The Extent of Cartesian Dualism

David Gould · Nov 6, 2005

Shane Roach said:
Hope you enjoyed your weekend.

Unfortunately, I think we've reached the bottom here. Since awareness itself is not something I believe you can detect, I do not know how you would ever determine whether or if plants, worms, thermostats and so forth have any level of awareness. If they do, as I think I mentioned in an earlier post, though perhaps not addressed to you, David, then you have succeded in making the supernatural into the natural. You have not to my mind however done anything to do away with spiritualism or religion. The "spirit" of the woods now is the sum total of all the complex reactions in the forest, and who knows but that the forest is "aware" on some level.

I think we are always making the supernatural into the natural.

Certainly such a model does nothing to upset the concept of God in the Christian religion. There are Christians who believe there is no free will. I happen to not be one of them, but I have been accused of sounding like them from time to time, which might come as a surprise to you since out introduction to each other has been largely in relation to free will arguments.

I just can't concieve of a consciousness test, so I do not know how to move forward beyond mere opinion as to the matter of whether things are conscious or not, and so have no way of knowing if your linking complexity to consciousness has any validity or not. I tend to think not.

I think that if we really need to define consciousness more specifically to test for it. My last post may be more useful in this regard than my other ones, as it does set out a dividing line between the consciousness we enjoy as humans and other forms of self-detection. However, even here there are difficulties. My suggestion would be that we can detect consciousness of the human sort by observing what creatures do - if they do similar things to what we do, particularly in regard to social interaction, it seems to me that they have consciousness similiar to our own.

This is actually why I do not think that AI can be built - I think that AI would be have to develop in a social setting and be pushed by forces that mimic evolution. This is also why I suspect that animals that interact with humans can be taught consciousness on some level. There is certainly evidence that animals that interact with humans tend to become more intelligent.

FreezBee · Nov 7, 2005

David Gould said:
The next major question, I suppose, is how do categories arise? I would suggest evolution - in other words, creatures that are better able to distinguish types of threats and types of food are more likely to survive to breed. In crude form, to climb a tree in response to a leopard threat is a bad move survival wise. But it will work against a lion.

What do you mean by evolution? Necessarily biological evolution? A system with the ability to learn from experience can evolve without necessarily changing structurally. I doubt it changes a human's brain that it learns something. Humans can learn from each other - that's why we have schools (although I admit that I'm not sure exactly what is learnt in schools ), but that does not change human biology. The tricky bit here is of course that the purpose of passing on experience is to keep things the way they are, to preserve society as it is - you are taught how to function in this society, so education is somewhat antievolutionary, I'm afraid .

David Gould said:
The monitoring and categorising of one's own thoughts is very useful, too - particularly from the perspective of a social species.

In deed - selfreflection can be beneficial - except that it may actually take so much time that you'll be hindered in having anything to actually think about, or do you disagree on this one?

cheers

- FreezBee

TeddyKGB · Nov 7, 2005

FreezBee said:
What do you mean by evolution? Necessarily biological evolution? A system with the ability to learn from experience can evolve without necessarily changing structurally. I doubt it changes a human's brain that it learns something.

That is not correct at all. At the physical level, learning is directly associated with creating new synapses between existing neurons.

FreezBee · Nov 7, 2005

TeddyKGB said:
That is not correct at all. At the physical level, learning is directly associated with creating new synapses between existing neurons.

Ok, so the more you learn, the more synapses you have. This is true, but what I meant is: the human brain is still a human brain, even if you learn PI to the gazillionth decimal digit Sorry for not explaining my self clear enough.

cheers

- FreezBee

TeddyKGB · Nov 7, 2005

Shane Roach said:
I imagine if the experiment were altered somewhat to go back and forth between the two, the self could indeed differentiate. The process of going back and forth would itself become easier in time I suppose.

Well, you can check out the researchers I mentioned earlier rather than speculatively second guess their work.

But the fact that practice makes thing second nature does not to me imply much of anything one way or the other about the nature of "self".

Hmm. It suggests to me that a solid line of demarcation between the electro-chemical perceptive pathways and the immaterial self - a division one might expect given the circumstances - is not apparent.

The Cartesian Theatre model - with a central observer able to process and make decisions based on information received - appears to have serious limitations here.

Well we've posted back and forth in a thoughtful way together at this point to have built a little good faith, and truthfully, motive, slippery as it is, is an important subject of its own in these matters. Still, I have to remind you (or tell you for the first time?) that I was not born a Christian, nor was I raised one. For me, the process was the exact opposite. I came to my understanding of self first, then from there went to spirituality and from there to the specific reigion of Christianity. This process was largely guided by my father in my late grade school years, who at the time and really, still to this day operates mostly as a sceptic, although he likes to confess Christ almost it seems as a hedge. Later, around 14, I came to a sort of crisis of conscience. I simply could not keep from thinking about spiritual matters, and found myself at a Methodist church. I joined it more or less out of a sort of combined sense of patriotism and civic duty. A few weeks later, I went to a Baptist church and for the first time really grasped the "good news", or gospel, however one might want to put it. I can say that as an experience, it is a lot like discovering the answer to a question you have been studying long and hard over. I think that's why it is often considered "revelation". But my conversion was long, long after I had decided that my personal self was at least in some way separate from the physical body.

Point taken. The dualist model is in no way unique to Christianity. Dennett refers to it in no specific religious context, but as a comfortable way of thinking about thinking.

Descartes, of course, although nominally Catholic, was no friend of the Church.

You can never have a concrete notion of the non-physical, and I think that is what trips you up. You're trying to shoe horn something that does not fit into your frame of reference into your frame of reference rather than simply changing your frame of reference to include the thing in question.

But by even referring to something non-physical here as a "thing," you imply that it can be thought of in classical thing-terms.

Even your use of language seems to betray a conscious effort to avoid even the appearance of implying the immaterial.

Similarly, your use of language often suggests something with qualities that can be conceived of.

Anyone else might have said, "but the fact that I do not share your perceptions does not entail something non-physical." But I think at some level you are aware that the word "perception", being more aligned with the subjective, is much closer to what I mean by the non-physical, whereas "phenomena" is a word that can bridge that gap. If you had no notion of the thing, you would not know to avoid words like "perceptions". So I think you have about as good an idea as is necessary. You just are uncomfortable with it for reasons I have yet to really understand.

I use "phenomena" because, traditionally, phenomenology is the study of experience and perception. I suppose "phenomena" is functionally equivalent to "qualia."

FreezBee · Nov 8, 2005

TeddyKGB said:
Descartes, of course, although nominally Catholic, was no friend of the Church.

An interesting factor is that Descartes and the other 17th century rationalists all were alienated religiously. Thomas Hobbes was accused of atheism, and Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated. Is common religion too irrational, or am I just playing around with words?

cheers

- FreezBee

Marz Blak · Nov 8, 2005

FreezBee said:
An interesting factor is that Descartes and the other 17th century rationalists all were alienated religiously. Thomas Hobbes was accused of atheism, and Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated. Is common religion too irrational, or am I just playing around with words?

cheers

- FreezBee

Interesting point, and one I had not considered before.

I am no historian of religion or philosophy, but it seems to me that whenever someone has made a philosophical or scientific development that has challenged religious orthodoxy (e.g., Copernicus and heliocentrism), he has had to endure censure from the Church (at best), only to have the Church eventually refine its stance to accommodate the new understanding after its attempts to quash it prove unsuccessful.

Sort of like God of the Gaps in action.

FreezBee · Nov 8, 2005

Marz Blak said:
I am no historian of religion or philosophy, but it seems to me that whenever someone has made a philosophical or scientific development that has challenged religious orthodoxy (e.g., Copernicus and heliocentrism), he has had to endure censure from the Church (at best), only to have the Church eventually refine its stance to accommodate the new understanding after its attempts to quash it prove unsuccessful.

Sort of like God of the Gaps in action.

Yes, religious orthodoxy is a weird thing. I'm not too sure about other religions, but Christianity seems to be amazingly adaptive - once the camels have been swallowed, then the new way of thinking becomes, what the Bible has said all the time!

And congratulations with your birthday

cheers

- FreezBee

Shane Roach · Nov 12, 2005

TeddyKGB said:
The Cartesian Theatre model - with a central observer able to process and make decisions based on information received - appears to have serious limitations here.

You keep coming back to this, and I am not getting it at all. If there is an immaterial observer in my head (my soul or whatever) being immaterial, it will have no worries at all dealing with the "theatre" being upside down, backwards, inverted, inside out or whatever, so long as it is consistent.

So I don't get how this experiment really addresses the issue at all?

It seems I am going to have to understand this to get much further.

Shane Roach · Nov 12, 2005

David Gould said:
I will add one more thing, because I think that I did not make this very clear previously.

The key thing in the detection and recognition system is that the system must have categories in which to place the things that it detects. If it cannot do this, then there is no recognition at all. Once it has this recognition, it can use its prepogrammed responses to react.

For example, if we imagine a creature that has motility and a very limited nervous sytem, what we might get is a creature that when it detects something places it in one of three categories: threat, food, neither. Its preprogammed respones might be 'run, eat, do nothing'.

The complexity of the system that I am talking about, therefore, increases as the categories and preprogammed responses expand.

One of the categories is 'self'. Without this category, even if it detects itself - as a damage control system does - it would not have the same level of awareness that we do. A damage control system might detect injury and dispatch antibodies and blood supply to deal with it. But there would be no categorising of 'self'. Rather, the category would be 'damage' and the preprogammed response would be 'repair'.

The next major question, I suppose, is how do categories arise? I would suggest evolution - in other words, creatures that are better able to distinguish types of threats and types of food are more likely to survive to breed. In crude form, to climb a tree in response to a leopard threat is a bad move survival wise. But it will work against a lion.

The monitoring and categorising of one's own thoughts is very useful, too - particularly from the perspective of a social species.

I hope this explains a bit better what I mean by 'complexity' and what I mean by 'pattern recognition'.

It's all so hypothetical here it is hard to know what to say about it. I do not know what I think about the categorization model except that on first brush it feels a lot like applying experiential divisions after the fact. It seems to me that we categorize things to make sense of them and sort them, but that mechanically speaking there needs to be no such categorization. We could for example observe a work having these three different reactions to various stimuli, and hypothesize what categories it processes the stimuli as, but ultimately, at the end, there is only raw action and reaction there, and as I mentioned above I do not see either how this results in consciousness or whether or not consciousness is something that necessarily always accompanies such behavior.

I'd also think that human interference is just purposeful evolution so to speak. If things become conscious just through complex behavior, then it seems to me it is bound to be something that will happen sooner or later, but the weird thing is, as I have said, I am not so sure it is anything that can be tested for.

Which brings us I suppose back to what you were calling the zombie theory or whatever? I do not know whether or not a thing complex enough to trick humans into believing it is aware can be built, but what I am saying is if it can be, it would be impossible to proove. This transfers over to what KGB and I were discussing I guess, how it is that we cannot share "phenomena", or in my language, perceptions or experiences.

Shane Roach · Nov 12, 2005

David Gould said:
I think we are always making the supernatural into the natural.

I know. Most folk of your general philosophy do. From my perspective though it is merely a shifting of nomenclature, and in some instances a change in frame of reference. It does not directly address for example, the insitution of the church, however, if you merely make the "supernatural" into the "natural". God is still all powefful, he is just naturally so instead of supernaturally so, and the whole debate rages on with new words for old concepts.

David Gould said:
I think that if we really need to define consciousness more specifically to test for it.

Sha! Well ya! That's the whole problem. We do not even seem to have compatible concepts of it in general! I am saying the nature of it is such that you simply cannot test for it, even if it happens to be totally natural.

Buh, I am suddenly having to go, I may try to get back to this post later.

The Extent of Cartesian Dualism

David Gould

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