Evoluiton can't account for higher-level animal behaviour

GrowingSmaller said:

No, because of "explanatory dualism" (see #96). However complex a physical thing, it will be described in terms of physical activity.

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ahhh over my pay grade wich is zero :> So can't comment on the idea.

GrowingSmaller said:

If there is rational attraction to being, then there is a force (i.e. being responsible for ourselves) acting on us that causes a movement towards the source of that force (i.e. existence, the world, the universe). Such that properly or appropriately responsible action draws us towards existence.

If there is irrational attraction to being, then life forms are drawn towards existence by means of irrationality (random mutation) and purely physical feedback (natural selection). Life is again drawn towards existence, but in a non-conscious or non-rational way.


Two distinct models. Dualism again.

Any comments?

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Mixing metaphysics with physics is a big no-no and an autoloss in a science debate.

GrowingSmaller said:

But physicists usually depend on metaphysical assumptions, which have a philosophical aspect, when debating mind. If they were pure physicists then "folk psychology" would be eliminated. And, implicitly, the need for and ethical standards in scientific psychology.

You could hurl your uncle into an atom smasher and have no worries at all.

Everyone knows that, or ought to.

So its vice versa. Eliminating sentience is a no-no!

So, really its the physicists and biologists that are being loose and sloppy with their reasoning. They hide behind a veneer of independence, and say everything is analogous to matter-matter mechanics and Newtons laws etc. but its not.

Philosophy is an legit topic. If biologists and physicists mention mind, then up it pops - metaphysics, philosophy, dream-weaving etc. whatever you call it - no escaping.

"Evolutionary psychology" .... genes, ontogeny, phenotype? That's insufficient*. Everyone knows that, or ought to. When debating mind.

So at least half of what we call evolutionary theory (the part that supposes animals are sentient, alongside being blocks of flesh e.g. SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class research journals ) is not-so-scientific as it seems. I'm not smuggling metaphysics in, its already there.

*So, Darwinism is either false or incomplete.

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Heh, no.

GrowingSmaller said:

I'm a dualist. I think there is explanatory dualism, in that we explain actions that result from consciousness in a different way than we do purely 'mechanical' processes. I'm influences by Wilhelm Dilthey here:
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Whether this "explanatory dualism" entails a substance dualism I don't know. I suppose that the conscious mind could still be a physical thing, even thought physics is the wrong discipline to talk about it. But, not 100% on that one.

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This sounds to me like a scale-dependent philosophy of the type physicist Sean Carroll calls 'poetic naturalism', a kind of conceptual dualism where different descriptive languages and concepts are appropriate to different levels of description of the world.

So, at a fundamental level, there would be the language of quantum field theory, where everything is described in terms of the excitations of quantum fields. At the next level up, there is the (now semi-classical) language of particle physics, where things are described in terms of particles, waves, and forces. At higher levels of description come chemistry, then biology, then behaviour, sociology and psychology, then ecosystems, etc.

So when we talk about consciousness, choices, exercising free will, altruism, selfishness, and so-on, we're using terms and concepts that are appropriate and specific to the level of human behaviour & social interactions; particles don't make choices, molecules aren't altruistic.

So it makes no sense to mix levels and languages of description (unless we're specifically studying the boundaries between them); we can say we're just a bunch of particles or chemicals following near-as-dammit deterministic physical laws, but it doesn't make sense to say we're just a bunch of deterministic particles, therefore, we can't make choices.

Making choices is a high-level description of how human behaviour and experience. If we knew all the information of how all the particles in someone were moving and interacting, we might, in principle, be able to predict every choice they made, but we don't know that; we only have a high-level macro-scale knowledge and understanding of what's happening in their head (and in our own head), so it makes sense to say we do make choices, and that matches our experience of going through the process of making decisions, even if it turns out to be deterministic.

Isn't a physical thing, something describable by physics?

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Yes, except, possibly, when it comes to subjective experience. There are two kinds of knowledge, extrinsic, i.e. objective and directly describable, and intrinsic or tacit, i.e. subjective, and only indirectly describable. Intrinsic knowledge is the stuff of phenomenal experience, which can't be directly described except in metaphor and simile, i.e. in terms of objective events, of what it is like.

There is an argument to be made that the tacit knowledge of phenomenal experience is a physical thing, i.e. has a physical representation, but that there are two different views of it; the physical description, consisting of the patterns of activity of the neurons that carry it, and the subjective view, consisting of what those patterns of activity mean to the individual in which they occur. But why they should have meaning or be 'like' anything is the hard problem of consciousness.

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

If consciousness is, as the evidence suggests, a mode of operation of the brain, i.e. brain processes, then the interaction problem goes away - consciousness doesn't need to 'influence' the brain because it is the brain in action.

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I think I see where you are coming from. I assume that you are basically saying this: when certain physiological / chemical / neuronal events occur in a brain, certain qualia happen - this is a brute fact about the world. Not that I want to bandy about technicalities, but I believe you therefore embrace epiphenomenalism - the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events.

Do you agree that this makes qualia rather "unnecessary" from an evolutionary point of view. If qualia play no causal role in the world, they are a curious add-on that we get "for free", no?

It has been a while, but 20 or so years ago, I was very impressed with the arguments of David Chalmers. I think your position may at least be consistent with his. Chalmers argues, persuasively in my view, that we will never be able to explain qualia reductively in terms of atoms and forces - it is somehow fundamental. Note that this does not, I think, make Chalmers a Cartesian-type dualist.

expos4ever said:

I think I see where you are coming from. I assume that you are basically saying this: when certain physiological / chemical / neuronal events occur in a brain, certain qualia happen - this is a brute fact about the world. Not that I want to bandy about technicalities, but I believe you therefore embrace epiphenomenalism - the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events.

Do you agree that this makes qualia rather "unnecessary" from an evolutionary point of view. If qualia play no causal role in the world, they are a curious add-on that we get "for free", no?

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No, I don't think they are epiphenomenal - my suggestion is that the patterns of neural activity are qualia for the individual in which they occur; IOW qualia are what it is like to have those patterns of activity in your brain.

It has been a while, but 20 or so years ago, I was very impressed with the arguments of David Chalmers. I think your position may at least be consistent with his. Chalmers argues, persuasively in my view, that we will never be able to explain qualia reductively in terms of atoms and forces - it is somehow fundamental. Note that this does not, I think, make Chalmers a Cartesian-type dualist.

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I don't agree that qualia are somehow 'fundamental', but I do agree with Chalmers that they won't be directly explicable in terms of atoms and forces, because they're not stuff, they're phenomenal processes, patterns of neural activity.

Support for an identity between neural activity and qualia comes from neuroscience. One example was demonstrated by Paul Churchland in 2005, involving the activity of colour-opponent neurons in the visual cortex. By modelling the activity of these neurons it's possible to predict the range of colour experiences their activity can provide.

This range includes a number of colours that are not possible to experience from objective colours (colours corresponding to combinations of frequencies entering the eye). Colours that are outside the objective colour space are called 'imaginary', 'impossible', or 'chimeric' colours and fall into three groups, stygian colours (dark as black with colour), self-luminous colours (bright as white with colour), and hyperbolic colours (oversaturated colour). The model not only predicts the experiential characteristics of these colours, but also predicts a method by which they can be experienced - the after-image effect.

Unfortunately, the full Churchland paper is now behind a paywall (I have a copy from when it was freely available which I can let you have if you'd like to read the whole thing), but Wikipedia does have one example chimerical colour template that will give you an idea of how these colours can be seen (ideally, you need a print-out with good colour-accuracy).

The point is, that by modelling neural activity alone, you can predict entirely novel qualia, and experience them by modifying that activity appropriately. This seems to me to be strong support for an identity between specific objective neural activity and specific subjective phenomenal experience. It seems to me that this is the simplest model that fits the data. YMMV.

GrowingSmaller said:

What about the claim that a purely physical account of animals and humans eliminates consciousness, eliminates the subject, and therefore it eliminates the need for ethics.

But, IMO there is a need for ethics, I protest, therefore a purely physical account is (at least sometimes) inappropriate....?

c.f. "eliminative materialism" -

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I agree with Mrs Churchland that having a physical explanation or description of mental processes won't change our experiences (as Isaac Bashevis Singer said, "We must believe in free will, we have no choice), but it will probably change the way we think about them - although experience of this forum suggests that there will be a significant proportion of the population that will simply not accept the evidence that much of their subjective experience is not what it seems to be, because they will see it as devaluing both their sense of self and the worldview and belief system it relates to.

Ethics is a concern at the level of human social behaviour, not at the level of the physical description of mental processes. This is where different levels of conceptual and descriptive language are relevant. But it would be nice to think that once free will is accepted as a high-level experiential description of low-level, broadly deterministic processes, a more enlightened approach to deviance and criminality will be possible, where punishment for retribution and revenge will give way to more humane treatment for socialisation and mental health problems - which appear to be far more effective and beneficial all-round than punitive approaches.

GrowingSmaller said:

Could a organism which talked merely in terms of brain states, and didn't not mention the self or subjective feelings etc, be regarded as a morally relevant person?

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Not sure what you mean by a 'morally relevant' person, but an entity with subjective experience would likely describe itself in terms of subjective experience, i.e. what it is like to be that entity.

If a computer merely gave system read outs, and never talked of having conscious states, we wouln't regard it as a an Artifical Conciousness, or would we (Artificial consciousness - Wikipedia )???

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That would depend on the content of the read-outs. If you were to print out the numeric values of the neural spike-trains at an early stage of human speech output processing, you'd get a bunch of numbers that would represent whatever was being converted to speech. Restricting a system to a non-linguistic or pre-linguistic output doesn't necessarily restrict what else it does.

GrowingSmaller said:

If every time a child I hurt s/he was taught to cry out "substance p!" - would s/he lear anything about brain chemistry, or would s/he thing that the statement "substance p!" was actually meant to convey info about qualia???

Im asking this because IMO we cant eliminate qualia from the "mental-life vocabulary" learning process. Therefore eliminative materialism is impossible.



"I've hurt my knee, ergo substance p!"

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Not quite sure what you're saying here, but it sounds as if you're mixing descriptive levels. You wouldn't attempt to describe the clothing of a character in a video game in terms of the string of bits in RAM that makes up the program's representation of that clothing; or the jumping/squatting action of a character in terms of the processor activity that generates it.

GrowingSmaller said:

I believe in conscious causation.

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Good for you.

Let us all know when you have evidence for it, rather than silly rhetoric.