Let’s suppose there really is a Ghost in the Machine – a “little man” (“homunculus”) who “looks out” through our eyes, and “listens in” through our ears (interestingly, those are the two senses most usually ascribed to the floating Ghost in NDE accounts). Or, if you prefer, a Soul.
And let’s further suppose that it is reasonable to posit that the Ghost/Soul is inessential to human day-to day function, merely to conscious experience and/or “free will”; that it is at least possible hypothetically to imagine a soulless simulacrum of a person who behaved exactly as a person would, but was in fact a mere automaton, without conscious experience – without qualia.
Thirdly, let’s suppose that there there are only a handful of these Souls in the world, and the rest of the things that look and behave like human beings are Ghostless automatons – soulless simulacra. But, as in an infernal game of Mafia, none of us know which are the Simulacra, and which are the true Humans – because there is no way of telling from the outside – from an apparent person’s behaviour or social interactions, or cognitive capacities – which is which.
And finally, let’s suppose that souls can migrate at will, from body to body.
Let’s say one of these Souls starts the morning in Lizzie’s body, experiencing being Lizzie, and remembering all Lizzie’s dreams, thinking Lizzie’s thoughts, feeling Lizzie’s need to go pee, imagining all Lizzie’s plans for the day, hearing Lizzie’s alarm clock, seeing Lizzie’s watch, noting that the sky is a normal blue between the clouds through the skylight.
Somewhere an empty simulacrum of Barry Arrington is still asleep (even automatons “sleep” while their brains do what brains have to do to do what brains have to do). But as the day wears on, the Soul in Lizzie’s body decides to go for a wander. It leaves Lizzie to get on with stuff, as her body is perfectly capable of doing, she just won’t be “experiencing” what she does (and, conceivably, she might make some choices that she wouldn’t otherwise make, but she’s an extremely well-designed automaton, with broadly altruistic defaults for her decision-trees).
The Soul sees that Barry is about to wake up as the sun rises over Colorado, and so decides to spend a few hours in Barry’s body. And thus experiences being Barry waking up, probably needing a pee as well, making Barry’s plans, checking Barry’s watch, remembering what Barry did yesterday (because even though Barry’s body was entirely empty of soul yesterday, of course Barry’s brain has all the requisite neural settings for the Soul to experience the full Monty of remembering being Barry yesterday, and what Barry planned to do today, even though at the time, Barry experienced none of this. The Soul also notices the sky is its usual colour, which Barry, like Lizzie calls “blue”.
Aha. But is the Soul’s experience of Barry’s “blue” the same as the Soul’s experience of Lizzie’s “blue”? Well, the Soul has no way to tell, because even though the Soul was in Lizzie’s body that very morning, experiencing Lizzie’s “blue”, the Soul cannot remember Lizzie’s “blue” now it is in Barry’s body, because if it could, Barry’s experience would not simply be of “blue” but of “oh, that’s interesting, my blue is different to Lizzie’s blue”. And we know that not only does Barry not know what Lizzie’s blue is like when Barry experiences blue (because “blue” is an ineffable quale, right?), he doesn’t even know whether “blue” sky was even visible from Lizzie’s bedroom when Lizzie woke up that morning. Indeed, being in 40 watt Nottingham, it often isn’t.
Now the Soul decides to see how Lizzie is getting on. Back east, over the Atlantic it flits, just in time for Lizzie getting on her bike home from work. Immediately the Soul accesses Lizzie’s day, and ponders the problems she has been wrestling with, and which, as so often, get partly solved on the bike ride home. The Soul enjoys this part. But of course it has no way of comparing this pleasure with the pleasure it took in Barry’s American breakfast which it had also enjoyed, because that experience – those qualia – are not part of Lizzie’s experience. Lizzie has no clue what Barry had for breakfast.
Now the Soul decides to race Lizzie home and take up temporary residence in the body of Patrick, Lizzie’s son, who is becoming an excellent vegetarian cook, and is currently preparing a delicious sweet-potato and peanut butter curry. The Soul immediately experiences Patrick’s thoughts, his memory of calling Lizzie a short while earlier to check that she is about to arrive home, and indeed, his imagining of what Lizzie is anticipating coming home to, as she pedals along the riverbank in the dusk. Soul zips back to Lizzie and encounters something really very similar – although it cannot directly compare the experiences – and also experiences Lizzie’s imaginings of Patrick stirring the sweet potato stew, and adjusting the curry powder to the intensity that he prefers (but she does not).
As Baloo said to Mowgli: Am I giving you a clue?
The point I am trying to make is that the uniqueness of subjective experience is as defined as much by what we don’t know as by what we do. “Consciousness” is mysterious because it is unique. The fact that we can say things like “I’m lucky I didn’t live in the days before anaesthesia” indicates a powerful intuition that there is an “I” who might have done, and thus an equally powerful sense that there is an “I” who was simply lucky enough to have landed in the body of a post-anaesthesia person. And yet it takes only a very simple thought experiment, I suggest, to realise that this mysterious uniqueness is – or at least could be – a simple artefact of our necessarily limited PoV. And a simple step, I suggest, to consider that actually a ghostless automaton – a soulless simulacrum is – an incoherent concept. If my putative Soul, who flits from body to body, is capable not only of experiencing the present of any body in which it is currently resident, but that body’s past and anticipated future, but incapable of simultaneously experiencing anything except the present, past, and anticipated future of that body, then it becomes a redundant concept. All we need to do is to postulate that consciousness consists of having accessible a body of knowledge only accessible to that organism by simple dint of that organism being limited in space and time to a single trajectory. And if that knowledge is available to the automaton – as it clearly is – then we have no need to posit an additional Souly-thing to experience it.
What we do need to posit, however, is some kind of looping neural architecture that enables the organism to model the world as consisting of objects and agents, and to model itself- the modeler – as one of those agents. Once you have done that, consciousness is not only possible to a material organism, but inescapable. And of course looping neural architecture is exactly what we observe.
I suggest that the truth is hiding in plain sight: we are conscious because when we are unconscious we can’t function. Unless the function we need to perform at the time is to let a surgeon remove some part of us, under which circumstances I’m happy to let an anaesthetist render me unconscious.
Go wrong by what standard? Your computation? Mine?
Certainty isn’t the issue; the issue is whether or not we assume absolute standards of evaluation, true statements and the capacity to freely pursue them exist (even if imperfectly understood or implemented); or if we assume materialism. In the former case we have reason to pursue true statements, debate, and argue; in the latter, we are merely compelled by physics to believe, say and do whatever we happen to believe, say and do.
That would require that you be able to actually compute all the physical processes that led to your belief in evolution, and that led to your belief that it was “learning history” that made you reach this conclusion. Since the computation generated both the change in views, and the belief about how and why that change in views occurred, your belief about how it occurred may have nothing to do with what actually occurred.
You see, only the assumption of individual free will and an absolute means (if imperfectly used) of arbiting evidence (even historical) can provide you with a sound basis for making the claim that because you learned history, so you accepted evolution – as if butterfly wind and pizza had no significant effect on that conclusion, as if a billion other things were not more responsible than “learning history”, as if the very belief that it was history, and not anything else, was not itself caused by butterfly wind and pizza.
You might as well say that you believe what you believe because of butterfly wind and pizza, as to say you believe it because of “learning history”, because under materialism, that is all any of your utterances amount to – in principle; they are the result of butterfly wind and pizza.
It is far from clear what you are saying there.
I guess I should take you as agreeing that a butterfly flapping its wings can affect your decision, and that your earlier denial was based on a misunderstanding of what was being argued.
I suspect that you may be arguing against your own strawman version of materialism.
Science isn’t about TRUTH.
I find it interesting that many theists, apparently in the cause of TRUTH, believe and teach stuff that is obviously contrary to evidence. Whereas science just seeks knowledge that reliably comports with evidence and testing.
Science is about whatever butterfly wings and pizza make you think it is about – nothing more, nothing less.
Under materialism, “materialism” is whatever butterfly wings (external causes) and pizza (internal causes) make us think it is, so there is no “straw man” version of “materialism”, since ideas do not exist independent of the chaotic, unpredictable computation that generates them.
You misread the butterfly effect. It may be true that some insignficant event altered the timing of my conception and is a necessary causal link in my existence.
But that is why billiard ball determinism doesn’t work in this universe. You can’t predict the future in detail and you can be pretty sure that the tape can’t be rewound and played back with the same results.
But living things have found ways of making useful prediction — statistical predictions that enable life and continuation of life.
The first method is evolution. Populations send out feelers in the form of variations. Mutations are analogous to roots growing in search of water, or seeds dispersed, some landing on barren land and some on fertile.
The second great invention is brains. Brains have populations of neurons that continually try variations and which store successful variations.
All this is interesting because it embodies an operationally defined free will. It implements a system that can cope with chaos and uncertainty.
Adding ‘spirit’ to the system does not change that. If we are ‘really’ souls wrapped in meat (souls that are nonetheless sensitive to the demands of that body for food, water, sex, companionship) then ‘the system’ is material + spirit. These souls integrate a good deal of the biological, the physical, into their decision-making process. But by placing a non-physical layer, you think you have solved the Free Will problem. But how? In what sense are such body+spirit systems more free than the ‘materialist’ system where all derives from the purely physical?*** Because there is an Ultimate System that has no material essence at all? Is that system the Free-est of all? Why? You seem to think that an essence free of constraint must exist out of logical necessity, in order to avoid a logical conundrum afflicting constrained beings.
*** Though there are, indeed, theistic positions where free will does not exist – everything is ‘the will of Allah’. I lie down in the road and get run over by a bus: it’s the will of Allah. My choice was determined, not by butterfiles, but by Allah. Most materialists would get out the way.
I don’t add “spirit”, per se. I add what is conceptually necessary to avoid the necessarily intractable, self-referential, self-annihilating conclusions of materialism.
Your conclusions follow from a straw man version of materialism, and what you add is an evidence free fantasy.
Before you draw conclusions about what materialism entails,.learns something about it.
Unfortunately for you, there is no non-relative arbiter of true statements that materialism can refer to in order to give the above claim more weight than a monkey throwing feces around hoping to change the material computations of others.
That would matter if “learning” and “concluding” was a linear, predictable process under materialism. It isn’t. According to materialism, what I conclude and learn is whatever butterfly wings and pizza happens to generate.
William J. Murray:
Kairosfocus would disagree with you here.
A peer to peer network has no “absolute arbiter” of any kind but it works quite well.
Certainly there is a non-relative arbiter. Its called reality. It provides the same feedback for everyone.
.
William J. Murray:
Don’t you mean the exact opposite?
If learning is NOT predictable under materialism then it would be predictable in a “non-materialistic” process such as yours.
If this is true, then non-materialism would lead to pre-determined “conclusions” and therefore would preclude free will, which I don’t think you are actually suggesting.
Am I right?
People perceive and interpret reality differently, so it is not “the same feedback” for everyone.
Especially if you make your own! 😉
Interpretation is a creative act. It is the mental equivalent of genetic variation. Feedback is what happens. It can objectively be viewed by everyone. In the formal settings called experiments, one of the necessary conditions is that the action and results be replicable.
William J. Murray:
That may be the conscious claim but reality doesn’t care for people’s perceptions.
Take any group of “theists” and any group of “materialists” and and march them across a desert without any water.
They will both experience the identical reality right down to the point where they start passing out.
>> If materialism is true, materialists will believe anything the computation tells them to believe, any time it tells them to believe it, whether any objective evidence exists or whether a collection of pizzas consumed and butterflies flapping their wings in Brazil causes you to believe it.
Seems like an apt description of reality to me.
To put it another way, the soul is not the source our physical actions and responses, (including thoughts). The soul does not make my hand grasp, my eye see, or my brain decide. These are the material apparatus for material life, as demonstrated by non-human organisms (life without souls) that can do all the same things.
Admitting this does not diminish the freedom generated by physical processes as you believe (and I suspect many ID supporters fear). My free will is not contradicted by the material, it is manifested by it. I believe what I believe because “I” am the brain, the body, that conceives of “me”.
How those decisions come to be, no matter how mundane, I can not circumvent with knowledge of its origin. My mind does not simply respect the illusion of the physical world and chooses to play along with its influences, pretending to be bound by them, I really am bound. Knowing this doesn’t change what I experience as freedom, however. My mind still experiences the weighing of options, the push and pull of reason and emotion. The ultimate action causing the decision is physical – an effect from a chain of cause and effect – but that final cause/effect comes from my material self, is known to my material self, and thus I, the material self, decides.
What then is the soul, and what is its purpose? It is made in God’s image, and it allows us to exist after death/outside this universe. It is in this other-realm that the soul is the source for grasping, seeing, and deciding. It is the immaterial apparatus for immaterial life. Admitting this does not diminish the importance or necessity of once having a material persona. Jesus is our example, both man and God.
Except for William, who would choose to believe there is water.
Edit to add:
William James argued that choosing to believe there is a solution to intractable problems increases the likelihood of finding one. The specific and famous example is choosing to believe that one can successfully leap over a chasm when the alternative is certain death.
That works in Hollywood movies.
I choose to interpret it a bit differently. Rather than the melodramatic life or death scene, I prefer to view everyday life as a series of (rather mundane, mostly) challenges requiring creative responses. People who choose to believe that answers cannot be found are called cynically depressed.
Oddly enough, their belief system can be altered chemically.
Hoping to find regularities.
So there is nothign special in learning . It is like theory of gases.
Why you have done a so long?
So what William seems to be saying is that he’s potentially wasting his life being moral because we might, for all he can tell, be living in a “materialists universe” and all his “good works” are for naught.
For all William knows he will believe anything the computation tells him to believe and still think that he’s coming to those beliefs independently of any evidence.
What objective evidence is there for what type of universe we live in William?
What’s that? None? So your claims, for all you know, every word you are writing here, for all you know, is because some butterfly flapped it’s wings. It’s perfectly possible for you to believe that you are making your own decisions as that’s what you’ve been programmed to believe so you are in fact in the same boat as the rest of us.
You have no clue whatsoever, do you.
According to classic philosophy all animated form of life has soul. It differs on the kind of soul. Read Aristotle or St. Tomas.
No; you didn’t think that, William.
According to classical philosophy (and classical science) the sun orbits the earth. It’s all very interesting to a philosophy hobbyist, but not very informative.
It’s a form of animism.
Unfotunately for youn you have no means to distinguish ‘true’ statements (as arbited by your assumed Arbiter) from errors in your computation. You think you fling a higher class of shit (or would like others to think you do), but there is no absolute means to assess that claim, for you or for anyone else.
Why are ID proponents so enamored of postmodernism?
William is carrying on the tradition started by Henry Morris and Duane Gish back in the 1970s when they taunted scientists into public debates. The major objective of ID/creationist “debates” is to generate as many mischaracterizations of scientists and “materialists,” and get in as many political talking points as time allows.
William isn’t responding to concepts; he is responding to “hot” buttons and words in order to Gish Gallop endlessly while getting in his jabs against the evil “materialist.” He isn’t learning anything.
This rigid, mechanical pattern of ID/creationist behavior hasn’t changed in something like 50 years now. If anyone can be said to be automatons, it would have to be the ID/creationists.
Yes. The argument seems to be that since science doesn’t produce certain TRUTH, every idea is equivalent to every other idea.
It’s all social text, so to speak.
Something for Blas and William to chew on:
If uncertainty did not produce lawful behavior that can be studied by scientists and utilized by engineers, there would be no transistors and no computers with which to post creationist nonsense.
As I never stated this literally, May you elaborate what do you mean? Please define uncertainty and lawful behavior.
Yes, I do realise that, William, which is why I rarely use the term “free will” without scare quotes. I find the concept incoherent, because it begs at least three different questions (what is volition? who is free? what does freedom mean?) all of which are critical to how we understand the concept. Logic, though, I probably don’t differ from you on, except that I don’t confine the term “logic” to clasical logic. Fuzzy logic works just fine, and I think it’s a better way of understanding how brains work.
No. But I think we need a different thread to sort this out. I have a post half written. Will try to get it up within the next couple of days 🙂
Your astonishment is not surprising, William, because, to turn the tables for once, your paraphrase is not an accurate reflection of my position 🙂
I’ll will try to clarify. Later.
No indeed. The world would be a dismal place without astonishment.
Indeed.
Indeed. It’s notable that when they had their go increasingly ornate palaces of gold were constructed, and were the pinnacle of human achievement. A concentration of art and money like no other, flowing upwards and into ever fewer hands.
I’ve been around the Vatican. I never thought you could become tired of great art. But there’s just so much.
Once a man has climbed atop a mountain of words, each individual rock placed to prevent questioning of authority to preserve privilege, then what else is there to do but interpret the immaterial wisdom as you see fit?
And if your mountain in the process becomes gilded in gold and flowers then all the better. After all, people like to show their appreciation for you taking the time to share your interpretations.
Perhaps ask William 🙂 ?
Well for NASA engeneers is easy to make the calculations to launch a rocket to a planet as if the earth were at rest. So the knowledge that it turns around the sun is not so helpful.
Yes, and many bronze age constructs concerning how people work are equally counterproductive. They infest our laws and social institutions like bedbugs.
They produce countless counterproductive institutions like prisons. (Not saying we do not need to constrain violent people, just that prisons as currently implemented make things worse.)
Laws ought to be subjected to review, like pharmaceuticals, and abandoned when counterproductive.
Asimov had something to say about that in The Relativity of Wrong.
William,
The criticisms you’ve aimed at physically-based reasoning apply equally to your own dualism.
Will you be relinquishing your dualism, or will you conveniently decide to retain it (as a belief that “serves” you) even though it is irrational by your own standards?
You win! You win!
That’s even more hilarious than what JoeG has been posting about cardinality.
This is why forcing oneself to write in E-prime is so helpful.
If you have replace “X is predictable” with a non-passive, construction, the wheels start to fall off the libertarian free will cart (and a few others too).
The issue is not whether determinism would make my actions “predictable” and therefore negate my free will, but whether anyone can predict my actions.
And the answer is, of course, yes, but only probabilistically, and from knowing me, and the kinds of things I take into account when I make my decisions.
What they know, as I know about others, is that we make decisions based on a huge combination of considerations, including our own goals and external information, and that it involves risk assessment, and the weighing up of the values of various possible outcomes and their probabilities etc.
We can’t even predict our own actions often, before time – which is why we spend so much time sometimes “trying to decide”.
Nothing about determinism makes that any less true. The point about chaotic systems, whether deterministic or stochastic, is that you can’t predict the end from the initial conditions without running the whole thing through.
Which is not essentially different from saying that you don’t know the end until you’ve got there (even if you are some deity who can replay the whole thing, having seen the end).
So all these questions about “predictability” are moot, it seems to me, unless we specify who is supposed to be doing the predicting. Whose uncertainty are we talking about, and at what rate and by virtue of what information is that uncertainty reduced?
From our own, literal, point of view, we are decision-makers with real options. From a God’s eye view we may not be. But that’s a problem for theists, not us infidels.
I missed that. I missed it because My mind wouldn’t accept the possibility that some would say that.
It is helpful to know where someone is coming from.
Blas, do you have any idea why NASA prefers to launch to the East?
If you do it in the morning, it makes the pictures look nice?
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/launch-windows/
I’m sorry. Where did I say I was a dualist?
If this was proposed to be an observation generated by something more significant and worthy of reflection than butterfly wind and pizza, it might be worth considering.
That might be your issue; as far as I’m concerned, “predictability” is entirely a non-issue.
As far as I can tell you’ve never said anything except what you are not.
Aren’t you?
And if you’re an idealist, you still have the same problem. Your criticisms of physically-based reasoning boomerang on you and undermine your own position.