Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Mind-Body Issues

The discussion that followed my last post raised issues pertaining to the so-called “mind-body problem” that deserve more reflection. Hence, although I am still on vacation, and although I imagined that at best I’d offer “lighter fare” on this blog until my return, I find myself moved to post something relatively short that doesn’t exactly qualify as “light.”

Specifically, I want to share some thoughts on the thorny cluster of mind-body problems, especially insofar as these thoughts help to flesh out points I inadequately gestured towards earlier, and insofar as they address Braun’s claim that a materialist view of consciousness actually does a better job than a dualist one of explaining how mental events such as deciding on the basis of reasons can cause physical changes in the brain.

In that comment, Braun takes it that mental events just are brain events. The argument seems to be this: Since there is no mystery concerning how brain events can cause other brain events—and since “deciding to do X” just is a brain event—it follows that there is no mystery about how “deciding to do X” can trigger neural firings that stimulate the rest of the body to do X. Since this “reductive materialist” view of the mind accounts so readily for mental causation, it actually does a better job of making sense of our experience than do dualistic views which posit two different kinds of substances—minds and bodies—and which then have to confront the difficulty of making sense of how they can causally interact.

This has been one of the standard arguments in favor of reductive materialism for a long time, which is one reason Goetz and Taliaferro spend so much time in their book, Naturalism, taking issue with the claim that causal interaction between non-physical minds and physical bodies poses such a challenge. The most important point they make in their response to this view is that there is a mystery about material causation, and hence about how brain events can cause other brain events—and that the most plausible solution to this mystery works just as well for dualistic mind-body causation. In other words, the latter is no more mysterious than the former.

But it’s not my intent here to repeat G&T’s arguments on this point. The deeper issue, for me, is the philosophical untenability of saying that mental phenomena just are brain phenomena. It is not similarly untenable to claim that mental phenomena are by-products of brain phenomena, or that mental phenomena and brain phenomena are distinct aspects of a more fundamental noumenal reality to which we do not have direct access (or, perhaps better, they are how this reality “looks” from two distinct perspectives—which is closer to my view).

The argument against such reductive materialism can be formulated in several ways. There is a “way it feels” to be the subject of an experience—say, the experience of observing the color red. Philosophers have come to call such things the “qualia” of conscious experiences (“quale” in the singular). Correlated with each quale is some repeatable sequence or pattern of neural firings (what I will call a “brain event”). But here’s the thing: I am immediately acquainted with color “qualia,” such as the subjective experience of red. I am not immediately acquainted with the corresponding brain events. As such, there is something that’s true of color qualia which isn’t true of corresponding brain events. But if something is true of X but not true of Y, then X and Y are not identical. Hence, conscious experiences are not identical with brain events.

The same idea can be arrived at via Frank Jackson’s famous arguments from his essay, “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” Jackson asks us to imagine a brilliant scientist, Mary, who for her entire existence sees nothing but black-and-white, but who knows absolutely everything there is to know scientifically about color and its effects on the human person, including the neurobiological processes correlated with color perception. But she has never seen any colors. Then, one day, she experiences the redness of a red rose for the first time. Jackson asks, has she learned something new about the color red?

Obviously, she has. She’s learned what red looks like. But by hypothesis she already knew everything there is to know about the neurobiology of color perception. And so the subjective experience of redness is not identical with the brain events that science studies.

None of this entails that mental phenomena cannot be construed as by-products or unique properties of brain events, thereby preserving a broadly materialist metaphysics. But it does entail that the simple reductive materialist solution to the problem of mind-body interaction evaporates. On the reductive materialist view, such things as “deciding to do something for a reason” just are brain events—and since (it is contestably assumed) there is no problem with brain events causing other brain events, there is no problem with explaining how deciding to do something for a reason can give rise to neural firings that trigger complex bodily behavior.

But insofar as “deciding to do something for a reason” directly describes a phenomenon of consciousness, and insofar as such a phenomenon is not identical with a brain event, this easy solution to the problem of mind-body interaction is no solution at all. On a materialist metaphysics, what causes the brain events that directly impel bodily activity are nothing more than other brain events. And since the conscious experience of “deciding to do something for a reason” is at best an epiphenomenal by-product or property of these brain events (rather than a brain event in itself), it cannot be what in ordinary human experience we take it to be, namely, the source of our activity. Deciding to do something for a reason is rendered as inefficacious in the world of human behavior as is the greyness of brain matter. Instead of causing our acts, it is just another effect, along with our actions, of brain events unfolding according to physical laws.

To this line of argument we can add a further argument specific to the distinctive conscious phenomenon that we call deciding something for a reason. Reasons are, by definition, conceptual. They have semantic content. Physical events do not. Hence, brain events do not. As such, to decide to do something for a reason is to act in a certain way because of a proposition with a conceptual content. And a proposition with a conceptual content is not reducible to a brain event. As such, if a brain event is responsible for my activity, then it is not true that I am acting on the basis of a reason. I am, instead, acting on the basis of a prior brain state giving rise to subsequent ones in accord with the physical laws regulating cause and effect. And so, on a reductive materialist metaphysics, there can be no such thing as doing something for a reason or deciding to do something for a reason. There can at best be an epiphenomenal conscious state that looks like acting for a reason. (To whom does it look this way? Well, that leads into other difficulties relating to making sense of the subject of experience given the assumption that the conscious self as we know it is wholly a product of the brain).

The final conclusion we are led to here is that a materialist metaphysics belies our ordinary self-understanding, specifically, our understanding of ourselves as agents who act for reasons. If we accept this metaphysics of reductive materialism, then our immediate conscious experience of ourselves, on this point at least, must be rejected as delusional.

And to reject our self-understanding on this point is nothing like, say, coming to believe that we have a subconscious mind in addition to the conscious one. Agency lies at the heart of just about every single aspect of our lived existence—only agents can be morally responsible for our actions; only agents can pursue creative endeavors or develop arguments or raise objections or think things through or take stands on issues. Deny agency, and these are merely things that happen to us, and my critics’ efforts to convince me to change my mind become nothing of the sort. Try as they might, they can’t try to convince me, because “trying” is conceptually linked to agency, and “convincing” someone is conceptually linked to agent-responsiveness to reasons as opposed just to mechanistic causes and/or quantum indeterminacy.

Put another way, agency is not just some feature of our self concept among others. It touches on every aspect of our self-understanding. Take it away, and one doesn’t just modify that self-understanding. One does away with it altogether. To strip us of agency is to strip us, in an important sense, of what makes us human. It seems to me that, all else being equal, a worldview that preserves our humanity in this sense is preferable to one that makes it out to be a Grand Delusion. The quest for such a worldview, one which also takes seriously everything we have come to know about our world through science, is therefore more than worthwhile.

22 comments:

  1. Good stuff. Very clear. It's seemed to me for awhile that the human experience remains one of agency and identity, no matter what we say about it, and those concepts remain something not quite physical even if they emerge from physical systems. This is how I interpret what it means for us to say that God is spiritual: God shares those non-physical properties of agency and identity and personhood.

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  2. "But here’s the thing: I am immediately acquainted with color “qualia,” such as the subjective experience of red. I am not immediately acquainted with the corresponding brain events. As such, there is something that’s true of color qualia which isn’t true of corresponding brain events. But if something is true of X but not true of Y, then X and Y are not identical. Hence, conscious experiences are not identical with brain events."

    This is a rather facile argument. How about a perspectival version- if I view a pyramid from one perspective it looks like a triangle. From another, it looks like a square. Therefore they can not be the identical thing.

    Consciousness, by a reductive analysis, is exactly like that ... a sensation of red is also a brain event that is or monitors the red sensation. More specifically, it is a monitoring event that shows the final results of a string of unconscious processing. Mary, in Jackson's gedanken experiment, would have complete knowledge from one (analytic) perspective, but experiencing the new inner perspective would not require her to alter knowledge within her prior perspective by one iota, only add to it the new perspective that .. from the inside, red looks really cool.

    This is all quite similar to how a computer works, representing on a screen internal states of memory and cpu that are physical in both places, and could have a third instantiation/perspective as backup data written to a disk. I am not saying that computers are conscious, but that what you see on the video monitor "is not the same" as what is present inside the machine. Yet it also is the same, presenting selected internal states and not others, such as the video monitoring process itself, reflexively. Likewise, consciousness allows us to monitor some internal processes (like the ultimate threads of vision processing) while not monitoring other things, most notably its own process of monitoring and representation.

    The diverse physicalist evidence about sensation being altered directly by drugs, lesions, magnetic fields, etc. indicate quite clearly the identity of phenomena as experiences and phenomena happening physically in the brain (apart from a large class of phenomena we do not internally monitor which can be lesioned but then provide no experience, or very indirect alterations of experience, of which lobotomy is one example). Perhaps most clear are the mapping experiments where an open, waking brain is stimulated systematically with electrodes while the patient calls out where they feel sensations happening, step-by-step, all around the sensory cortex.

    One has to ask as well where the non-material nature of consciousness arises in phylogeny. Do dogs have a distinction between how things feel to them and their brain activities? Do birds? Do flies? Do do plants? Bacteria? All these organisms sense the outside world and respond to it. Take flies... they have tiny brains and process information very rapidly, and steer away from pain and towards pleasure. Thus we really have to assume that they have some kind of conscious experience of their world. Is this a non-material soul, separate, but adjunct to their physical selves? Doesn't that seem a bit hard to credit?

    cont...

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  3. "Reasons are, by definition, conceptual."

    Well, in view of the above, this holds no more water than the rest of the argument. Any reason or concept we entertain only happens by virtue of some physical constellation of brain activities. Thus they can lead to other physical events in the brain that we experience from our interior perspective as consequences, etc. Computers have reasons for doing things as well, which can be quite complex, contingent, learned, etc. These reasons are instantiated mechanistically, and whether or not the computer has an interior perspective on what is going on (it could be programmed to sense some states [conscious] and not other things [unconscious]), nothing gets done without physical instantiations of every bit of reason, data, monitoring, etc. Computers even thrive on semantic content!

    If I may digress a bit on information theory, the physics of the situation are quite clear- physicists regard all information as physical. Thus information coming in from the great beyond violates basic tenets of conservation of energy/matter. How supernature interacts with nature is not something to be swept under the rug in a cloud of sophistry, but is a very fundamental problem, if you want to take science seriously.


    "Deciding to do something for a reason is rendered as inefficacious in the world of human behavior as is the greyness of brain matter. Instead of causing our acts, it is just another effect, along with our actions, of brain events unfolding according to physical laws."

    This is sort of true, in that our consciousness of these kinds of processes tends to be a monitoring function that only follows the events in question ... neuroscience finds that our decisions are made well in advance of our consciousness of what we have decided. But it doesn't have the dire effects you impute, since as long as we aren't conscious of the rest of the unconscious story, we also don't really care much about it and can go on with our lives according to our brain's original specifications, which are to do as we like and to learn from experience, as agents.


    "Try as they might, they can’t try to convince me, because “trying” is conceptually linked to agency, and “convincing” someone is conceptually linked to agent-responsiveness to reasons as opposed just to mechanistic causes and/or quantum indeterminacy."

    Mechanistic or not, we are equally agents. You touch on the key point of responsiveness. It seems that breadth of conception, motivation, and responsiveness/ability to learn are the essential elements of agent-ness. Mechanistic beings can learn, respond, and be agents just as much as any other kind (I think ... this would need to be proven out by artificial intelligence or a full solution to brain mechanics). However creepy it might seem to you that there are gears and pulleys lurking beneath the surface, the action is the same.

    Ditto for the internal free will perspective. If decisions arise with the illusion of self-agency, it makes little difference that as it actually happens, we are hopelessly susceptible to influences like advertising, ideology, habit, indoctrination, and suggestion in general- we feel like agents, and that is the proper moral position to act from. But every day brings new data about how our agent-y feelings are inaccurate- how we can not diet as effectively, or quit smoking, or control anger as we would wish. Taking these limits seriously rather than chalking them all up to moral defects is, in the end, a significant moral advantage of the naturalist position (i.e. compassion). (Recent podcast on the topic).

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  4. Regarding the following: "This is a rather facile argument. How about a perspectival version- if I view a pyramid from one perspective it looks like a triangle. From another, it looks like a square. Therefore they can not be the identical thing."

    First, a point about form. I really would prefer that my arguments and the arguments of others who post on this blog not be declared "facile" or "sophistical" or by any other name that amounts to a kind of name-calling. It is, typically, far easier to engage seriously with critics when they simply say, "This argument doesn't seem to work. Here's why." Or, even better, when they have the humility to say, "I don't see how this argument holds water, for this and that reason. Am I missing something or have I misunderstood your point?"

    In the case at hand, it seems to me that my critic HAS missed something. The same thing may appear differently from different perspectives--but this shows that neither APPEARANCE can be identified with the THING, since the appearances differ from each other while the thing cannot differ from itself. The way something looks from a certain perspective is not identical with the thing itself. As such, if a state of consciousness is taken to be the way that a brain state looks from a certain perspective, then it cannot be treated as the very same thing as the brain state.

    Now I actually have some sympathy with the idea that consciousness is the way a brain state looks from a certain perspective--but my position is that it is the perspective of the self who is both subject OF experience (and as such is affected BY changes in the brain) and agent (and as such affects changes IN the brain).

    Braun's view, as I interpret it here, is that consciousness is to be identified with a second-order brain event. Consciousness is the way the brain looks to itself when it monitors itself. Or, perhaps better (so as to avoid assuming too readily that the brain can be treated as a unified self), an event of consciousness (whether it be a passive experience or an active one like "deciding to do something for a reason")just IS a second-order brain event in which parts of the brain are responding to other parts of the brain ("monitoring" them, although that term connotes agency).

    But if so, the original problem remains. I am immediately acquainted with consciousness but entirely unacquainted with brain events. And so while consciousness might be identified with the way that the second-order "monitoring" brain event APPEARS to "me," it cannot be identified with the second-order brain event itself.

    If the "me" from whose perspective the brain event "looks" like consciousness is, once again, just the brain itself (or some subsystem) engaged in yet another self-monitoring event (a third-order one?), the same problem emerges yet again. To avoid infinite regress when we assume that conscious just IS the way brain events appear from a certain perspective, we need a subject (someone "whose perspective it is") that is not reducible to a brain event.

    cont. --->

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  5. A materialist can avoid this infinite regress problem by claiming that consciousness--rather than being the way brain events appear from a certain perspective--is an emergent property OF brain activity (one that has a subjective-objective "shape" to it but is such that there is not actually a subject OF consciousness).

    But my point is that this solution forces us to reject important elements of our immediate self-understanding. While doing so may be justified if it is necessary in order to make sense of a barrage of facts, I am not convinced that the facts on hand DO make it necessary. As I put it in my book, the world of our experience is "conceptually malleable" and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

    But rather than develop this point here, I want to briefly touch on another issue that comes up because, in my comment above, I invoked an infinite regress argument. The last time I made such an argument, Burk dismissed it on the grounds that positing a regress-ender doesn't solve the regress problem. But this seems to me a bit quick. Infinite regresses such as this one really ARE problems. If a certain kind of explanation generates an infinite regress if it is assumed to be the only sort of explanation available, that is a BIG problem for treating that kind of explanation as the only kind available.

    What such an infinite regress argument shows, then, is that one can't legitimately regard this sort of explanation as the only one. There must be some other kind of explanation out there, even if we presently have no idea what this other sort of explanation is like--indeed, even if it seems impossible for us to have ANY sort of concept of what such an explanation is like.

    In a sense, infinite regress arguments are arrows pointing to mystery. And I don't think we can avoid the press of mystery just by pretending that infinite regresses aren't a problem.

    Now I'm going to go enjoy the rest of my vacation.

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  6. love reading everyone's points.

    I must admit that I see it best as a paradoxical loop, even if that's unsatisfying to some. The following may not be exactly the same as what you all are arguing but it's similar.

    Human evolved through genetics until they became conscious and able to create memes. This is the point that we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, to invoke a famous metaphor. Memetics then proceeds to affect our genetics. Basically, we are pulled in many different directions in many ways. Our choices are affected by the memes in our brains as much as the genes we are born with. The genes create memes, the memes affect genes - through affecting mating, plasticity of the brain, changing environment which changes phenotypes, etc.

    So to me, there seems to be a paradoxical nature to the root causes of our actions. Our choices may be affected by genetics, by memetics and also a large chunk of it is probably indeterminate - chaos throwing environmental changes, inside and outside our brains. We process this into order, we yearn for coherent narrative, and this is worthy......but....

    "my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." JBS Haldane.

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  7. I find your line of reasoning on this interesting. The hard problem of consciousness is probably one of the most profound mysteries in both science and philosophy and one reason why I reject materialism. It seems to me that the reality of consciousness is irreducible and cannot therefore be a by-product of merely material processes.
    I was wondering if your own position is similar to the double-aspect theory of the relation between the mental and the physical. If I’m not mistaken, this is what you refer to when you write; ”or that mental phenomena and brain phenomena are distinct aspects of a more fundamental noumenal reality to which we do not have direct access.” I find this theory, in some version or another, attractive for a number or reasons. It doesn’t reduce one to the other (the noumenal reality is neither merely physical nor mental) and it makes it easier to explain how the mind and body correlates (I don’t see how classical dualism can account for that.)

    John Polkinghorne describes his version of the theory as “an attempt to wrestle with the persistent unsolved problem of how mind and matter relate to each other. It differs from classical dualism, which maintains that there are two sorts of substance: mind and matter. Its problem was how they relate to each other. I'm sure that we're not simply matter, and I'm sure that reality is more than just ideas. None of the classical solutions seem to correspond to our experience. Dual aspect monism tries to take seriously both our mental experience and our material experience. It says that they're related to each other in a very deep and complementary way, that there is only one stuff in the world. Dual aspect monism seeks to avoid devaluing or subordinating one side or the other. Sometimes it might seem a little like a subtle form of materialism, but I don't think it is, because it doesn't treat the mental as being just an epiphenomenon of the material.”

    I don’t expect you to answer right away. Enjoy your vacation! You have definitely earned it.

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  8. Hi, Eric-

    Sorry to cause offense or insult. I will try to be less direct in my language.

    The infinite regress argument is well put. Yet we know the regress ends, and our task should be to find an end that best fits the evidence in hand. Why choose to end it at a supernatural point that has so little to recommend it from a scientific point of view, rather than a point that is consistent with anatomy and physics? We don't have to go back to the pineal gland of Descartes- there are much better candidates today to end the regress (though no one can offer a complete solution yet). Why not take the view that the second order "monitoring" system of the brain is identical with subjective experience? It is the same thing. In this model, the experiencer is one way (and by far the most common way, being built-in) to experience some other selected brain operations.

    The monitoring function does not experience itself at all, but only a few other brain operations. Thus the regress ends, and we are actually unconscious of the mechanisms of our own consciousness. If consciousness is, say, the gamma wave patterns that tie together distant regions of the brain, we wouldn't and don't "experience" them directly, but through them experience other events. The other perspective available from outside (which we have only recently gotten even a small glimmer of through technology and science) sees all this as physiology, though in this perspective, nothing is experienced subjectively, of course.

    Again, the deference shown to common self-understanding is extremely puzzling. In physics, the perspective of Einstein enveloped the prior perspective of Newton, which in turn enveloped the commonly understood folk-physics of Aristotle and others of time immemorial (or contradicted their not-very-good theories). Obtaining broad, encompassing perspectives can be very hard to do- they need not grow on trees. What we need to explain are common experiences. Common understandings are very frequently worthless.

    Philosophy generally seems to be a competition to attain the broadest possible perspective by which to contain and make sense of all those perspectives that have gone before. As argued above, I think that naturalism efficiently does this job for the mind (among many other things), accounting as well as can be done for both the inner and the outer, though lacking at the moment a complete account. Theism offers its own attempt at a broad perspective, including authorship of all that is, supernatural "containment" of material existence, souls as the endpoints of mind, causeless causes, etc. But its explanatory power over the natural world has been deeply eroded and seems to exist in rather wan formulations in recent times, while the competing process of explaining inner experience in a naturalistic way is far more explicit and grounded. Doubtless we will have far more to say on the issue in a very few decades, at least from the naturalistic perspective.

    If I could be so bold, I think this perspectival approach also dissolves the theist/naturalist divide. From an internal perspective, the universe is created by the mind. In an old testament sense, mysterious commands come from the unconscious, implacable and unanswerable. It is also the ground of all being, the I AM that I AM, and all other mystical formulations. It accounts for the spiritual power of hallucinatory experiences, for whatever can so move and twist the ground of all being is not to be trifled with. It accounts for immortality, since the self is co-eternal with the ground that creates it, which will all dissolve simultaneously into the ocean of universal consciousness (or death), at least as seen from within. Yet at very the same time, naturalism is true as well, about all the same things.

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  9. Burk, bravo on your last paragraph! I really think there is so much possibility in finding ways to ultimately resolve the tension between theist/naturalist points of view. As you have implied, everything is a symbol that our brain creates for the swirling mass of subconscious emotional blah blah in our deepest psyche.

    And as Eric implies, so much of it all is the angle from which we are looking at it. If the theist is still accountable to the facts of observation, and a naturalist is still open to the necessity of "metaphysical" assumptions to create meaning - anyway, it's one way among many to think about it.....

    At the risk of over-stretching, when you throw in a quantum view of time, reality, etc. some of our deepest instincts about the universe may end of being true, albeit in a completely different manifestation than the symbols used to represent them in religion.

    I think a way for me to see it all is this way -

    The gap is a beautiful thing. But the more we refine it through knowledge, the more beautiful it becomes.

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  10. After thinking some more about the mind-body problem and feeling quite sore that I couldn't solve the problem of consciousness myself in an afternoon, I realized that I was not alone. As Eric says above, it would take a barrage of data to move him from a supernaturalist position, and I am sure that is true of other philosophers in their various states of dualism, dual monism, etc. What will provide this data? Not philosophy or philosophers.

    It seems that the mind-body problem is now really a scientific question, not a philosophical one. There are two important reasons for this:

    1. The problem is heavily bounded by physics and other known science, as I have taken some pains to show. It is confined to our heads, and to the neuro-electric chemistry of the brain. Even hypotheses that are so confined, like Penrose's quantum fluctuations in neuronal microtubules, can be extremely weak from a scientific standpoint, let alone hypotheses that call on other dimensions, supernatures, nonspatial entities, etc. This of course needn't bother philosophers, but it does guide scientists, whose track record in seeking out solvable problems is pretty good.

    2. In light of #1, many scientists are in the field, actively working on the problem and able to generate data. Pubmed gives hundreds of references for keywords like consciousness and binding. One example.

    Just because scientists are looking doesn't mean they will find anything. Psychic reasearch has been going on for decades, and has not found anything reliable. In that case, the mainstream scientific community has concluded that they have indeed found that psychic abilities don't exist, so the search has been productive in that sense. Consciousness certainly exists in some sense as a natural phenomenon, so the field is not trying to establish its existence, but explain it, which is exactly what science is best at, as time will perhaps tell.

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  11. Burk writes: "It seems that the mind-body problem is now really a scientific question, not a philosophical one." What he forgets is that some philosophy drives, guides, and informs all science. There is no such thing, in a conversation like this (or any perhaps), as a purely "scientific" question as opposed to a purely "philosophical" question and the statement only reveals a modern bias toward binaries or oppositions. It is a false view to begin with. Eric, I don't know what your feelings are about this, but one huge factor missing in this conversation is talking about the modern/postmodern divide. All "facts" and "evidence" are interpreted "facts" and "evidence." Unless the modern/postmodern question is brought into these discussions, I think there will be a lot of talking past one another. I know this from experience. Just a thought.

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  12. Just to add some more to my last comment, Burk also writes: "What will provide this data? Not philosophy or philosophers." Again, scientists are philosophers. This is a false choice. Again, the modern/postmodern divide needs to be addressed.

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  13. Eric, I may just be missing it, but could you (or anyone really) give a formulaic account of the regress in this case. As I'm reading the arguments, I only see a description of an admittedly very long causal chain, but not one that lacks grounding.

    Darrell, care to develop your invocation of the "modern/postmodern divide?" I'm not just being obstinate here; I've found 'postmodern' is used largely as a vague reference to some condition in the zeitgeist for which everyone poses understanding without ever pinning it down to functional meaning. That being the case, it often serves to cloud analytical consideration of specific questions as a specter rather than a legitimate object of consideration.

    When you use the term, are you simply referring to the view that all experiences (including experiences of language but also of other physical phenomena) need parsing? If so, then I'd agree with you that it is an important consideration in these arguments, but also one already presumed by everyone outside of religious fundamentalism.

    For the record, I'm not asking for a complete account of postmodernism here, just an explicit formulation of its bearing on the current debate.

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  14. Hi, Cheek-

    You are right on with your points. How I understand the regress is as a "watcher of the watcher of the watcher..." situation. If our brain is going about its business processing inputs from the senses, somehow consciousness is a watcher of the end results of this process (most of the process is submerged in unconscious processing). If consciousness is another brain process, then it again has to be watched by something else, since it, being a brain process, can not be identical with what we feel as qualia (from some perspectives). And so forth. From the soul perspective, the non-spatial entity or soul serves as the unwatched watcher, much as God serves as the uncaused causer. A sort of homunculus that needs no further explanation.

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  15. Cheek, I am referring to an entire body of work out there from Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault to Charles Taylor, John Milbank, Graham Ward, Catherine Pickstock, and James K.A. Smith, to just name a few, which speaks to this whole area. Burk is arguing from an entirely modern perspective that has been completely unpacked, deconstructed, and shown to be a metaphysical viewpoint, a “faith,” rather than some neutral objective observation of “facts” and “evidence.” No “fact” or piece of “evidence” simply drops from heaven telling us what it means. Material reality is interpreted (This does not mean the material world is not real or imaginary!) and interpretation happens through a complex process of metaphysical/philosophical/experiential presuppositions (which are historically-culturally situated) that cannot be “proved” in the same way as the conclusions they lead to might be. When you say “analytical consideration,” we must recognize that all such considerations and analysis are always being done from a philosophical viewpoint. A legitimate “object” of consideration is always an interpreted object, which is to say that nothing is simply an “object.” There is no neutral objective gaze. There is no “functional meaning” that is not first a philosophical articulation. Scientists are always already philosophers because a philosophical viewpoint provides the very condition for the possibility of “science” to even happen. Burk is trying to oppose philosophy to science, faith to reason, and so on. It is a dead end of modern oppositions and binaries that have no place in a conversation like this and advance nothing.

    I’m not sure what you mean by “parsing.” If you mean “interpreting,” then yes. However, if you think such is already presumed by everyone other than “fundamentalists” I would doubt that somewhat, but I would be more inclined to agree as long as you were lumping “secular” fundamentalists in as well. The secular fundamentalists (the Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens of the world) are simply the other side of the “religious” fundamentalist coin. They both live in the same small world. They are both informed by modern presuppositions that have been completely undermined and subverted by the postmodern critique.

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  16. Darrell, I'm aware of the major shift in philosophy that took place post-Kant, and I understand that some people call that postmodernism. Many of the philosophers you mention did groundbreaking and enduring work (e.g. WIttgenstein), and others made a living of saying nothing with the appropriate academic swagger (e.g. Derrida). However, I still don't see what you mean when you claim Burk is approaching this issue from a purely modernist perspective, dooming him to the same philosophical fate as the logical positivists. While I happen to believe Burk's claim that philosophy has no further role to play in answering the mind/body question or the problem of consciousness is too strong, it is not entirely out of bounds. Furthermore, just because we can agree that all positions rely on a philosophical framework, does not demand that all such frameworks are equal, and just because all evidence requires parsing (I think I'm using the term roughly the same way you use 'interpreting'), we are not free from basing conclusions on evidence. It is wrong to equate religious fundamentalists with those you would dub secular fundamentalists because while the religious place faith in certain propositions without any evidence whatever, the secular simply choose to accept as settled (effectively certain) a philosophy of evidence that has proved itself effective over centuries. Now, you can make good arguments that the latter is an epistemic error, but it is certainly minor compared to the epistemic catastrophe that is the former.

    Back to the matter at hand, are you simply claiming that there is a place for philosophy in answering these questions, or are you also saying that Burk has made some other error in reasoning regarding the central issues of mind/body causation and the nature of consciousness that is attributable to what you see as his singular reliance on failed modernist binaries.

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  17. Cheek, as to Derrida I disagree; he actually said some very important things—see John Caputo (and many others.)

    “Furthermore, just because we can agree that all positions rely on a philosophical framework, does not demand that all such frameworks are equal…” I didn’t say they were. My point was that Burk doesn’t seem to believe that all positions rely upon a philosophical framework. He believes there is “science” and there is “philosophy” which seems to be clear from his statements I quoted.

    “…just because all evidence requires parsing (I think I'm using the term roughly the same way you use 'interpreting'), we are not free from basing conclusions on evidence.”

    This statement doesn’t make sense to me. How does saying all evidence has to be interpreted mean we are now free to come to conclusions without evidence? No one is saying that. What I said is that all evidence is interpreted evidence and we interpret through our philosophical frameworks or presuppositions.

    “It is wrong to equate religious fundamentalists with those you would dub secular fundamentalists because while the religious place faith in certain propositions without any evidence whatever, the secular simply choose to accept as settled (effectively certain) a philosophy of evidence that has proved itself effective over centuries.”

    No, it is entirely correct I believe. This statement shows you make the same mistake Burk does. The truth is that both the secular fundamentalist and the religious fundamentalist both believe they have the “evidence” and “facts” to prove their positions and your statement that the religious person has no evidence “whatever” should rather be that the religious fundamentalist interprets the evidence differently. To claim that one has “evidence” and the other doesn’t is exactly what Burk is trying to say and is exactly what I’m critiquing. Do you honestly believe that there are doctors, scientists, and those in the neuro-sciences out there who are also Christians or theists who aren’t aware of some “fact” or “evidence,” and if only they were, it would make them instantly become philosophical naturalists as to the mind-body problem? Please. Or, perhaps you can tell us what “evidence” or “fact” all the theists/Christian doctors, and those in the neuro-sciences who are working in this area, who also agree with Eric, have missed. And exactly what “philosophy of evidence” are you speaking of? The modern one I just pointed out has been completely subverted by the postmodern critique?

    “Back to the matter at hand, are you simply claiming that there is a place for philosophy in answering these questions, or are you also saying that Burk has made some other error in reasoning regarding the central issues of mind/body causation and the nature of consciousness that is attributable to what you see as his singular reliance on failed modernist binaries.”

    I’m not sure how you can ask this in light of my original point. Not only am I saying there is a place for philosophy in answering these questions, I am saying it is impossible to answer them without it, because the moment we begin talking about an area like this (or anything for that matter) we are coming from some philosophical viewpoint. I believe you noted this yourself in your response. Burk’s failure is to assume that there is an objective pure “science” that just considers the “facts” and “evidence” and then there is “philosophy” or “religion” that is based upon a prejudiced blind faith and is somehow untethered to reality. This is a modern fallacy.

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  18. Darrell, I looked back at my latest comment, and realized I did a pretty poor job communicating my thoughts. Sorry about that.

    My contention with your original invocation of postmodernism was that I could not see how it was on point in unraveling this issue. I recall the discussion of philosophical frameworks that you reference, and I was opposite Burk in that one. I just still don't see how it directly informs the mind-body question. Here's what I mean: if Burk is wrong regarding philosophical frameworks, as I believe he is, (though I'll qualify that by saying that he seems to be arguing that the correct philosophical framework, empiricism, is so obviously the correct one as to brook no argument, sorry if that is a misinterpretation of your position, Burk) then he does rely on a philosophical framework despite any disavowal. In that light, it seems to me, the pertinent question is whether that framework offers the best answer to the mind/body problem. I think that is an open question. So I think it is controversial to claim, as Burk did, that the future of the mind/body question is entirely the providence of the sciences, but by no means so outrageous as to be out of bounds as you claimed.

    As to your points regarding my previous points, I'll clear up what I can, though I'll just leave some of them since they weren't really on point either. (I can't very well criticize you for it when I'm about it myself, alas.)

    1. Derrida: I'm going to leave it alone despite the joy I take in deriding him since I really only made the comment out of compulsion, not any relation to the present argument.

    2. "This statement doesn’t make sense to me. How does saying all evidence has to be interpreted mean we are now free to come to conclusions without evidence? No one is saying that." I suppose I was attempting here, though not very clearly I'll grant you, to suggest that the kinds of evidence here required make Burk's claim of scientific providence interesting.

    cont'd

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  19. Cont'd

    3. "This statement shows you make the same mistake Burk does. The truth is that both the secular fundamentalist and the religious fundamentalist both believe they have the “evidence” and “facts” to prove their positions and your statement that the religious person has no evidence “whatever” should rather be that the religious fundamentalist interprets the evidence differently." Perhaps my statement was a (very tiny) speck to strong, but it is still clear to me that while the secular fundamentalists are not justified epistemically in granting effective certainty to empiricism as a framework, they do have strong reasons to accept their particular framework. I agree that religious fundamentalists "believe they have the 'evidence'. . . to prove their position." However, that belief is interesting epistemically only because it is utterly baffling. There are simply no grounds in experience for accepting the detailed religious content of any one religion. My support for this assertion is that you could take the "evidence" offered by a fundamentalist from any religion and apply it to any other. Therefore, the same "evidence" that supports certainty of the truth of the Gospel also supports certainty in the truth of the Koran (or of the Iliad for that matter). Given the overwhelming success of the empirical approach, it is easy to understand why someone would overstate its capabilities, whereas it is clear that religious fundamentalists are deluded or lazy in their interpretation (again, I damn myself as I am doubtlessly lazy myself in offering only these two categories).

    "Do you honestly believe that there are doctors, scientists, and those in the neuro-sciences out there who are also Christians or theists who aren’t aware of some “fact” or “evidence,” and if only they were, it would make them instantly become philosophical naturalists as to the mind-body problem?" No, and you'll notice that my statements regarding theists extended only to fundamentalists, a category that would not include Eric or many of the various experts you cite. Again, here I'm just trying to get at the fact that the acceptance of the value of empirical evidence in solving this problem leaves Burk's claim in bounds. I don't think it's likely that existing philosophical frameworks will be sufficient to solving this problem even as we discover more on the empirical side, but I also don't think it's inconceivable that some future empirical discoveries in neuroscience will clear up the fundamental questions given only current philosophical understandings. It's an open question is all I'm saying.

    Anyway, I hope that helps. Despite my efforts, I got sidetracked with some of my own thoughts here. Sorry for the tangents.

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  20. Hi, Darrell and Cheek-

    My ears are burning! If I didn't know Darrell better, I'd suspect he was trying to cloud the issue by injecting postmodernism. The practice of destabilizing narratives is much more dangerous to those who live by the mythos than to those who live by the logos. There is no question that philosophy could be said to be the underpinning of science- (natural philosophers, etc.)- indeed of everything we do, even crossing the street.

    The deep role of philosophy here seems to be to support integrity of thought, which means principally, the ability to uncover and analyze one's own presuppositions and those of others. This is the essence of the scholastic disputation, the scientific method, and of reasoned discussion in general. This would seem to be the point of parsing, interpretation, hermeneutics, etc- not preserving the presuppositions one has (by faith; as eloquently put by Cheek, an epistemic catastrophe), but plumbing them and evaluating whether they hold up to a definition of truth. A definition of truth which I take to be correspondence with reality, thus the empirical method I prize. If one takes the definition of truth to be the Bible, then one is an inerrantist, and if one takes the definition of truth to be god and revelation as selectively reconciled with reason and non-biblical evidence, then one is somewhere in between (which seems a somewhat unstable position, I'd suggest, though certainly more coherent than the inerrantist position).

    My immediate question was more concrete, though- whether formal philosophy of today has anything to add to resolving the mind-body problem. Formal philosophy has the same tools it has had from time immemorial, which is to say, introspection and armchair cogitation. The mind-body problem has perplexed thinkers forever, and to hear philosophers still invoking "souls" indicates that not a great deal of progress has been made (speaking parochially from my own perspective, of course). The great Eastern practitioners of introspection have moved mountains to learn and control their internal worlds, and have found ... no self. As I've mentioned, the introspective sense is terrible. The idea that we can learn about how consciousness works by introspection presumes just the kind of infinite regress referred to above that logically can not take place.

    The problem reminds me of the preformationist debate, where the origin of adult animal design was a mystery to all up to the last century. How could so much pattern come from such tiny gametes? If the design was not injected by a deity at the time of conception, how about if all animals were pre-created when the world was created, in infinitesimal packages that then emerge to fruition in each generation? The same kind of infinite regress arguments were in play, and the same kind of mysterious irreducibility was suspected. Matter could not possibly author such wonders. Now, of course, the whole question has been dissolved by data and the debate practically forgotten.

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  21. For the record, my experience suggests that the overwhelming majority of professional philosophers reject the idea of souls. Epiphenomena are the most that most are willing to admit beyond the physical.

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  22. Cheek and Burk, given the length of my response, I thought it better to respond with a post on my own blog: http://byzantinedream.blogspot.com/

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