Brain and brain! What is brain?
randallsquared and I seem not to be able to communicate. This could be because our brain-atoms are not in the same patterns. I suspect it is because our concepts are not agreed on certain points of logic and truth, but we shall see:
“(quoting me) “Well, my point here is that not only is ‘honesty’ not a fluid, we do not have the faintest idea what it is. And yet you and I (both honest, reasonable, well-read men) do not yet even agree on whether honesty it has a physical basis AT ALL.”
(Randall replies) I would have thought that we could agree that ‘honesty’ itself is a description of how some brains act, and that the concept of it is constructed of neurons and their associated chemicals and charges, being a separate construction in each person’s brain.”
Honesty is not a description of how brains act. “Sleepers enter REM sleep during Delta wave activity” is a description of how brains act. “He said he was awake at his post, but he fell asleep,” is a description of dishonesty.
Not only can I not agree with this, I do not even begin to understand how you or anyone else can agree with it. It sounds like pure gibberish to me.
I mean no offense! When something sounds like gibberish that is a warning bell that one of us (or both) is making a fundamental assumption the other cannot see. We have axiomatic differences of philosophy. It behooves us, not to dismiss each other as crackpots, but to see if we can find these hidden, unspoken axioms.
Specifically, I think there is a distinction I am making between when is necessarily the case versus what is contingently the case, and you are talking about the fact that symbols and signs are carried or conveyed in matter, from which you make the leap that all the properties of the ideas thus carried can be expressed in material terms. I do not see that leap because it is paradoxical; I am assuming you do not see it because you take it for granted. Let me expand, and you can tell me if my assumption is a misunderstanding. We are talking about two different topics
Let me see if I can get us both on the same topic.
I propose three basic ideas. 1. Material things exists. 2. Conceptual meanings exist. 3. The one is not the other.
1. In life, there are things like billiard balls or rays of light which cannot be described or depicted in a meaningful way without some reference to categories such as mass, motion, dimension, duration. Material objects take up space. This fundamental property can be called “extension.”
These values can be measured by comparison to a standard: a billiard ball moving at velocity X of mass Y has kinetic energy Z and so on, where X,Y, and Z refer to a meter stick, a stopwatch, a gram weight or some other physical object. This fundamental property can be called “Commensurability.” There may be clearer words for this, but I hope you know what I mean. If I can hold it up next to a meter stick, a stop watch, or a balance scale, it has this property.
Other physical properties are “intensive”, that is, the property is not dependent on the amount of matter present: Color, Odor, Luster, Malleability, Ductility, Conductivity, Hardness, Melting Point, Freezing Point, Boiling Point, Density. Nonetheless, these are physical properties, apprehended by the senses.
These are properties of things are made of matter that occupy time and space. They affect and are affected by matter.
Every physical quality, even things that seem impalpable, like light or magnetism, or are too small to be seen, like atoms, are nonetheless “material”: invisible atoms can be “seen” in their naked-eye effects on chemical reactions, for example, or detected by means of amplifying instruments. Therefore even things that seem impalpable can expressed meaningfully in terms of their mass, motion, dimension, duration. Even intensive properties such as boiling point and density are expressions of material objects that occupy time and space and are seen by the senses.
2. In life, there are also things like “honest” and “dishonest”, “efficient” and “inefficient”, “fair” and “foul”, “praiseworthy” and “blameworthy”, “logical” and “illogical” which cannot be described or depicted in a meaningful way without some reference to categories such as “truth”, “beauty”, “validity” and “purpose”, “meaningful” and “meaningless.”
These properties have to do with ideas and concepts and reality as seen from a point of view of a self-aware mind. They are properties of consciousness. They are not extensive and not commensurable. It is not meaningful to speak of them in terms of multiple magnitudes of a standard measure.
These things apply to statements, to symbols, to ideas, to deliberation and to deliberate human actions. A deliberate human action can be called “dishonest” or “unfair” but a non-deliberate motion cannot meaningfully or literally be called that.
A billiard ball can have mass and position. It can have hue and shape and occupy volume. A billiard ball cannot be true or false. Only a statement can be true or false. A rock cannot be honest or dishonest, valid or invalid, logical or illogical, meaningful or meaningless. I suppose we could talk about a rock being beautiful or ugly, but this is a property that is not observed unless an observer with a proper sense of aesthetics is in a position to view it; in any case, the prettiness of the rock is not a property one measures with a yardstick and stopwatch.
A statement is not the physical means used to express the statement.
If I speak, the “statement” is not the compression waves issuing from my throat. No examination of the compression waves will tell you anything about the truth or falsehood of my statement. You might be able to learn the decibel volume of my statement, but the truth is just as true whispered as shouted, and the falsehood just as false shouted as whispered. If the same statement is written down with pen and paper, the truth or falsehood does not change: only the medium being used to carry the idea to the audience or reader has changed. If the statement is written in red ink or black, using many words or few, the physical properties change, but the truth or falsehood does not change.
Honesty is a concept used to describe whether a symbol, like a word, correctly and truthfully represents what it intends to represent. Honesty is not an invisible but material thing, like an atom, nor an intensive yet material property, like density, nor does it have weight or location in time or space. 2+3=6 is a FALSE statement; one of the properties of the statement is its FALSENESS. This is a property it actually and really has in real reality. It is a non-material and non-temporal statement.
The basis of its falseness is that if 5 were removed from both sides of the equation, 1 (unity) would necessarily equal 0 (nullity) and “something” would be “nothing”. This falseness would exist whether the statement were spoken or written or sent as brain-waves from one telepath to another or transmitted as nerve chemicals from my cortex to my hypothalamus.
It would be false today, tomorrow, and always. It would be false in a box and with a fox and here and there and everywhere. It’s truth or falseness therefore is INDEPENDENT of ANY material circumstance. It cannot be made more true by adding mass, or made less false by subtracting velocity or mixing it with sulfur. It is not a physical property.
Honesty also cannot be described without reference to the category of intention: human actions cannot be described meaningfully without reference to ends sought and means used. 2+3=6 is FALSE because this statement is intended to refer to numbers. If the sign of two parallel horizontal lines was intended to represent the concept “not equal” the statement would be true, for then the signs would represent the intent.
Billiard balls do not have intention.
More to our point, it would be a false statement if spoken by a sober man, a drunk man, or a man with a brain chemistry disease. A drunkard who says twice two is four speaks the truth. A sober man who says twice three is five speaks untruth. Nothing, nothing at all, nothing in any way whatsoever, connected with the chemical and neural composition of the brain would change the truth or falseness of the statement.
3. You just said honesty is a chemical property of the brain. At least, that is what it looks to me like you said. I assume I misunderstand you, because it sounds like Lewis Carol-magnitude nonsense: merely a pun or play on words like “beating time” to mean time was a physical thing one could hit with a stick. Time cannot be hit with a stick; a concept cannot be made of matter. Matter is matter. The word “matter” only has meaning to distinguish it from concepts.
A concept cannot be “constructed” of neurons, any more than a statement can be “constructed” of sound waves or ink on a page. A concept can only be “constructed” (if that is the term) of terms, words, ideas, other concepts. If concepts were made of atoms the concepts would change when the physical medium changes. I have given you an example of a statement whose properties does not change when the medium changes: 2+3=6 is false whether spoken or written, whether it is in my brain or your brain, whether my brain is sober or intoxicated. The truth of the statement does not depend on the physical construction of my brain.
A false statement cannot be made more true by diddling with the atoms in my brain. Perhaps you can damage my brain to make me SAY or THINK it is true, but in that case my statement (spoken or unspoken) would simply also be false. Likewise, you can also damage my eye to make me see light were there is no light. This changes the property of the eye, not of the light. The truth or falsehood of the statement simply does not depend or change according to any physical property of the brain.
Indeed, if the truth or falsehood of statements depended on physical properties of brains, then two men with who differed in whatever this crucial brain property was could not communicate concepts at all. Parallels would be equidistant for brains wired for Euclidian thought, and parallels would diverge or converge for brains wired for Non-Euclidean thoughts—and that would be that. No further communication would be possible between them, because no statements would have any independent truth value. (Indeed, in a universe were truth-value depended on matter, thought itself would be impossible, but that is another argument).
*
So much for my three basic ideas. With this in mind, please contemplate the unintentional paradox of your statement:
“However, I’m not sure we’re going to be able to reach any kind of agreement on this, if you really believe that there is something non-material, which nevertheless “is” honesty, or a symbol.”
You are using symbols to ask me whether or not “I” “really” “believe” in symbols.
But not the word “agreement” nor “I” nor “really” nor “believe” has any meaning in the physical, material universe: these are all concepts we bring to our sense impressions without which we cannot make sense of sense impressions. Concepts are symbols of things. Thar are not things. The map is not the terrain; the word is not the thing it represents. Concepts are categories used to make order of reality, concepts without which reality does not make sense.
If I am nothing but a collection of atoms in motion, the statement cannot obtain. Atoms have mass and diameter, but they cannot “agree” or “disagree”. They cannot “believe” things, much less believe them “really” or “not really.” An ion may have a negative charge or a positron a positive one, but a statement does not have a truth charge that can be changed to a falseness charge by rubbing amber against the fur of a cat.
Obviously you believe that symbols “really and actually exist”, or else you would not be using them.
Let me ask you a question: Why are you arguing with me? I am not asking your motives, I am asking you to analyze what it is the act of argumentation consists of.
Suppose a Genii gave you a choice: (1) all the atoms in my brain will remain in the same physical location, but I will be convinced by the argument or (2) all the atoms in my brain will occupy different positions, but I will not be convinced by the argument.
If you pick (1) this means you do not care about winning the argument or about convincing me of the truth. If you do not care about convincing anyone of the truth, the act of argument is meaningless. For any materialist, argumentation is meaningless.
If you pick (2) you are not a materialist, because you acknowledge that concepts have meaning independent of the medium used to express them (sound waves for spoken thoughts, ink for written thoughts, pixels for typed, brain waves for unspoken thoughts).
If you say that it is not possible for a brain to physically have brain atoms of one configuration and to think thoughts not necessarily represented by those atoms, I refer you to the example of “unionized”. The word physically, as ink on the page, is that same IN EVERY MATERIAL AND PHYSICAL RESPECT when it means employees forming a union, or when it means an atom that is not ionized. Since words on a page can mean two different things even when physically identical, why must be assume that words in my head, or brain atoms in my head, cannot mean two different things even when physically identical?
Clearly the opposite is the case. My brain and your brain have no physical location in common, and my brain atom differ from your brain atoms in countless ways. But when I say “2+2=4” we are thinking the same thoughts, and we understand each other. At least in this respect, the meaning of the statement is independent of the physical properties of the medium used to convey it.
To sum up:
In written thoughts, the same material properties can carry different conceptual meanings. “Unionized” is the same physically yet carries two different meanings.
In unspoken thoughts, men whose brains have different material properties can carry the same conceptual meaning. “2+2=4” is the same meaning in your brain and in my brain, even though our brains physically differ.
Despite this, your claim is that conceptual meanings are nothing but and can be nothing but material properties.
You do not even make the (far more modest) statement that the conceptual meaning is expressed or conveyed by the material property: your statement was that the conceptual meaning it is the material property, nothing more and nothing less.
5. I also owe you an answer to your question.
“If we were to simulate on a very powerful computer every single molecule in a brain — that is, the brain itself on a molecular level — which was a duplicate of the brain of someone who writes opera generally considered to be good, with the appropriate interfaces to the real world, would you expect that the simulated brain could write opera?”
Good question. The answer is that no one knows. What is the relationship between the brain and the mind? If the relationship is one-to-one, you will get the same mind in emulation as in reality. If the relationship is something else, you will get something else.
If we get the same mind in emulation, he might be able to write an opera if the mood and inspiration strikes him: but even then, he will not be able to reduce opera-writing to a step-by-step process. Mental acts that involve value judgments (such as the assessment of sublime and trite, or pretty and plain) cannot be reduced to step-by-step processes.
For the brain atoms of our opera writer not only need to be in the computer correctly, they need to do the same thing the opera writer does when he writes opera: and what the relation is between the mechanical cause and effect and the intentional final cause toward which he aims cannot only not be described in terms of one another, they cannot be described at all.
Imagine sending our opera writer through a Star Trek transporter, but with the unfortunately side effect that he comes out of the receiver dead. Every single atom is in the exact same location it was in reference to every other atom. No mass has been lost or gained, but the physical processes are stopped. Let us say the body is still warm, and the electrons in the brain are still in their exact same locations.
Nothing physically is different on the atomic or electronic level between the dead body and the living opera writer. Obviously the dead body cannot write opera. Therefore opera writing talent is not something that can be found or described just be finding or describing the location of atoms and electrons in his body and brain.
Imagine sending our opera writer through a Star Trek transporter, and he comes out alive, but no longer with the talent or interest in writing opera. Suppose a close examination of every atom in his brain shows no gross differences. There may or may not be subtle differences a second trip through the transporter might correct. Suppose further you ask him why he is no longer writing opera, and he says he just broke up with his girl. If you try to solve the problem by shoving him through the transporter again to rearrange his brain atoms, you are a materialist, and therefore an idiot. If you try to solve the problem by giving him a sympathetic ear to hear his lament to or a sympathetic shoulder to cry on, or by introducing him to your sister, you are a human being. The first is a material approach, the second is conceptual. I suppose buying him a stiff drink partakes a little bit of both approaches.
6. You seem to be assuming (correct me if this is not your assumption) that a thought is the same from the point of view of a self-aware consciousness, a mind, and from the point of view of an outside observer looking at the physical brain inventing or perceiving the thought. (inventing in the case of subjective thoughts, perceiving in the case of objective thoughts).
Admittedly, the brain is somehow related to, accompanies, embodies, or composes that mind: but no one knows what the relationship is. If you say that the brain IS the mind, you are merely making a mistake of language: a play on words.
When I say the conceptual properties of a statement are not material, I do not mean a deaf man can hear my sentence when I speak it, or that a blind man can read what I write. Obviously there are material representations of statements both spoken and written. What I am saying is that the conceptual properties of the statement are an independent variable. You can change the concept without changing the matter. You can change the matter without changing the concept. “Unionized” is not “unionized” (union-ized and un-ionized). “2”, however, is “two.”
If we were talking about how the eyeball worked, we would draw as distinction between light, which is physical, and vision, which is conceptual. I can see a pretty girl with my eye, but the property ‘pretty’ is not to be found by any examination of the photons carrying her image to me. I have to describe my vision to you for you to have any hope of understanding what I am talking about when I talk about ‘prettiness.’ To see the prettiness you have to have my sense of aesthetics, and be reminded of much the same things I am when I see her; and even then, there is a mystery.
If you insist that vision is merely light, or that thoughts are merely brain-atoms, you are trying to analyze how the human mind works without taking human consciousness into account.
The source of the confusion seen to be a word confusion: as if you were to say that ‘prettiness’ must be a physical property of the girl, because the prettiness cannot be seen unless a physical girl is physically present.
While it is true that the prettiness of a pretty girl cannot be understood unless the physical girl is physically present and physically seen by the physical eye, it is also true that ‘prettiness’ is a conceptual and not a material property. To call something pretty is to refer to aesthetic concepts. ‘Prettiness’ does not have mass, even though girls who are pretty can have mass (but not too much, please).
Likewise here. Statements can be true or false the way a vision of a girl can be pretty or plain. The statement is conveyed or carried by some material medium, sound waves or ink or brain waves, but only the extensive properties of the medium can be meaningfully spoken about using physical properties. To address the truth or falsehood or a statement, one must speak of the conceptual meaning.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
