Over at Recursive Thinking, there are charges of massive ignorance, trapped by preconceptions concerning those who don't believe in the sentience of electrons. Jeffrey Shallit explains with an example of a non-techie who expected that the graphics being constructed on a monitor screen by a computer routine actually required a human to somewhere to be doing the actual drawing. Shallit could not come up with an adequate explanation to overcome the preconceptions of the non-techie's misunderstanding. (Feynman would not be impressed).
Shallit has claimed that an examination of the machine (brain) and its physical characteristics is enough to comprehend its activities. This is because - as I will reduce his already strenuous reduction - electrons are sentient. Now he doesn't say this outright, he merely presumes it, a necessary preconception of his own, while attacking others' preconceptions.
"Like my acquaintance in the graphics lab 30 years ago, poor RLC is trapped by his/her own preconceptions, I don't know what to say. How can anyone, writing a post on a blog which is entirely mediated by things like electrons in wires or magnetic disk storage, nevertheless ask "How can a chemical process or an electrical potential have content or be about something?"
Shallit misses the content of the question completely. In living things the electrons or ions are not just carriers of information which is modulated by intelligent creatures; Shallit presumes that the electrons are causers. This is a radical departure from physics and the entire electronics industry, where electrons are moved around like chessmen, placed in positions where they do the bidding of the intellect in charge. Or from the communications industry where electrons are sent in packets which are rationally designed by over-seeing intellects, and carry information of which the electrons are entirely incapable of comprehension.
So why, then, does Shallit expect electrons to be the causers of intellectual activity in the mind? Is he perhaps stuck like a fly in amber to his own preconception of both electron sentience and the overarching stupidity of those who can't see his point as a valid statement of physics?
Or is there evidence somewhere that electrons are in fact sentient causers of consciousness, intellect, abstract thought, agency, and rationality. All this is caused within a meat machine which is inert without the sentience of its electrons. He presents no such evidence.
Of course this goes against Dawkins' concept of the living creature as a mere carrier, a host, for DNA molecules, blindly doing what is necessary to promote and preserve their molecular overlord. Do electrons compete with DNA for control of the meat machine?
The supposed sentience of electrons is a fantasmagoric projection with no basis in observation or evidence, certainly not empirical evidence. It is a necessary by-product of having to deal with the empirically observable status of humans as uncaused causers, a status which cannot be allowed under Philosophical Materialism. Causation of human activity then must be transferred to some material object, no matter how inanimate or preposterous that appears. The absudity then is covered by the assertion that those who cannot accept it are ignorant and / or deluded beyond hope, beyond his ability to communicate his truth into their own set of preconceptions.
As if this were not enough, Shallit continues by perpetuating the reduction of human intellect (accidentally attained) to that of robots (intelligently designed). This fallacy is so apparent on the face that I will move on to other reductions.
Those include reducing consciousness to mere awareness, and then reducing awareness to mere input signals from the surrounding environment. This is, even on its face, absurd. Is a video recorder conscious in the same or even similar sense as is Richard Dawkins?
Shallit thinks so.
12 comments:
Wow, so anything with electrons flowing through it possesses sentience?
I've always suspected my fridge was secretly trying to kill me with all the buzzing it makes.
It's not the fridge. It's the electric blanket - you always have to watch out for the quiet ones.
I have never discovered 'conscious intent' in Maxwell's equations-
but my TV is trying to make me stupid...(and apparently succeeding)
Where does Shallit say or imply that electrons are sentient? Really bad straw argument. You don't even appear to understand basic neurobiology if you think brain activity involves flows of electrons (something Shallit never said, but you seem to think).
As I said, I reduced Shallit's reduction. If the causer for the mind is, in fact, a part of the machine, then it must be a part of the dynamics. Since the neurons are relatively static within the timeframe of, say, an original thought, then the electrochemical ionic discharge must be the causer, being the dynamic element. Ions are determined by electrons. So, in the spirit of reductio ad absurdum, the electrons must have intellect or at least sentience.
If it is not the electrons, then the ion itself must be having the thought, which it confers upon the mind, second hand. Or if it is not the ions, then it must be the neurons which are thinking away, and then transferring the thought to the conscious mind. Any way you turn it, some collection of mass is doing the thinking and then allowing the conscious mind to have access to the thought. The beauty of this argument is that it relieves the conscious mind of any responsibility for any thought or action, since it obviously didn't do it, it was just informed of the matter post facto. A nice death blow for free will... except that it doesn't stand in the face of personal experience (the original empiricism).
It is a natural and only slight extension of Shallit's actual words, and certainly within the scope of his thinking.
Michael Shermer has referred to the MRI brain images that show blood flow in the cranium but are used to claim that a certain mental function resides in a specific place, as the modern phrenology. It is demonstrable that not only is the brain plastic, it is constantly rewiring itself, and that brain structure is not an indicator of mental ability as is shown in hydrocephalics with only a thin shell of brain lining the cranium while the interior is half-gallon or so of nothing but brain / spinal fluid, yet function normally, even achieving math degrees.
The function of the brain as the material causer of rationality and original thought is both unsubstantiated and not a predictable outcome of inert substances, electrical fields or any combination thereof. In fact, it would be considered absurd, were it not for the necessity of a material cause in the Philosophical Materialism agenda.
Those who pretend to understand the mind in terms of the brain are not in control of the facts. To top that off with arrogance and a faulty worldview is an irresponsibity that requires challenging.
As I said, I reduced Shallit's reduction. If the causer for the mind is, in fact, a part of the machine, then it must be a part of the dynamics. Since the neurons are relatively static within the timeframe of, say, an original thought, then the electrochemical ionic discharge must be the causer, being the dynamic element. Ions are determined by electrons. So, in the spirit of reductio ad absurdum, the electrons must have intellect or at least sentience.
This is both a strawman and a fallacy of decomposition on your part. No materialist informed of the facts of neuroscience would say that because a brain produces sentience, its component subatomic particles must be sentient, nor is it implied by the position that the material brain is sufficient to explain consciousness. Do serious chemists say that because water is wet, individual water molecules (or even their electrons and protons) must therefore exhibit wetness? Wetness is an emergent property of a system of water molecules. Wetness is irreducible at some point, but this hardly implies wetness cannot be explained by materialism, or that the supernatural (whatever that is) is required to explain it. This sort of naive reductionism is a common strawman argument leveled at materialists, but I have yet to seen an actual materialist make it.
If it is not the electrons, then the ion itself must be having the thought, which it confers upon the mind, second hand. Or if it is not the ions, then it must be the neurons which are thinking away, and then transferring the thought to the conscious mind. Any way you turn it, some collection of mass is doing the thinking and then allowing the conscious mind to have access to the thought. The beauty of this argument is that it relieves the conscious mind of any responsibility for any thought or action, since it obviously didn't do it, it was just informed of the matter post facto. A nice death blow for free will... except that it doesn't stand in the face of personal experience (the original empiricism).
Proof that you are strawmanning is right here in this paragraph. You can't even represent monist materialism correctly. Brain processes transfer thoughts to the mind? That doesn't sound like monism. That sounds like dualism, where there is a separate mind to transfer things to, which would be your position. And of course you then deliver the anticipated argument from consequences, that if neuroscience demonstrates that we don't have absolute metaphysical freewill (whatever that means) then there will be horrible moral consequences. Does it really need to be explained why something having moral consequences that you might find unsettling does not make it untrue?
And as for free will, that is another topic unto itself, but "personal experience" is hardly proof of free will. What is your personal experience of free will? That you can imagine a counterfactual decision that you didn't make in the past? That doesn't prove free will exists, it only proves that you can imagine a counterfactual decision, something that is entirely compatible with all of your decisions having been rigidly determined. I am not saying whether or not free will exists, as I don't even think free will is a well-defined concept so discussing its existence is a non-starter. All I'm pointing out here is that your reasoning is weak when you say that free-will must exist because you have a "personal experience" of it. I'm sure you're knowledgable enough about the facts of neuroscience to know that your visual field is not uniform and coherent, even though your "personal experience" of it is that it is. You and I have blindspots and inability to detect color and shape at the periphery, yet "personal experience" doesn't seem to indicate so. I certainly don't see any blindspots or lack of shape and color at the periphery of my visual field. "Personal experience" is a very weak argument, most especially when dealing with topics of neuroscience.
Michael Shermer has referred to the MRI brain images that show blood flow in the cranium but are used to claim that a certain mental function resides in a specific place, as the modern phrenology. It is demonstrable that not only is the brain plastic, it is constantly rewiring itself, and that brain structure is not an indicator of mental ability as is shown in hydrocephalics with only a thin shell of brain lining the cranium while the interior is half-gallon or so of nothing but brain / spinal fluid, yet function normally, even achieving math degrees.
Neuroscientists accept near-unanimously that brain functions are localized. I don't know the context in which you pulled Shermer, but if he is saying we should exercise caution in how we interpret fMRI, then he is right. This is an ongoing discussion in the field, but this does not disprove that brain functions are not localized. They are. And the fact that brain damaged patients can compensate for their brain damage by using other parts of their brain more actively does not disprove localization either. There was still lost functionality, and compensation for this has to be learned, and some intact portion of brain is still required. It is also debatable whether compensation for a lost function is the same thing as the original function. For example, I have a friend who had a stroke in his occipital lobe and is now legally blind. He has compensated for his blindness by utilizing his remaining senses more thoroughly than us sighted folks do. In fact, he's gotten so good at walking without bumping into things and without using sight, that you could probably put him and a sighted person into a dark maze and he would navigate it faster every time. Does this mean his vision is restored? No. He still can't read a book. He still can't watch TV. Brain compensation for a lost function does not necessarily restore the original function, so in no way can you conclude from this that localization does not occur.
Michael Shermer has referred to the MRI brain images that show blood flow in the cranium but are used to claim that a certain mental function resides in a specific place, as the modern phrenology. It is demonstrable that not only is the brain plastic, it is constantly rewiring itself, and that brain structure is not an indicator of mental ability as is shown in hydrocephalics with only a thin shell of brain lining the cranium while the interior is half-gallon or so of nothing but brain / spinal fluid, yet function normally, even achieving math degrees.
Neuroscientists accept near-unanimously that brain functions are localized. I don't know the context in which you pulled Shermer, but if he is saying we should exercise caution in how we interpret fMRI, then he is right. This is an ongoing discussion in the field, but this does not disprove that brain functions are not localized. They are. And the fact that brain damaged patients can compensate for their brain damage by using other parts of their brain more actively does not disprove localization either. There was still lost functionality, and compensation for this has to be learned, and some intact portion of brain is still required. It is also debatable whether compensation for a lost function is the same thing as the original function. For example, I have a friend who had a stroke in his occipital lobe and is now legally blind. He has compensated for his blindness by utilizing his remaining sense more thoroughly than us sighted folks do. In fact, he's gotten so good at walking without bumping into things and without using sight, that you could probably put him and a sighted person into a dark maze and he would navigate it faster every time. Does this mean his vision is restored? No. He still can't read a book. He still can't watch TV. Brain compensation for a lost function does not necessarily restore the original function, so in no way can you conclude from this that localization does not occur.
AL,
As I said, both in the original text and in the reply to you, I used reductio ad Absurdum, a valid approach to decorating the fallacy at hand by taking the premise to its full conclusion.
Internet Encyclopedia:
In its most general construal, reductio ad absurdum – reductio for short – is a process of refutation on grounds that absurd – and patently untenable consequences would ensue from accepting the item at issue. This takes three principal forms according as that untenable consequence is:
1. a self-contradiction (ad absurdum)
2. a falsehood (ad falsum or even ad impossibile)
3. an implausibility or anomaly (ad ridiculum or ad incommodum)
The claim in question is whether the mechanics of the material brain are enough to explain or predict the mental functions of consciousness and intellect.
Given that in the material world the sum is not greater than its parts, then consciousness and intellect must reside either in one component or the aggregate componentry. The axiom of cause and effect contains a caveat that the effect is not greater or more complex than the cause. Entropy suggests that effects are less complex than their causes. Plus, there is nothing about mass or energy that allows the prediction of sentience, consciousness or intellect.
For these reasons it cannot be expected that electrochemical activity in and between neurons is the originating source of consciousness or intellect.
You seem not to be aware of the following development in neurobiology:
The recent articles on the purported delay between the 'brain' deciding to energize a muscle, and that information being then transmitted to the conscious mind, are taken by materialists to prove that the experience of consciousness and intellect etc. are secondary, and that the material neurological functions are primary, having made the decision before the conscious mind is aware of it.
That, in turn, makes the conscious mind a dependent variable, not independent. This has been seen as a victory for the anti-free will camp.
(continued in next comment due to space restrictions)
(Continued from previous comment)
But the unasked question remains, what induced the neurological brain to make the decision in the first place? The question is unasked and unanswered. So the possibilities remain as I stated. Under materialism, either the mass consisting of neurons and support tissue, plus biochemical ionic discharge activity, as an aggregate cause the activity which is designated as consciousness and intellect, or else some partial differential of those components causes the activity that is designated as consciousness and intellect.
The so-called emergence of the consciousness and intellect out of lesser forms of inert mass and undirected energy is untenable, and completely not predictable as a feature of these components.
On the other hand, if the mass and energy are directed, or focused toward these mental elements, what does the focused decision making, what is the source of the forcing function, if it is not the conscious intellect?
The denial of the primacy of the conscious intellect is a self-refuting non-coherence: if the conscious intellect is not in charge, or is a delusion / illusion, then human 'thoughts' clearly have no meaning, having not been derived by the conscious human, but by an aggregate of mass / energy which is not under the control of the deluded or non-existant conscious intellect . So a thought to any effect regarding the matter is neither consciously nor intellectually derived, and therefore is not the property of the conscious intellect.
These are consequences of the idea that the mind is purely a material artifact of the material brain, and the consequences are irrational.
The idea that wetness, which is the relationship of cohesion and adhesion properties, along with evaporation as a sensation of cooling perhaps, its inherent heat content, and also possibly its shear characteristics, is an emergent quality of water, is not tenable because all of these are sub-properties of water, not an all new unexpected entity. Wetness does not emerge from water, wetness is part of its material description and can easily be predicted from material sub-properties. To describe water without wetness is to exclude some of its basic physical properties. (All analogies have deficiencies, some deficiencies are encountered earlier than others).
The new speculative field of “emergence” is (currently) unsupported by any real empirical replicable data, to my knowledge. Further, it is motivated by the need to preserve materiality in the face of existing physical laws against things that require the effect to be greater and more complex than the cause. Certain effects, like the “butterfly effect”, and some chaos theory are grossly misused in order to try to preserve materialism. I would be happy to discuss those with you too, should you wish.
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