On the other hand, there is a certain irony in the struggle between materialists and — what should we call those other philosophers who want some kind of idealism in their soup? Since very few people would actually deny some sort of external reality, we must all be varieties of dualist in the great and honorable tradition of Reneé Descartes. People like Dennett, the Churchlands, my friend Manapatra, et al, argue that their words and the thoughts of their comrades-in-arms are random bits generated without meaning or significance, like the noises of a running motor. While people like me struggle to take their remarks seriously. It’s an odd sort of situation where surrendering to materialist arguments would eliminate the need to consider their arguments.
I was thinking last night about written numeric symbols, such as, for example, a big red “20″ you might see painted on a sign in a Serpentine type face, which is fairly angular, with square corners. Most people would accept that the painted marks represent the number 20, although we can’t find any “20″ object for it represent, other than other painted, printed, typed, or written 20’s. Which is not to say that a visual representation of “20″ doesn’t represent the same abstract idea of “20″ as does the spoken word “twenty,” which it does. And using a representationalist theory, the signals in the brain which MRI scans show when a subject is shown the number “20″ must represent the number “20″ too, but then, saying so would imply that the signals in the brain are not the number 20; they are only more representations of it. Otherwise, if it is the number 20, then neither the written 20 nor the spoken “twenty” looks anything like the brain pattern, so it’s hard to see why they are supposed to be representations. Instead, the analytic theorist would only claim that the patterns are correlations, and there is no representation, and so nothing that is being represented. In the end, it all starts to float in the air when you try to understand why the correlations exist at all, but empirically we just take it at face value without thinking about it.
Although, there is a bit of a problem when we try to figure out whether the brain-20 was a learned response to hearing and seeing real-20’s, or if somebody invented the real-20’s to represent the brain-20 he was thinking, but since there is no “20″ the question sort of nullifies itself.
It is all very confusing, and although I am, by certain measures, a pretty smart fellow, I know the physicalist interpretation of mental phenomena is way beyond my understanding, and I suspect it is for those who try to defend it, too. Maybe the best response to physicalist brain theories is to smile knowingly, nod, and reassure the poor creature that he is quite correct, and wouldn’t he like a nice piece of pie.
I have to confess there is a practical side to it, though, and it emerges in the diagnostic and medical applications of brain theory, namely that we can see mechanisms have certain kinds of structure and operation, and we can learn through observation that the structure correlates with the operations, thus allowing us to restore (or create) the desired operational functionality by (fixing or constructing) the correlated structure. It’s a sort of monkey approach. Pushing the keys on the piano makes the sounds you hear, even though you may not understand anything at all about piano construction or the principles of sound. A practical medical application of brain theory has no more significance for the real nature of minds than a theory of quantum mechanics has for the real nature of the Universe, or a theory of automotive design and engineering limts, restricts, or even explains why people want to drive to the grocery store.
The most ironical thing I know about the whole brains-minds thing is that people still write books with the same naive assumptions about our readers that we always did. The supposition that the writers have intentions, that their words represent something, and that the reader will respond thoughtfully to the meaning of the words, doesn’t depend on brain theory, and isn’t explained by it. This suggests to me, at least, that the people who write the books are either not sincere or not thinking, and both possibilities are hilarious.
Lastly, I just want to say that this post is not a reasoned argument for dualism or against physicalism, it’s just a casual observation that makes me laugh, and I wanted to share it with you.
June 12, 2008 at 10:21 am
There is likely some level of randomity beyond which understanding is not possible, but I do love novelty.
The nonironic life is not worth living. And a cosmos without critters capable of creating comic canons of incredible complexity wouldn’t be much fun either.
I shall be so bold as to be one of the few who want to deny “some sort of external reality.” This is not because I am anti-realist or solipsistic, I merely object to placing the trojan horse named External at the beginning, or it might later disgorge its treacherous gate openers who will let the other Outsiders into The Premises.
(I concede that I cannot see inside your thoughts directly, nor can you see mine. I also realize that what I perceive “out there” is not exactly what is there, but is the result of a complex web of sensory inputs, stirred together with memories of similar situations and a dollop of imagined inferences and deductions. However, this is not sufficient justification for assuming some kind of fundamental division about “external” versus “internal”. It may turn out to be fundamental, or it may not. Lets not leap before we look.)
Trojan horses sneak into arguments, in all sorts of ways.
We all know that Mr. Descartes gave us “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum). Sometime previous to this, in a dimmer portion of history, one might imagine that “I” arose as an insight all by itself. Its funny the formulations that can arise from the invention of language.
Suppose Reneé had said “I think, therefore, IT thinks ‘me’”. In this formulation, unlike the one that he actually made, the error of accepting a premise that contains its own conclusion (circular argument) is not made.
This is serious business. If we don’t want our words to be just random bits generated without meaning or significance, we find ourselves, of necessity, insisting that the meanings we intend to give them must not be lost in a cacaphony of their own hilarious incoherence. They must fit together well. They must not cancel each other out. Their logic must not be circular. They must serve us, not rule us.
If materialists (or physicalists) are as you describe them, I sure would rather not be one. I like ideals in my soup, thank you. But I think that the Great IT (whatever it is) has room for ideals, ideas, and thoughts that say “I”, as well as quarks and larks and jellybeans, without necessarily splitting the whole shebang into two parts. So I’m not keen on dualism either.
I don’t think brain theory (whatever that is) has finished its work yet. There are things yet unexplained. It may be that the brain resolves like this page of words on your monitor, where bits and bytes and pixels form the “dance floor”, and mind is merely our habits of forming relations with a desire to be understood, that lead us to repeat a certain dance, with ex tempore variations, upon the floor.
Our meanings are like the wind. We blow. The debris of our language goes skittering and we strain to put it in order.
communication n. An exchange involving symbols.
Implication: An exchange is required only because there is a separation (between me and you, here and there, now and then, etc.). In order for the exchange to occur, there is a source point, from where that-which-is-to-be-communicated, having been conceived, composed, encoded, and packaged, is launched. It then moves across the intervening separation, to arrive at a receipt point, whereafter it is unpackaged, decoded, interpreted and reconstructed, in an attempt (perhaps vain) to duplicate That which was intended to be communicated. The passive voice of these verbs avoids argument about who or what agencies accomplish these actions, or exactly how such agencies interface with the physical universe source and receipt points involved in the transfer.
The passive voice may be avoided by expressing identity to the agents, for instance “I composed the message and sent it”, but what good does this do in explaining the process? Who am I and where am I? Am I the hand that wrote words on paper? Am I the brain who controlled the hand? Am I the mind who controlled the brain? Am I the spirit that directed the mind? Am I god that conducted the spirit? Am I the hallucination of my protoplasm? Am I the universe talking to myself? Am I mad that I assumed any of this? Did I communicate anything to you by this dancing around?
June 12, 2008 at 11:10 am
Actually, no.
Well, maybe a bit. I gathered you didn’t like the external-internal distinction. I’m not exactly sure why. It really only underscores that thoughts of a tree are not the tree nor any part of the tree. That is probably a useful distinction. From it comes the idea of research: trying to find out about the tree. Why is it that, no matter how much we know about the tree, there is always more to learn? If IT can think the tree, and IT thinks us, and WE are all in IT together, as you suggest, then IT must be devious.
Hm. Maybe you are groping toward some great unification. I don’t think that will work too well on a physics foundation. Besides his Law of Non-simultaneity, Einstein also described light cones, where objects outside the lightcone of an event are causally disjoint from the event, unaffected by it. The Universe is a collection, not a unity.
Communication is not an exchange of symbols.
I have the feeling you’re talking around a point instead of hitting me over the head with it. You know, getting through anything thick takes a lot of effort
June 12, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Yes indeed. My mind being a very “thick” thing, I could not agree more
IT may be less than devious and merely rather forgetful.
I was following your lead in being rather more casual and less earnestly logical.
Despite the preachy tone of my post, I deny having a need to settle these issues so much as a need to keep wading through them, since they are quite fascinating.
Grand unifications are only possible with language, it being more an attempt to do arithmetic with an unknown quantity than anything else.
I appreciate the idea of research, always attempting to add more to the collection of facts. At some point one may have to make a decision that can only be made if one leaps to a conclusion rather than waiting for the collection process to come to an end (which it won’t).
Despite the implications of a word like “conclusion”, it doesn’t have to be the ultimate end of a thread, just a decision point.
Hope we can have some more.