Final Cause, or, Hammers and Letters in a Lifeless Universe
Posted on 14 June 2010
Mechanical cause, which is sometimes called efficient cause or historical cause, is the description of an event, an object being moved, in terms of pressures and magnitudes of physical motions and forces acting on the event. Final cause is a description of an event, an actor acting, in terms of the end, purpose, intention, or that for the sake of which the event is done. A mechanical cause looks to the past, and asking what bumped into what to make the event; a final cause looks to the future, and asks what the actor feared or desired or anticipated.
In a recent discussion in this space, the question arose concerning final cause versus mechanical cause, and two objections were raised. The first, if I understood it, was that final cause, properly so called, did not exist because all final causes could be reduced to a recitation of mechanical causes. The other was that final causes are prescientific.
The second objection can be dismissed with a word. Physical sciences deal with identifying the mechanical causes of empirical events. Biological sciences deal with final causes. No biologists describing the mating dance of a peacock can avoid the language of attributing a final cause to the behavior: the dance is for something and meant to do something. Soft sciences like anthropology deal with final causes when they describe the mating rituals of various tribes and nations of man.
It is an agreement among physical sciences not to speculate on the final cause, if any, behind such behaviors as cannonballs flung from the Leaning Tower of Pisa reaching the ground at the same time despite a difference in weight, because such behaviors cannot be determined empirically, and therefore are beyond the grasp of science to determine.
Science is content to describe the form of what happens without saying for what purpose it happens.
But the silence of science is not the same as condemnation.
When science says “That is beyond what my methods can discover” she is not saying “That does not and cannot exist.”
No one can argue on purpose that purposeful acts do not exist, for either he contradicts himself, in which case his argument is suspect, or the words of his argument is the result of a blind natural process, in which case they are not words at all, merely noises conveying nothing.
So much for the second objection. Yes, physical scientists do not debate final causes. Baseball players also do not play football during their baseball games, and there is also no way to checkmate a king in checkers or go. But if we are talking about something outside of natural philosophy as it relates to physics, final causes are inescapable.
The first objection is more subtle, because it is a speculation grounded in metaphysics.
The first objection is that since everything is merely matter in motion, then anything in theory could be reduced to a numerical description of the position, vector, and mass-energy of small particles. Since the intention of an action is a thing, ergo, it in theory could be reduced to a description of vectors and masses.
The mere fact that no one ever has reduced even a simple final cause to a mechanical cause does not refute this argument, since it is based on a speculation that such reduction is ultimately possible in theory.
If an empiricist (or a guy from Missouri) says “show me” — reduce a final cause to a mechanical cause — the metaphysical materialist argument need only answer that the mere fact that such reduction has not yet been done does not mean that, several trillion millenniums from now the worm-things wallowing beneath a dying star lost in the supercluster beyond Indo-Pavus might not accomplish the task.
The only way to address the argument is to address the axiom that everything is matter in motion. The problem with the statement is that even if it were true, it does not follow that everything can be reduced to material motions without a loss of meaning. A list of numbers telling the position of moving parts or particles does not tell you what it means, or what purpose it serves. A list of numbers does not mean anything in particular. Even if you described in excruciating detail the position of every dot of ink on a page, if those dots do not form letters in a language I read, and the letters do not form words, and the words do not have some relation to concepts in reality, literal or metaphorical, and do not have logically formal non-contradiction, then the message is meaningless. The message will not somehow acquire meaning by describing the position of more and more dots of ink.
Let me use a clearer example to emphasize this point:
Once upon a time, there was a homicide case. The defense admits that the defendant shot the victim.
The Judge instructed the Jury that, as a legal matter (1) if the defendant did not form the specific intent to commit a criminal act in his mind before or during the act, he cannot be found guilty of murder in the first degree. Also, (2) a crime of passion, such as when a man suddenly finds his wife in his lover’s arms, is murder in the second degree, and carries a reduced penalty. Also, (3) If the man was acting in his own self-defense in a place (such as his own home) where he had no duty to retreat, then this defense might mitigate the crime and lead to a finding of not guilty. Hence, not just the brute fact that the defendant shot the victim, but the meaning of the act, will determine the verdict and the degree of punishment.
The defendant took the witness stand in his own defense. He was asked on cross examination: “Why was the victim shot?”
The defendant gives two answers:
ANSWER ONE. The finger, actuated by nerve-firings in the finger muscles, caused the trigger of the murder weapon to be depressed, which dropped the hammer, which ignited the primer, which caused the gunpowder in the cartridge explosively to expand, propelling the bullet from the barrel at such a velocity that it struck the victim in the chest, penetrating his heart and lungs, killing him instantly from hydrostatic shock. That is why he died.
ANSWER TWO. Coming home unexpectedly, I found my wife in bed with the mailman copulating like weasels. When she saw me, she screamed that she was being raped and tossed me the revolver I keep in my bedside nightstand for self protection. The mailman advanced toward me in a threatening manner. I decided to kill him, not because I believed he was a rapist, and not because I thought his manner was threatening, but because I hated him for soiling my wife, and therefore I wanted him dead. It was my intent to shoot him in order to kill him.
Now if only Answer One is given to the Jury, and not Answer Two, then the legal meaning of the act of (1) whether it was murder in the first degree or (2) whether it was murder in the second degree or (3) whether it was in self-defense cannot be determined. This meaning defines of what crime the defendant can justly be found guilty.
On the other hand, if Answer Two and not Answer One is given to the Jury, the legal meaning of the act is not defined, or even addressed. Answer One fits all three legal meanings of the act. Answer Two does not.
My question is this. Does Answer One, the mechanical cause, contain the same information as Answer Two, the final cause?
If there is no distinction between mechanical cause and final cause, then the two answers must contain the same information. Please note that if Answer Two can be deduced from Answer One, it would indeed contain the same information, merely in an implied or derivable form, much in the same way the shape of a bird is material in the genetics in the egg.
Is that the case here? Can the information in Answer Two be derived or deduced from the information in Answer One?
Is it the case in this example that there is no distinction between mechanical cause and final cause?
Now, let us suppose for the sake of argument that Answer One is found to be insufficient, in that it only describes the mechanics of the firing of the murder weapon, but does not trace the mechanics of the act back far enough.
We must expand Answer One: “The trigger was pulled because the finger was actuated by a charge of electricity stimulating the finger muscle. The charge came from the nervous system, through nerves and nerve-trunks from a set of ganglia in the cortex. A charge of .05 microvolts appeared in the Sylvan Fissure area of the brain at 103, and a charge of .03 microvolts appeared in the thalamus complex at time 102, and a set of impulses from the optic nerve stimulated the thalamus at time 101, and lightwaves consisting of various frequencies and patterns stimulated the chemicals in the back of the eye at time 100. The lightwaves bounced off the surface of the victim, and came from the window, and came from the moon, which was full, and came in turn from the sun, and came in turn from atomic reactions taking place in the sun to produce light.”
Now, what is missing? Have we not told the thoughts and the passions in the mind of the defendant at the time involved? Of course not. Saying .03 microvolts in the thamalus does not saying what meaning from the point of view of the defendant that neural message held for him. That is because “he” and “him” and “meaning” and “message” are all concepts related to final causes, to act and to the intensions of acts, whereas “force” and “magnitude” and “voltage” and “duration” are all concepts related to the mechanical causes, that is, related to the description of how a passive bit of matter is acted upon by the external forces of another passive bit of matter.
But this merely pushes the objection back by one remove. If we accept metaphysical empiricism, then all reality can be described empirically and there is nothing left over which is non-empirical. On the other hand, if it is true that the meaning of a message, or the meaning of an act, or the final cause of a tool, cannot be reduced to a list of numbers describing the magnitudes of matter in motion, then it would be true that there is a reality that cannot be reduced to empiricism.
Let us use the example of a tool, as this is the clearest example. The word ‘tool’ is distinguished from the word ‘object’ only because of the final cause involved. A tool is meant for a task. A hammer is meant to pound nails, a screwdriver to drive screws, a crowbar to pry. You can use a hammer to drive a screw, or a screwdriver to pry, but these uses are outside the design of the tool.
Now let us suppose that a tool exists in the woodshed of a handyman in Winona, Minnesota. It is a sledge hammer. It was constructed by the Mississippi Welders Supply Company, and bears its maker’s mark. Now, while it is true that the handyman could pick up a rock and use that as a tool to drive a fencepost the next time he wanted to drive a post, it is also true that the presence of the sledgehammer in his shed is not an accident and not a meaningless event. If called to the witness stand in a court of law, and asked to testify whether or not the sledge hammer was a tool he keeps in his shed, it would be perjury for him to answer in the negative.
The fact that the rock is not a tool but is being used as a tool does not logically imply that the hammer, when used as a tool, is not a tool when not so used. The rock was produced by blind natural processes and the hammer was designed.
On the other hand, if called before an tenured professor who convinced him that no tools existed because no final causes existed, perhaps that professor could get the handyman to say that the sledge hammer was merely a meaningless object and not a tool: but no matter what he said to the professor, the next day, if he had to drive a post, in the normal course of events, he would go to his toolshed and get the sledge and use it as it was meant to be used.
The distinction between a rock and a hammer is clear enough in everyday speech. It is only after talking to a tenured professor would the handyman speak of his hammer in a circumlocution, such as “A meaningless object produce by blind natural processes, including human thought and deliberation, which I chose to use as a tool, but which is not innately a tool” rather than using the more natural language and calling a hammer a tool and a rock not a tool.
In such a case, the words used to talk to the court of law would fit reality better than the words used to talk to the professor, because the professor’s words are being used outside their ordinary meaning, and are being stretched or shrunk to fit into a particular intellectual theory. This is not to say the professor cannot make his word-game logically self-consistent, but he is violating Occam’s razor, and adducing a complex explanation rather than a simple one to save an article of metaphysical faith.
Now let us further suppose that there exists another dimension, whose laws of nature have nothing in common with ours, and only our laws of metaphysics are shared in common. The speed of light is different, the gravitational constant is different, the way strong and weak nuclear forces act is different, and that universe has phlogiston as well as N-rays. The universe is completely uninhabited, and no life and no intelligent life exists there or ever will. By a blind and unintentional natural process, in one place an object comes into existence that has a wooden haft fitted, quite by accident, to a metal head. It looks like a sledgehammer, in fact, to make the hypothetical interesting, let us say that it looks exactly like the sledgehammer in the toolshed of the handyman from Winona, down to the scratches and the manufacturer’s mark.
Is this a tool? It was not designed nor built by anyone for any purpose, nor does it serve any purpose during the span of time while its parts retain their shape.
I would argue that it is not a tool, but merely an object. The shape is an accident and has no meaning. The handle was not designed to fit the human hand and arm because there are no humans in that universe and no human arms and no designers of any kind.
I would furthermore argue that the difference between a mere object and a tool is not an empirical fact. Empirically, the sledge hammer in Winona and the hammer-shaped object in the phlogiston universe are identical and interchangeable. No material property or quality is different in any way.
But one is a tool. It has a purpose for which it was made by the Mississippi Welders Supply Company. It has a purpose for which it is used. It has a purpose not only in relation to the handyman, but in relation to the whole human world. Any human person seeing that sledgehammer, if he were intelligent, would grasp that it was meant for hammering. The shape of the handle and the shape of the human hand and arm would be fitted or suited one to another, by design.
If the handyman suddenly and for no reason says that the sledgehammer is a doorstop, or a screwdriver, or a prybar, he is acting beyond his powers: he is making a statement he does not have the authority to make. If he took the stand in a court of law testified that the sledgehammer was a prybar, he would be committing perjury. The purpose served by the sledgehammer is not up to him. It is not a matter of taste or opinion.
Now, in theory, if every human being on the planet, and retroactively back through time, suddenly had (and has always had) tentacles or crab claws instead of hands, the sledgehammer would no longer be a tool. It would be useless, something no human could hold or use. Maybe we could use one as a doorstop, but then this would be like the handyman picking up a rock and using the rock as a hammer. It would be a tool by use, but not by design.
As a third hypothetical, let us consider a letter, dated February 14th, written by the handyman to the manufacturing company praising the hammer. By pure coincidence, in another part of the uninhabited phlogiston universe, a square bit of matter remarkably like paper unintentionally and accidently comes into existence by a blind natural process, and is splattered during a phlogiston explosion by something remarkably like ink and just so happens to form what look like the exact same letters in the exact same shapes, including the man’s signature and the misspelling of the word ‘nuncupatory’. The two are so similar that the handyman’s letter and the random bits of matter that look like a letter could be swapped with no one telling the difference.
But there is no observer to observe the square bit of matter. It is not a letter, since there is no letter writer, and the ink marks on the surface are not words, since no languages, no signs, no calls, no symbols, can or could exist in a universe with no life. It has no more meaning than the billions and billions of other square bits of matter common in the phlogiston universe, splattered with countless trillions of possible combinations of ink-shapes, none of which mean anything because there is no one in that universe to whom anything has meaning.
I submit that there are only two choices here: either at least one thing ultimately has a final cause, or nothing does. If anything ultimately and irreducibly has a final cause, even one thing, then empiricism is insufficient to describe reality, and a distinction must be made between final and mechanical cause.
On the other hand, if nothing has a final cause, then not only are designed and manufactured tools indistinguishable from meaningless and accidental objects, but by the same logic, words are indistinguishable from noise, and the patterns of electrons in a sane human brain are indistinguishable from white noise, or the meaningless scurry of electrons from cloud to cloud during a lightningstorm. In which case no words, including those that argue that all final causes can ultimately be reduced to mechanical causes, have meaning.
I agree that it is the final cause that differentiates a hammer from a rock. Where I work, the false dichotomy is between a piece of steel and a hammer, not a rock and a hammer. The difference between a piece of steel and a hammer is that the piece of steel is within arms’ reach and the hammer is back at the toolcrib. The usual reason for going to the toolcrib for a hammer is that the pieces of steel you are working with are not useful as hammers.
It would be a great piece of luck for a rock suitable for driving nails to be easier to find than a carpenters’ hammer, but I would not hesitate to use that rock if, while looking for a hammer, I found it first.
But you are merely repeating your original assertion, without adding any additional information to support it! The point is precisely that a [i]sufficiently detailed description[/i] at the atomic level [i]does[/i] contain the meaning, the thoughts, and the passions.
How do you know? Have you ever taken a long list of numbers and failed to derive meaning from it? I refer you again to your own analogy of the bird’s shape contained within the DNA. The DNA is formless to a human eye, just as a list of numbers is meaningless; but nonetheless the DNA does describe the eagle soaring on the wind. You are arguing from incredulity: You do not understand how the meaning can be extracted from the numbers, and therefore it must be, you think, impossible; the meaning must be separate. That-does-not-follow!
Verbiage, prolixity! You introduce a distinction between tools and objects in language, and argue that because you see a distinction, there must be a distinction in nature. And in fact you are right, there [i]is[/i] a distinction in nature, but it’s not what you think it is; it rests in the description of the brains of the designer. Your analogy of the sledgehammer-object that comes into being randomly but is indistinguishable from the sledgehammer-tool fails to engage the naturalistic explanation of the tool, because in fact the two [i]are[/i] distinguishable: You just have to examine a different set of atoms. There exists relevant information about the tool which is not found in the atoms that make it up, but in a different set of atoms; it-does-not-follow that no distinction between them can be made without resort to other things than atoms.
I suggest that you are exhibiting a classic pattern: You look at a model which you dislike, you reason about it using [i]your own[/i] model until you think you have a contradiction, and then you stop, satisfied that your work is done, without considering what the counter to your objection might be. This is not the way to arrive at truth.
As a side note, I suggest that a tool designer might well think about people using his screwdriver to pry, and consider whether it’s worth adding some extra metal to make it better suited to that use, or at least ensure it won’t bend into uselessness. But this does not much affect the main argument, except as evidence that the final cause is not to be determined purely by looking at the object.
I’m not certain I agree with this; if the judge and jury agreed with him, it seems to me that as a matter of law the sledgehammer would be a prybar. And the jury might well agree, if they had, for example, video footage of the workman using it thus, and his own testimony – he being otherwise trustworthy – that he never used it otherwise. Alternatively, a jury of men-at-arms from the middle ages might find it ridiculous that a peasant should claim that something so obviously suited to be a weapon, is in fact a tool. It is made of good steel, after all; who would waste such a material on a mere farming tool?!
But even taking the argument at face value, it-does-not-follow (a rationally designed language would have a single short phrase for this!) that the information about the intended use does not exist in atoms; you can look at the brain of the designer, and a sufficiently detailed examination will tell you what he had in mind for the tool.
You keep arguing that the final cause cannot be determined by examining the atoms of an object; very well; but it-does-not-follow that it cannot be determined from atoms at all. It is rather that the information is not local to the object, being contained in a different set of atoms. “Spooky action at a distance”, if you like! You will observe that even in your theory, you cannot determine the final cause by looking only at the two sledgehammer-things, if the one from your lifeless universe should suddenly be transported to the workman’s shed. Only by looking at human intentions and the history of the two sledgehammers would you be able to say “This is a mere object, while that is a designed tool”. So the objection that the final cause is not contained in the hammer is not sufficient; you must also show that it is not contained anywhere else.
As a side note, I use ‘information’ where you use ‘meaning’; the two are not exact synonyms, but I prefer ‘information’ because it has a formal definition and can be measured.
This is fair enough.
No! Absolutely not! I refer you again to information theory, linked above; and to the distinction which, even empirically, can be made between tools and objects, as I described. I also refer you to the mechanical monkey I described on Friday (not Thursday as I thought), which you have not yet engaged with. There is a train of thought leading from this monkey to rescuing the appearance (a useful phrase, by the way) of the meaning we experience; but you keep skipping to the end and denying the conclusion I’m going to reach, without engaging even the first step of the chain. If you find this discussion interesting – no blame if you don’t; we all have lives to be getting on with – then I request that you attempt to follow this reasoning.
Apparently the moderation filter dislikes long posts, but while we wait, I offer this movie script as a humorous comment on the issues we are discussing.
“On the other hand, if nothing has a final cause, then not only are designed and manufactured tools indistinguishable from meaningless and accidental objects, but by the same logic, words are indistinguishable from noise, and the patterns of electrons in a sane human brain are indistinguishable from white noise, or the meaningless scurry of electrons from cloud to cloud during a lightningstorm. In which case no words, including those that argue that all final causes can ultimately be reduced to mechanical causes, have meaning.”
If the arguer is being ruthlessly consistent, might they not say, “We do not claim that the words expressing our arguments have ‘meaning’ in the sense you define the term — i.e. some absolute informational property that cannot be empirically observed but only logically deduced. However, as arbitrary agreed-upon shorthand sensory referents for particular experiences, events and processes, they possess an illusion of what you call ‘meaning’ that is adequate to the purposes of the argument”?
What I’ve always found difficult about any argument for eliminative materialism vs. free will is that it is utterly unfalsifiable from both sides, as there is absolutely no metaphysical axiom admitted in common between the worldviews that I know of and all observable empirical evidence is insufficient. Like thinking about the clash between LaVeyan Satanism and traditional Christianity, where I imagine LaVey and C.S. Lewis dismissing each other with “That is exactly what we said you would say.”
Occam’s Razor, I believe, is admitted by both sides in this debate. My end goal is to get Mr Wright to agree that a purely material explanation can, in fact, account for the meaning he feels, and that to postulate additional facts about the universe, ie final causes not reducible to atoms, is therefore in violation of that principle. Of course the Razor is a rule of thumb and not strict proof, but at least we might reach the point of agreeing that reasonable men can disagree on the subject.
Further, I think you’re mistaken about the lack of empirical evidence: Both sides agree that we perceive meaning, and more generally qualia – the ‘redness’ of red things, in the classic example. The point in dispute is whether these feelings can be explained in terms of atoms. Mr Wright’s contention, if I understand it correctly, is that we can directly perceive that these things are not atoms; it is, to coin a phrase, obvious. My contention, on the other hand, is that this is an intuition, albeit a very widely shared one, and one which is mistaken. In addition, Mr Wright makes the argument that if my thesis holds, then there is no point in listening to me, because I am only a collection of atoms emitting random noises; I intend to show that this is false, because the noises are anything but random even though they are deterministic. (Modulo whatever one might believe about the effects of quantum mechanics on human brains and on determinism; I have no strong opinion of that subject.) In hindsight I should have laid out these things from the start, to form a road map and let people see where I was going, rather than try to start with the first step and give no indication of the destination.
With talk of ‘atoms’, materialism, and physicalism, I think it’s worthwhile to point out Noam Chomsky thoughts on all these things, recently highlighted by Ed Feser:
“There is no longer any definite conception of body. Rather, the material world is whatever we discover it to be, with whatever properties it must be assumed to have for the purposes of explanatory theory. Any intelligible theory that offers genuine explanations and that can be assimilated to the core notions of physics becomes part of the theory of the material world, part of our account of body. If we have such a theory in some domain, we seek to assimilate it to the core notions of physics, perhaps modifying these notions as we carry out this enterprise.”
and
“The mind-body problem can therefore not even be formulated. The problem cannot be solved, because there is no clear way to state it. Unless someone proposes a definite concept of body, we cannot ask whether some phenomena exceed its bounds.”
In other words, ‘materialism’ is in large part a red herring, because just what is “physical” has been obscured for a long time now – the Cartesian model was serviceable, but since expired, and there’s no definite and equal replacement for it. And this before getting into Bertrand Russell’s observation that (paraphrasing) with science and observation, all we get are abstractions. Intrinsic properties of what we see are, sadly, off-limits.
“I intend to show that this is false, because the noises are anything but random even though they are deterministic.”
Mr. Wright only mentioned “random” at one point, and that was to describe the forces that brought about the second ‘letter’ in his example. That noises are or aren’t deterministic isn’t his claim or problem, as near as I can read. A universe consisting of nothing but a floating pebble is “deterministic” in some sense.
As far as whether “reasonable men” can “agree” or “disagree” about these things, the problem is that for the eliminative materialist, these words don’t have the meaning they do to others. They can’t, because they’re precisely what’s being eliminated – hence the constant fights where eliminative materialists have it pointed out to them that ‘believing in EM’ is self-contradictory. EMs end up replying that they don’t really ‘believe’ anything, but what they do do is.. well, it cannot yet be explained, but a future science shall do the trick.
Trying to be a materialist without smuggling formal and final causes back into the picture is difficult.
Nonetheless that is what I intend to do. May I suggest that it’s better to dismiss my line of argument after you’ve seen it?
1) Who dismissed it? I simply said the general attempt was difficult. A misreading like that doesn’t bode well for you.
2) “Intend to do”? Is the final cause of your argument to show there are no final causes?
I’m not sure a purely materialistic explanation is a good model for how we find meaning. In this it fails Occam’s Razor, because the purely materialistic explanation is too complex to explain abstract meaning, whether true or not. Maybe one day an empiricist will prove how the meaning of letters on a page is contained by the ink, or by the positioning of electrons in our brain. For now, the mechanism by which this might happen is so needlessly complicated that it makes it impossible to prove or disprove anything about the meaning of letters in a page to argue about them from atoms and neurons. Basically, whether true or false, the materialistic explanation is not a good model for the philosophical questions being asked.
I refer you to my previous comment (in the ‘Sophomoronology’ thread), on the distinction between model and physics. It is by no means in dispute that a final-cause model is a lot simpler to think about than an atoms-and-neurons model. But one should not on this account mistake the model for the physics.
I note also that you are misapplying Occam’s Razor. A model which postulates additional entities – final causes – is more complicated than one which postulates only atoms, even if it is more computationally tractable; the latter is due to mechanical properties of the human brain, not to real simplicity. It’s important to keep this distinction in mind; intuition is not a good guide to what is actually simple. As an example, consider two competing models of thunder. One is something with electrons and static buildup in clouds; the other is the wrath of the thunder-god Thor. Now the latter model actually feels simpler to a human, because it refers to concepts which are, as it were, black boxes in our own minds. We all know what it feels like to be angry and to smash things, so it appears to us that this is a simple, readily-graspable concept. But this is illusion. To understand anger, we are running our own anger-feeling machinery (please note, this particular argument applies whether you believe that the machinery is material or not), which has a huge number of moving parts. The true Kolmogorov complexity of the concept is vast, but hidden from us. Thus the apparent simplicity of “The skies are angry” is an illusion caused by our inability to model properly the real workings of our own brains.
Occam’s razor is about the tractability and usability of a model.
Ok, the anger model of lightning is simpler, but not useful. It doesn’t allow us to build lightning rods. Not to mention the cosmology of the Nordic people arguably had more parts and stories than a basic rundown of electricity. The electric model is a bit more complex, but simpler for certain utilities, like building lightning rods. We also have many models for explaining electricity, and different ones are used by engineers and scientists depending on application — one does not part from quantum mechanics wave/particle duality to build a lightning rod, even though the model is more scientifically accurate. Occam’s razor is not that you should use the simplest model, period. But that if your model requires too many elements to explain, you will not understand your model and it will not be of any use.
Chemical and electrical analyses of the brain have some uses, but as of still are not very good models for deriving logic, morality, epistemology, etc.
“I think you’re mistaken about the lack of empirical evidence: Both sides agree that we perceive meaning, and more generally qualia – the ‘redness’ of red things, in the classic example. The point in dispute is whether these feelings can be explained in terms of atoms.”
Perhaps rather than “empirical evidence” I should have said “probative [or perhaps even simply commonly interpreted] empirical evidence”.
As I understand the eliminative materialist position, it seems to be that if it can be shown that words are made up of dots of ink, any meaning we attach to the words is therefore also “made up of” dots of ink, for all intents and purposes; the mere fact that dots of ink are required to convey the meaning from one to the other is taken as self-evident proof of this. To the objective metaphysicalist, on the other hand, the fundamental inability to physically observe “meaning” in any actual process by which those dots of ink and their arrangement transfer information (from the application of the dots to a reflective surface, to the reflection of the light from those dots, and to the transformation of that retina-impacted light into neurological signals) is self-evident proof that “meaning” is something entirely other than the dots of ink in and of themselves.
This is what I meant by lack of evidence: precisely the same physical observation — that written words are made up of patterns of dots of ink — seems to me to be taken as self-evident proof of both opposing propositions. This is probably my misunderstanding of simplified arguments, but it nonetheless has the feel to me of a true insight.
The first position is clearly utter nonsense. That said, one could postulate that the material connections made in the brain is where the meaning or information derived from the spots of ink is physically located. And then it follows that one can use spots of ink to transmit these connections, given proper mutual previous connections (language, proper background for the subject at hand, etc). This argument against materialism seems to be essentially a straw man, as one is arguing not against the position a ration materialist would hold.
I am completely not a materialist, but I think our host and many others are unfortunately too dismissive of the materialist argument. Perhaps there is too much experience with people who do not actually think about their assumptions or attempt to reach logical conclusions. That said I believe arguments exist which make a materialist position difficult to maintain.
Also, on Occam’s Razor: simplicity is a subjective judgement, dependent on both knowledge and axioms. Without mutual knowledge and axioms, parties will usually disagree as to what is the most simple solution. The pagan of three-thousand years ago would laugh at our explanation of how lightning and thunder happen, considering it to be too complex to possibly be true.
I’ve always thought of LaVey’s “Satanism” as a very carefully-crafted product, dependent upon and indeed parasitic of Christianity (particularly American mainline Protestantism, which is what I see it reacting to/against).
Without the parallels to Christian thought, it makes no sense on its own. That, and the shock value of “Épater la bourgeoisie” which was equally its purpose, and certainly nowhere as truly offensive as de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” with its very explicit and deliberate anti-Catholic ‘satanic’ elements (I’m thinking of the proposed abuse of the Blessed Sacrament described in one passage, something I very much doubt Anton LaVey would even have contemplated).
For my decadent Satanic needs, I’ll stick with “Là-Bas”
Here is a point of contention:
“If the handyman suddenly and for no reason says that the sledgehammer is a doorstop, or a screwdriver, or a prybar, he is acting beyond his powers: he is making a statement he does not have the authority to make. If he took the stand in a court of law testified that the sledgehammer was a prybar, he would be committing perjury. The purpose served by the sledgehammer is not up to him. It is not a matter of taste or opinion.”
Technically true, if he did it for no reason, but there can be reason for such a declaration. If it’s the most convenient heavy object, it is indeed a doorstop. Or for one handyman, his sledge’s purpose might be as a post-driver, and for another, his sledge’s purpose could be to demolish drywall. Any particular instance of the class “sledgehammer” has whatever final cause is imputed to it by the people who access it. The Platonic ideal sledgehammer has all the potential uses as part of its nature, down to and including being split into component atoms for use as part of a completely different ideal concept.
So my question is: why is the final cause of an object limited to its most common use? What are the criteria that separate perception of a pre-existing final cause from mere taste and opinion?
“why is the final cause of an object limited to its most common use?”
The final cause in your example is the most efficient use: a sledgehammer used as a doorstop is daft – people will fall over it, Granny won’t be able to move it, and the manufacturer on hearing about that use will say, ‘WTF?’ Their conclusion, and anyone else’s, is that this is a misuse of the sledgehammer, only justified by being temporary or in emergency. The purpose of the sledgehammer includes-but-is-not-limited-to, demolishing masonry, driving piles into ground or stakes into vampires, slaying zombies, etc – i.e. anything which requires heavy blows. The purpose of the sledgehammer, its reason for existence, does not depend on my whim.
“What are the criteria that separate perception of a pre-existing final cause from mere taste and opinion?”
Again, to refer to your example, someone who has bought a sledgehammer as a doorstop ‘has left the path of wisdom’ as Gandalf said. Someone will eventually trip over it while carrying a car battery, Granny will slip a disc because no-one was around to move it for her, etc. Using things for reasons other than the intention of their design is axiomatically misuse. In the short term (e.g. emergencies or for a few minutes), there’s no harm done; the damage is done in the long term.
And, to return to the topic, it’s precisely that purpose which can’t be found by studying the sledgehammer.
Misuse of an object may result in inefficiency, danger, or hardship, but it does not violate its metaphysical nature, nor does it necessarily violate ethics. Even if I use my hammer as a pillow, I may not get a good night’s sleep, but I have in no way done something improper. Whatever degree of ill I have done I have taken all the consequences upon myself. But the thing that goes under my head *is* a pillow. That is what *is* is (as our 42nd president needs to learn). Things are defined by what we, as individual, sentient, world-confronting entities do with them.
I think that is a difference in my thinking. I believe that I am exceptional among the flotsam of the universe and as such capable of arbitrating first principles depending on my nature. If I will to do other activities beyond what you perceive as a final cause, I claim I am merely defining a new final cause. That willing is a fact just as much as the nature of the activity.
OK. You say the only person suffering the ill-consequences of sleeping on a sledgehammer is yourself: but let’s examine this a bit further.
Because you slept on a sledgehammer one night (hey, whatever, man), you didn’t get enough sleep, or your sleep was uncomfortable and broken. Therefore, when you rose in the morning, you were tired, grumpy, had a pain in the neck, perhaps you were even bruised or bleeding or had sore teeth. This led to you having a short temper, diminished concentration, perhaps requiring arnica or paracetamol. Your work suffers, your family/colleagues/fellow travelers are affected, and the single misuse of a sledgehammer spreads like waves of dis-ease from you outwards, with completely unforseen consequences.
Do you see what I’m getting at here? It’s never only about the individual. ‘No man is an island’ as John Donne said. We can’t just declare an unintended purpose for things to be whatever-we-want, and expect there not to be any consequences, for us or for others. Surely it would be wrong to visit those consequences on innocent others? What if the victim of your sledgehammer-induced short temper passed it on to someone else on the brink of a psychotic episode, who at 2am the following morning went out and hacked a prostitute to death with a machete?
You may be right about not violating the metaphysical nature of the hammer – as long as that nature doesn’t include the purpose for which it was made. I believe it does, because again, purpose is part of creation, not an addition to it.
But in that case, one could never be certain that one’s actions were moral. It is possible to connect a butterfly-effect chain of events from any two occurrences, but only proximate cause is worthy of correction.
Word games. Please stand by what you mean, not merely what you say.
No. If you don’t mind, I already dealt with this argument; my use of the language of intent does not imply that I believe in nonphysical final causes, but rather that I use convenient shorthands where I find them. Please go back and read my comments over the last couple of posts, where I expound on this in more depth, before again making this attempted dismissal. It is neither powerful nor amusing.
“Word games. Please stand by what you mean, not merely what you say.”
Obfuscation. I pointed out a difficulty with your response re: random and materialism, pointed out the past track record of some other eliminative materialists, then mentioned that their argument had difficulties. You replied huffily that I was dismissing your argument before seeing it. I did not, nor did I write as much. Keep your mistake in mind, and move on.
I do await that argument after all.
“No. If you don’t mind, I already dealt with this argument; my use of the language of intent does not imply that I believe in nonphysical final causes, but rather that I use convenient shorthands where I find them.”
I haven’t been impressed with what I’ve read, and I find the claim that speaking in such a way is merely ‘convenient shorthand’ as convincing as someone telling me that, while they can fly around like Superman, they simply choose to walk everywhere so as not to worry the earthlings. Sometimes, a person is just bluffing.
But, I await to be proven wrong by your argument. Whatever that means in imaginary eliminative materialism language.
As you say. At the moment I have a long comment awaiting moderation, so we’ll see what happens when it becomes visible.
Rolf, I really love that script. Thanks!
Anyway, the main issue I have with your analysis, John, is related to the first example re: the trial. You haven’t even started to analyze the mechanical causes behind the pulling of the trigger finger. It’s not complete without an analysis of the light entering the retina and being processed via pattern recognition into the image of the wife and the mailman rutting, which through various other mechanisms causes the brain to enter a state which we label “jealousy,” which sets other brain functions to ticking setting up another state which we could label “the desire to kill,” followed by the brain calculating the muscle movements required to catch the revolver, aim, and send the signal to the fingers.
The whole point of the argument that you’re addressing is that, among other things, they are assuming that human will and consciousness itself can be reduced to mechanical causes.
“It’s not complete without an analysis of the light entering the retina and being processed via pattern recognition into the image of the wife and the mailman rutting, which through various other mechanisms causes the brain to enter a state which we label “jealousy’…”
But this is merely using a materialistic metaphor to explain a meaningful reality. There is no such thing as an image of a wife and a mailman rutting — you use a term that implies a meaning — because one cannot have an image without an observer, and one cannot attach the meaning of the sexual act to a group of moving light waves without an observer. The lightwaves themselves are unaware of the image they are carrying.
Beside, I did describe what you are describing, I merely use a more consistently materialistic explanation, by referring to the magnitude and position of the electrical charges in a brain, without cheating and telling you what those electrical charges would mean to an observer’s point of view. The whole point of view of materialism is that nothing has a point of view.
Well, under such a materialistic metaphysic, such things as “images” and “wives” can be explained as a shorthand for various patterns in an individual’s brain.
That wasn’t the important point, though. The important point was that your analogy stopped short of positing any sort of mechanical cause for the conscious desires and will of the individual in question, whereas the main point that such materialists are trying to push is that every aspect of human consciousness is wholly composed of mechanical causes; that such behavioral patterns as jealousy and love, or emotions such as rage, are patterns in one’s neural network. Positing a chain of mechanical causes that does not reduce the human will to mechanical causes, and then pointing out that this isn’t the same as an explanation that is based entirely on terms of human consciousness and will, seems like it’s kinda missing the point.
Tangentially, although final causes may have some connection to biology, in my experience the research of biologians is all about mechanical causes. Like any other field of science they may dip into the language of final causes when they want a little poesy, but at work it’s less talking about how “sex is the tool by which life propagates itself” and more “what are the mechanical factors in which creatures distinguish their own species from similar ones?”
I think the point of disagreement most likely lies not in the fact of objects having final causes, but of objects having multiple final causes, and which of them can be divorced from the act or not — and which causes are dependent and not final causes. The problem is that pleasure is in most people’s minds the purpose of sex, the final cause. A man decides to have sex because sex organs are filled with pleasure nerve endings and thus a tool suitable for seeking pleasure. OTOH, emotional bonding and reproduction, the true final causes of sex, are seen as auxiliary uses of the tool.
Serendipity; browsing ScienceBlogs I came across this article showing how expectations influence both our qualia, in this case the pleasure from drinking wine, and the physical activity of the brain. Briefly, subjects were given the same wine, told that it was either $5 a bottle or $45 a bottle, and asked to rate it. They rated the ‘higher-priced’ wine better; also, their brain activity changed. Now in this case the change in perception cannot be due to any change in the final cause or essence of the wine, since it’s the same stuff! And if a brain can be fooled so easily as this with regard to how it judges essences, then how can we trust our intuition about final causes?
“Now in this case the change in perception cannot be due to any change in the final cause or essence of the wine, since it’s the same stuff! And if a brain can be fooled so easily as this with regard to how it judges essences, then how can we trust our intuition about final causes?”
If we can be fooled so easily, how can we trust our intuitions about what third parties mean during reports of tasting wine claimed to be from a $90 bottle, or even claims that two glasses/tubes of wine are “the same stuff”? Skepticism is an acid that eats through far more than ‘essentialism’. (You may reply that just because we’re mistaken about some things don’t mean we’re mistaken about everything. But then, there are essentialists who would say the same.)
It does not seem to me that any intuition is involved. We have lots of tools for extracting meaning from the subjective reports of experimental subjects, and get consistent results from them. The whole enterprise of science, in a sense, is a tool for extracting objective truths from subjective reports; and I think neither of us disputes that science works.
“We have lots of tools for extracting meaning from the subjective reports of experimental subjects, and get consistent results from them.”
Except we also have various philosophers, some being materialists who praise science up and down, who insist that there is no ‘fact of the matter’ about what a given person or what they said ‘really’ means – ergo, there is no “meaning” to “extract”, much less “qualia” to be “influenced”. Someone who would say “this brain state is essentially about wine tasting good” is right back to formal and final causes.
“I think neither of us disputes that science works.”
But not many people understand where ‘science’ ends and ‘philosophy’ begins, much less the inherent limitations and scope of science. In fact, some people have interesting opinions about whether certain things regularly called science really fit the bill, or even which are the purest fields.
On the contrary, that refutes your argument. Both the wine and the minds are the same, and the sounds used to communicate differed in no physical trait. Only their meaning.
Of course the sounds differed; “ninety” is a different pattern of pressure waves from “five”.
But the only significant difference between them is their — significance.
The change was caused by the final cause — the participients did not want to look like fools.
This is merely a restatement of the point in dispute. My point is precisely that, because two patterns of pressure waves cause different changes in a brain, the order and magnitude of the pressures is significant. If you remove the consciousness from the problem for a moment – perhaps by inducing sleepwalking in the subjects? – there is still a physical brain receiving electrical signals from the physical movement of membranes in the ear; there are still electrical charges moving in patterns which depend on whether the incoming sound waves are ‘five’ or ‘ninety’, and on no other fact. My point is that the later utterances of “Very good” or “Meh, plonk” can be explained only in terms of these electrical impulses.
My point is further that there is nevertheless meaning. I do not deny that there is meaning; I deny only that the meaning is additional to the movement of atoms.
However, we are once more arguing on the level of conclusions, where nobody’s mind (hah!) is going to change; the electrical patterns are too deeply embedded. Once more I request consideration for the mechanical monkey. Is such a thing possible? Can it evolve without intelligent intervention? I would like to reach agreement on these points, if possible, before building the next step of my chain of reasoning.
“This is merely a restatement of the point in dispute. My point is precisely that, because two patterns of pressure waves cause different changes in a brain, the order and magnitude of the pressures is significant.”
Significant to whom? Your theory does not account for any observer.
“My point is that the later utterances of “Very good” or “Meh, plonk” can be explained only in terms of these electrical impulses.”
The problem with your point is that if someone who did not understand what you meant when you said “Very good” asked you what you meant, your answer would not be in terms of pressure waves or electrical impulses.
These things are utterly and entirely irrelevant to understanding what the words “very good” mean.
If you were to explain what “Meh, plonk” meant (if it means anything) to someone who did not understand it, you would have to explain the symbol-to-object relation, or, in other words, tell the listener what those noises would mean if they were truthful. The symbol-to-object relation is not an object-to-object relation because symbols are not the objects they represent. The ability to represent involves a judgment: a word that accurately represents an object is truthful, and one that does not is not truthful. Accuracy in symbolism is not a physical or material property. It is not a relation that exists between physical objects. Cameras do not “see” and they do not have opinions, true or false, or conclusions, thoughtful or hasty, about what they are seeing. The pattern of dots on a camera film is not “accurate” or “inaccurate” or “true” or “false” unless an observer looks at it and makes a judgment about the relation between the image, as a symbol, and the thing the image (in his mind, but not in the mind of the camera) represents.
Now, all that is going on here is that you are using a metaphor. The metaphor is that understanding a concept is like a record player being scratched with an imprint; the metaphor is that a word is actually the ink mark on the page, or the soundwave in the air. It is merely a figure of speech.
As witness that if you conducted the experiment in a different language where “five” meant “ninety” and “ninety” meant “five” the people would react to the meaning, not the sounds.
Finality is broader than conscious intention. Without finality, efficient causes make no sense! That is, when we say that A->B “always or for the most part,” we mean that there is something in A that “points toward” B. That is why tiger cubs grow up to be tigers and not tiger lilies; why physical bodies move toward the attractor basin of a potential function; why evolution leads to greater fitness within the niche rather than less.
In a word, without final causation, there would be no regular laws of nature. (Just as without formal causes there would be no “emergent” properties.)
That’s why abandoning finality led Hume to soften efficient causes to mere correlation. A->B always or for the most part because, well, it just does. But A->C or D or nothing at all.
Most folks who say that efficient causes make final causes unnecessary usually smuggle finality in under the radar unwittingly. If you say that a dropped rock (or sledge hammer) falls at the rate of 32 ft/sec^2 “because” of gravity and the distance covered in time t is 0.5gt^2 is simply describing the behavior of the falling rock. Why should it move to the point of minimum potential? Why should gravity not push it away instead?
(It just DOES!)
The finality of artifacts is evident: a sledge hammer is “for” driving posts in a way that it is not “for” being a doorstop.
But in the same manner, a leg is “for” walking in a way that it is not “for” being pulled in a joke.
As for the people tasting the same wine, but being told it was different, there are two lessons:
a) never trust scientists about wine.
b) material and efficient causes are insufficient to explain the experience.
As regards the latter: if they were, the identical atoms would be moving in identical ways and creating identical inputs on the nose and tongue, and hence in the brain. The difference in reaction stems from the beliefs held by the unqualified wine tasters. Their expectations of the experience were the finality of the experience.
Comment: final causes are not alternatives to efficient causes, only operating from the future. They are part of the four-fold way of grasping a thing so as to better understand it. Final causes have sometimes been called “the cause of causes” since efficient causes [and the rest] depend on them for coherence.
Sez you. Sorry to be so blunt, but mere assertion is not a good argument.
Quite so, and the beliefs were caused by the different patterns of sound-waves they had received prior to drinking the wine; and the ‘finality’ of the wine was unable to overcome this quite physical cause of difference.
Sez you
If there is nothing in A that “points toward” B, then how can A “cause” B “always or for the most part,” and if A does not cause B and it is mere correlation, then how can there be “laws” of nature?
Rolf
Quite so, and the beliefs were caused by the different patterns of sound-waves [sic] they had received prior to drinking the wine; and the ‘finality’ of the wine was unable to overcome this quite physical cause of difference.
The last sentence shows that you do not understand what finality is, but regard it as only another weird sort of efficient cause. Why is it that the finality of “gravity” is unable to overcome the flight of an airplane?
Your comment about the sound waves “causing” the different reactions only indicates that you were caused to post the comment by forces external to yourself. There is a difference between a living thing using information and a stone being moved by external forces. Did every single one of the test objects [people being manipulated and controlled by the white-robed priests] make the same judgment of quality? Or was that only an average response? The post-modern mind often does confuse statistical correlation with causation [perhaps because they don't understand finality]. If the test objects were wine-bibbers or professional tasters, would the “sound waves” have had the same effect? Was this, in fact, scientific in any meaningful sense, or a stunt by pseudo-scientists called “psychologists”?
There is no reason why the final cause of the wine [to be imbibed] imposes any ability to the drinker to perceive differences in quality. Imagine handing a telescope to folks with astigmatism, tell them it is pointed at Mars, and telling them that Mars is in quarter phase. Undoubtedly, some will obligingly report “seeing” the phases of Mars. No one likes to look like a fool and say to the “expert” that she doesn’t see/taste what the “expert” tells her she should have seen/tasted.
A constant program of the post-modern is to undermine the concept that there are any objective standards for anything, which has the fortunate outcome that no one can ever be judged on an accomplishment [which implies meeting a standard] and only on their credentials.
That experiment has been done too, and yes, they did.
Your confusion stems from using words to describe what ought to be described mathematically. The evolution of the quantum wave-function is perfectly deterministic, although computationally rather intractable in the case of the strong force. A causes B in the same sense that 2 stones and 2 stones ’cause’ there to be 4 stones: By the workings of simple rules which we may discover, but ought not to describe in language developed for other purposes.
Quite so, but I am not a postmodernist, I am a radical modernist. I hold to the Enlightenment objectives, only rather more so than the original Enlightenment thinkers managed. No blame to them, any more than they can be blamed for not inventing computational science; they could not help being born too early. The purpose of standing on the shoulders of giants, however, is not to praise the giants but to see further.
Please note: I do not say that there is no truth, or that truth is a matter of taste, or any such nonsense. I merely hold that you are mistaken about what the truth is. For making such an assertion I do not think you ought to call me a postmodernist.
The comments here accept HTML formatting. Use ‘blockquote’.
Some external to my body, some internal to my body, none external to myself. I realise that I suddenly sound like a non-materialist; it is not so; it is merely that I have a rather broader conception of what counts as ‘self’.
Gah, I see my long comment has annoying [i] brackets where I meant to emphasize something. That’ll teach me to switch between formatting modes too quickly!
A nice summary. I’d also add the stressing of extrinsic over intrinsic teleology, at least according to the Aristo-Thomists I’ve read. The bit about how a rock-used-as-a-hammer (to use our host’s example) has an extrinsic teleology in such a case, not to be confused with intrinsic teleology.
PS:
The final cause of the wine is “to be imbibed.”
For artifacts like wine, the causes are best described by variations on “make”
1. Material Cause. What is this wine made of?
2. Formal Cause. What makes this a wine?
3. Efficient Cause. What made this wine? [or How was it made?]
4. Formal Cause. What was this wine made for?
“Quite so, and the beliefs were caused by the different patterns of sound-waves they had received prior to drinking the wine; and the ‘finality’ of the wine was unable to overcome this quite physical cause of difference.” [How does one do that nice block-y thing for quotations?]
Surely you can’t mean that? (Sorry to use ‘mean’, but hey, you’ll cope.) If the sound-waves had been identical but the listeners had been monolingual Spanish speakers (say), then the whole experiment would have fallen down. English speakers attach meaning to particular sets of sound-waves; Spanish speakers to a different set.
Because English and Spanish speakers received, as infants, different patterns of reinforcement to the growth of neurons in their brains. A pattern is emerging here: Every time I mention some mechanical cause, the non-materialists push their final cause one step back, without trying to defend the position they held a minute ago. Is this not the sign of a thing-in-the-gaps argument? If your proposed caused can so readily be shown to flee from the touch of physical things, why are you so confident that it must nonetheless exist?
How do we explain “Meh, plonk” to a child? We argue by analogy; “I feel about this wine like you feel about broccoli”. In other words, we appeal to the existing abstraction “Do not like” in the child’s conception of the world. But this abstraction is an object; it is expressed as some pattern of neurons within the child’s brain. All that’s being done is to form another pattern, associating the sound-waves with the pre-existing “Ick” pattern. This does not require the existence of an external “plonk” concept; everything can be considered in terms of atoms.
No, this is not a metaphor; it is, to the best of my knowledge, an accurate description of reality. I may be mistaken, but I am not speaking in tongues. When I submit this comment, the physical state of electrons will change in the hard drive of the server. When you read it, the excitation state of neurons will change in your brain, and you will perceive the change as conveying information. The physical change is the understanding. That you think it is nonphysical, because you cannot directly perceive the neurons changing but instead perceive the gestalt they produce, does not change the reality.
I have noticed, however, a discrepancy in our descriptions: You consistently speak of ink on the page or sound waves in the air, while I speak of neurons and brains. I agree, if you like, that the ink is not the word; the change which the light-waves reflected from the ink produce in the viewer’s brain is the word. I do not know if this will move our views any closer; the neurons are physical too. But perhaps it will at least clarify my view a bit? I do not say that the symbol (ink) is the referent (the word); but I do say that there is a physical object, or rather configuration of objects, which is the referent.
It does seem possible that we can meet on this point. Suppose I arrange three pebbles to form a triangle. (Equilateral, to be specific.) You would not say that the triangle was a property of the pebbles, but of their configuration; and you would, I think, agree that the description “They form a triangle” could be extracted from a list of atomic positions. (And it seems to me that a word like ‘triangle’ could reasonably be used of a universe without observers; a triangular object will toss differently in the wind than a circular one does, and a computer could distinguish between them without being conscious.) Now my assertion is this: That it is also possible to arrange a large number of neurons to form “A brain which perceives a triangle”. The perception is not a property of the neurons, but of their configuration; and could be derived from the same list of atomic positions. Does this make my position more sensible to you?
By the by, you might find this experiment interesting. With a sufficiently detailed brain scan, we can tell what a subject is reading! In other words, we could say “What is the subject perceiving” merely by statements about neurons. Admittedly letters are a somewhat special case, but still, it’s early days.
“But this abstraction is an object; it is expressed as some pattern of neurons within the child’s brain. ”
This statement is nonsense, like saying that if Tuesday is made of noodles, then noon on Tuesday is a meatball. An abstraction is a concept removed (abstracted) from particulars.
An object is an object. Abstractions have properties like true and untrue, accurate and inaccurate, logical and illogical, fair and foul. They do not have the property of location or duration. Objects have both location and duration, and have properties like Mass, Length, Time, Temperature, Amount, Current, Candlepower.
Unless and unless you can show me a step by step algorithm by which Mass, Length, Time, Temperature, Amount, Current, Candlepower can describe and completely describe true and untrue, accurate and inaccurate, logical and illogical, fair and foul, your assertion that abstractions are concrete things, that symbols are objects, that final causes are mechanical causes, and so on, not only stand as gratuitous assertions, they appear to be merely self-evidently self-refuting statements.
You reason that final causes are mechanical causes because abstraction ideas are concrete objects. A better way to reason would be to say because abstract ideas are not concrete objects, final causes are not mechanical causes.
“you would, I think, agree that the description “They form a triangle” could be extracted from a list of atomic positions…”
No, I would not agree. Triangle-ness is an abstract property grasped only in thought. It is not a property of the atoms, any more than the sound of a hiss is a property of a snake-shaped curved made of ink on a paper. They pebbles can represent a triangle or symbolize a triangle or stand for a triangle, but the triangle does not exist in the pebbles. Pebbles have physical and material properties, such as mass, extension, and duration. Triangles have purely abstract conceptual properties, such as that the sum of their angles equals two right angles. Pebbles are real and solid objects you see with your eye. Triangles are mathematical objects you apprehend with your mind.
“Now my assertion is this: That it is also possible to arrange a large number of neurons to form “A brain which perceives a triangle”. The perception is not a property of the neurons, but of their configuration; and could be derived from the same list of atomic positions.”
I don’t follow you. It sounds like you are saying that if you take a dead brain and push the brain cells around with a spoon, that the person will come back to life and suddenly think the thoughts you, as an evil genius with the mystical power of total mind control, can force him to think. I ask you to make a distinction between dead people and living people, and between symbols and the objects the symbols represent. If your model of the universe does not allow for these distinctions, your model (a) does not map onto the universe and (b) cannot be a model, because a model is a symbol, and so if your model says that there are no symbols, ergo your model denies that it is a model, ergo your model is self-refuting.
I can see that we are not getting anywhere, here. Both of us are trying to make our positions clearer, as though the other had not understood it; but it appears to me that both of us understood the other’s position, we just disagreed. At that stage, we ought to be examining axioms, but it seems to me that what you take for axioms (eg, “An abstraction is not an object”) I take as a conclusion, and a faulty one at that since I would assert the opposite.
I have attempted, with my evolutionary diversion, to show how I reach the conclusion that abstractions are in fact objects, or if you like, that there are no Platonic ideals. But it appears you do not have the time to engage in a lengthy discussion on that subject, and I cannot really say that I blame you.
It therefore appears to me that we cannot fruitfully discuss the subject any further, and must instead agree to disagree; and if in your heart you think me a self-refuting fool, well, the world will not end for that. (For what it’s worth, I do not think you either self-refuting or foolish, but merely mistaken.)
I will be glad to continue the discussion with any other commenters here, on my own blog, which is sorely in need of some traffic. To make that easier I will write, as time permits, a summary post of the discussion thus far, trying to draw together the different threads, many of which, I think, circle around a central disagreement. I hope you will not object if I post here a link to that summary. Of course you would also be welcome to join us – either by commenting there or posting here – if contrary to your expectation you should find some additional time.
All right, one more point since I’m eating lunch.
Yes, I believe this is possible, although not with a spoon. It would require a subtle instrument capable of manipulating the electrochemical potentials of neurons, not their locations. In fact, it looks to me as though we take this as an experimental prediction of my theory, which yours does not make; consequently, we need not resort to philosophy but can do science. If I can set up an experiment whereby I control the thoughts of a person; or if I can restore a recently dead person to life by manipulating his brain, then my theory receives an experimental boost. Would you agree with this?
Looking at the last paragraph of my June 16:1525 post, I see that the words ‘this experiment’ are not a hyperlink, as I intended. Let me try again: This experiment may be of interest to the discussion. By scanning a subject’s neurons, the scientists were able to read back the text he was looking at. This is rather a crude beginning, certainly, but nonetheless it is a beginning. It seems to me, then, that if you were able to restore the neuronal state you had scanned, you could dictate a subject’s visual perceptions to your taste. This is not quite the experiment I outlined above, but it does point in that direction. No?
Gah! This experiment, curse it!