A reader who has far more patience for this long dead topic than it deserves asks:
I believe that the question that Dr. Andreassen has been trying to ask with the convoluted Mechaspeare thought-experiment is, do immaterial things impact the trajectory of material things? So, for example, if Shakespeare were sitting at a desk and we had the God-like power to instantly analyze the entire physics of the universe would we absolutely know what he would physically do next?
If we would, Dr. Andreassen concludes, then there is no need believe in immaterial things as they add nothing to predictive power. If we wouldn’t, Dr. Andreassen concludes, then in theory, and at some point in the future, physicists could develop an experiment to show that immaterial things exist. He then is interested in how the immaterial things change the trajectory of material things.
I solemnly assure you that I understand the purpose and point and every nuance of Dr Andreassen’s hypothetical. We have flogged that particular horse of conversation to death and then with additional whip strokes torn the carcass from the bones.
The original conversation consisted of very few exchanges, and then month after month after month of impasses, where neither side said or could say anything new.
His disagreement with me is metaphysical, and since does not believe metaphysical questions are meaningful, he can neither ask nor answer meaningful questions about his position.
It was a question I answered two years ago, and again every few months since.
My answer is and was this: Immaterial things do not suffer physical motion from material things nor impart physical motion to material things. Only material things impart physical motion to material things.
You are perhaps imagining that I am saying that a thought is like a ghostly cue ball which strikes a physical eight ball of the brain cells, or that immaterial spirits deflect electrons flowing through the nervous system in some fashion by imparting motion to them from nowhere and for no cause.
Instead, I am saying that the thing which makes a cue ball a cue ball, that is, the rule which tells the player not to knock it into the pocket, is a thing without weight or shape or time or space or motion. It is an idea.
“So, for example, if Shakespeare were sitting at a desk and we had the God-like power to instantly analyze the entire physics of the universe would we absolutely know what he would physically do next?”
The question is ambiguous, and nothing I can do or say can get Dr Andreassen to see or resolve the ambiguity.
Maybe you can. Let me ask.
When you say “the entire physics of the universe” do you mean the physical quantities only of the material dimensions of the physical universe only?
Or do you mean the physical quantities as well as mental and logical and formal qualities of all dimensions of the universe, physical and mental, conceptual, ideal, spiritual, aesthetic, and so on?
If you mean the second, then the answer is not just “yes” and not just “yes, obviously” but is “yes, obviously, why do you even bother to ask?” For if you know everything in the universe (including what people will free will shall do) merely from knowing the physics of the universe, then you live in a universe where everything in the universe can be deduce from the physics in the universe.
In that case, the question is a meaningless tautology. The question in that case is “if hypothetically, I know everything in the universe, and therefore know exactly what Shakespeare will do, will I know what Shakespeare will do?” Yes, obviously, why do you even bother to ask?
But on the other hand, If you mean the first, the answer is not just “no” and not just “hell, no” the answer is “hell, no, and how in the world did you even think to imagine that you could predict the psychology and philosophy and aesthetic judgments of William Shakespeare without taking any of these things into account?”
If you leave out of your model not just incidental factors and not just crucial factors, but the one and only factor you are asking about, then the model cannot predict whatever depends on those factors.
In this case, you are in effect asking whether God Himself, by taking the temperature of Shakespeare’s brain and measuring its diameter can predict whether Shakespeare will pen a happy ending for Romeo or a sad one, the answer is not just “no” and not just “hell, no” the answer is “hell, no, and how in the world did you even think to imagine that anyone, including God Himself, could predict what Shakespeare intends to do while ignoring what Shakespeare intends to do?”
At this point in the conversation, I keep expecting Dr Andreassen to say “Well, I am assuming that I can deduce Shakespeare’s intent, and the contents of his mind and will, by making sufficiently careful measurements of his brain temperature and brain diameter.”
He never does, because he is perhaps unaware of the metaphysical assumptions underpinning his question.
If he ever did, at that point I would ask him whether temperature measures tragedy, or does it measure temperature? I would ask him whether diameter measures happy endings, or does it measure length of the axis?
And, at that point, he might perhaps say that if you measured temperature or some other brain element very, very carefully indeed, you could tell what thoughts a man was thinking.
And I would ask him if there was one temperature per thought, so that 98 degrees means happy ending, but 99 degrees means ‘grab the dagger’ and so on. He might say yes or he might say no, but he might say that it is brain atom motions or some other element and not temperature that determines thought content.
At that point I would ask him, if there is a one-to-one link between every brain quantum and thought quality, what is the nature of the link?
If, for example, one brain cell or other quantifiable element, represents one and only one concept, such as Aardvark or Zymurgy, what is the connection between the concept or abstraction ‘Aardvark’ and the brain cell assigned to represent it? Is this link a physical link?
Or is it a mental and symbolic link? Symbolic link between the symbol and the thing symbolized could be true or false, accurate or inaccurate, depending on the relation between the symbol and the referent.
But a physical link has physical properties only, so it would be some sort of chain made of nerves or electrons, that has mass and occupies space.
If it is a physical link, how can it be weighed and measured?
No one has ever detected these links leading from objects to brain cells to words and images to language to the rules of logic and back to other brain cells. No one has measured them.
At that point, no matter how he answers the question, he finally will have said something even he would acknowledge no one has ever measured.
He is not drawing his conclusion from an experiment. He is not drawing his conclusion from an observation. In other words, he is not drawing his conclusion from physics.
In other words, the conclusion that all conclusions whatsoever about anything in the universe can be drawn from physics is contradicted by itself.
But he has never said this, so we have never reached that point. I am not sure what he would say if asked this particular question.
If we would, Dr. Andreassen concludes, then there is no need believe in immaterial things as they add nothing to predictive power. If we wouldn’t, Dr. Andreassen concludes, then in theory, and at some point in the future, physicists could develop an experiment to show that immaterial things exist. He then is interested in how the immaterial things change the trajectory of material things.
The same ambiguity is present here. Which prediction are we discussing? Are we discussing physical outcomes only, or are we discussing all outcomes, including what Shakespeare thinks and says and the deliberate motions of his living body?
We can predict the physical behavior of Shakespeare, but not mental behavior, if we restrict ourselves (as physics by definition restricts itself) only to the contemplation of the physical behaviors.
This is because if we predict the physical behavior while ignoring the mental behavior then we cannot predict the mental behavior.
I am not saying anything abstract or complex here. If you have an exact predictive model of Shakespeare called Mecha-Shakespeare, and it modeled absolutely all physical properties of physical atoms, including brain atoms, but you do not ask Shakespeare “Say, Will, will Romeo and Juliette have a happy ending or a sad?” you will not hear or know his answer, which is, “I am planning on throwing myself from the top of the Tower of London if philosophers arguing about materialism do not stop bugging me!”
If, on the other hand, we are talking about predicting everything, then we are talking about predicting things physics does not even in theory try to predict, such as the intentions of a man.
What are we talking about predicting?
Our prediction of the ballistic flightpath of Shakespeare’s body if he were thrown from the Tower of London could be excruciatingly accurate.
What he says as his last words, whether it is a curse or a prayer or a poem or a shriek, cannot possibly be predicted by physics because physics refuses to consider the intent of the actor (pun intended).
Intent is not a physical thing, and physics deals with and only deals with mechanical causation. Intent is final causation.
Once our Shakespeare in Midair speaks, of course, the medical properties of his lungs in motion and the physical properties of the sound vibrations in the air, can all be described by physics.
So this answer again, depending on the assumption, is either, “hell, no” or “obviously, yes.”
If physics can deduce all things, including things excluded from the science of physics, using nothing but the scientific method of observation and experiment, then the word ‘physics’ merely means ‘all forms of knowledge whatsoever about all topics whatsoever gained by using any means whatsoever’.
In that case, the set of disciplines outside physics would equal exactly nothing, because all disciplines would be a branch of physics. In that case, yes, obviously, the disciplines outside physics could add no predictive power to the findings of physics because then physics (by definition) is all there is and finds all there is.
But, meanwhile back in reality on this side of Alice’s Looking Glass, physics cannot deduce all things, because it concerns itself with and only with the physical properties of physical objects, and it restricts itself to observations of observable properties.
Assuming physics is not everything, then a physical description of the physical body of Shakespeare including the physical location of every element, atom, and particle in his brain, cannot possibly, even in theory, allow anyone, not even God Himself, to deduce how Shakespeare will decide which means to use to seek the ends he seeks, either when he finishes a poem or throws himself from the Tower of London, because means and ends are not observable properties of physical objects.
Now, again, one might object that in this hypothetical we are assuming that the qualities of nonphysical properties (such as the truth value of a statement, or the artistic value of a tragedy, or the value of man’s life) can be deduced from the quantities physical properties, such as the temperature of Shakespeare’s brain or the alcohol content of his blood. So what happens if we assume physics is everything? What if we assume we can predict how Romeo and Juliette will turn out based on careful measurement of Shakespeare’s moustache and the amount of tobacco he smokes while thinking?
However, the assumption is a blatant self contradiction. It does not even make any sense. It is like asking how many numbers on the number line does it take to reach Omicron, or High C? But Omicron is a letter, not a number, and does not exist on the number line at all, and High C is a note of music. No matter how many numbers you add to a line segment, you cannot make a line segment into a line of poetry or a bar of music.
Likewise, no matter how many quantities you add or subtract to other quantities, you cannot deduce anything but quantities.
Ah, but you might again object that if an intelligent observer or onlooker arbitrarily assigns a qualitative meaning to a quantity, that manipulating the quantity with quantitative operations will allow him correctly to make a qualitative judgment. So, for example, if 5 is assigned the meaning ‘red’ and 2 is assigned the meaning ‘happy’ then 10, which is the product of 2 and 5, will mean that red makes me happy.
At this point, the conversation is merely Alice Through the Looking Glass nonsense, where words are being associated with things arbitrarily, and no rules of logic or rules of grammar exist to make sure the symbol operations in our speech match or parallel the real world operations in our observation.
And, not to beat a dead horse, the observer in the hypothetical is now standing outside the domain of physics, because in order to frame the hypothetical, we need to talk about an observer, and the symbols he contemplates in his mind, and their meaning which he assigns them, whereupon we are no longer talking about length, duration, mass, current, candlepower, temperature or moles of substance of any material thing, not even the material in the brains of the observer. We are talking about truth and falsehood, just and unjust, the logical relation of symbols, the relation of symbols to reality, and the relation of knowledge to topics. In other words, even the discussion about the idea that everything is physics rests on the ideas that can only be talked about if everything is not physics.
Short answer: qualities are not quantities and cannot be expressed in terms of quantities. Matter is not mind and mind is not matter. Final cause is not mechanical cause.
Physics is not everything.
AFTERWARD:
The reason why the conversation is so frustrating, is that the underlying assumption is never addressed.
It is an assumption of ontology. If we assume that only material things properly speaking exist and that thoughts and forms ‘exist’ only in the sense that unicorns do (in speech but not in reality) then the conclusion that physics is everything follows naturally, because the physical properties of objects are the only existing properties.
If we assume contrariwise that not only material things properly speaking exist, however, we cannot conclude that physics is everything.
Dr Andreassen has never discussed his underlying assumption with me, and seems, by his own choice, not to be qualified to have the discussion, because it would be a discussion of ontology, a branch of metaphysics, a discipline he holds in contempt.
He has never once uttered a single argument to assuage, nor even to address, my skepticism about the assumption that only physical properties properly so called have existence.
I have told him half a dozen times that we are at an impasse because this question of ontology must be addressed first before any more discussion on the question of materialism is possible. He never responds.
This is not a case of my misunderstanding a new argument or a new take on an old argument. I am a professional philosopher. It is my field. I am familiar with these arguments. He is not only NOT saying anything new, he is not even giving the old arguments in a rigorous and persuasive way.
So, all modesty aside, I understand materialism, and the arguments for and against it, far better than anyone who had arisen to argue with me here. I have read Lucretius and Hobbes and Kant and Hegel and Marx and the other materialists who invented the idea of materialism.
I got the concept.
But I am skeptical, and no one has made serious attempt at the serious argument to me to assuage my justifiable skepticism.
So, with all due respect, I do not need anyone to explain to me the hypothetical again.
You may enjoy Edward Feser’s review of an interest-congruent book here:
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/10/aristotle-call-your-office
I am not moving on to the topic of whether thoughts can be deduced from material properties for this reason: I still cannot figure out what you are saying about physics and atomic motions. It has nothing to do with not comprehending the metaphysics (it may be true that I don’t understand the metaphysics, but that’s not the non-understanding which is stopping me from moving on); the thing I’m not comprehending is your contradictory statements, which I cannot get you to reconcile. First you say:
but then you go on to fulminate:
Well curse it, sir, which is it? Either the atomic motions of Shakespeare’s body can be predicted by physics, or not. What do you mean by “atomic motions”, if not the movements of Shakespeare’s body as he takes up his pen to write a sonnet? Are these movements not ‘atomic’ because Shakespeare is a living creature?
Are you including the atoms in the objects Mr Shakespeare himself moves on purpose? How can you predict whether he will pick up the inkwell and throw it threw the window into the Thames unless you know what his purpose might be in so doing? You cannot predict the motion of his arm muscles until he tries to move his arm; you cannot predict the movements of the electrons in his nervous system until you know what he is trying to think.
Perhaps you think that the electrons produce or cause the thoughts, but this means a physical object is expending energy physically moving a nonphysical and immaterial object, which violates Newton’s laws of conservation. I say the relation of mechanical causation is a different dimension, at right angles to, and not describable in terms of, final causation, and the same relation exists between mind and body, between an ink mark on a page, and the meaning of a letter that ink mark represents. Brain atoms represent thoughts. Thought manifest themselves as brain atom motions. But ‘representation’ and ‘manifestation’ are not themselves physical things that follow physical rules. A circle which is meaningful because it represent the number zero or the letter omicron does not weigh less or more than a circle formed by a natural process for no reason and means nothing. “Meaningfulness” is not a physical property.
Imagine, if, instead of talking about the mind-body relation, we were computer programmers discussing the software-hardware relation.
Our conversation would be like this:
You keep asking me if you can predict what a computer will do if you have an exact description of the hardware and no description of the software. It is a nonsense question, and I answer no. Then you ask if knowing the software, one can predict what the software will do. It is an nonsensically obvious question, and I answer yes. And then you say there is no distinction between hardware and software, and you wonder why I am answering the same question with both a yes and a no. Then I explain the difference between software and hardware over and over and over again, and you ignore me, and then you ask the same question again.
Yes, obviously! When I say ‘atoms’ without qualification, I don’t intend to refer to some particular subset of atoms and leave out other ones. If I did, I would say so.
Edit to clarify: That is, when I say ‘atom’ I mean to include all objects consisting of a small positively-charged nucleus of radius about 1 fm and a negatively-charged cloud of radius about 0.1 nm, without attention to whether or not they are within a living body.
Suppose for a moment that Shakespeare has no intentions or purposes, that he is a robot, as you like to put it. Then I can look at the current motions of the atoms in his (its?) body, and from that extrapolate their future locations, taking all the physical forces into account. Agreed? Well, that’s a prediction.
Now suppose that Shakespeare is not a robot, in your terminology; but I stubbornly do the same calculation anyway, FOR SCIENCE! I will get the same answer, since none of the numbers have changed. But now the answer will (if I understand your position) be wrong. Shakespeare will not in fact do what the robot-calculation indicates, except perhaps in the special case that he is aware of the prediction and decides, for his own amusement in confounding philosophers, to follow it. Is this an accurate summary of what you have been saying?
Mr. Wright
I apologize fir the fact that my prior post drove you to distraction — and it would be distressing to me if this follow up drove you to greater distraction. The point that I was trying to make is that Dr. A does _not_ care if thoughts exist as immaterial things if they cannot effect physical things. If the next president of the United States can be predicted by the purely physical examination of the first second of the Big Bang then as far as he is concerned immaterial thoughts are an unnecessary hypothesis.
Assuming that the starting state of the Big Bang irrevocably ‘determined’ the future state of all matter then that one needs immaterial thoughts to comprehend the state of matter has no bearing on the topic to him. The very fact that one could predict via physics the state of matter on August 20, 2013 and thus “see” the President being sworn in indicates to him that immaterial thoughts are either not real or irrelevant as they add nothing to predictive power.
“Assuming that the starting state of the Big Bang irrevocably ‘determined’ the future state of all matter then that one needs immaterial thoughts to comprehend the state of matter has no bearing on the topic to him.”
The assumption contains the same ambiguity again. Does the starting state determine only the physical state of matter, or can you somehow know what a man is going to do without knowing his goals, desires, means, ends, or purposes?
You can certainly determine any material facts about him that he cannot control.
If the set “things he controls” is a null set, if in fact, everything can be determined to the last iota by knowing the initial conditions of matter in the Big Bang and all the physical rules of the universe, and if there are no non-physical rules, then the answer is “yes, obviously” but if there are non-physical rules, then the answer is “hell, no.”
All that happens is that the good Dr A keeps asking me whether physics can determine everything, and when I say it can determine physical things but that there are other things that are not physical which physics does not even pretend to predict, he just asks the same question again in other words.
Physics cannot predict deliberate actions, or, to be precise, it cannot predict deliberate actions where the deliberation determines the outcome. It does not even pretend to or try to. Indeed, by its very method, it refuses to speculate about deliberate actions.
Final cause is simply not a category in physics. When asked if one can predict things without final causes, I say well yes, physics does that all the time. But you cannot predict an outcome determined by final cause without knowing the actors final cause, can you?
Mr. Wright
I am referring specifically only to matter. Did the starting state of the universe predetermine the end state (and all states in-between) of matter — whether it is conscious or not.
In the event I am unclear, whether President Kennedy was a human with free will or a cleverly programmed robot was the physical body/shell predestined by the laws of physics (and physics only) to be shot the 22nd of November, 1963? I am not asking about motives, desires, beliefs, etc. But rather, was the physical matter that composed his body required to be in Dallas, and only Dallas, at that date and time?
My (possibly quite poor) understanding of Dr. A’s argument is that if the physics would have been the same regardless of immaterial thought, then what use is a theory of immaterial thought? Otherwise if immaterial thought changes the outcome then it must alter the physics of matter at some point.
I have been assuming that your argument is that these are two different ways of measuring the same event — such as while a blind man might describe a car crash differently than a deaf man both are describing the same event and their descriptions are simply that, descriptions of an underlying event. Since, however, physics is predictive Dr. A is arguing that matter is both the underlying event and prescriptive.
Thoughts are prima facie immaterial.
One would need to observe a thought, “out there”, “in the world”, in order to refute this.
That we can imagine a fully robotic JFK indistinguishable from “a real” JFK should indicate that this is never going to happen.
Whether thoughts are materal or immaterial are not, at this stage, relevant to Dr. A’s argument. He really just wants to know if a conscious being’s actions could, with complete accuracy, theoretically be predicted soley by physics. He isn’t trying to predict a physical mass’s thoughts but its physical actions. IOW’s, not if he could predict WHY Kennedy was in Dallas but if he could have predicted (using physics) that Kennedy’s body would be in Dallas.
The answer is no. The question involves a thing called ‘consciousness’ which is something physics neither defines nor measures, so not only can no prediction be made, the question or experiment cannot even be asked. It is like asking if you can predict how a cannon ball will fly given no information about the acceleration of gravity nor the impetus of the ball.
His question specifically asks if one can predict an action whose causes and nature are excluded and ignored by the predictor, using a methodology that prevents prediction.
I can predict the actions of a conscious being by asking him what he is doing and what he intends to do next, and if his answer is honest, and if he foresees all the events correctly, and no accident intervenes, and I trust him, I can predict what he will do without measuring a single thing with a yardstick. On the other hand, if you give me a yardstick and the conscious actor hides his cards from me, I cannot predict the outcome of the card game with a yard stick.
No one has ever predicted the outcome of a card game with a yardstick. Yardsticks don’t measure poker tells. You are better off asking the man what he means to do, and using judgment and wisdom to assess his character.
It is as if I am trapped in a discussion with a madman who thinks a yardstick can measure EVERYTHING, including how high it is to “up”. It is twice as far as half way up.
Interesting that Ed Fesser addresses many of the same issues today at First Things, with a bonus tour of modern materialists getting a little more real:
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/10/aristotle-call-your-office
Great minds think alike; see above! (But fools seldom differ.)
The bottom line for me, here, is this not-so-subtle point: if reasonable discussion of the truth or falsity of propositions is not even theoretically possible under the philosophy or world view or metaphysics one is propounding, then why would I or anyone else spend a minute listening to what purports to be such a reasonable discussion based on such a philosophy or world view or metaphysics?
Mr. Wright and I, and anyone who has seriously studied philosophy, come across endless layers of sophistication (or obfuscation, take your pick) by the big boys like Kant and Hume, to try to stamp out, ignore or otherwise get around the problem that, if we, the readers, are actually sitting there reading a thing called a ‘book’ containing symbols called ‘words’ that are conveying ‘ideas’ and ‘arguments’ meant to convince or inform us, then, THAT FACT ALONE disproves the position taken by these philosophers. Kant writes books that profess to doubt that there’s anyone out there to read them; Hume writes books that attempt to persuade – to cause persuasion to happen – that cause does not exist in people who do not exist. These are not positions that can be tenably defended in books, seminars or in comboxes on the internet.
A main obfuscatory technique is to say, like Kant, of *course* things are different in real life, 100 real thalers are different than 100 imaginary thalers, but were going to stick to the admittedly imaginary world where it possible for me to doubt the existence of every other person and thing, including any particular knowledge of anything at all (apart from categories of aperception yada yada…)
But this ignores the inescapable fact that, once you try to discuss this position with another person, GAME OVER. You’ve granted that which you claim to dispute. Continuing to dispute it at that point is frankly insane – which is why Aristotle and Thomas spent comparatively little time on these issues.
And these guys, the classic proponents of materialism, idealism and the whole sorry array of other post-Aristotelian isms, are more sophisticated than any modern materialist, whose ideas are a subset of what people back all the way to the time of Socrates have professed to believe. As our host has mentioned, one is forced to conclude that these guys are not serious – that they write books (!) to convince (!) people (!) that they speak the truth (!) when they claim ideas, people, and the free will needed for anyone to be convinced of anything at all simple do not exist in a way to allow those things to happen.
To put it into context: if I am not a distinct creature with intellect and free will, I cannot be persuaded of anything. If what I am is a temporary confluence of matter where free will and intellect are just ‘persistent illusions’, then attempting to persuade me or any other such confluence of matter of anything at all is sheer folly and insanity.
Attempting to persuade anyone is to grant the crux of the argument.
I have many times denied that deterministic physics (describing human bodies and brains as well as nonliving things) implies that we are “meat robots”. That is your inference, and it’s wrong. But this point tends to get lost in the noise of trying to figure out what our host is saying about the future motions of human bodies. Until I know what his position is, it’s hard to dispute about what it implies.
And I have many times pointed out that this denial is illogical.
I’m wasn’t calling anyone a meat robot. But now that you mention it, under what magical incantation does a human being within a universe that consists *solely* of deterministic physics avoid being a robot? That’s a stumper, right there. You do see, I hope, why a reasonable person might stop and demand: if it’s deterministic physics all the way down, what is it that makes anyone *not* a meat robot? And dig in their heels and refuse to move on until you’ve convinced them.
Your position strikes me not so much as wrong as incoherent.
It is a point that needs explanation, yes; it is a touch counterintuitive. But I don’t like to go into that in any detail before the fundamentals are established, and to my mind that includes this of atomic motions. However, the two-dollar version is that a universe of final causes has exactly the same problem. In particular, your character, knowledge, wisdom, and whatever-else determine your actions exactly; so aren’t you, then, “just a final-cause robot”? Between lawful behaviour and random behaviour there is no middle ground. Either your actions are determined by some law, whether of atoms or of souls; or they are random. If they are lawful, then atoms are no more robotic than souls; it’s just that their laws have already been written down and we are used to thinking of them as simple. But the complexity of the law, or our knowledge of it, cannot matter; if you object to being a lawful creature, then it is absurd to single out atoms.
The thing-that-decides, the subjective I, is equally predestined in a material or immaterial universe, whether it consists of atoms or of immaterial thoughts. In either case it exists and decides. If I write a comment here, my decision to do so is not somehow invalidated just because it could have been known in advance by someone who knew a sufficient amount about my character; it was still me he knew something about. If it was fated that I should make such-and-such a decision, well, it was still I who was fated to make it. Do you see? Mere predestination does not cancel out the weight of decisions, nor their meaning, nor their wisdom or folly.
“Between lawful behaviour and random behaviour there is no middle ground.” In the Thomistic worldview, there is no such thing as plain real random. Everything that exists has reason and cause. There are accidents or chance events when chains of causation intersect: this can be called loosely “random”, but it is not really, because every cause in every chain is determined to its effect, the most determinant causes being the deliberate ones.
So, there is definitely something apart from deterministic physical behaviour, arising continually from beings endowed with free will, namely, lawful or unlawful deliberate behaviour — and one more time we leave the physical for the metaphysical domain.
“Either your actions are determined by some law, whether of atoms or of souls”: you probably like to think that souls and other immaterial things are epiphenomenons of matter, but it cannot logically be so, because of formal and final causation (immaterial things) which necessarily precede material and efficient causes.
It doesn’t matter whether souls are epiphenomena of matter. Either they behave lawfully or not; how they arise is irrelevant.
“…how they arise is irrelevant”: this is certainly irrelevant to physics, so you should not speak about souls or immaterial epiphenomena while denying you are then talking metaphysics.
Er… ok? I have no idea why that’s relevant.
I had the same reaction to Thomas Ligotti’s philosophical essay The Conspiracy against the Human Race, where he lays out the case for his bleakly nihilistic consciousness-eliminationist view of humanity (a trait that, to be fair, contributes greatly to the profound creepiness of his horror writing).
It’s a well-written book, but all the persuasiveness of this worldview suddenly foundered completely when I thought to myself: “Mr. Ligotti, if you truly believed the thesis you propound in this book, you would not have bothered to write the book.”
“If what I am is a temporary confluence of matter where free will and intellect are just ‘persistent illusions’, then attempting to persuade me or any other such confluence of matter of anything at all is sheer folly and insanity.”
Granted; but to be fair, if they’re right, the materialists have no choice about “attempting to persuade” you, either, any more than you have any choice about whether you “believe” them or not.
This is my biggest problem with eliminative materialism as an explanatory hypothesis: it is self-defined to be empirically unfalsifiable. If there is no way, experientially or practically, to distinguish ontologically between Case A (someone choosing to make an argument to me which I choose to reject) and Case B (an organism compelled by the physics of its brain atoms to express data-symbols to the senses of another organism which uses the symbol “I” for self-reference, to which that second organism is compelled by the physics of its brain atoms to react with contrary data-symbols), then any call to action or policy that relies on acknowledging and making that distinguo is pointless. (As is any “choice” not to bother because of your perception of its pointlessness, for that too was never any real choice.)
Or as no less an authority than Conan the Barbarian once wrote: “This I know: if life is an illusion, then I too am an illusion; and being so, the illusion is real to me.”
Bravo and Amen. I have pointed this out so many times that it is my personal leitmotif for all my philosophy.
My one personal touch, is that I always add the moral argument as well.
Philosophers do not simply write books appealing to the reason of their readers, thereby admitting that cause-and-effect and free will and objective reality and minds and bodies exist; they also write HONEST books in the HONEST expectation that their readers are under an obligation, a moral obligation, to weigh and consider and contemplate the arguments HONESTLY.
I am not the only philosopher who says this, but I may be the one who says it most often:
All reasoning, either within oneself or with another, tacitly and inescapably assumes loyalty to an objective moral code, and this assumption is and must be granted by both sides before any argument is even attempting, or by a man in isolation before he embarks on any act of introspection or ratiocination.
Any reasoning about whether or not honesty exists, or whether man is obligated to obey a rule to be honest or when, automatically has already assumed that the rule does exist and applies in this case.
I’m reminded of once hearing a retired general talk of the grim task of negotiating with the North Koreans back in the 60s: the North Koreans took the position that they were unconstrained by anything they’d agreed to at any point – they’d spend hours hammering away at one single minor point (and hours spewing propaganda at the unfortunate negotiation team), finally agreeing to some tiny procedural issue, only to later deny that they had agreed yesterday or that morning or last hour. To them, negotiation was only about discovering and exploiting weakness in the adversary. Truth and honor had no part in it.
But, here’s the key: for this to work in the North Korean’s favor, the adversary (us) must not behave the same way – the adversary must be at least a little honest and honorable.
It’s a sort of sinister and unintended complement that the North Koreans believed they could try this on the US military.
Dr. Barr, a quantum physicist at U.Delaware, tells us that even if one could know the position and motion of every particle in the universe the best you could do is predict a probability distribution of possible results.
http://www.researchonreligion.org/player/index.php?episode=RoR_125_Barr_10102012
I believe that Dr. A disagrees and believes that probability is simply indicative of a lack of knowledge.
No, that’s Mr Wright’s position on quantum mechanics. Mine is that the actual underlying objects are not particles, but excitations in Hilbert-space fields; and the movement of the fields is perfectly determined and gives rise to subjective probabilities. Strictly speaking the phrase “position and momentum of every particle” does not describe a possible state of knowledge, but one can know the amplitude and phase of every field at every point, and then all the future follows. But anyway none of that is relevant to the question of whether movements are determined by physics or immaterial minds; probabilistic physics is physics just the same.
Does anyone believe that the underlying objects are particles anymore? I thought that was just a simple model that was used to help create “common sense” examples — much like your and Mr. Wright’s use of Newtonian physics shorthand.
At any rate, I’d have sworn that you on several occasions have suggested that what we call probability is simply a byproduct of a lack of knowledge. Perhaps I’ve conflated you with someone else.
Then again, perhaps not. What do you mean by subjective probabilities?
No, that is me. I am the strict determinist in this conversation. What Dr A believes is more nuanced.
Suppose we have an electron in a superposition of spin-up and spin-down; for clarity, let’s make the amplitudes unequal – say, the amplitude is 3/4 up, 1/4 down. Then I send the electron through a magnetic field, which ‘measures’ the spin, causing a ‘collapse’ of the wave function. (I use scare quotes to indicate that I’m using language developed in the thirties and forties, which doesn’t really describe what’s happening but is, unfortunately, the language we’ve got for discussing these things.) Then the electron goes either left or right, hits one of two detectors, and I’ve got my detectors set up so that they trigger either a red or a green light. Now, if I repeat that experiment 100 times, I will see (roughly) 90 red lights (spin up) and 10 green light (spin down); and on any particular occasion I am uncertain of what colour I’ll see, although obviously I know what betting odds to offer.
However, the uncertainty is all subjective. What’s actually happening is that we’ve gone from a superposition of up and down, to a superposition of (up, red light, experimenter puts checkmark in ‘red’ column) and (down, green light, checkmark in green column), with the same amplitudes 3/4 and 1/4. Both wave functions still exist; there is no ‘collapse’, no disappearance of one set of options. All that happens is that the two ‘blobs’ of nonzero wave-function amplitude become separated in their Hilbert space and can no longer interact; that is, you cannot observe interference between these two widely-separated amplitudes, as is sometimes possible between the up and down amplitudes of a single electron. The only uncertain thing is which blob you are going to experience, and of course the real answer is ‘both’, but each copy of you will only remember one outcome.
So, if I understand you properly, you subscribe to the Many Worlds Interpretation/Theory and probability essentially exists because we don’t know which world our current consciousness will find itself in?
That is a much better description, yes.
Dr. A
Why, under this interpretation, do “I” go to world X rather than world Y?
So, Dr Andreassen finally states his metaphysics. Probability amplitude is the one true substance. Probability amplitude evolves in that vast domain of possibilities, Hilbert space, driven by the Hamiltonian. A silver atom here (in the Stern-Gerlach apparatus) is a blob of amplitude here; a Shakespeare there is another, rather stranger, blob of amplitude there.
So, why is he so baffled that Mechaspeare winds up in the Thames and Shakespeare stabs himself with a bare bodkin? The obvious explanation, in his own theory, is that a blob of the true Shakespeare’s substance, Shakespeare’s probability amplitude, went this-a-way, while the rest went that-a-way. We happen to be in the version of the multiverse where Shakes did one thing and Mecha did another. Note that his system remains quite deterministic.
Alternatively, why isn’t Dr Andreassen over at Physics Stack Exchange complaining that one silver atom in Stern Gerlach went one way and another went another way. “After all”, he sobs, “my interpretation of physics is deterministic. How can such things be?”
Well, we all know the answer to that one. He would be hooted down. More modest physicists, such as those primitives, Heisenberg and Bohr, did not reify probability amplitude. To them, probability amplitude was not the ultimate substance of reality, it was a device for encoding our knowledge or lack of same from prior observations. It generalizes quite nicely into density operators, incorporating classical ignorance as well. Their physics predicted in probabilistic terms, because probabilities are what you get when you predict in a state of ignorance.
To quote Bohr
Oh, wait. That’s not Bohr. That was Mr Wright.
Aah. That’s Bohr. and the next one is Andreassen.
Because Mechaspeare and Shakespeare are couched in the Newtonian metaphor which our host and I have agreed to use, and ignore the details of quantum physics. There are two quite separate threads of discussion here, one about whether the mind can cause matter to move, the other about the actual nature of the real physics of our universe. The two are not connected. Please do not apply what I say in response to questions about quantum physics to an example which was deliberately constructed to exclude all that. Moreover, it is (our host has said) specifically not quantum mechanics which causes Mechaspeare to do something other than Shakespeare does; it is a difference in intention, courage, will to live, or some other immaterial quality.
Additionally, if amplitudes are not real then you’ll have one hell of a time explaining quantum-mechanical interference. You say that predictions in a state of ignorance are probabilistic; I say that when your ignorance has the real physical effect of producing interference patterns, something else is going on. That is, when you are ignorant of the way a coin is being thrown, it is reasonable to offer even betting odds on heads and tails. But if throwing another coin at the same time causes both coins to land on edge in one of three throws (and this does not occur when only one coin is thrown), then something is happening that is not connected to your lack of precise knowledge about air resistance and muscle movement.
It is interference that provides evidence that amplitudes (not ‘probability waves’) are real; subjective uncertainty has nothing to do with it.
But, unless I am mistaken, because they are using Newtonian physics (atoms as billiard balls) the multiple worlds explanation is not available for the Mechaspeare thought-experiment.
That is, in effect, what my answer was. I had been afraid I was not being clear enough, so it is gratifying to see someone understands my point. Thank you.
Yes, I have been wondering why Dr Andreassen has always withheld this solution to the Mechaspeare Challenge. Is he waiting for you to say, ” I give up. How do they wind up in different places?”
In somewhat the same way, a physicist peers at his Stern Gerlach apparatus and thinks, “Hmm..the atom swerved left” or “right”, as the case may be. The process of perception is consonant with the physical process just as Shakespeare’s thoughts are consonant with the physical events.
Oddly enough, the Mechaspeare Experiment resembles that old chestnut, Schroedinger’s cat. In both, one is asked to choose whether a mental process causes a physical change or vice versa.
Wait wait, after all this time you’re appealing to quantum mechanics? But then the argument breaks down as soon as you change to Newtonian mechanics! Not to mention that your interpretation of quantum mechanics is that the uncertainty is merely subjective, and that the real physics is determined!
Are you sure you and Nostreculsus are talking about the same thing?
No, that is the opposite of what I said. My argument is the same no matter what physics says, just so long as physics says anything at all. My argument is the same under Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, or QM.
I was only agreeing with him on the point I quoted: namely, that the physical description of the universe is the same whether Shakespeare drinks coffee or jumps in the Thames. In neither case is determinism of physical phenomena broken. In neither cases is the description of the physical party of the reality a description of the whole reality.
I have said this countless times. Can you understand the concept of talking about some other topic than physics? Dualism is not a theory of physics, but of metaphysics.
I am what one might call a nonexclusive or accommodating dualist: I believe mind and body are described by different means for different ends, and that they two descriptions cannot be translated into each other, but neither is there any ground of conflict.
A non-accommodating monist would say there is only one substance, and no room in the universe for any more. When you ask me whether immaterial bodies use mechanical causation to cause physical motions in physical things, you are asking a question that presupposes non-accommodation. You presuppose that the answer cannot be “both” and so you are baffled when you ask “Which is it, one or the other?” and I answer, “Both, each in its proper place.”
Let me use an analogy: If the flatearther asked “Which is it? Does the balloon rise to infinity or bump into the sky dome? It cannot be neither!” and balloonist answers “Neither. Your question assumes there is no such thing as air.” Nothing can be done until and unless the flatearther and the balloonist discuss whether there is air.
Without this discussion, the matter is at a standstill. An impasse.
I cannot bring us out of the impasse by myself. You have to engage the foundations of the topic we are discussing, or else drop the discussion. You have shown yourself unwilling or perhaps unable to do so. So here the conversations rests until that changes.
This is one of the few areas where Dr A and I actually came to an agreement and actually understand each other. He and I are not talking about predictability, but about existence and essence.
Neither his argument nor mine would be influences or affected in the slightest degree by the specifics of the physics of the universe we happen to find ourselves living in. If a genii thrust us back into a universe where Newtons rules were complete and perfect, or Aristotle’s, or anyone’s the argument is exactly the same.
That is, by the way, what makes this an argument about metaphysics and not about physics.
Mr. Wright
To you it is. I have taken Dr. A’s argument over the last two years to be that metaphysics (if it exists at all) is a subset of physics.
“…metaphysics (if it exists at all) is a subset of physics.”
I suppose Mr. Wright would have pointed out more than once the self-contradiction inherent to the proposition. He just pointed out that it is contradictory to affirm that everything is physics.
Ms. Rousseau
Would you explain the contradiction? I am not suggesting that I agree with Dr. A but maybe a fresh perspective would help.
In a way this discussion reminds me of another that I was having on a different blog where Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity was implied to traffic in pernicious patriarchal politics because they deny women the opportunity to become priests. If you are a non-believer then that is one of the only (if not the only) avenues available for why Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics would have such a rule. In the same way, if everything is physics then metaphysics is simply word games caused by limited human reasoning and the inadequacies of language.
If everything is physics, there could be no such thing as metaphysics. The contradiction in the proposition that metaphysics could be a subset of physics lies in the composed expression “meta-physics” itself, which unavoidably implies that there is something else beyond, outside, other than, different from, physics, and not subject to its laws. By definition, metaphysics is thus a conceptually wider set than physics, including formal and final causation, so the smaller set, whose business is confined to material and efficient causation, cannot logically contain the larger one.
Ms. Rousseau
Absolutely. It is my contention that Dr. A does not believe in metaphysics. There is no contradiction to say that metaphysics is a subset of physics because of the definition of metaphysics _if_ you believe that metaphysics is simply an internally logical body of human knowledge (much like a non-believer views theology) such as you or might think of the Cthulhu mythos or knowledge of the Fringe TV universe.
Ms. Rousseau
To better explicate my point. My interpretation of this two-year-long argument has been that Mr. Wright is trying to prove the existence of metaphysics so that he can make his logical argument. Dr. A, however, has been arguing there is only physics and trying to pin down Mr. Wright on how matter and immaterial mind interact so that he can either (theoretically) create an experiment to prove immaterial mind false or show immaterial mind to be irrelevant/unnecessary.
In other words, he is asking me about an empirical experiment to prove a metaphysical hence non-empirical statement, and is baffled when I say it is impossible to do so.
Mr. Wright
Well yes, because Dr. A believes that metaphysics is a subset, if you will, of physics. To him everything is falsifiable and this is why the two of you never move far in this discussion. You have different definitions of metaphysics and you are arguing different points.
For Dr. A there are three possibilities: the theory of immaterial thoughts being able to move matter can be shown to be false (physicalism wins), the theory of immaterial thoughts can be shown to be unnecessary to predicting the motion of matter (physicalism wins), the theory of immaterial thoughts being able to move matter can be shown to be true (physicalism loses). This has been his essential argument for two years and he never really moves off if it.
If you want to move Dr. A off of this argument then you would need to prove to him that immaterial thoughts are both necessary AND unverifiable.
Forgive me for saying this so rudely, but your remark “to you it is” is pure rubbish.
The argument that metaphysics (if it exists at all) is a subset of physics is a metaphysical argument.
This is not a question of viewpoint. All arguments of physics refer to an observation of at least one measurement of something made of matter or energy or anything existing in time or space for their validity. This is empiricism. The argument that all metaphysics if it exist is a subset of physics does not rely on any measurement of anything made of matter or energy or anything existing in time or space. Empiricism is irrelevant to this argument.
If we woke up tomorrow in a different universe where Aristotle’s description of the universe was right and Newton’s was wrong, all of physics would be overthrown, and every experiment ever performed would have to be performed again.
But two men discussing whether physics embraced metaphysics could continue without pause.
Mr. Wright
Undoubtedly to you the two of you are arguing about metaphysics. And for all I know, Dr. A agrees with you and I have misinterpreted him.
What I have understood from this interminable argument is you saying over and over, “If the statement ‘truth does not exist’ is true then the statement itself can not be true and therefore refutes itself.” Dr. A then responds with, “Uhm, whatever. Can the immaterial mind cause an atom to move in a way that could not be predicted in advance purely by physics?”
This, in my opinion, has been because he does _not_ believe that the earlier statement is coherent. He thinks that metaphysics is word games and make-believe. Thus the reoccurring Mechaspeare thought experiment. To me, Dr. A believes that there are two options available to you in the Mechaspeare question: (1) immaterial thoughts move atoms or (2) immaterial thoughts do not move atoms.
If immaterial thoughts move atoms then theoretically an experiment could be created to prove this true or false. If immaterial thoughts can not move atoms then the theory of an immaterial mind is superfluous. If immaterial thoughts are proven by experiment to be unreal or if they are superfluous then physics is all that is needed and so metaphysics is unreal or superfluous. This is the point of the thought example and why he wants a clear answer of 1 or 2 from you. If you are a physicalist then there is no metaphysics because the subject is really just an artifact of language and imperfect human thought processes.
Yes. A perfect capsule description of the argument.
Well no, it’s coherent. I just don’t see the relevance to the question of minds moving atoms.
Dr. A
My use of coherent was perhaps ill advised. What I meant was that you believe metaphysics to offer no explanatory or predictive power and the term to essentially refer to knowledge akin to, for example, English grammar.
This is something that I am curious about, as it informs my understanding of your argument. How would you personally define the term metaphysics and its relationship to physics?
It’s more like chemistry, as it is objective and not constructed by humans. You cannot discover an objective and non-arbitrary truth about English grammar; that’s not true of chemistry or metaphysics. Moreover, both chemistry and metaphysics do have explanatory power and predictive power in a pragmatic sense: Obviously it is impractical to do the full physics calculation, down to the quarks and gluons, every time.
To answer your question about a definition: Metaphysics is the discussion of such mental quantities as justice, intention, consciousness, and mathematics. Its relation to physics is the same as the relation of the mind to physics: The mind consists of patterns of atoms which have an intrinsic (ie non-arbitrary, objective, discoverable) meaning. If we knew the mapping we would be able to discuss, say, justice in terms of “an atom here, an atom there” and derive, purely by mathematics (classical or quantum, whatever) the conclusion “these atoms meet over here – therefore it is just that he be executed”. In practice of course we do not know the mapping, and even if we did we could convert the Solar System to computronium without being able to do the calculation, so pragmatically speaking the identity is a bit of a moot point.
“The mind consists of patterns of atoms which have an intrinsic (ie non-arbitrary, objective, discoverable) meaning.”
Please remark that “intrinsic meaning” is a metaphysical concept relating to form, or nature, thus to formal causation.
Ms. Rousseau
You realize, of course, that Dr. A believes that you are simply making an assertion. If you hope to alter his thinking you would have to explain why this must be so and phrase it in a way that he wouldn’t take to be a word game — in much the same way that you or I would take the statement, “God can’t be omnipotent because He could then make a weight that He couldn’t lift, therefore proving His lack of omnipotence.”
Thanks for the warning, Darrell, but I believe Dr Andreassen is intelligent enough to know that I am not intelligent and learned enough to play word games in philosophy. I make only assertions that I believe true because they were demonstrated true by the most intelligent and consistent minds in history. Of course, I can state them wrongly, but not intentionally so.
Ms. Rousseau
Not so much a warning as a suggestion. I fear that people are operating under the assumption that Dr. A is not being serious or that he is a bad actor. This isn’t really the case. Dr. A is essentially rejecting philosophy as a pseudoscience like alchemy or astronomy. (I admit to some hyperbole on this point, but I am trying to get across just how alien his thinking is to many that contribute here.)
Because he (essentially) rejects philosophy appealing to, for example, Aristotle would be much like an atheist appealing to P.Z. Myers on a theological matter with you. Your very best response would be mild bemusement and at worst, scorn.
That is the core of my frustration. If philosophy is alchemy, I am Paracelsus. Why is he debating me about the Philosopher’s Stone and the arts of calcination? If philosophy is a pseudoscience to him, why is he using its tools and methods and approaches (amateurishly) to address someone who uses its tools correctly and knows their strengths and limitations — and to address him on a philosophical issue?
If he says physics can explain metaphysics, and if physics is experimental, let him produce his experiment. He cannot, because his belief is a metaphysical belief deduced from (in my opinion, incorrect) first principles. But when asked to produce his deduction from first principles, again he cannot because his contempt for philosophy has led him to disregard doing the work of putting his argument in order.
What he has is an inarticulate metaphysical assumption, which he cannot articulate, because he is ignorant of metaphysics. And he is, if you will forgive for saying, too proud to allow himself to ask any questions or be instructed in the matter.
Mr. Wright
Ah, but your contempt of Dr. A colors your understanding of how he views you. To him you are not Paracelsus but Newton! He is _not_ trying to trick you or play at parlor games, he is paying you the ultimate compliment of trying to lead you out of error because he thinks that you are smart enough to be so led if only you would stop becoming distracted by the shiny bauble of alchemy (philosophy).
To alter his belief you have to discover why Dr. A believes that predictive power is the key to reality and show, if possible, why those assumptions are faulty.
Yes, sir, obviously if I could get Dr Andreassen to tell me why he thinks that predictive power is the key to reality, the conversation could proceed past this impasse. Because this would be the beginning of his thinking about ontology, the nature of being, and epistemology, the nature of knowledge.
It has been clear to me for years that this is where the debate rests, that in this area is where we have to unearth the root of disagreement, and see the chains of thought or chains of unspoken assumption leading from his ideas about predictive power (or any other form of epistemological statement) to his ideas about what is really real (or any other form of ontological statement).
Forgive my frustration, but I am actually a philosopher and I know how such topics need to be debated. I see exactly where his argument rest and on what ground it rests and where it is leading and what it means. This is not the first philosophical discussion I have had on this topic or the first thing I have read about it like it is for him, but my fiftieth or perhaps five hundredth.
So, thank you for your helpful comment, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. I know what question has to be address to move this discussion out of its impasse.
I said as much to him two years ago.
He never responded or replied. He merely repeated his original dogmatic statement of unsophisticated materialism to me as if the intermediate discussion had not happened.
We went through the same steps again, reached a point where, in order to proceed further, we would have to look at why he believed what he believed, what were his unspoken assumptions, and that same thing happened again: again he repeated his dogma as if they had not been discussed in detail twice before.
Then in January of this year, the same behavior repeated itself. He began to tell me his idea as if I had not heard it three times before.
No repetition of the dogma contained any awareness of the problems or questions with the dogma. There was no change, no added qualification, no phrases showing that he anticipated any objections and was prepared to answer them. Each conversation started at the same point, as if the history eraser button has been pushed.
Hence, I have serious doubts about him. I am willing to discuss the topic with other people. Any discussion with him is a waste of time.
To him you are not Paracelsus but Newton! He is _not_ trying to trick you or play at parlor games, he is paying you the ultimate compliment of trying to lead you out of error because he thinks that you are smart enough to be so led if only you would stop becoming distracted by the shiny bauble of alchemy (philosophy).
It really isn’t pertinent how Dr. A views himself. The objective fact of the matter is that his position is invalid even by his own metrics. If the claim that metaphysics is a subset of physics is a physics claim, and if physics is experimental and empirical, then Dr. A must have a physical, empirical experiment demonstrating that metaphysics is a subset of physics. If he does not have an experiment demonstrating this, but believes it anyway on other grounds, then he believes a claim that is about physics but is not itself part of physics (and is hence meta-physical) on non-physics grounds, which logically implies that metaphysics is both valid and not part of physics.
If he won’t even deal with the implications and resolve the inconsistencies of his own premises, there is certainly no hope in trying to engage him in a rational, honest assessment of someone else’s.
Deuce
Not that it matters, but I was ‘answering’ a rhetorical question as to how Dr. A views Mr. Wright, not how Dr. A views himself.
When I write that Dr. A believes that there is only physics, I am somewhat loosely using this term to stand in for his grand theory of Reductive Physicalism — of which his Eliminative Materialist theory of the mind is simply one part. What I mean is that by this theory EVERYTHING would eventually be explainable by physics and that while metaphysics “exists” under this schema, it is simply an artifact of the necessarily quirky reasoning of humans combined with the inherent limitations of human languages.
But of course the answer is, “Neither option [immaterial thoughts move atoms or (2) immaterial thoughts do not move atoms] is a coherent or comprehensible statement. Both form a string of words that mean nothing. Immaterial thoughts describe the immaterial purposes for which material atoms are moved by material causes when and if they are moved for a purpose by someone who moves them. The someone’s motion has BOTH a material cause (mechanical cause) and a final cause (intention).
In the same way a chessman has both physical properties (a castle shape of brass, for example) and nonphysical properties (may legally move any number of squares horizontally or vertically, but not through other chessmen).
Why Dr A does not understand the distinction I am trying to make, and why he does not or cannot ask me any questions about this distinction, not even to erect a simple argument against it, I cannot fathom.
There is also a degree of ignorance here: he is just not familiar with the technical terms, and not willing to understand my metaphors which I use in order to avoid technical terms. He does not even know the basics of the field we are discussing, and he shows no interest in learning enough of the ground rules to have an intelligent discussion.
It would be like a man who did not believe in air trying to have a technical discussion with a professional balloonist about altitude ceilings, and the man keeps saying, “Well, why doesn’t the balloon hit the dome of the sky? Either it hits the dome and stops or it keeps going up until it hits the dome.”
And the balloonist keeps saying, “There is no dome. Your model, your description, is wrong.”
And the man keeps saying back again, “But then, what HAPPENS when the balloon keeps going up? It must hit something or it would rise to infinity!”
And the balloonist keeps saying, “There is this thing called air which has different densities, and the density is greater near the earth’s surface and less as you rise; there also a thing called buoyancy, so that when a body of less density is in the air of greater density,lift is created. When however the body’s density is equal to that of the surrounding air, lift stops, and the balloon maintains equal height.”
And the man says, “The balloon cannot stop for no reason! I don’t want to hear about this thing called air. It has nothing to do with ballooning!”
And so on.
No doubt to him, he sees himself as the balloonist and me as the flatearther. That is the way such discussions usually happen, and why I am obligated on my honor as a philosopher to give him the benefit of the doubt. Which I have hitherto.
I say ‘hitherto’ because I have now come to believe that his inability to follow my explanation is not due to my lack of powers of explanation, nor to the clarity of my thesis. The problem here is a category error. We are in a metaphysical discussion and Dr Andreassen acts as if he has no willingness (or no ability) to follow what rules a discussion on this topic, in order to be meaningful and logical, must follow. And, to be frank, he has not enough humility to be instructed.
On of the rules is that you do not determine metaphysical truth by empiricism. In the current thread, he has been asking me what the difference in a thought experiment of an empirical nature would be if the experimental outcome remains the same but the metaphysical explanation of the mind-body relation differs, and he ignores or cannot understand my reply, which is that the question is incoherent, on the grounds that different metaphysical explanation of the mind-body relation do not result in different empirical outcomes. Newton’s Third Law is the same whether materialism or dualism describes the mind-body relationship, in a deterministic universe where no free will exist or in an animistic universe where everything has free will including falling rocks.
It is self contradictory both to despise abstract philosophical questions as unworthy of attention and to harp on an abstract philosophical question for years, and show the question immense attention.
If Dr A were truly interested in the topic, he would read Aristotle. I assume he is not interested in the topic, and I regret how patiently I have spent hours of time and pages of words with him.
“…I regret how patiently I have spent hours of time and pages of words with him.”
Please don’t regret. If he does not profit from your patient lessons, I do, and probably a few others too, which is a good thing.
I’ll second that. I have gained much from this interminable debate, and I still nurture a faint glimmer of hope that you and Dr. Andreassen will agree to edit your debate and publish it in a book. The occasional interjections from the resident Sith Lord should go in there, too, for comic relief.
Mr Wright,
Thank you for what you have said. I know that I benefited.
“Are we discussing physical outcomes only, or are we discussing all outcomes, including what Shakespeare thinks and says and the deliberate motions of his living body?”
I think this quote really points up the gulf. In what sense could all physical outcomes not include all the motions (deliberate or otherwise) of his body? The body is physical. If its motions can be caused by something not physical, then the question has been answered: the non-material can move atoms in the material world (and is therefore susceptible to experiment/observation).
Yes, precisely.
“Yes, precisely.”
Really? Seems to me you are admitting that non-material (will, intent, purpose, therefore formal and final causes) move atoms.
I am not agreeing (or disagreeing) with that hypothesis, I am agreeing that it is one of the possibilities to be considered. I am also rejoicing that someone else was able to express the thing I’ve been trying to get across: “In what sense could all physical outcomes not include all the motions (deliberate or otherwise) of his body?”
My problem with Mr Wright is that I cannot get him to commit to one or another of the two options. If you straightforwardly assert that final causes move atoms, then I welcome you with open arms: That is a position I can get my teeth into. It may even be right. It is the combination of insisting that final causes don’t move atoms and that physical laws are not sufficient to describe their movements that I object to.
“In what sense could all physical outcomes not include all the motions (deliberate or otherwise) of his body?”
Beware of the contradiction “physical outcomes” / “deliberate”: “deliberate” is not “physical” in any way.
On this side of Alice’s Looking Glass, physical outcomes all ultimately come from the deliberate act of the First Cause through chains of second causes, deliberate or otherwise, while physical motions cannot produce directly any immaterial outcome if not processed by beings endowed with at least sensitive capabilities. Anyway, every time you use words like “deliberate,” “purpose,” “intent,” “meaning”, etc., you are in a metaphysical argument, no matter how hard you try to deny it.
If I throw up my hands in exasperation, we can debate whether or not it is deliberate, but it remains a measureable fact that my hands are now above my head. I include this fact in what I mean by ‘atomic motions’ and ‘physics’. If you don’t, then please say so.
But it is not necessarily predictable that you should throw up your hands physically or just in thought, or not at all, or even that you should be exasperated or not.
Well then, I do not see how you can avoid the conclusion that immaterial things cause physical things to move, in a way which is not predictable by looking at physical things.
Am I supposed to avoid the conclusion that immaterial things cause physical things to move? I would say that a mind does not move things directly like magic, or like God as Prime Mover, but causes actions which introduce changes in chains of causation.
Not at all! I’m perfectly happy for you to reach that conclusion; it is coherent and sensible. But it seems to me that our host does want to avoid it, and I don’t understand why, nor how he proposes to manage it. For example he says
Well, ok, but then how do the atoms of a man thinking “I’d like a cup of coffee” end up moving differently from the atoms of a man thinking “Time for tea”? Are his atoms not ‘material things’? And again (apparently agreeing with the thesis he attributes to Lewis)
Again, if they don’t move in defiance of what Newton’s law predicts, then why can’t I use Newton’s law to predict their movements? (Where ‘their’ refers to every atom in a body, and thus the movement of the body as a whole, including whether it ends up at the teapot or the coffee machine.)
I don’t understand the distinction. How do I cause my arm to move left instead of right, without at some point changing the motion of an atom? It may certainly be the case that I move only a single electron, in the manner of the pebble that causes an avalanche; the nerve impulse goes down this path instead of that, a muscle (vast in comparison to the nerve, which itself is huge compared to the electron) contracts, and a microsecond later my whole arm is moving. But the principle is the same: That electron zigged when according to Newton it was going to zag.
This question contains the same ambiguity again. If you wish to describe what the man is doing something for, you must describe his goals. So, here, we would answer the question, “For what purpose are are the grounds of coffee falling into the coffee pot?” The answer must be: “Because Shakespeare is trying to make a cup of coffee.” The answer is in terms of, and can only be in terms of, the cup of coffee that is the goal. The goal exists in Shakespeare’s mind because his desires are drawn by a cup of coffee that only exists as a symbol in his imagination, or a desire in his soul. This cup of coffee is an ideal, timeless, and does not exist in space or have mass, length, duration, and so on. It is not a material cup.
The question cannot be answered, and makes no sense, if not answered without some reference to the goal.
But, then again, if a different question were asked, “What forces cause the grounds of coffee to fall into the coffee maker?” the answer must be in terms of the acceleration of gravity, the shaking of the coffee container, and motions of the hand and arm, and, I suppose, the atoms in the Shakespeare’s brain.
You cannot or will not make the distinction. So you ask, in effect, “But how to the goals in a man’s mind cause mechanical motion in the atoms in his brain, the muscles in his arm, the coffee being poured into the coffee pot?”
This assumes the mind and the brain are one and the same, and that the goal of the imaginary cup of coffee is a force acting on the coffee grounds falling into the pot in the same way that the force of gravity is. I deny this. I say that the two explanations describe two entirely different dimensions or aspects or elements of the picture, and that they are incompatible.
The answer, more simply, is that if your trace the mechanical causes of coffee ground falling back through the chain of cause and effect to arm motions and muscle contractions and nerve impulses and all the way back to the big bang, at no point will you see any violation of Newton’s laws or any other physical law. Likewise, if Shakespeare had decided on a cup of tea, you could trace the mechanical causes back to the beginning of the world, and see no violation of the laws of physics.
But if you asked him why he wanted one as opposed to the others, he might have a perfectly good reason he can explain, “As an Englishman, it is my duty to drink tea” or “Coffee keeps me awake at night” or something of the sort.
If you suddenly put him in a body where muscles acted based on different physical rules, of put him on a different world with a different constant of gravity, your story or account of the physical part of the situation would differ. But the account of the mental part, his desire to make coffee and the acts he does to fulfill that desire, remains the same.
If you (somehow) put him in a different metaphysical universe where the relationship between means and ends differed, so that you could only get coffee if you desired not to, then the account of the mental actions would differ, but the account of the physical universe would remain the same.
But neither can you describe what the man is doing without reference to a supernatural, super-physical reality, namely, these eternal ideals and imaginary forms and thoughts and symbols and the entire mental universe.
I am not sure why this is confusing to you or anyone. It is the reality we live with each and every days of our lives. Matter behaves by material rules. Mind behaves by mental rules. No description of one, no matter how complete and correct, gives even the slightest hint of the behavior of the other.
So, no, an answer where immaterial objects can impart mechanical motions to physical things is incoherent.
Oh, and I forgot to tell you that I agree that throwing up your hands is an atomic motion, but it is caused by a deliberate (immaterial) decision to physically react to an emotion, that is, something also immaterial.
…emotion itself caused by a philosophical argument, again something immaterial.
“So, with all due respect, I do not need anyone to explain to me the hypothetical again.”
I, for one, am glad that such questions or comments give me to receive a philosophy course over years: it is profitable to have important things often repeated. I am grateful to Dr Andreassen for always dodging the discussion on basic assumptions, as it emphasizes by contrast the importance for any scientist to have the basic ontological principles right if he ever wants to venture in philosophical argument.
Like Chesterton said in his article Philosophy for the Schoolroom: “all argument begins with an assumption… an infallible dogma, and that infallible dogma can only be disputed by falling back on some other infallible dogma…” So this is futile to discuss the corollaries without addressing the first assumptions, which, of course, cannot be empirically proven, but can certainly be demonstrated to be unavoidable if true or reduced to absurd if false.
Very well. But then I do not see how you avoid the other conclusion: That if you knew all the physical forces and whatnot at the time of the Big Bang, you could trace them forward in the same way that you traced them back; and eventually observe, in your mind’s eye, the coffee grounds being dropped into the machine, and rule out the teabags without knowing anything about Shakespeare’s preferences in caffeine. Yet whenever I suggest anything of the sort, you say it is impossible, absurd, and any number of other adjectives. Are you suggesting some asymmetry in time, here, so that we cannot do forward what we did backward?
“…you could trace them forward in the same way that you traced them back”
Hypothetically, if you know all the minute details of history, minds and matter, you could trace back chains of causation, but there is no way you could accurately predict future behaviour. In addition to uncertainty in matter, where not only the weatherman is reduced to probabilistic calculations, when it comes to systems implying consciousness and free will (in other words final causation) it is total unpredictability.
Oh sure, it would be impossible in practice. I have never claimed otherwise. But we are discussing what is possible in principle, not what can actually be accomplished by engineers.
I would say that one could avoid that other conclusion by postulating that two different mental processes may have the same physical manifestations. A mental process by which Shakespeare decides to reach for the coffee because of some pragmatical reason may have the same physical manifestation that another mental process by which he decides to reach for the coffee because of some other motivation.
If you trace back the mechanical causes of the coffee ground falling in both cases, you would find the same physical ‘footprint’; both nerve impulse patterns leading to the same muscle contractions and the same physical outcome and yet you would not be able to say anything about the differences between the two mind processes, much less be able to predict any consequences or deduce any causes of said processes.
Sure, you may not be able to distinguish between drinking coffee because he needs to stay awake, and because he likes coffee. But I never said you could. I said you could distinguish between drinking coffee, and drinking tea.
You must forgive me, I am not sure of what you said or not since I have not followed this conversation from its beginning. However, I thought you were trying to argue that mental processes can be fully explained, or at least predicted, by physics. My apologies if that is not the case.
I was merely trying to point out that saying that one could trace the coffee ground falling all the way back to the Big Bang does not mean that perfect knowledge of the laws of physics and perfect knowledge about the contents of the physical universe could allow us to fully understand the mental process by which Shakespeare decides what to drink. Perhaps we could say what he will drink, but that is a much weaker proposition.
But I would say that, in order to have that ‘asymmetry’ you mentioned, the physical universe would need to be nondeterministic.
You are correct, it is indeed weaker, but it is not so weak as to be without interest.
Agreed.
It seems to me that the problematic assumption in thinking about all of this is the idea that there exists any matter whatsoever that is not ultimately moved by immaterial mind. The “mechanism” by which electrons obey physical law during scientific experiments is no less mysterious than the “mechanism” by which the matter in my arm obeys my will when I decide to move it. In both cases, the will of God is involved and in the second case a power delegated from the will of God to my own will is also involved.
Matter is always moved by mind; there is simply no such thing as inert matter disconnected from mind, and as such, the idea of human free will does not in any way represent a “violation” of anything.
The idea of a scientific experiment to prove that immaterial mind can move matter is absurd, for science itself presupposes that mind can move matter. Otherwise the concepts of “designing and building experimental apparati”, “conducting physical experiments”, and “publishing results” are rendered incoherent. If mind cannot move matter then none of these foundational activities of science are possible.
Has anyone here ever read Tom Wolf’s article, “Sorry, But You Soul Just Died?” http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/Wolfe-Sorry-But-Your-Soul-Just-Died.php
It’s about popular acceptance of the mechanistic, deterministic view of human consciousness and its consequences. Wolf thinks (well, thought – he’s since repudiated the article) that it’s likely to be the 21st Century’s equivalent of Nietzsche’s insight, “God is dead.”
You have a propensity of making stuff up out of whole cloth. Chemistry is a science that is constructed by humans based on observation. Grammar is a science (yes! without test tubes and lab coats!) of the proper expression of thoughts and feelings, of the rules of communication.
The fact that it is objective and non-arbitrary can be observed from the simple fact that some forms of expression are coherent while others are not.
The fact that different languages can have different rules, or that grammatical rules can evolve over time merely means there is more than one means for proper expression – but it is not arbitrary. The standard is unchanging and objective: the proper transition of thought to expression.
Only a divorce between the organic bond of thought to writing (or speaking) could result in one thinking grammar is arbitrary.
There is no chemistry out there. There is simply substances and their interactions that we name and categorize. Chemistry is certainly constructed by humans. But that does not mean arbitrary, it too has standards by which an theory or categorization is judged arbitrary or non-objective.
I think if you were to take an introductory course in philosophy a lot of this confusion would cease. Metaphysics is none of the things you describe. Justice belongs to ethics and politics (sub-branches of philosophy) and belongs nowhere near metaphysics.
Intention belongs to ethics (and psychology which is its own field) and politics. Mathematics doesn’t belong in philosophy at all unless we are discussing the ontology of number, but then that is not mathematics, it is the metaphysical status of a certain category of abstractions.
Consciousness does belong in metaphysics but only in a delimited sense. It belongs in metaphysics only in relation to the question of matter – matter in a strictly non-technical sense. Matter as understood as that which mind is not.
Most dictionaries will give you at least a semi-workable start as to the nature of metaphysics; the study of first principles of things, the study of being, the study of existence as a whole, etc, etc. It does not get bogged down in such things as justice or mathematics.
I am puzzled by Dr. Andreassen’s comment: “…if you knew all the physical forces and whatnot at the time of the Big Bang, you could trace them forward in the same way that you traced them back…”
It does not follow that you can trace forward the physical forces just because you can trace them back. You can rewind the tape, so to speak, but it does not follow that playing it forward again will give you the same outcome. The same difficulty besets Dr. Andreassen when he asserts that because you can reduce macro-level phenomena to micro-level phenomena, you can therefore construct (or re-construct) the macro-level phenomena from the micro. The problem is not that Dr. Andreassen is a reductionist, it is that he is a constructionist. And constructionism fails, not only from the level of physics constructing upward to mind, it fails even from physics up to chemistry. In that sense, I am disagreeing with Mr. Wright when he says that physical reality determines future physical reality. It doesn’t even do that. Chemical phenomena can be reduced to physical phenomena but they cannot be completely constructed, i.e., predicted from them. Chemistry has to be compatible with physics, but that doesn’t mean you can get chemistry from physics. Chemistry is not applied physics, and has its own fundamental laws not derivable from those of physics. Chemistry is constrained by physics but not determined by physics. So Dr. Andreassen isn’t even right when he talks about his deterministic picture of physical reality. He wouldn’t be able to predict chemical reactions in Shakespeare if he knew everything about the configuration of atoms in his body, never mind his poetry.
Well, to be fair, in the hypothetical Dr Andreassen and I are supposing that physics had somehow been improved to the point where macroscopic events can be predicted from microscopic data. Now, if you are saying we cannot suppose this because modern physics is insufficient, that is true. But if you are saying that even in theory no future physics howsoever advanced will be able to predict this, that point is debatable. Myself, I know of no reason in theory why it should not be so, but I have no heard both sides of that argument.
In either case, shouldn’t we be willing to grant him that argument for the sake of the hypothetical? If chemistry cannot be reduced to physics for some metaphysical reason, we should not grant it. But if chemistry has not been yet reduced to physics merely because of the particular condition of physics this decade, we should.
Within Newtonian physics it absolutely does follow. And while real physics may differ on that score, it is an assertion of Mr Wright’s that the precise form of the physics does not matter.
You are mistaken. At this time we do chemical experiments because we lack the computing power to solve the equations of quantum mechanics on the scale of molecules. Nevertheless, the laws of chemistry can be derived from those of physics.
Before I make my comment on the subject at hand, I would like to address one word to our dear host: you may be frustrated with the arc of your discussions with Dr. A, but you should be aware that you have also been patiently explaining to many others as well. I, for one, have had a number of points clarified in my mind due to these exchanges; and I hope that you will continue to develop these ideas in the future.
Now on to the topic: if I had to put my finger on the disagreement I have with Dr. A’s explanation, it would be that he appears to be confusing a mathematical model of reality (the Standard Model, or sometimes rhetorically the Newtonian Model) with actual reality. As a metaphor, consider a map versus the actual terrain. We may say that the map is extremely accurate (i.e. it gives us very accurate information about the existence of and distance between objects), and very useful (e.g. we can use it to plan out a trip to a place we’ve never been before). Yet even an excellent map leaves out more than in includes, and we cannot extrapolate from the characteristics of the map to the characteristics of the terrain except in a very narrow way (e.g. we cannot assume that “geography proves” that the terrain is rectangular and finite because our map is rectangular and finite).
Physics gives us a very accurate mathematical model for predicting the physical state of inanimate objects, given initial measurements within a certain degree of tolerance. This is our map, and it’s a very good one. But it’s not the terrain. It doesn’t violate the “laws of geography” to say that the map shows the way to Grandma’s house, but doesn’t show Grandma herself.
I am an electrical engineer, so David Hilbert is, we might say, an important collaborator of mine. (Which is tricky for a rigid materialist, since he was dead before my parents were born.) More to the point, I also am professionally acquainted with Kurt Goedel and his incompleteness theorems. Specifically, he showed that any system that is at least as complicated as the natural numbers and arithmetic will be either inconsistent (assert that A is both true and not true) or incomplete (cannot determine whether A is true or not true). If your definition of “reality” is a Hilbert space, then you are 100% certainly going to either 1) be wrong, or 2) miss something, when you start at the Big Bang and begin calculating.
(For those of you following along: Goedel’s theorems have actually made several appearances already: “This statement is true” and “This statement is false” are two classic examples. I also believe that this is the “nub” of St. Thomas’ “second way”– that efficient causes alone are insufficient to explain the existence of efficient causes.)
Perhaps the confusion here is that you’re talking about two different levels of explanation. There is no reason why explanations in terms of higher-level, emergent properties like coffee cups and can’t be more explanatory than explanations in terms of atomic motions. But these emergent properties don’t exist in some metaphysical Platoverse of ideals, they are categories of states of the brain. We may notice that the emergent property “Shakespeare wants a cup of coffee” leads to the emergent property “coffee grounds go in the pot”, and be able to predict the second by observing the first without looking at individual atoms, but there is nothing immaterial going on. Shakespeare’s desire for coffee didn’t arise magically from his soul, it was simply an emergent property of his physical state at that particular time. So there is no reason to talk about free will, when the simplest explanation is that it is an illusion created by our brains, just as our brains create the illusion that there are mystical ideal coffee cups in the Platoverse.
Perhaps the real issue here is that the idea that humans are “meat robots” is just too repugnant for people who share our host’s worldview, so they are looking for arguments why this must not be the case. This is how theists tend to argue; they start with a conclusion and look for rationalizations. But like Dr. A. I don’t see where additional constructs like Platonic ideals, souls and God offer any additional explanatory power. By Occam’s Razor, they should therefore be dispensed with until someone proves their necessity.
This is a sad falling away. I had hopes that you would firmly assert the primacy of the Will against the materialist rabble. Recall the definition of Magick; it is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.
Hence follows the theorem of Frater Perdurabo, “Every man must do Magick each time he acts or even thinks, since a thought is an internal act whose influence ultimately affects action, though it may not do so at the time”
After studying under some of the Sithier, less dogmatically Surakian Kolinahru on Vulcan, I’ve gone beyond mere sorcerer’s ways. In this ‘verse it seems that rationality and science are the keys to power, so I now say this of theists and occultists alike, whether of the light or dark side persuasion: “I find your lack of logic disturbing.”
Ah, the Kolinahru Monastery! “To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.”
“…I don’t see where additional constructs like Platonic ideals, souls and God offer any additional explanatory power. By Occam’s Razor, they should therefore be dispensed with until someone proves their necessity.”
By Occam’s Razor, all “constructs” (or rather, “deconstructs”) contrary to sound philosophy should be dispensed with because they fall short of the simplest explanation.
Let us stipulate, for the moment, your dualism. A realm of mental things exist and another realm of matter exist. There is still a question of their relations. Do the two realms communicate? Is there easy commerce? Do travelers ever venture across the border? Can a spiritual entity ever incarnate?
Your comment suggests a sort of Korean DMZ between matter and mind. This seems unlikely. It is a commonplace that one’s physical state affects one’s thoughts. Sit back, light a pipe to focus your mind and contemplate that. Yes, the nicotine does have an effect.
But is the traffic all one way, from the physical to the mental? Darth Imperius and Dr Andreesen think so. So, let us take their pet theory, the Many Worlds Interpretation. Shakespeare has a choice: to be or not to be. In one world, Shakespeare’s thoughts run to suicide as his hand reaches for the fatal bodkin. In another branch of reality, he reaches for his quill to write a marvelous soliloquy which has just entered his mind.
Now, are Darth and the good doctor right that the physical changes are the primary movers, and the corresponding mental state just a rider? Or does Shakespeare decide on a course of action, so that his mental decision selects the particular deterministic chain of causation leading either to death or to “Hamlet”?
Or do you maintain a sort of Cartesian dualism, where the two worlds are mysteriously always in synch, without any interplay?
Let me ask you a question in return before I answer, so that the ambiguity in your question can be addressed.
Mr A Square of Flatland is talking to A Sphere of Spacland about the relationship between the dimension of horizontal plane figures (which he can sense with his two dimensional senses) and this direction or dimension called “up” or “vertical.”
Do the realms of the horizontal and vertical communicate? Is here easy commerce? Do travelers ever venture across the border between horizontal and vertical? Can a vertical entity ever become horizontal?
Now, again, let me ask a second question, again merely to make clear the nature of the question and the assumptions behind it.
A robot with no concept of imagination or stories or art or literature named Uniblab is talking with an science fiction writer named Nowlan who has written a story in which the main character, Buck Rogers, goes to sleep in 1917 and sleeps for 497 years without aging. Uniblab asks whether the book, meaning the physical object the story is written in, is five hundred years old. Nowlan says no, on the character is five hundred years old. Uniblab asks him if the paper material of the pages are exciting. Nowlan says no, only the plot is exciting. Uniblab asks him if the ink marks of the letters, written Times New Roman 12 point, are destroyed by Han airships using antigravity rays, and Nowlan says, no only props and characters in the story are destroyed by Han airships using antigravity rays.
Nowlan seeing finally that Uniblab is too stupid to pass the Turing test, tries to tell the machine that there is a difference between the story, which is a set of ideas, and which has properties like plot, theme, pacing, realism, craftsmanship, characters, props, setting, and the physical book, which is one of a set of books all printed with the same words, but some in hardback and some in paperback and some translated into different languages, and that the properties of the books are mass, dimension, duration, temperature. The realm of the story and discussions about stories are different from the realms of the books and discussions about books.
Uniblab is puzzled and asks these questions: Do the realms of the book and story communicate? Is here easy commerce? Do travelers ever venture across the border between book and story? Can a book page ever become a story character?
If the book lasts for twenty five years between first printing and the destruction of the last copy, and took a year to write and took the reader a day to read, how can Buck Rogers be asleep for 497 years? There is no way to fit 497 inside 25 or 1 or 1/365?
There is a problem with your questions. The way you phrased them makes them unanswerable. Mind and body are two different descriptions of the same reality, but in different aspects or elements. The two cannot be separated any more than vertical and horizontal, nor can they be combined any more than physical pages and character traits. You never see the one without the other. You never talk about the one using any words that refer to the other, except by metaphor.
“Do the realms of the book and story communicate?”
Well, in this case it’s easy to see that Uniblab’s problem is that it doesn’t understand that the story isn’t a real thing separately from the book. I (and I assume others) have been under the impression that you believed mind was a real thing separately from the brain. If you’re asserting that mind is merely a different level of abstraction, or that it’s merely what the brain does, then there may be no disagreement at all!
(But I have the feeling that you are now going to say that’s not what you mean. I’m not sure how you can do that without asserting that Buck Roger’s sleep of 497 years is real in some sense separately from all the descriptions of it in ink, neurons, or whatever).
It is actually more subtle than that. I believe that a story is a “real” thing in one sense of the ambiguous word real and not in another sense. In order to have that discussion, we’d have to discuss the nature of what is really real and what is not — a philosophical discussion.
What I am saying is that the mind is indeed a different level of abstraction from the body, but that the mind touches or see a nonphysical reality of a world of Platonic Forms, which are real and independent of material things, but that material things are not independent of them. The sun can exist without the plants, but the plants cannot live without the sun.
We know the body has some influence on the mind from fatigue and glandular reactions, and we know the mind has much influence on the body, such as when each man decides what to drink for breakfast or Shakespeare decides whether to give a happy ending to Romeo. These are the primary and axiomatic and non-negotiable raw data we have to work with. A materialist takes it as a primary non-negotiable primary axiom that materialism is correct, and he just ignores that fact that we know and that we cannot doubt or make ourselves doubt that each man decides what to drink for breakfast.
So it is possible that I am saying why you think I am saying, but we’d have to define our terms and state our axioms and ‘get into the weeds’ of an actually technical philosophical conversation, not the imprecise sophomoric bullshit that has been being discussed here so far, to make the statements here clear enough to confirm that you and I are meaning the same things by these words.
Does the number of pages in my paperback version of Armageddon 2419 A.D determine exactly how long Buck Rogers sleeps in his cave, breathing radioactive gas? You are asking whether a quantifiable material thing can move a physical cause to create a physical effect which moves an nonphysical quality, such that the nonphysical quality is helpless.
The idea of two worlds in synch is nonsense. It assumes the very thing dualism denies, namely, that the two cannot be reduced to each other. Are we talking about a physical synch so that some sort of chain or wire or particle connects the physical with the nonphysical? That means a ghost can be chained. Are we talking about a mental synch so that bodies are symbolically the same as or metaphores of thoughts? That means matter can be created by thought.
I don’t understand the question. The mental decision defines the outcome of the play, whether it will be a tragedy or a comedy. The physical motions define or determine the mechanics of printing the play on paper, the mass of the ink and the dimensions of the paper. The medical state of Shakespeare’s brain has no necessary relation to either of them, albeit if he had a fever, perhaps that would hinder his powers of concentration. I do not know what you mean by a mental decision selecting a deterministic chain of causation. There are certain mechanical chains of causation which reach back to a something that happens in the brain cells at about the same time as a mental decision and then stop, because we do not have any adequate account of the mechanics before that point.
I do not see how this can be the case. For given initial conditions (and Newtonian physics) there is exactly one possible outcome for the location and velocity of every particle. Suppose Shakespeare has coffee. We trace back the effective cause of every atomic motion, seeing no violation of Newton’s laws at any point, until we arrive at the point when, the day before, he learns that his son has died of the plague. (Or in principle, at the Big Bang; but that does not matter to the argument.) Now we go forward again in time. If anything except the same coffee-drinking happens, then Newtonian physics has been broken. In particular, if drinking coffee conserves momentum, then jumping in the Thames must necessarily violate it. It is relatively straightforward to show at the level of atoms that this is so; it is referred to as “time symmetry” and can be demonstrated mathematically for Newtonian physics. And if it’s true for each atom, it must also be true for the body of Shakespeare.
Ok, I’m happy to stipulate this for the time being.
This is because you are unable or unwilling to examine your assumption. Suppose you could examine two parallel universes. You look into the first one, and there you see Shakespeare drinking a cup of coffee. You examine the laws of nature. Newton’s law of gravity are the same as in the second universe where he instead has jumped into the Thames.
Let us assume two philosophers debate the question, a dualist and a determinist.
Under the approach and theory of the dualist, if that were the case, the dualist would assume that the law of gravity does not decide nor determine what Shakespeare drinks for breakfast, or whether he thinks his life worth living. The law of gravity pulls on the coffee as he pours it from his anachronistic coffee pot to his cup, and the stream forms a parabola. This happens in accord with the law of gravity. Likewise, when jumping into the Thames, the pull of gravity plus his lateral jump makes his dive into the stinking water a parabola.
Under the approach and your theory of the determinist, the Law of Gravity determines the position of every particle, including the particles that intelligent creatures with particular purposes in mind move from one spot to another, such as moving coffee into a cup for the purpose of getting a drink or moving a body into a river for the purpose of ending a life. Hence, the determinist cannot contemplate the idea, even as a hypothetical, that any particle on one universe could be in a different spot than any particle in the second.
Now, let us add other laws to the law of gravity, but let us specifically exclude any discussion of the laws of psychology, or philosophy, or metaphysics, or economics, or morals, or aesthetics, or any part of the science of biology that deals with living systems. The determinist adds the law, say, of Maxwell, or the Relativity of Einstein to his contemplation. The same result obtains: in the same way the law of gravity does not determine whether Shakespeare drinks coffee of jumps into a river, neither do laws of electromagnetics nor the laws of relativistic measurement of bodies moving at near lightspeed. They simply do not matter. They have no effect on the outcome.
But neither version of Shakespeare in either of the parallel universes breaks any of those laws.
Do you see where I am driving with this? You are proposing a new law, a law no physicist has ever heard of, imagined, or discussed, which says that if a man decides to end his life or drink a hot drink, that this is controlled by —- what? The motions of atoms in his brain?
If so, prove it. Show me a brain. Tell me which atom to move. Tell me which atom creates or causes or is lined to the desire for coffee. Tell me the weight, duration, length, candlepower, current, and moles of the subjective quality of craving coffee. I do not want to know these measurements of some symbol or some biological or medical event that accompanies the quality, nor the event allegedly causing the quality. I want the quantity, the measurement in numbered magnitudes, of the quality itself.
Can you provide it?
No? Then how to you know it exists?
This is not only a false statement, it is outrageously false. For the given initial conditions of an experiment involving inanimate objects under controlled conditions, one control of which is that no deliberate actions are allowed to disturb the experiment, there is exactly one possible outcome for the location and velocity of every particle.
Newton’s laws describe Newtonian mechanics, the motions of planets and falling apples. They do not even pretend to describe what makes LORD OF THE RINGS a better story than ULYSSES. Not a single part of the discussion of what makes a good book, not a word, not an iota, not a jot above an iota, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing in a discussion about story is effected or influenced in the slightest way, not even remotely, by any physical measurement of the Newtonian properties of the physical book the story is written in, nor any physical or medical statements about the brain of the author or the reader.
Physics is a fine field, in its place. But at least one field exists, one discipline, one line of thought other than the narrow specialty dealing with inanimate particles. Discussing the aesthetics and craft of story telling is one of them. Economics is another. Law is a third. Epistemology is a fourth. Morals is a fifth.
Shakespeare does not break any law of economics when he drinks a cup of coffee either. If he were picked up from our universe, where the price of coffee is set by supply and demand, and placed in a second universe where the price of coffee were a imposition of use-value above labor-value, in neither case would those laws be broken. Marxist economics or mainstream economics do not determine whether Shakespeare drinks coffee. Nor do he break the rules of morality by drinking coffee, whether those rules are natural or supernatural in origin. Nor does he break the laws either of England or France by drinking coffee.
The discussion of whether he drinks or whether he jumps has nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing to do with the disciplines of physics, law, economics, or ethics.
I have said this before a dozen times.
if a man decides to end his life or drink a hot drink, that this is controlled by —- what? The motions of atoms in his brain?
Clearly I’m not the esteemed Dr. A, but YES, YES, this is it exactly!
If so, prove it. Show me a brain. Tell me which atom to move.
Of course I can’t do that, and as brilliant and over-educated as he may be, I don’t think Dr. A can either. Neuroscience is not there yet; we just don’t know enough about how the brain works to do that.
However, there are plenty of cases of crude physical damage to the brain changing how people behave, and presumably how they think and feel. A lot of drugs also change how people think and feel. Based on this, I think people’s actions (and their thoughts and feelings) are products of the physical brain, and with sufficient knowledge and tools, I think one could change a man from a coffee drinker to a tea drinker, a monarchist to a republican, or a pacifist to a berserker by manipulating the atoms of his brain. I don’t know this for fact, and I can’t prove it, but it doesn’t seem ridiculous at all to me.
Exactly. Which means that the belief that material brain atom motions are the sole and COMPLETE cause of immaterial subjective mind states is not an empirical belief.
IT IS NOT AN EMPIRICAL BELIEF
IT IS NOT AN EMPIRICAL BELIEF
IT IS NOT AN EMPIRICAL BELIEF
It is not a belief based on sense evidence, sense observation, or any experiment open to the material senses.
But if Materialism is true, only matter exists.
If only matter exists, the only way to gain knowledge is through the sense impressions.
If the only way to gain knowledge is through the sense impressions, then no non-empirical knowledge exists.
That includes that non-empirical knowledge that brain atom motions cause or are in any way connected to subjective qualities of mental states.
QED.
Dr Andreassen has not understood enough of Philosophy 101 to make an argument strong enough to refute. You have. If he had said two years ago what you said now, he would have changed his mind two years ago, or at the very least given an argument of some kind, any kind, to explain his way out of the paradox of a self-refuting argument.
As it is, I cannot even draw his attention to the paradox.
Wouldn’t it follow then that the physical universe is nondeterministic, no matter what its laws are and that ‘deliberate actions’ can move physical objects?
Dr. Andreassen,
How does physics explain why physics explains everything in the universe? How does a model that is in my mind correspond to physical processes that live independently of those models? The degree of correspondence means the correctness or incorrectness of that model?
I claim that you have made a metaphysical assumption that order exists independent of your material self so that you have something to study. When you evaluate how a tennis ball is falling to the ground, you can start thinking about Newtonian physics as much as you like, but when you start calculating what velocity will be when it hits the ground, you have assumed order. Why does any phenomena, even physical phenomena, in the universe have to explained by physics?
I would like to note that there was a mistake in the course of this whole conversation that started early on – June of 2010 to be exact. The subject of physics should never have arisen. And when you start having people throwing in quantum such and such (and the flux capacitor) and thermodynamics and calculus, you can know the philosophic argument has got out of hand. Incredibly the subject of biology has never come up. Incredible because at least biology has living organisms as its subject matter while physics does not.
As we have found out, the Dr. believes every subject falls under physics. And, under his premises, they would have to.
It was always about free will, which is a philosophical topic, see the link below:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2010/06/sophomoronology/comment-page-1/#comment-44511
And I know this because I was the one who instigated the original argument! That’s right, that link is the initial impetus to Mr. Wright’s 2+ year argument with the doc.
If I had known what it would turn into, I may have not commented. But I am pretty sure the subject would have been inevitable given the good doctor’s premises.
At the time I warned that the disagreement was unsolvable. The only resolution was the complete surrender of one or the other’s complete fundamental metaphysical framework.
And so I make the pitch again. The subject is at a fundamental level – discussion taking place higher up the philosophic hierarchy presumes the point in question. Physics is irrelevant.
And as I showed in the same argument from 06/10, it involves the doctor assuming that which he is denying. That is what has been happening for over 2 years.
http://www.scifiwright.com/2010/06/sophomoronology/comment-page-1/#comment-44547
I still find that response to be definitive.
That isn’t to say the doctor’s intentions are malign, he is just not equipped to discuss the topic under discussion. Not only has he shown a contempt for the subject free will falls under, but two years later he is no more knowledgeable about the subject than when the topic started. I submit this definition of metaphysics he offers in this thread.
This is not a definition of metaphysics.
Physics has nothing to say about the topic under discussion, not a single thing. It would be more to the topic to discuss the career of Anson Williams after Happy Days than discussing wave functions.
Mr. Loki
Ah, so much like in Norse myth it is the trickster himself who is ultimately responsible! Well played sir. Well played.
I think that two years of Dr. A reading Mr. Wright is a good example of flattery.
Darrell claims that this flattery amounts to Dr. A believing that Mr. Wright is capable of turning to his argument. I think it goes deeper than that. I think that Dr. A is impressed by Mr. Wright’s patience…I certainly am.
Did not King Herod also listen to John the Baptist his prisoner, even though he did not seem to change his life? “When he heard him, he was much perplexed; yet he heard him gladly.” Mark 6:20
Unfortunately, I am not capable of turning to Dr A’s arguments because a widow cannot turn into a virgin. The conversation concerns an idea that I have examined and rejected as illogical before I was old enough to drive a car.
Amen. This is basically what I said two years ago. The reason why the conversation is and shall always be at an impasse is that Dr Andreassen is not willing or not able to discuss it. Metaphysics is beyond him.
Rolf Andreassen June 8, 2010
John C Wright to Rolf Andreassen June 9, 2010
Dear God, Mr wizard, you are right. The same arguments – back in that bygone era of the BP oil spill. Mind you, I, for one, find the discussion entertaining and provocative. But, in all that time, the only movement has been in the beliefs of Sean the Sorcerer, who has changed his name and his views, and now holds that we are all meat puppets.
It is sometimes useful, in understanding a difficult thesis, to shelve the tricky point for a time and move on. See where the other guy is going with this.
Therefore, I implore both Darth Imperius and Dr Andreassen to please skip ahead. What is is this ontology of which John speaks?
Dr. A,
I admire that a materialist has faith in anything except his physics.
What is your definition of ‘understanding’ or ‘agreement’ according to physics?
Wasn’t that my comment rather than his?
I honestly cannot understand why you guys keep insisting in skipping ahead and talking about ontology when there are relevant questions about physics and questions about the physical reality that Dr. Andreassen is asking but which no dualist in this space, as far as I have traced back this discussion, has been willing or able to answer concisely and clearly.
To follow Mr. Wright’s suggestion I will use the exact philosophical terms: is there physical closure? is there nomological closure in the physical reality? what is the -physical- nature of the interaction between the mind and the physical reality? does this interaction necessarily implies that the laws of physics are nondeterministic or violates said closures?
With all due respect, another set of elaborate metaphors explaining how mental objects and physical objects belong to different categories and therefore cannot interact is not a satisfactory answer and I doubt it is going to be very helpful for any skeptic such as myself. Dualism must solve the problem of interaction.
Interesting question, but perhaps wrongly formed. My answer is here: http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/10/on-the-necessity-of-ontology/
You appear to be using the phrase “break the laws” in a way which is almost completely orthogonal to the way I use it. Are you perhaps speaking as a lawyer does, and saying that one cannot break a law which does not apply? If I serve alcohol to a young child on my yacht in international waters, I have presumably not broken American law, which has no jurisdiction outside the twelve-mile limit. Is this analogous to what you mean when you say that the laws of Newton are not broken in the case of Shakespeare jumping in the Thames?
I do not understand the analogy of serving alcohol to a child in international waters. Obviously a creature with free will can disobey a moral law, and be held blameworthy if he does. That is what free will means. Obviously again, natural objects in motions form patterns of reaction which physics can reduce to specific manifestations of an underlying elegant simplicity. Laws of nature are models of those patterns, as when we say every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If we see something where it looks as if every action does not have an equal and opposite reaction, we look for some additional particular condition, such as friction or air resistance, to make the model more complete.
What I mean by “breaks the laws” is that a phenomenon happens which the model cannot account for. The procession of Mercury due to the relativistic influence of the gravity gradient of the sun altering the metric of Mercury “broke the laws” of Newton, because it was a phenomenon which should have been explained by the model, but was not explained.
If the words “broke the law” are unclear, let use the words “broke the model” or “proves the model to be inaccurate or inadequate.”
So, substituting this new phrase for the old, the unclear sentence may be clarified thus:
Is that clearer? I am not asking if you agree with the mark, I am only asking if you understand it.
The phrase “Newton’s model of particle movements does not apply to Shakespeare, nor to the constitutent atoms of his body” is clear, yes. It corresponds exactly to what I meant when I said “Shakespeare breaks Newton’s laws”: In other words, the movements of Shakespeare demonstrate that Newton’s model is inaccurate.
I wonder if you will agree with the following? Suppose I measure the velocity and mass of each atom of Shakespeare’s body (and his surroundings) as he drinks his coffee. Then suppose I do the same for the hypothetical Shakespeare who jumps in the Thames. Now velocity times mass is momentum, and momentum may be added linearly; so when I add up the momenta of all the particles in each case, I get some particular number. (Well, three numbers actually, one for each direction of three-space.) I assert that these numbers are necessarily different. Do you agree that this is, at any rate, a measurement I can (in principle) make? Perhaps you’ll say that I am misusing physics in a realm where it does not apply; fine, but I suppose I may be stubborn about it if I choose. Can I acquire and compare these numbers?