Keith Augustine responded to some of the comments that I have blogged. Instead of answering his comments I want to underscore them. This is why physicalists are physicalists.
VR: I thought my point was that sophisticated dualists like Bill Hasker have never denied the extensive relaince of the mind upon the brain.
KA: Acknowledging mind-brain dependence is not the same as making sense of it. If I may quote Paul Churchland in _Matter and Consciousness_:"If there really is a distinct entity in which reasoning, emotion, andconsciousness take place ... then one would expect reason, emotion, andconsciousness to be relatively invulnerable to direct control or pathology by manipulation or damage to the brain. But in fact the exact opposite is true. Alcohol, narcotics, or senile degeneration of nerve tissue will impair, cripple, or even destroy one's capacity for rational thought.... And the vulnerability of consciousness to anesthetics, to caffeine, and to something as simple as a sharp blow to the head, shows its very close dependence on neural activity in the brain. All of this makes perfect sense if reason, emotion, and consciousness are activities of the brain itself. But it makes very little sense if they are activities of something else entirely."Note that this empirical argument would establish the improbability not only of Cartesian dualism, but of any sort of dualism which maintains that the mind is something separable from the brain, whether it is a pure disembodied mind or some quasi-physical astral body made of exotic matter. The mind-brain dependence argument does not establish that the mind depends upon some physical system, but upon a specific organic physical system which decays at death and thus, in all probability, destroys the mind as well.
VR: So we would not be appealing to soul theory to explain the Capgras > problem, for example, or blindsight. In fact, Hasker specifically appeals to these things to argue that a more traditional, Cartesian form of dualism is inadequate, in favor of an emergent kind of dualism in which the soul emerges from the activity of the brain.
KA: I think Jim's point was that such mental disorders, caused by neurological deficits, makes a soul thery--*any* soul theory--scientifically implausible. The issue is not whether emergent substance dualism can explain these syndromes; it is that the details of these syndromes are what we would expect to obtain if physicalism or property dualism were true, but not if substance dualism were true.I don't understand how an emergent *substance* could be highly dependent upon a brain. Emergent properties clearly could be. But a substance by definition is something that can exist independently of other substances. So if at some point in the development of a human being a "soul" emerges from neural activity, that means the brain has just ex nihilo created a soul. It does not explain why, once A has generated B, the states of B continue to depend upon the states of A. If A and B have separate existences now, there should be no dependence between them beyond that of a driver and his car. That is, if one's car engine catches on fire and is destroyed, the driver's heart should not automatically catch on fire too. And yet those who take psychedlic drugs effect the mind *directly*, not merely the mind's ability to control the body--the mind itself. Psychotropic drugs do not merely produce paralysis or cut off one's sensory information--they affect the mind's functioning. That seems to indicate that mental functioning cannot occur without brain functioning.
VR: I don't see how the sort of dualism Hasker has in mind is refuted by these sorts of phenomenon. If I am right a lot of anti-dualist arguments attack a straw man.
KA: Perhaps an analogy is appropriate here.Let's say we have two separate, interacting things: A Predator drone and the remote pilot controlling it from a distance. The drone is captured and its captors start fiddling with its transmitter/receiver. What's the worst the captors can do to the remote pilot, miles away? They can destroy the drone's camera, making it blind. The person controlling the drone will no longer be able to see the environment around the drone. They can destroy the microphone, making it deaf, and again, the radio controller will no longer be able to hear what is going on. Ditto if the wires connecting the camera and microphone to the transmitter are severed. Information from the senses has been cut off. Next, suppose that the wires connecting the receiver to the drone's engines are severed. Now the pilot cannot even blindly control the drone.It seems inescapable to me that any form of substance dualism is committed to predicting that the mind (the controller) is largely independent from the brain (the drone's transmitter/receiver). The worst you can do to the controller by manipulating the drone's transmitter/receiver is make the controller deaf or blind regarding the drone's environment, or unable to move the drone. You cannot affect the the controller's ability to do math, to understand language, or recognize undistorted faces. You cannot get the controller to go into a psychotic rage by manipulating the drone's radio. But you can make someone psychotic by spiking his drink with PCP, or prevent him from being able to do simple addition by lesioning certain areas of his brain. In short, basic neuroscientific facts are simply inexplicable on any variety of substance dualism.
VR: That has the effect of taking away the illusion that the "soul" is something radically separate from the brain. It's matter all right, it just doesn't obey the normal laws of matter.
KA: It doesn't matter (no pun intended) if the soul is a nonphysical substance or a physical substance separate from the brain. The argument from the dependence of consciousness on the brain cuts across both versions of dualism.
VR: The radio receiver analogy looks, on its face, like a good one.I strongly disagree for the reasons above. When I started this e-mail, my computer crashed, and I had to start over.
KA: Yes, but when your computer crashed, you did not have to check into a mental institution. But if your brain "crashed," you would have to--or worse. It's amazing how a ministroke in a specific area of the brain can cause one to behave in a way that seriously jeopardizes one's salvation... as if one freely chose to have a ministroke. And not just a ministroke that causes reflex-like reactions, but a ministroke that affect one's behavior because it affects one's mind. A frontal lobotomy can change one's personality (to say the least!). How, then, can one's personality persist after the full-brain lobotomy called death?
VR: Clearly, deficits and enhancements in my computer result in defecits and enhancements of the message I received.
KA: Certainly. But a distorted message does not affect your IQ, your beliefs, or your desires, in the way that LSD, schizophrenia, or Alzheimer's disease could, does it?Regards, KA
15 comments:
I went back to it, and tracked back to your exchanges with BDK on the other site. I have to admit I'm not too familiar with the way quantum mechanics get brought into the philosophy of mind; is it based of the Penrose book The Emperpr's New Mind?
It seems that many of Keith's objections can be circumvented simply by rejecting his analogy. I don't think the driver/car or remote/probe analogies are adequate to say the least. The mind/brain relationship is two-way, not one way. This is not captured in his analogies, i.e., those examples do not contain two-way causation, so it's no wonder they fail. I think he's begging the question. We need a new analogy where two things are related (a priori)in a two-way causal manner. Any ideas?
Keith – My initial intuition that there was question begging going on here didn’t pan out, so I’ll retract that charge. I couldn’t quite distill from your post exactly how it was question begging. Let me offer these other critiques instead.
Instead of arguing, as many have, that non-physical minds cannot have causal power over brains/bodies, you argue the reverse – that brains/bodies cannot have causal power over non-physical minds. Your argument could be put like this:
(1) If the mind is essentially part of a non-physical, substantial soul, then it should not be affected by malfunctions of the brain/body.
(2) The mind is affected by malfunctions of the brain/body.
(3) Therefore, the mind is not essentially part of a non-physical, substantial soul.
The critical premise here is (1) in my mind (no pun intended). I don’t see how anyone could dispute (2). But your reasons for (1) seem weak. You said, “I don't understand how an emergent *substance* could be highly dependent upon a brain . . . a substance by definition is something that can exist independently of other substances.” Neither of these statements shows that physical brains cannot have causal power over non-physical minds, and that is all that is really required here. In fact, you seem to concede that mental-to-physical causation is possible. So what’s wrong with the reverse?
If I accept your definition of a substance, then why can there not exist a soul, for which independent existence is metaphysically possible, but that still has a deep, 2-way causal relationship with the body? My view of dualism is one in which this independent existence is a possibility, but as long as the body lives, the soul is deeply connected to and affected by it. I have not heard any physicalist explain, in a non-question begging way, why it is impossible for such a causal relationship to exist.
Another issue seems to be confusion over how evidence works. The data you have provided, such as examples of the effects of drugs or the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on the mind, are indisputable, as for as I can see. But of what are they evidence? They are evidence of causation at best, and that is all. If I were a pure Cartesian dualist, then they might count against me. But with a more robust version of dualism (“moderate dualism”) in which 2-way causation is welcomed and important, your data become the gander’s sauce. Instances of malfunctioning brains causing mental malfunction support my position exactly as much as yours! Such a correlation is a prediction of my system and yours.
Regarding the drone/pilot analogy – it is a straw man, even if dualists have used it. If that analogy were correct, then neuroscience would be recalcitrant for dualism. But I reject the analogy completely. As far as an analogy that better illustrates the 2-way relationship between mind and body, I’m still working on that.
(1) If the mind is essentially part of a non-physical, substantial soul, then it should not be affected by malfunctions of the brain/body.
(2) The mind is affected by malfunctions of the brain/body.
(3) Therefore, the mind is not essentially part of a non-physical, substantial soul.
I think it would be better to invert the premise: If the mind is nonphysical, then it shouldn't affect the brain/body. If you think the supervenience base of mind is classical then such affects would violate conservation of momentum/energy (I have the classical caveat b/c in QM there can be such violations). That is, dualism violates fundamental laws of physics. Of course, you could turn this around into a dualist prediction that in the brain, conservation laws are violated. Any scientist approaching this question without a bunch of other religious biases would rightly be skeptical of any such theory. But you can do the experiments, I guess.
The data from neuropsychology, which show the tight (and tightening) correlations between mental and neural states, continue to provide strong inductive (rather than deductive) support for some kind of physicalist metaphysics. As I've said before, such data are not knock-down deductive arguments. They are just more facts which make it reasonable to think that mind and brain are correlated because the mind *is* a feature of the brain.
Following up on some of Keith's arguments, when your grandmother with alzheimers dementia dies, is it her demented mind that continues after death? Or, perhaps, her undemented mind was there all along, unchanged, but it is the physical changes of alzheimers that caused strange things to happen in her (perfectly functional) mind. This is not an inconsistent philosophical position, and only time will tell us how outlandish it will (or will not) appear once we have come to understand brains.
Since we observe similar phenomena (e.g., Alzheimers dementia) in nonhuman primates, the dualist will have the added challenge of explaining why monkeys don't also have immaterial souls. You would be left with arguing that a) They don't have sould, but (like Descartes said) are merely unconscious automata, or b) We need to start evangelizing to monkeys. :)
Again, nothing in the world of deductive logic dictates that you give up on substance dualism, but over the past few hundred years it has looked more and more like a degenerative research programme.
Two side comments to BDK's comment (the one just above the current comment, unless someone finishes writing one before this is done):
1. There's no need to evangelize apes or any other non-humans, because non-humans having immaterial souls, if they do, doesn't imply that those souls are immortal, capable of right and wrong, fallen or in need of salvation.
Nor is this much of a "gotcha" to the dualist - Aristotle and Aquinas both believed that animals had souls, and I see no reason why one must be a Cartesian to be a dualist. (I also don't see why a Cartesian has to deny souls of non-human animals.)
2. Contra the whole Churchland enterprise, I don't see any reason to think of substance dualism as a "research program", failed or otherwise, at least if we're talking about scientific research programs. I doubt that anyone in, say, medieval times reasoned like this:
X just suffered a blow to the head, causing unconsciousness.
We lack a good explanation of how the brain works.
Therefore, substance dualism is true.
Dualism, philosophically speaking, is in large part motivated by the sorts of concerns Victor raises in his book, and given that those worries lead many physicalists to opt for the at least prima facie wildly implausible eliminativist and epiphenomenalist positions, one might be forgiven for thinking that physicalist talk of failed (or degenerative) research programs is an instance of throwing stones from glass houses.
The conservation of energy concern, which I have mentioned twice, has twice gone unaddressed. I can only assume predictions of such violations, a consequence of interactionist dualism (where the interaction is from mind to brain/body), don't bother its proponents. If this is the case, then we are indeed living in incommensurate conceptual worlds, with very different standards for credibility. As a scientist, violation of COE makes it a theory that I would need a REALLY good primae facie case for before I would even consider taking it seriously, whether it is part of a research programme or not.
I am very happy, though, that my cheeky comment on monkey souls was addressed :-P Like I said, I am sure there are logically possible scenarios where things like bacteria have nonmaterial souls, but the human soul was given immortality by God. Etc. Etc. In fact, it is probably fun for theists to think about such possibilities. Have fun! As an undergrad it was always fun to stay up until the wee hours arguing with my Fundamentalist friends: we would be so angry with each other, arguing for hours. I am now very good friends with some of them, but I am now older and more crotchety, and (partly because of concenrs above) don't have the patience to work through all the convolutions of angels on pins. I'd rather think about neuroscience.
As for "Blue Devil Knight's" concern with the principle of the conservation of energy, I really do not understand this. Why is it so important that this be held onto so strongly?
Pace, "I have a theory of mind that implies when I drop an anvil from a bridge, it will not fall to the ground below. I don't understand what the big deal is."
I suppose if the goal is not to provide arguments that would convince someone who isn't already a dualist, there is no problem. Otherwise, COE (conservation of energy) is one of the most basic guiding principles in physics (look in the index of any physics book). The burden of proof is on those skeptical of this well-established principle to come up with arguments why we should take them seriously.
I'm sure that dualists can come up with logically possible worlds in which conservation of energy is violated, but they need to make a VERY strong, non-question begging, primae facie case for why one of the basic principles of physics is violated. We know it is logically possible, but hundreds of years of physics say it is nomically impossible.
As for Broad's argument on this point: "physical forces (such as the force of gravity and the rotation of the Earth) can cause changes in other physical systems (such as a pendulum) without the introduction of new energy", it is hard to believe it is Broad's argument since it clearly does not apply and is easy to dismiss: for all of the causes acting in such a case are still all physical causes, and the principle of the conservation of energy includes them all (for example, in a pendulum, energy changes over time from potential to kinetic and back again, but it remains conserved).
This is an interesting argument, but it sounds like sophistry. Let's think more about a pendulum: for one, a pendulum doesn't start to swing without some energy provided from outside the system. This is needed to build up some potential energy (that is, lifting the end of the pendulum requires energy). If I am a dualist, the brain is like the pendulum before being tweaked, and the mind is the tweaker. That is, the pendulum can start to move even if there are no physical inputs to the system: energy comes from some other place: COE is violated.
You could say we should focus on a pendulum that is already moving, but the point would not change. In this case, the dualist needs the pendulum to swing in a way that violates F=ma/the laws of gravity. This can only happen when COE (conservation of energy) is violated, as any change in velocity of the pendulum outside that allowed by F=ma and gravity implies that momentum (which is equivalent to energy) was not conserved! You can say that the earth or an explosion might knock it off course, but this is trivially part of physics and follows COE.
So I either don't understand, or don't agree with, Broad's claims. I presume the latter. Broad, being a moral philosopher in the head-in-the-sand Oxbridge tradition, likely didn't know what he was talking about.
Also, I think your argument, Keith, from the lack of convergence, is weak. Think of early quantum theory. There was no consensus early on, right before Bohr and Shrodinger built their models. Lack of consensus often preceeds the most interesting developments in a field.
I think all the mind-brain dependence is solid inductive evidence, in part because it is a straight prediction of physicalism but not dualism (which comes out sounding ad hoc when it scurries to deal with such dependencies).
We need to be careful not to overstate how much neuroscience has revealed. I study rat sensory cortex, and did my graduate thesis on the leech nervous system. At a truly fine-grained, explanatory level, neuroscience needs a lot more time to mature. We still don't fully understand how a leech bends! Don't get me wrong: in my opinion there is absolutely no reason to think we'll need more than neurons with their beautiful electrical signals swapping back and forth to handle everything, from consciousness to eye movements, but we are still in our infancy and shouldn't be arrogant. Right now, both materialists and dualists are making predictions about how they will feel once we have a complete understanding of the brain.
Note when I said an argument, quoting CalvinOstrum's post, sounded like sophistry, I wasn't referring to Calvin, but to Broad.
Broad, being a moral philosopher in the head-in-the-sand Oxbridge tradition, likely didn't know what he was talking about.
I wrote too fast here. He did much more than just moral philosophy, and I was not familiar with this. For instance, he was also a diligent student of parapsychology, even becoming the president of the Society for Psychical research. Here is a lecture he gave called Normal Cognition, Clairvoyance and Telepathy.
Keith wrote:
Broad took "the intellectually honest dualist's approach" of conceding the mind-brain dependence argument. For instance, he writes:
"We find bodies without minds; we never find minds without bodies. When we do find minds we always find a close correlation between their processes and those of their bodies. This, it is argued, strongly suggests that minds depend for their existence on bodies; in which case, though survival may still be abstractly possible, it is to the last degree unlikely.”
The problem here, Keith, is that you don’t seem to acknowledge that theistic dualists, such as myself, are working from a set of presuppositions quite different than yours. If physicalism is true, and if God does not exist, then I might consider your view to be the “intellectually honest” one. However, the truth of physicalism is not a given, nor is atheism. If one starts with theism, then dualism is not problematic. Broad’s concern vanishes – God is the paradigm case of a mind without a body.
I think the charge of “intellectual dishonesty” might apply to dualists who are also physicalists and atheists.
BDK wrote:
I think all the mind-brain dependence is solid inductive evidence, in part because it is a straight prediction of physicalism but not dualism (which comes out sounding ad hoc when it scurries to deal with such dependencies).
Historically speaking, I don’t know when more robust versions of dualism (those that embrace a deep, 2-way causal connection) began to emerge, but it would be interesting to see if they preceded the advent of modern neuroscience. If they did, then the charge of “ad hoc” would be unfounded.
In any case, adjustments to a theory are not automatically ad hoc. They are only ad hoc if the adjustments seem somewhat alien and procrustean. It needs to be shown how adjusting dualism to allow for deep, 2-way causal connections is a case of shoe-horning. Failing to improve or fine-tune a theory based on new data would be irresponsible (again, assuming that the data can find a home within the current paradigm). I should add that I do not believe that the mind “emerges” from the brain. If anything, the body and soul of a being would come into existence simultaneously. (This could open a can of worms.)
I am presently reading Broad closely, as well as this excellent discussion of the issue from a Catholic perspective. It is clear and penetrating (as the Catholic philosophers often are). Here is one fun line for example:
[T]he tension of gravitation keeps the earth in its elliptical course round the sun without affecting the quantity of energy possessed by the moving mass. If the enormous force of gravitation were suddenly extinguished, say, by the annihilation of the sun, the earth would fly away at a tangent with the same energy as before.
I plan to think a lot more about this COE argument and will post any interesting stuff I find...At the catholic site they seem to have come upon the exact same solution as Broad: the mind 'redirects' energy (e.g., from chemical to heat), but never changes the total amount. I will need to think about whether they have gotten around this objection.
That said, I must admit my physicalism was always based on neuroscientific and evolutionary considerations, but it will be exciting to have one of my trusty stand-by arguments (for those who push for deductive arguments) refuted!
Perhaps I dismissed Broad too quickly. I've been reading Mind and its Place in Nature: very well written! I always admired the Churchland's clarity of writing, but Broad is close....
Keith,
Your comments are lucid and reasonable. However, I think we may have a misunderstanding. I was responding to the charge of being "intellectually dishonest," not to the general attack on dualism. If I was merely claiming that, given my presuppositions, dualism is true, then your last post would be on target. That line of reasoning would be open to anyone, no matter how ridiculous their assertion.
In my understanding, intellectual dishonesty is the failure to honestly consider the data because one is fearful of what conclusions it might lead to. It's the "head in the sand" approach. Is this what you meant?
If that is what you meant, then (I suppose I should only speak for myself) I can hardly be accused of this. I am not ignoring or dismissing the neurological evidence. I welcome and embrace it. But data is interpreted depending on the schema with which one is working. There is nothing inconsistent or "dishonest" about incorporating this data into my schema of theistic dualism. Now, don't miss this -- I'm NOT saying that given my schema, dualism is true (that would be question begging). I'm saying that given my schema, I am not being dishonest. THAT was the charge. If I am still missing something here, then please help me see how I am being dishonest. Now, if you would like to take issue with theism per se, then I would be glad to entertain any such arguments. But for the theist, it is clearly false that brains are necessary for minds.
I will close my comments by saying that I enjoyed the exchange and learned a few things in the process! Thanks to Keith & Victor for initiating this helpful dialogue.
I guess I am 3 years late but I thought that the Law of COE only applies to closed systems? Couldn't a case be made that perhaps the non physical aspect of the mind itself is not a closed system? This is just me rambling, I have not postulated this in full with regards to the back and forth comments, this is more of me just trying to see if the idea itself is even plausible. How does quantum entanglement fit into this equation as well?
There are multiple ways that substance dualism is able to evade the COE objection to the interaction problem.
a) Physics is incomplete. Hence, mind could be part of "physics", which we currently have no clue about -- like our level of understanding of dark energy and dark matter 50 years ago. This unknown mental physical process would then be subject to COE, and interact with other matter, analogously to how dark energy does.
b) Interaction is non-energetic -- the addition of information or logic state change affect but add no energy to a physical system. This is the approach taken by Eccles, and Penrose. This could be limited to Quanta, or -- if macro-scale chaotic systems are similarly meta-unstable, could in principle be a direct interaction with neuronal patterns.
c) Mind is interactive with physics, and one should treat the combined mind-body as the "closed system" for energy conservation -- and energy could in principle have a mental form. The current status of measurement of energy conservation does not exclude this possibility. This dualism would ultimately trend toward a neutral monism, and the duality would be only one of convenience, not fundamental essence.
d) Energy conservation is not really a "law", and can be and is broken. This actually is the current position of physics, where energy conservation is a local reflection of a gauge symmetry, which can and is spontaneously broken under TBD circumstances. ALL of our symmetry principles, upon which the conservation laws are based, are expected to be only regularities, NOT "laws". One example of broken energy conservation are time crystals. A second is the creation of massive amounts of energy and mass in the inflation phase of the Big Bang. If energy conservation is not a law, then breaking it is not an obstacle to interactive dualism.
Physicists generally do not treat our current understanding of energy conservation as inviolable, because physics is still under construction, and its edges are not defined. Physicists propose variants of these four strategies to address anomalous phenomena all the time -- these are the sorts of proposals one finds in theoretical physics journals. It is generally non-physicists who treat physics as closed and law-bound.
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