousness… are things that occur not in our brains, but in our brains, in our bodies, in our environments, interacting over time. They are not stored, they are not represented mentally, they are reified into nouns after we observe them unfolding in time. Those reified nouns exist as linguistic shortcuts, metaphors for complex processes for which we still struggle with a prescientific vocabulary.
As complex as the brain is, reducing such things to brain processes has very much oversimplified the situation. No. The brain is necessary but not sufficient. https://proxy.freethought.online/cuttlefish/2013/02/18/there-are-times-i-just-hate-the-brain/
@37, ragdish
Woa there. Not sure exactly what you meant here, but there are indeed moral facts. Even in a naturalistic worldview. At the atomic or superstring level it is indeed just atoms or superstrings going about and you can’t really see morality there. But you can’t see planets or storms there either.
It seems your mistake here is of an ontological kind, so here’s some explanation of the ontology of morality!
http://richardcarrier.blogspot.ca/2011/03/moral-ontology.html
@27, Brian Pansky
The theist will likely respond here that only part of the machine/process is natural. They will insist there must be some part which cannot be natural. But of course they don’t have anything else except insistence without evidence, and fallacies.
@44, Cuttlefish
I think you got it mixed up. It’s the purple end of the color wheel that doesn’t have a single wavelength associated with it, not the red end. Red is indeed achievable with one wavelength (the wavelength just above infrared), purple needs two.
From your link:
https://proxy.freethought.online/cuttlefish/2013/02/18/there-are-times-i-just-hate-the-brain/
But since all of the environment can be swapped out for completely different ones and yet consciousness will remain so long as the brain functions in a particular way, then yes the operating brain is sufficient. At most it needs fuel.
Your arguments against this are sensory organs and histories.
But histories are just the manufacture of the object. After than manufacture is complete, is the brain sufficient for consciousness? Yes it is.
Genes are a similar red herring, but more bizarre.
Sensory organs don’t seem to matter. You could argue that consciousness would become messed up after a while if deprived of senses (see sensory deprivation experiments that show this usually happens) but yet there is some time when normal consciousness would seemingly persist, and some abnormal form of consciousness would persist for longer.
*my link to purple didn’t work, here it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple#The_optics_of_purple
Hey, what better expert on the nature of life, mind and spirit than a lifeless puppet operated by committee?
Yeah, it completely distorts Darwin’s actual argument in that letter. Darwin isn’t questioning the reliability of all human thought, including evolutionary theory. Rather, he’s questioning the reliability of deeply-held “inward convictions”…such as his own conviction that the universe must have had a divine creator.
I think it’s a mistake to read that as some sort of self-refuting, generalized skepticism. It’s actually an attack (in Darwin’s typically cautious and gentle fashion) on faith-based belief.
Cuttlefish @44: Who do you think is doing useful work on consciousness? What about Tononi (IIT)?
I’ve never had a good answer to my query of those who insist upon the existence of an immaterial being:
How does something that has no physical substance interact with a physical object? The Third Law still applies: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In order for you to touch me, I have to touch you at the same time.
A god that is “outside time and space” cannot possibly interact with time and space for to do so, it would have to become part of time and space for that is where we are. And if it can transcend that barrier, then there is no reason why we can’t either.
[Note, by “we,” I mean as a physical process, not that we’d be able to survive the journey as extant beings. Falling into a black hole is a physical process, but you don’t survive the process.]
Brian Pansky @#47–
I appreciate the chance to reconsider things I had not looked at in years! But I cannot find a spectral unique red (one source did say “for most people”); the red that disappears into infrared does so with a tinge of yellow). A psychologically unique red, from everything I can see, requires a mix (typically of blue to knock out that pesky yellow). For the record, I find myself amused that it irks me to refer to wavelengths by color; too much training that color is perceptual, wavelength physical, etc. But that is not important here, other than tangentially. If you do have a source (yours focused on purple) that shows a unique red single wavelength, I can easily show you others that claim otherwise. A quick search found journal articles ranging from 1939 (which I knew about ) to 2013 (which I did not, and so I thank you for making me look) affirming no unique red single wavelength.
“Histories are just the manufacture of the object”. I love that statement. It is the essence of mechanism distilled. I do disagree, though; I thought I had illustrated some reasons why, but apparently not well enough. Let me recommend a paper I hope you will enjoy: Field & Hineline (2008), Dispositioning and the Obscured Roles of Time in Psychological Explanations. Behavior & Philosophy (36) 5-69. Damn, I wrote all that instead of linking… http://www.behavior.org/resource.php?id=206 if that works. I used the term “reifying”, for the “nouning” of extended processes; it’s a perfectly cromulent word, but F&H probably do a better job with “dispositioning”. Bottom line is, “history is the manufacture of the object” cannot be claimed when “the object” is inferred, not observed, and inferred because of philosophical assumptions of what must be. We observe a brain in a body in an environment, over time, and you infer that all of this is represented in the brain; there are philosophical reasons to make that assumption under mechanism, but that is not at all the only epistemological stance one can take here.
“Sensory organs don’t seem to matter” is a fascinating statement. I’m not quite certain how to take that. I mean, my first thoughts go to Wilson & Golonka’s (2013) “Embodied Cognition is Not What You Think It Is” (which I think is cool, but I think they eventually overextend themselves when there are other theories… never mind), in which they examine some of the fundamental assumptions of traditional cognitive psychology, like the impoverished picture our senses deliver us (necessitating a built-up representation of the world), and embrace a rich, directly-perceived world, in which we interact with the actual environment, not with a cognitive representation. In other words, sensory organs absolutely do matter. Mind you, I am not certain that is what you mean, but that is the first thing that pops up. (Oh–W&G–http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23408669)
This is a topic I find fascinating, and will gladly devour anything you have that challenges my current views. But those current views are not held lightly.
Rob Grigjanis–
A very frustrating question. So far, I am loving some things, hating others, perplexed at still more (why did they not look at this other line which is so closely tied to theirs?), and completely happy with nobody. Some of the “embodied consciousness” stuff is amazingly good, but there are divisions that are there that need not be.
Worse, if I write the perfect book on it, it would immediately be rejected by both people who chanced to read it.
rrhain@#52–I’ve asked audiences: “whoever in here believes in mind over matter, raise my hand”. If an immaterial mind can interact with your body, why should it not be able to interact with mine?
@53, Cuttlefish
I don’t know what you are trying to say there.
@Brian Pansky and @Cuttlefish:
I’m interested in your take on the fact that color terms tend to follow patterns linguistically. That is, a “color term” linguistically is a word for a color that isn’t defined as something else. In English, “turquoise” is not a color term. It is a reference to the stone that has that color.
There are languages that only have two color terms: “Black” and “white.” It isn’t that they don’t see other colors, but rather that the words they use to describe those colors are based off other things. In English, for example, we have a color term that distinguishes light shades of red from red, itself: “Pink.” But, we don’t have such a term for light shades of blue. It isn’t that we don’t see light blue, but rather that we refer to it by referencing something else or modifying “blue”: “Sky blue,” “baby blue,” “seafoam,” “turquoise,” etc. Russian, on the other hand, does make the distinction between light blue and blue.
But how do we know that these terms refer to those colors? If all you have are “black” and “white,” how do we know that those terms really mean what we in English would describe as “black” and “white”? Because speakers of those languages were given color chips covering all the various shades of color and asked to be the most representative version of that color. And it was found that the most representative color for speakers of these languages was also the most representative color for speakers of English when asked to choose “black” and “white.”
And it turns out that those colors tend to be consistent across culture. If you have only three color terms, that third color is always “red.” And it’s the same red that speakers of other languages think of when asked to think of “red” (in their language). Pretty much speakers of any language that has “red” as a color term are all referring to the same default, even if their “red” also tends to cover what we would call “orange.” So even though color is very much perceptual and psychologically constructed, there does seem to be something about how we think of color that transcends some parts of culture and psychology.
For the life of me, I’ve never understood this argument. Why on earth would reason and thoughts being chemical reactions make them untrustworthy?
We do also have physiology. The majority of human eyes work the same way (color blindness and four color vision being uncommon exceptions).
Also language is tricksy. Did English speaker have a word (now lost) for orange before they got the word for the fruit of a tree from Sanskrit (by way of French)?
@58:
Haven’t you ever used a computer?!? Phenomenally untrustworthy those things are. They do more math in a minute then you will do in your lifetime, and make mistakes every year or so.
@Brian Pansky #56–
I’m pointing out that the “object” you are referring to is a requirement of a mechanistic philosophical stance. It is not something that is actually observed. What is observed (over time, in the interaction of a whole organism with its environment) has been (in traditional cognitive science) assumed to be represented mentally as the “object” you speak of (unless I am misreading you dreadfully). There are both philosophical (the assumptions of mechanism) and historical reasons for this assumption, but it is an axiomatic assumption (and inference based on that assumption) rather than an observation. To say that the brain is sufficient is to assume representations of body and environment (and for that matter, interaction over time); there is no reason (other than epistemological assumption) to think this is “reality”.
You assert that they are not necessary for consciousness. I disagree. Especially when taking the extended-in-time view. You are suggesting that something that has never sensed can be conscious? Of what? And how could this be anything other than conjecture? Rocks (to the best of my knowledge) do not sense… do you have examples of entities that have never sensed but which are undeniably conscious?
It ignores their imaginary deity. They believe the presuppositional lie that their deity is needed to have reliable thoughts. *snicker*
Plantinga went on for 700 pages of bad theology/philosophy with that nonsense.
They ignore that evolution requires prey to have reliable identification of predators, or they are dinner, and for predators able to reliably identify prey or they starve. So thoughts and reason are reliable enough, but they aren’t perfect.
Sure, why not? Are you claiming that a human brain denied all sensory input wouldn’t dream? On what basis?
@61, Cuttlefish
The “object” I’m talking about is the brain. From 53 you say:
Are you saying we don’t observe brains? But we have observed brains.
I think you misread me, which is why I still can’t tell at all what you are trying to say here.
So I’ll restate my point:
The history of a brain is just the manufacture of that brain. After that manufacture is complete, is the brain sufficient for consciousness? Yes it is. (with one or two caveats about oxygen and food and such)
I do not merely assert it. I referred to studies done where senses were not given information. That is a simulation of what might happen if sense organs were removed from someone.
Sure, it’s not a perfect simulation, but I can’t see any reason the real deal would be much different.
Your eyes don’t compute consciousness. People lose their eyes and are still conscious (which is another piece of experimental evidence, not mere “assertion”).
No I’m not suggesting that. I have been talking about removing the senses in fully grown people, just like in the sensory deprivation studies.
Corwyn–
On the basis of how much learning, how much experience, how much interaction with the world, goes into learning the simplest of perceptions. We have to learn to discriminate sounds, colors, motions, shapes, etc..
Remember, this is not an adult brain being deprived; this is a brain that has never had sensory input. If the brain processes information… what information is there to be processed?
(I will admit that you could re-define “dream” beyond all recognition to make a point; if that is your choice, then yes, we can deny meaning and nothing is impossible…)
Brian, the removal of senses in fully grown people is not the same. Brains are shaped by a lifetime of interaction, of course, but the patterns we see are patterns of brain, sense organ, and environment in interaction over time. You continue to say that this needs must be “stored” in one part of this interacting system. That which we see unfolding over time in a complex system need not be stored in one element of that system.
well I fucked that up
uncle frogy
@67, Cuttlefish
Not the same as what?
Do you think this corrects me on my view of something? I can’t tell what.
And what “patterns” are you talking about?
What did I say was stored? What are you saying here?
Sorry, I’m not really sure I get what your position is.
Going back
@61
So now it seems there are two ways to interpret the statement “necessary for consciousness”.
1) necessary for the manufacture of a machine that is conscious
2) necessary in the present (not past) whenever consciousness is occurring in the present
I was only talking about the second kind of “necessary for consciousness”.
There is nothing “mere” about molecules in motion.
That is a dance the encompasses the universe.
To say we can’t know anything by mere chemicals might as well be phrased as a camera can’t take a photo because a camera doesn’t know what it’s “seeing”. Chemicals react to reality so our thoughts being chemical reactions is … not in the least bit problematic. I seriously don’t understand what the objection even could be.
Aaargh. Molecules not chemicals. …. but this isn’t a very intelligent argument so confusing chemicals with molecules isnt the worst abuse.
Turek’s argument seems to be that he doesn’t like the implications of materialism, but that’s not actually a refutation of materialism, anymore than “Gee, I would prefer a world in which Spassky beat Fisher in 1972” is proof Spassky did beat Fisher. In fact, assuming God exists outside of this universe, materialism isn’t even a proof that God didn’t create a completely deterministic universe.
Corwyn
Red squirrel, red deer, red kite and robin redbreast (and probably loads of others I don’t know about) suggest not; English speakers seem to have just called (what we would now describe as) orange/orangey things “red”.
I think his argument boils down to a God being necessary in order for matter to behave deterministically. If there was no God, like charges would not always repel, opposite charges would not always attract, light would not always travel in straight lines, and so forth. Everything would be random without God imposing order.
It’s bollocks, of course; but some people just seem congenitally incapable of comprehending that matter has certain intrinsic properties and behaviours that do not depend on some external entity deciding what the rules should be and enforcing them.
It’s bollocks, of course; but some people just seem congenitally incapable of comprehending that matter has certain intrinsic properties and behaviours that do not depend on some external entity deciding what the rules should be and enforcing them.
I suspect that (at least for some of those “some people”) it’s a matter of not understanding how a “law” as the term is (or used to be) commonly used in science is entirely like a “law” in the legal sense, which presupposes an enforcer (and typically a law-maker). That is, I suspect it’s the same kind of confusion that arises (and is actively promulgated by bad-faith actors) about the word “theory”.
I suspect that (at least for some of those “some people”) it’s a matter of not understanding how a “law” as the term is (or used to be) commonly used in science (i.e., an observed regularity, ideally bolstered—eventually!—by a theoretical, often mathematical, framework that predicts other potentially observable regularities, etc., etc.) is entirely unlike a “law” in the legal sense, which presupposes an enforcer (and typically a law-maker) who is there to stop and possibly punish observed (or potential) irregularities. That is, I suspect it’s the same kind of confusion that arises (and is actively promulgated by bad-faith actors) about the word “theory”.
Excuse the double post; my browser was being uncooperative. The second version is more nuanced, I hope.
@77, leerudolph:
That’s another one of those questions that I ask creationists all the time and never get an answer. Not even an obfuscation but a simple flat-out ignoring:
Is there anything that happens on its own or is god required for everything? If I take a handful of coins and toss them on the ground, do they end up in their final positions simply because of the way gravity works or does god come down and deliberately, personally, and consciously place every single coin?
The follow-up, of course, is that if there is something that can happen on its own without god, why isn’t this one of those things? How can one tell?
Chemically speaking, I would not trust elements; they make up everything…
I will be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your server…
If you see all of life as “just” chemical reactions, and interpret evolved humanity as “just” animals, and humanity as “just” alone in the universe, and existence as “just” having no purpose, and your relationships with other people are “just” friendships and “just” family, and you see life as “just” time passing by….
…then you are “just” utterly depressed.
If I was unfortunate enough to view reality this way, I’d probably have need for an imaginary friend too (or I would likely just kill myself to end my suffering).
@Rich Woods #43
I was hoping for someone to come up with that response :)
@Brian Pansky #45
I was struggling through Richards essay but I didn’t read any views on the ontology of morality which I speak of. I don’t see how from the level of the subatomic realm and superstrings all the way up the materialist ladder to the level of society that we can speak of morality. This is why I disagree with Sam Harris’ scientific morality. Even though morals are the product of minds and therefore brains, I think they should be considered as part of a separate illusionary domain as if they were distinct from the material world. Let’s take any example of an act of cruelty. The perpetrator has neural firing patterns which can ultimately be reduced to the activity of movement of ions and neurotransmitters and so on down the chain of reality to the level of subatomic physics. The same can be said of the neural activity of the victim. The same can be said of my mind when I think of the immoral act of the perpetrator. And the entire subatomic world of this universe is a collective of interconnected network of multidimensional vibrating strings (we think). The notion of you and me have no meaning at that level. I don’t think of the subatomic world that ultimately constitutes me, making moral judgements of the subatomic world that makes up the mind of the perpetrator wielding the axe that is ultimately a part of the subatomic world that strikes the hapless victim who is ultimately made of the subatomic world. Even though all of that is ultimately true, our day to day discourse creates an illusion that morals come from some place else. My head goes into a tailspin thinking of the subatomic realm making “moral judgements” about itself as it is “cruelly trying to kill” itself. Even though the truth is that reductionism is the foundation for morality, we need the imaginary separate spooky category. Now perhaps my simple neural nets failed to perhaps grasp Richard’s take on this matter, but I didn’t read anything that seemed to broach the subject of materialist reductionism and morals. Please enlighten me if he did.
Ragdish
I do not know what you are trying to say. What kind of a moral judgment would a sub-atomic particle make? To make a moral judgment does not there need to be agency present? It sounds more like a questioning of the nature of consciousness then moral judgments.
In so far as what ever “you” are you are making the moral judgment. the only thinks that are outside of you in the moral sense are the collective moral judgment of society which can very depending what cultural is referenced is it not?
uncle frogy
Wait. You think that they aren’t illusory, but we should create an illusion that they are illusory? What if we created an illusion about the illusory illusion? How long will it take before we decide that this is going to be pointless?
We really think that they they’re not from people, who are physical beings like everything else? I don’t think that. When do others actually talk like that? What other place? Why should we talk like that?
@ragdish
Well maybe it didn’t really deal with quite the issue you are talking about.
I can sort of sympathize, but I also sort of can’t see what the problem is.
Certainly we don’t have to think about subatomic particles when dealing with morality most of the time. But we don’t have to with other things either, like cars or swords, and yet all of these things are real, not illusory.
[side note: this all reminds me of this quote from Consider Phlebas.]
Well it’s basically impossible to imagine all at once (and of course the subatomic realm isn’t killed when an organism is killed). But “a judgement” is a collection of billions of particles arranged and moving. Try thinking about other things that are real but also complex. Like a frog that predictably eats flies every day. Let your mind also boggle at that prediction, when any of the specific details will be much less easy to predict.
Is the subatomic realm predictably eating flies (or as you say, “itself”) every day?
But we don’t need to deal with all the tiny details in everyday life. But it is still real in this example that the frog exists and will predictably eat flies.
The same goes for our reasoning processes in our brains. It will predictably do certain things under certain conditions. It’s all real, just too complicated to talk about in terms of details that are ultimately irrelevant (most of the time) to what we are trying to discuss when we talk about morality.
Pure nonsense. Human beings don’t do much at the quantum level, where “randomness” operates. (More like the particles can exist in all states until they collapse into one state when measured. ) All the activity that leads to the mind/consciousness is at the molecular level in the wetware of the brain. That is where moral judgements exist.
What pisses me off the most about this dualism crap is that all of these faux-philosophical “proofs” of a soul are just ducking and weaving around the actual evidence. We can observe that physically altering the brain alters thoughts, be that through surgery or drugs, and we can trace cognitive functions to patterns of neuronal activity. The brain as a whole, and the functions of and connections between the neurons that make it up, are structured in a way that allows them to take in, process, and output information. There’s no point in this process where it’s controlled or influenced by an outside, non-physical force. All of the neurons behave exactly how we would expect them to under the laws of physics. Where, exactly, is there room for a soul inside of the brain? If you want me to believe that a soul exists, show where or when in the brain it influences our cognitive functions.
I’ve come to really hate when someone tries to use “pure logic” to prove something, because it inevitably means that they’re going to be using deeply flawed reasoning to prop up idiotic ideas. You can talk all you want about how you’re navel-gazing armchair philosophy has disproven something that has solid empirical or theoretical evidence behind it, but in the end you’re just blowing smoke up your own ass.
@66
The brain seems happy to provide random input when there is no real input. Dreams are one such example, and while the dreams of a person who has never sensed anything, might not be comprehensible to us, or even the person having them, I see no mechanism which could prevent them.
I suppose another way of looking at it is this. The God-believers think there has to be a conscious decision behind the fact that the universe behaves in an orderly manner; without a God in charge, all would be chaos.
But how could there even be such a thing as a conscious decision, without orderly behaviour in the first place?
And if there is enough orderly behaviour to account for the existence of a being capable of making conscious decisions, isn’t that more than enough orderly behaviour to account for the universe not needing a conscious decision behind it?