A good place to begin understanding why consciousness is not strictly reducible to the material is in looking at consciousness of material objects — that is, straightforward perception. Perception as it is experienced by human beings is the explicit sense of being aware of something material other than oneself. Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity. There is a chain of causes and effects connecting the glass with the neural activity in your brain that is entirely compatible with, as in Dennett’s words, “the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice” to explain everything else in the material universe.
Unfortunately for neuroscientism, the inward causal path explains how the light gets into your brain but not how it results in a gaze that looks out. The inward causal path does not deliver your awareness of the glass as an item explicitly separate from you — as over there with respect to yourself, who is over here. This aspect of consciousness is known as intentionality (which is not to be confused with intentions). Intentionality designates the way that we are conscious of something, and that the contents of our consciousness are thus about something; and, in the case of human consciousness, that we are conscious of it as something other than ourselves. But there is nothing in the activity of the visual cortex, consisting of nerve impulses that are no more than material events in a material object, which could make that activity be about the things that you see. In other words, in intentionality we have something fundamental about consciousness that is left unexplained by the neurological account.
so, again, what does this have to do with ID? That once again this is evidence of a non-material designer? or that we have souls?
You somehow managed to post that without a title. I hope that can be fixed.
I have not yet finished reading the cited article. I may have more to say on the topic when I have had time to finish reading it.
I will make one quick comment. Neuroscience is attempting to find the “design”. If it cannot succeed, that should count as evidence against intelligent design. My blog posts on a natural basis for purpose have been attempting to point to a different way of addressing these issues.
From the extract you give, Tallis seems to be underestimating neuroscience. Neuroscience does not posit a solely “inward causal path”, although clearly there are inward causal paths. But there are also outward causal paths, interacting causal paths and looping causal paths.
And it is these that give us a basis for formulating a neuroscience of consciousness.
But I’ll read the whole piece later. Thanks for posting it (a title would be useful!)
Something odd here – Tallis writes:
Now, I don’t have my copy of Consciousness Explained to hand, so I will check later, but IIRC this passage represents Dennett taking a pot shot at the view it expresses. Note the way he inserts “(in principle!)”. Dennett is actually, here, attacking the notion that we can “in principle” account for the mind in such reductionist terms. In fact, that is his his whole point – that the mind cannot be understood from what he calls the “physical stance”. We must ascend first to a “design stance” and them to an “intentional stance”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.....ree_levels
I won’t level the vexed charge of “quotemine” here, because I’m sure Professor Tallis has honestly mistaken Dennett’s position, but mistaken it he has, as should be clear not only from the context of the quote (which I will check), but from the whole corpus of Dennett’s work, including his “three levels” approach outlined in the wiki link.
There’s a better summary of Dennett’s position here, for anyone interested:
http://www.consciousentities.com/dennett.htm
I fail to follow this statement for two main reasons.
1.) It does not accurately reflect the claims of ID. ID does not say that things in biology are intelligently designed because we have found the “designs”, but because what we find is best explained by intelligence. There are some things that could be argued to be “designed” but are explicable by natural causes (like a river bed that transports water to the nearest larger body of water). A sewer system generally does the same thing, but its components are not explicable by anything but intelligence. Water and gravity, given millions of years, will not form pipes, valves, elbows, etc.
2.) All other biological sciences, by your logic, are also trying to find the “design” of everything in biology, if by that you mean why things work. If a failure to do this is “evidence against intelligent design”, then successfully finding designs should count in favor or ID, right? So then all of mainstream biology is doing science in pursuit of ID. And since we have discovered thousands/millions of different designs in biology, then ID is confirmed and who cares if neuroscience also backs it?
uoflcard (#5)
I am not suggesting that at all. If anything, biology has been criticized as mostly cataloging. It is evolutionary theory which has changed that.
My comment about trying to find “design” was particularly related to the issue of intentionality. Philosophers adopt something like a design stance, look at language as a symbolic representation system, and then they find that they have to invent the intentionality problem to fill in the resulting gaps.
Tallis writes: “Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity.” That’s a designers way of looking at things. That’s how the AI people look at it in their attempts to design an artificially intelligent agent. But maybe that’s the wrong approach. Perhaps we should go with J.J. Gibson’s ecological approach, his ideas of direct perception, where the idea of looking outward is the starting point.
Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways.
The problem with Darwinists is that they never consider the astronomically complex engineering that would be required to produce such a phenomenon.
This is perfectly understandable, of course, because the typical Darwinist is a complete ignoramus concerning even the most trivial engineering principles.
The Darwinist waves his hands in the air, proclaims that spontaneous generation turned dirt or “the primordial soup” into a highly complex information-processing system in the first living cell, and then asserts that random errors introduced into this highly complex information-processing system turned that cell into Mozart in 10^17 seconds with hopelessly inadequate probabilistic resources.
This is fantasy. Silliness. A bizarre disconnect from reality, logic, and any notion of basic scientific reasoning.
How do these arguably intelligent people live with such nonsensical anti-reason? I know why, because I was once one of them. I’ll give you the answer in a future post.
Nothing could be clearer, than that the eye is not the result of any kind of engineering design. Instead of a high precision lens, the organism uses a bag of jelly to focus the light. As a result, there is a lot of distortion (spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, astigmatic effects) in what shows up on the retina. There is no sign of that “complex engineering”.
Neil Rickert:
Yet there isn’t any evidence that it is the result of the accumulation of genetic accidents.
NR:
Strange how baseball players can hit a small sphere traveling over 90 mph with only hundreths of a second to respond.
Neil Rickert stated:
‘Nothing could be clearer, than that the eye is not the result of any kind of engineering design.”
I guess beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder; 🙂
“How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art…. Was the Eye contrived without skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds?” –
Sir Isaac Newton
What astonishes me is that evolutionists are so easily led astray by the dubious bad design argument when the staggering level of complexity is so readily apparent: The eye is infinitely more complex than any man-made camera. It can handle 1.5 million simultaneous messages, contains over 2 million different working parts, and gathers 80% of all the knowledge absorbed by the brain. The retina covers less than a square inch, and contains 137 million light-sensitive receptor cells, 130 million rods (allowing the eye to see in black and white), and 7 million cones (allowing the eye to see in full color). In an average day, the eye moves about 100,000 times, using muscles that, milligram for milligram, are among the body’s strongest.
The body would have to walk 50 miles to exercise the leg muscles an equal amount. The eye is self-cleaning. Lacrimal glands produce secretions (e.g., tears) to flush away dust and other foreign materials. Eyelids act as windshield washers. The blinking process (3-6 times a minute) keeps the sensitive cornea moist and clean. And, tears contain a potent microbe-killer (lysozyme) which guards the eyes against bacterial infection. During times of stress, one eye will “rest” while the other does 90% of the work; then the process is reversed, allowing both eyes equal amounts of rest. The brain receives millions of simultaneous reports from the eyes. When its designated wavelength of light is present, each rod or cone triggers an electrical response to the brain, which then absorbs a composite set of yes-or-no messages from all the rods and cones.
There are about seven-million shades of color the human eye can detect. It takes 200 million billionths of a second for the retina to create vision from light. The eye is so sensitive it can detect a candle one mile away. One type of light sensitive cell, the rod, can detect a single photon. For visible light the energy carried by a single photon would be around a tiny 4 x 10-19 Joules; this energy is just sufficient to excite a single molecule in a photoreceptor cell of an eye. There is a biological computer in the retina which processes and compresses the information from those millions of light sensitive cells before sending it to the visual cortex where the complex stream of information is then decompressed. While today’s digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina’s real-time performance goes unchallenged.
To actually simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second. The human is the only species known to shed tears when they are sad. In spite of this stunning evidence evolutionists use a very dubious and philosophically based “bad design” argument to try to undermine the obvious Theological implications. Something tells me evolutionists are not being fair with the evidence. And all this begs the question for the evolutionists; Can you go into your laboratory and design a better eye by random mutations?
Optimized hardware compression, The eyes have it. – February 2011
Excerpt: the human visual processing system is “the best compression algorithm around”.
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....s-have-it/
the inverted retina, which evolutionists insist is “bad design”, is now found to be a ‘optimal design:
Retinal Glial Cells Enhance Human Vision Acuity A. M. Labin and E. N. Ribak
Physical Review Letters, 104, 158102 (April 2010)
Excerpt: The retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images.
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-354274
“Evolution” gave flawed eye better vision
Excerpt: IT LOOKS wrong, but the strange, “backwards” structure of the vertebrate retina actually improves vision. ,,, Their findings suggest that sending light via the Müller cells offers several advantages. At least two types of light get inside the eye: light carrying image information, which comes directly through the pupil, and “noise” that has already been reflected multiple times within the eye. The simulations showed that the Müller cells transmit a greater proportion of the former to the rods and cones below, while the latter tends to leak out. This suggests the cells act as light filters, keeping images clear.
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-354157
Why the eye is better than a camera at capturing contrast and faint detail simultaneously – May 2011
quote; ‘The human eye long ago solved a problem common to both digital and film cameras: how to get good contrast in an image while also capturing faint detail.’ (of note; saying the human eye ‘solved’ these problems is ridiculous. A eye can ‘see’, but it takes a mind to ‘see’ into the future so as to anticipate these problems and devise solutions.)
http://medicalxpress.com/news/.....faint.html
Evolution Vs. The Miracle Of The Eye – Molecular Animation
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4189562/
Neil Rickert:
Is this an accurate description of all known types of eyes in the biological world? For example, the trilobite eye?
What would be the biological consequences of having a high-precision lens type eye?
Basically, as I see it, your argument boils down to this here particular type of eye cannot be designed, because I can think of a different way the eye could have been designed taht I think would have been a better design. Weak. Very weak.
But then, if that’s all you’ve got I guess you have to trot it out and hope for the best.
It would be a shame if this interesting OP got derailed in to a discussion of the evolution of vision, but I must take issue with GilDodgent here:
Well, yes, we do 🙂 Or at any rate, if you count most biologists and vision scientists and neuroscientists as “Darwinists” which you probably do.
Well, I’m not sure what you call a “typical” Darwinist, but I have never met a biologist, vision scientist or neuroscientist who was a “complete ignoramus concerning even the most trivial engineering principles”. Some of my colleagues even have engineering degrees, and in the field of AI vision scientists are almost indistiguishable from engineers.
Name one; not only name one, but name one who asserts that such a vanishingly unlikely event, should have even occurred, could be explained by “Darwinism”.
It is indeed. It is a complete straw man.
Which is why nobody with any grip on reality and logic, or any notion of basic scientific reasoning proposes such a thing.
Well, I can give you your answer now: if that’s what you thought the reasoning behind evolutionary theory was, you took a very sensible decision in abandoning it!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
As for the piece referenced in the OP:
I’ve read it now (and also checked my copy of Consciousness Explained, and Dennett is indeed using “in principle”! mockingly, and the view expressed is not his own). However I do not blame Tallis for missing the point, as he seems to have misunderstood Dennett’s book in its entirety.
I find it a very odd article. For a neuroscientist (perhaps because his experience is in neurology and stroke rather than psychiatry and cognitive psychology) he seems to have an oddly regional approach to brain function.
I’m not at all sure what point he is even making, other than “consciousness can’t be localized”. No, it can’t. But he himself is a “distinguished supporter of the British Humanist Association
http://www.humanism.org.uk/abo.....supporters, and on accepting the honour, wrote:
http://www.humanism.org.uk/abo.....is-FMedSci
I must say, I don’t think he succeeds.
Mung (#11):
I am not a biologist. I was commenting only on the type of eye that Tallis mentioned and that was raised by another commenter.
Please don’t put words into my mouth and then criticize me for what are actually your claims.
I was specifically disagreeing with the “astronomically complex engineering” statement in comment #7. I did not make any claim as to how the eye arose.
Your right Neil, it’s nothing an angineer would do, and it’s certainly not complex.
“When light strikes the retina of the eye, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to form trans-retinal. The change in the shape of retinal forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein’s metamorphosis alters its behavior, making it stick to another protein called transducin. Before interacting with activated rhodopsin, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with activated rhodopsin, the GDP falls off and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. GTP-transducin-activated rhodopsin now binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to activated rhodopsin and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the ability to chemically cut a molecule called cGMP. Initially there are a lot of cGMP molecules in the cell, but the phosphodiesterase lowers its concentration, like a pulled plug lowers the water level in a bathtub. Another membrane protein that binds cGMP is called an ion channel. It acts as a gateway that regulates the number of sodium ions in the cell. Normally the ion channel allows sodium ions to flow into the cell, while a separate protein actively pumps them out again. The dual action of the ion channel and pump keeps the level of sodium ions in the cell within a narrow range. When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phosphodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged sodium ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane which, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.” -DBB, Behe
Perhaps. But then you spend over half your own post engaged in quibbling over something Gil wrote, which was itself primarily concerned with the evolution and engineering of the eye. To each her own I guess.
Neil Rickert:
Then let’s look more closely at what you wrote and criticize it shall we?
You’ve given a premise and a conclusion. This is known as a non sequitur. It’s not a logically valid argument.
Feel better now?
Mung:
Which was why I followed the comment you quoted with a “but…”
Some things are just too egregious to let pass without comment.
Has anyone else read Tallis’s piece?
Thoughts?
Dennett is actually, here, attacking the notion that we can “in principle” account for the mind in such reductionist terms. In fact, that is his his whole point – that the mind cannot be understood from what he calls the “physical stance”. We must ascend first to a “design stance” and them to an “intentional stance”.
Useful fictions and little more, to Dennett. If they were something more – if Dennett was saying that mind and/or intentionality existed and did not reduce – he wouldn’t be a reductionist and a materialist.
Yes, Dennett talks about ‘stances’, but they don’t ‘account’ in the way you’re suggesting. For Dennett, all intentionality is derived rather than original. Saying ‘the mind cannot be understood’ apart from this or that stance suggests that there is ‘real meaning’ to understand in brains, and therefore minds. But Dennett explicitly denies this.
The intentional stance largely functions as A) a way for certain materialists to not get mocked (“See? See? I can talk about love and meaning and thoughts and beliefs too! So long as you don’t ask me what I’m really saying, and what these things really are. Otherwise I’ll sound like Alex Rosenberg, or the Churchlands at their silliest.”) and B for people who aren’t really materialists to pretend they are (“See? See? Intentional stance! I’m a materialist! Materialism is reasonable, so long as you misunderstand it wildly enough!)
Could you explain what you mean by saying that Dennett is saying “all intentionality is derived rather than original”?
Let me quote two passages from Dennett’s book, the first to reinforce my original point, and the second to express what I see is his:
From Chapter 1, on “The brain in the vat”:
Hence my interpretation that far from expressing his own view, in the passage quoted by Tallis, Dennett is lampooning a view he does not hold.
The other passage is from the other end of the book (“Consciousness Explained, or Explained Away?”):
Now, you may want to call this Misunderstanding Materialism, but I think that is to misunderstand materialism!
The widespread view that Materialism must be Reductionist is false, IMO. They are not coterminous. Everything in the universe can have a cause within the universe, and yet those things can be described only by metaphors that operate well above the level of the fundamental particles that we think the universe is “materially” comprised of.
Ontology is, I would suggest, a function of the way we parse the universe, not a function of the universe itself (except inasmuch as we are part of that universe). The “problem” that both non-materialists and materialists like Tallis have with understanding consciousness, or rather, with considering that it may have a “material” origin, is an artefact, I suggest, of the “metaphors” with which we construct our ontological universe – indeed with which we parse, conceptually, incoming sensory data into things (what Tallis refers to as “the binding problem”, and which suffers from the same problem).
One of those “things” we parse the world into is “I”. It’s as valid as any parsing (an apple, the atmosphere; a molecule; a star; love; justice; you) IMO, no more and no less. Yet we do not find those other things inexplicable; I don’t see why we should find the object we call “I” inexplicable either.
Or rather I do, because I did, but then I saw the light 🙂
“I” cannot be “reduced” to my brain or my neurons, even though it can be explained by them.
Is my point.
Could you explain what you mean by saying that Dennett is saying “all intentionality is derived rather than original”?
Why ask me to explain? Let’s ask Dennett:
I can, however, give a summary expression of the main positive point of my theory: the intentionality of our mental states and processes is derived in just the same way as that of our books and maps (and the inner states of our robots). Suppose you have composed a shopping list, on a piece of paper, to guide your shopping behavior. The marks on the piece of paper have derived intentionality, of course, but if you forgo the shopping list and just remember the wanted items in your head, whatever it is that “stores” or “represents” the items to be purchased in your brain has exactly the same status as the trails of ink on the paper. There is no more real, or intrinsic, or original intentionality than that.
There is no original intentionality for Dennett. There is no ‘fact of the matter’ about what a person means or thinks. It’s stances upon stances upon blind material mechanism. This doesn’t go away just because Dennett says, in essence, ‘metaphors can be useful in a practical sense’.
Now, you may want to call this Misunderstanding Materialism, but I think that is to misunderstand materialism!
I’ll call it what I called it previously: Being vague and obfuscating, because that’s the only way the view sounds remotely plausible. A lot like saying “See, recursion! *smile*” in explaining consciousness, and hoping like hell no one points out how empty that is.
The widespread view that Materialism must be Reductionist is false, IMO.
What’s false is the suggestion that materialists are immune to making inane claims or of being reductionists, such that if one reading of a popular materialist makes his view look silly, well darnit, it must be a misinterpretation.
I don’t doubt that ‘materialism doesn’t have to be reductionist’, because at this point materialism doesn’t have to be anything. Panpsychism is considered a form of physicalism now. It’s hard to think of what could not be considered materialism so long as people are willing to squint their eyes and turn their heads at the right angle.
Yet we do not find those other things inexplicable;
Actually, those things are plenty inexplicable unless we strip away every common-sense or mentally associated experience of them and leave behind only the barest abstracta. They are ‘explicable’ by materialism only insofar as anything explicable about them is ruled out of bounds to begin with (Why, those are secondary qualities – let’s put those aside.)
“I” cannot be “reduced” to my brain or my neurons, even though it can be explained by them. Is my point.
So it can be explained by, but not reduced to, even though reduction to is explanation by.
As I said: Obfuscation. The materialist’s best tool for not sounding like a Churchland or Rosenberg style academic lunatic.
Well, clearly there is a wide gulf here, nullasalus 🙂
I don’t think those words (or mine) are “obfuscating” at all. Yet they seem so to you.
Clearly some fog is getting in the way somewhere!
Would you read my own words (not Dennett’s) again, and see if you can peer through the fog and discern what I might be getting at, even if you disagree?
What I was trying to say (says she, having another go) is that we, as human beings, perceiving animals, parse the world into objects; we make our own ontology (by virtue of our perceptual processes); we say “this apple exists”; “this star exists”; “this cat exists”, even though a physicist can “reduce” all those things to a mere assemblage of subatomic particals, perhaps mere mathematical strings.
That does not mean that the apple no longer exists, nor the star, although it may cause us to wonder where exactly the apple stops and starts (and even whether the cat is dead or alive before we open the box…).
In other words we do not deny things there ontological category just because we know what they are made of at a lower level of analysis. So with materialists and the mind; just because it may be possible (and I think it is) to know at a lower level of analysis what material processes result in the ontological thing we call a “mind” does not mean that the mind does not exist. To explain what a thing is made of is not to deny its existence qua thing.
Is that still fog? Do you see what I might be trying to say?
I don’t think those words (or mine) are “obfuscating” at all. Yet they seem so to you.
Clearly some fog is getting in the way somewhere!
Why? Because it can’t possibly be actual obfuscation, or legitimate confusion in thought on your part? Just as Dennett can’t really be saying something inane or ludicrous, and we have to read between the lines until it sounds kinda-sorta reasonable?
we say “this apple exists”; “this star exists”; “this cat exists”, even though a physicist can “reduce” all those things to a mere assemblage of subatomic particals, perhaps mere mathematical strings.
Try reading what I said: Physicists can’t ‘reduce all those things’ to a mere assemblage of subatomic particles or otherwise. Not entirely, and not satisfactorily, at least according to many plausible (and more plausible than materialist) views.
Further, it’s what is meant by ‘this cat exists’ that’s key. A full-blown mereological nihilist is not forbidden from using metaphor, or pragmatic shorthand. On the flipside, the fact that a mereological nihilist is able to talk casually about ‘that car’ or ‘that tree’ doesn’t mean he’s no longer a mereological nihilist.
Likewise, saying “I believe bigfoot exists” with the stipulation of “by the way, I’ll redefine bigfoot to mean whatever I please – in this case, bigfoot is a figment of the imagination, but such figments are located in a brain and thus are real” is just another way of saying “bigfoot doesn’t exist”. And no, I’m not going to pretend otherwise after a conversation about ontology and the fluidity of language.
In other words we do not deny things there ontological category just because we know what they are made of at a lower level of analysis.
That’s open to debate. Sometimes materialists really are reductionists. Some materialists really do deny the existence of beliefs, even selves, and otherwise. Sometimes ‘reduction’ is actually ‘elimination’. Sometimes a person thinks they’re a materialist and they aren’t. And often, wordplay plays a big role.
Is that still fog? Do you see what I might be trying to say?
The problem isn’t that I fail to see what you’re trying to say. The problem is I’m pointing out the fog that’s present, and you’d really like me to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist. No dice.
It’s perfectly possible, of course, that I am talking nonsense, but incapable of seeing it.
All I’m asking is that you consider the possibility that I am talking sense and you are failing to see it.
Or, more likely than either, that both of us have a view of the world, and those views differ, but that neither of us are making a very good job at seeing the world through the other’s eyes.
But, at least a glimmer of a place where we might share a view point is perhaps emerging from the fog: I agree that some materialists are reductionist.
All I’m saying is that a materialist view point (where “materialist” means something like the view that all things world have causes within the world) is perfectly compatible with an ontology that includes things like stars, cats, apples, icicles, you, me, minds, consciousness and experience.
Because to explain these things in terms of patterns of other, more fundamental things, is not (necessarily) to “reduce” them to those other things; indeed you could equally argue, I suggest, that it is to “elevate” those more fundamental things to something that transcends them.
That doesn’t seem very foggy to me.
And, practically speaking, we know a lot about the neural correlates of consciousness. Not fog at all, but data.
Elizabeth, you stated..
This is the gap in understanding between you Elizabeth, and the ID proponents you are interacting with here.
To an ID proponent, a thing losses its essence when reduced to the things it is made of (what they would refer to as material causes). It’s the same issue as with Free Will. Whereas you may be able to hold the idea that free will exists, even though at a lower level it is a result of other stuff, in the eyes of an ID proponent that is complete nonsense.
I’ll add that there’s really nothing you can say, Elizabeth, to close that gap. And that’s the gap that you perceive as misunderstanding or miss-communication.
Oh the irony.
Well, that’s interesting, lastyearon.
Why is that to you, “a thing loses its essence when reduced to the things it is made of?”
And why “reduce it” at all?
In fact, why even call it “reducing”?
Take information theory itself – one way of telling a “random” string froma “meaningful” string is to measure its compressibility. A meaningful string will, in general, be more compressible than a random one.
I’m suggesting that when we talk about apples, stars, minds etc (even fog!) our act of creating a high level ontology is a compression process. We create meaning in the world by making it describable in high level terms. To “reduce” it to subatomic particles is to render it meaningless, literally. We cannot capture the appleness of an apple in purely physical terms.
My point is that that does not mean that the apple is not a product of physical processes, but that it’s appleness is a product our our minds, and that our minds are no less real than the apple.
Well, that’s interesting, lastyearon.
Why is that to you, “a thing loses its essence when reduced to the things it is made of?”
And why “reduce it” at all?
In fact, why even call it “reducing”?
Take information theory itself – one way of telling a “random” string froma “meaningful” string is to measure its compressibility. A meaningful string will, in general, be more compressible than a random one.
I’m suggesting that when we talk about apples, stars, minds etc (even fog!) our act of creating a high level ontology is a compression process. We create meaning in the world by making it describable in high level terms. To “reduce” it to subatomic particles is to render it meaningless, literally. We cannot capture the appleness of an apple in purely physical terms.
My point is that that does not mean that the apple is not a product of physical processes, but that its appleness is a product our our minds, and that our minds are no less real than the apple.
oops double posted trying to fix a horrible typo.
Why irony, Upright BiPed?
Elizabeth,
I am not an ID proponent. I am in complete agreement with you on this one. In my discussions with ID proponents I have found that the gap can be closed no further than your trying to close it.
All I’m asking is that you consider the possibility that I am talking sense and you are failing to see it.
I already considered that possibility. Rejected it, with regards to what I’m saying. Haven’t seen much reason to change my mind.
Or, more likely than either, that both of us have a view of the world, and those views differ, but that neither of us are making a very good job at seeing the world through the other’s eyes.
And why’s that more likely? Why can’t it be that I can see your view of the world, but see problems with it clearly that either you cannot, or that you paper over?
It’s doubly amusing to see this coming from an admirer of Dennett, who doesn’t exactly treat those he disagrees with philosophically in the most up and up manner.
All I’m saying is that a materialist view point (where “materialist” means something like the view that all things world have causes within the world) is perfectly compatible with an ontology that includes things like stars, cats, apples, icicles, you, me, minds, consciousness and experience.
Yeah, if you radically change some definitions. You could change the definition of ‘materialist’, as is pretty popular. Or the definitions of ‘minds’ and ‘consciousness’ or even ‘cats’.
I mean, look at materialist. ‘All things have causes within the world.’ Go by that definition and you’ve made a materialist out of Zeus and Harry Potter.
Because to explain these things in terms of patterns of other, more fundamental things, is not (necessarily) to “reduce” them to those other things; indeed you could equally argue, I suggest, that it is to “elevate” those more fundamental things to something that transcends them.
That doesn’t seem very foggy to me.
You roll out some poeticisms (maybe reductionists don’t reduce at all – why, maybe they elevate!) and then wonder where the fog is? C’mon.
And, practically speaking, we know a lot about the neural correlates of consciousness. Not fog at all, but data.
Correlations are cheap, and not terribly new in the relevant sense – we’ve had them for millenia. “You say the dead guy isn’t conscious, Oog? And all it took was you hitting him with a big stick? Why, just think of the military applications!”
Ah, thanks for the clarification, lastyearon!
Well, my question still stands, anyway!
In my discussions with ID proponents I have found that the gap can be closed no further than your trying to close it.
Yeah, ly. Because this is an ‘ID proponent’ thing. Not a ‘plenty of people, ID proponents and not’ thing. Even among materialists, Dennett has plenty of opponents. And I don’t think ID is science – I just happen to think no-ID is not science as well.
Well, if you want to define a materialist as a reductionist, nullasalus, then I’m not a materialist, because I don’t reduce things to other things.
I don’t think Dennett does either, and in general, I don’t decide whether someone is right about a point of argument on the basis of what I think of the way they handle their social interactions.
So here is my position:
I think that that things world can be explained by causes within the world, but I don’t think that reduces them to the sum of their causes.
I think this applies to minds.
And as a neuroscientist, I think we have made a huge amount of progress in discovering some fairly fundamental principles about the way that brains produce minds.
I think the biggest difficulty is purely conceptual – that something important about minds seems to be missing from any unexplanation not because minds are inherently unexplainable but because the very idea of explaining a mind seems, from a certain point of view, to be tantamount to denying its existence; to be “reducing” it to “mere” patterns of neural firing.
I don’t think it is. I think things can be explained perfectly well without Loss of Essence.
I think insisting that they do is, well, foggy.
Anyway, nice to talk to you 🙂
I’m off to bed.
Cheers
Lizzie
“Ontology is, I would suggest, a funtion of the way we parse the universe.”
Parse away, m’dear.
Before minds, there was no “mindness”?
So what one would expect from that line of reasoning is:
Before apples there was no appleness.
Not, before mind there was no appleness.
Which is what you seem to be saying.
Are you a Platonist?
Well, if you want to define a materialist as a reductionist, nullasalus, then I’m not a materialist, because I don’t reduce things to other things.
Where did I define a materialist as a reductionist? I pointed out a number of things about materialists, including that yes – some of them really are reductionists, even eliminativists. You seem to be holding onto touted non-reductive materialism as a talisman which means ‘this materialist can’t possibly be saying what I think he is. Crazy-sounding views are only for non-materialists’ or ‘so long as I say I’m not a reductive materialist, my stated views can’t themselves add up to reductionism or eliminativism’.
I see this a lot – the habit of pretending that there are no materialists who deny beliefs exist, or who deny that there is ‘aboutness’ in the world, or who deny the reality of qualia/experience and so on. As if it’s only non-materialists who think this is what materialism entails – and not some actual materialists.
I think that that things world can be explained by causes within the world, but I don’t think that reduces them to the sum of their causes.
And once again: First, there is a relationship between reduction-to and explanation-by. Saying ‘minds are entirely explained by the bare physical operations of brains – oh, but they don’t reduce to them of course’ is fluff. Then no, the explanation is not entire after all. Or perhaps it is. Hard to tell, because the words are wildly unclear – and perhaps that is the point.
Doubly so when materialist explanations become simply ‘explained by causes within the world’. Intrinsic intentionality is ‘in the world’ for Aquinas and Aristotle. Consciousness is ‘in the world’ for the panpsychist, and arguably for the cartesian.
Finally, it’s not that ‘minds are unexplainable’ full stop, or better yet that materialists are the ones who think minds have explanation and everyone else doesn’t. Just look at the (largely materialist, at least in name) New Mysterians. Dualists have explanations, ranging from the panpsychist view (before they got rounded up for whatever ‘materialism’ is now), to the Aristo-Thomist views (where intentionality is intrinsic and ‘in the world’), to otherwise. It’s not a case of ‘the guys who think there’s an explanation versus the guys who don’t’, it’s ‘guys with rival explanations’. (Except for the New Mysterians – but again, that’s an area occupied by a number of materialists.)
nullasalus:
Hi Lizzie, where do you stand on the whole “aboutness” thing?
I mean, at least reckon, you refused to acknowledge that “aboutness” is a necessary property of information, so I’d sort of like to know.
As I keep pointing out, it matters not in the least what ad hoc mish-miash of mis-matched propositions this or that materialist asserts; what matters in these sorts of discussions is what logically follows from the -ism itself.
… you all ought to stop letting yourselves be distracted by the ad hoc mish-mashes and focus on what inescapably follows from the -ism.
Mung:
Re your second paragraph: no I didn’t “refuse to acknowledge that “aboutness” is a necessary property of information”. I wanted to know what definition of information was being used in the context of the claim that information can’t be created by Chance and Necessity only.
And, if it includes “aboutness”, an operational definition of “aboutness”.
But to answer your question:
When human beings (and possibly other animals) use language, or language-like ways of communicating with each other, clearly the messages they transmit are often “about” something: e.g. danger on the horizon; differential calculus; a broken heart; enemy troop movements.
However, here we are not (directly) talking about communication between two people – nullasalus talked about people “who deny that there is ‘aboutness’ in the world, or who deny the reality of qualia/experience and so on”.
Well, I’m not sure what “aboutness” means, in that context, and I don’t have much use for the word “qualia” but I certainly don’t deny the reality of “experience”.
My own view is that the “experience” does emerge from an information-transfer process (in other words, it is “about” something), but rather than being information transfer between two people, it is an internal transmission over time.
This is metaphorical, of course (it is very difficult to talk about experience and consciousness without metaphors, as Dennett says) but my own characterisation of “experience” is that it is what happens when we “tell” ourselves what just happened.
I agree with Dennett that the idea of consciousness/experience as a continuous stream is flawed. I like the metaphor of the fridge door light – the light only goes on when we open the door, so we have the impression that it’s always on – in other words something that is always there when you need it is effectively continuous, even though in mechanical terms it actually isn’t.
And we have fairly good evidence that vision works like that.
So, that’s where I stand, I guess 🙂
Cheers
Lizzie