Jay Richards: A Short Argument Against the Materialist Account of the Mind
| October 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
Jay Wesley Richards
You can picture yourself eating a chocolate ice cream sundae:
John Searle’s Chinese Room scenario is the most famous argument against the “strong AI” presumption that computation-writ-large-and-fast will become consciousness: … His argument shows that computers work at the level of syntax, whereas human agents work at the level of meaning: …
I still find Searle’s argument persuasive, despite decades of attempts by other philosophers to poke holes in it.
But there’s another, shorter and more intuitive argument against a materialist account of the mind. It has to do with intentional states. Michael Egnor and others have offered versions of this argument here at Mind Matters and elsewhere but I’d like to boil it down to its bare bones. Then you can commit it to memory and pull it out the next time your office mate starts to worry about Skynet or denies that he has free will.
Here goes:
Imagine a scenario where I ask you to think about eating a chocolate ice cream sundae, while a doctor does an MRI and takes a real-time scan of your brain state. We assume that the following statements are true: … More.
Readers? Thoughts? You can’t comment at Mind Matters but you can here. Doe Richards’ argument work?
See also: Jay Richards asks, can training for an AI future be trusted to bureaucrats?
and
Will AI lead to mass joblessness and social unrest?
4 Responses to Jay Richards: A Short Argument Against the Materialist Account of the Mind
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Isn’t the whole point that consciousness is such a hard problem because, as has been pointed out, we do not have a materialist account of mind. What we have is an inference, to whit, if there is no plausible “supernatural” or ‘super-material’ account of mind then one possibility we are left with is a materialist or physicalist account, whatever that might be. Neither Searle’s nor Richards’ arguments rule out that possibility.
Searle’s Chinese Room argument is stated as follows:
One problem with Searle’s argument, as I see it, is as follows. We have an English-speaking person locked in the room with a list of all the symbols used in the Chinese language and a book of instructions on how to manipulate them which must include rules of grammar and syntax. A string of Chinese symbols is passed into the room. By matching the symbols to his list and consulting the book of instructions he is able to identify the symbol string as a question. The problem is that knowing that it is a question does not tell the person what the question is asking and, hence, what the answer should be.
In computing terms you could imagine a comprehensive database of all possible questions that could be asked in the Chinese language. You could also imagine a comprehensive database of all the possible answers to each of the questions, given that many questions allow a number of different answers depending on context. It would be a relatively simple process of pattern-matching to identify which particular question is being asked. But without knowing the meaning of the question there is no conceivable way of deciding which of a number of possible answers is the correct one in this case.
In fact, it seems to me that in Searle’s Chinese room analogy there is no way that the man could construct a correct answer to the question without some means of translating the question into English. No book of instructions could conceivably do that. Without something like that both the man in the room or an equivalent computer program would simply stop and return a message of something like “Input not recognized”.
All this does is reinforce Chalmers observation that it is very hard to see a way of relating physical processes in the brain with our conscious experience of the world.
Sev states:
You are kidding right?
The logic is as follows.
1. The Mind of God is either the primary substratum from which everything arises or else some materialist substratum is.
2. Material is not the primary substratum from everything arises, especially consciousness.
3. Therefore the Mind of God is the primary substratum from which everything arises.
Consciousness is a non-material reality, which is why it will never be explained in terms of matter alone. Why should we believe that consciousness and will are wholly due to material agency? For that matter, why should we believe material realities are the only realities, anyway?
The notion that material realities are all there is, is contrary to the thought of the vast majority of humanity from time immemorial. Most people believed in non-material realities, although not everybody could articulate exactly why there must be non-material realities. Sometimes the extremely obvious is more difficult to demonstrate with logic than is the mysterious. Such is the case with the existence of non-material realities.
Gregory of Nyssa (born c. 335, died c. 394) discusses the non-material mind and soul:
Updating Gregory’s thinking with contemporary technology:
If you closed your eyes and imagined a luscious-looking bright red apple, you would see in your mind’s eye an image of an apple. If you kept concentrating on that image of an apple sufficiently, scientists could monitor your brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and actually produce an image of your imagined apple, albeit a blurry one. But the data gathered from monitoring your brain activity is not the image of the apple you are seeing; the data can be mapped to an image though, roughly analogous to the way data in a GIF or JPEG file is translated into an image (fMRI mapping isn’t nearly as precise a translation as that of GIF or JPEG data). Just as the binary data in a GIF or JPEG file is not the image itself, the fMRI data is not the image itself. It should not surprise us at all that there is brain activity that corresponds to what you are seeing in your mind’s eye that is different from other brain activity, nor that scientists could learn to translate such data into an image. Nor are we surprised that scientists in the distant future, if they found an ancient, well-preserved hard drive from our times, might figure out how to translate those zeros and ones in the GIF and JPEG files on it into the corresponding images.
So what does all that have to do with non-material realities? Well, exactly where was that image of an apple you saw in your mind’s eye? It existed – you saw it. Where was it? If all the physical matter and electrochemical activity of your brain had been detected and analyzed right down to the last subatomic particle, no image of an apple would have been found. Data that corresponded to your imagining an apple would have been found – data that could even be mapped into an image of an apple – but there was no actual image of an apple to be found in your material brain. Yet an image of an apple existed – you saw it. I ask with Gregory of Nyssa, where was it? It was in the non-material component of your mind. The image of the apple you saw in your mind’s eye had no temporal, physical existence. As we already knew 1600 years ago: The non-material mind sees, not the eye.
The non-material component of the human mind is, obviously, somehow integrated with our physical brain. We could begin to learn about this integration if we acknowledged the existence of the non-material component of the mind. We could learn of it from its effects on our physical brains, just as we learned much about gravity from its effects alone. That project will most likely have to wait until atheistic, strictly materialistic science ends up in the dustbin of history along with the thinking of Freud, Marx and eventually Darwin.
There are non-material realities. Consciousness will never be explained in terms of matter alone.
The irony is we perceive the material world through our conscious mind, and then use those perceptions to deny the conscious mind.