Monday, March 30, 2015

Are Minds like Witches? The Catastrophe of Scientific Progress

Here's an article of mine that went up on Scott Bakker's blog. The article's called "Are Minds like Witches? The Catastrophe of Scientific Progress." It's about the full implications of thinking that the naive, quasi-dualistic conception of the human mind should be eliminated in favour of thinking that only material systems exist. Here are the article's first few paragraphs:

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As scientific knowledge has advanced over the centuries, informed people have come to learn that many traditional beliefs are woefully erroneous. There are no witches, ghosts, or disease-causing demons, for example. But are cognitive scientists currently on the verge of showing also that belief in the ordinarily-defined human self is likewise due to a colossal misunderstanding, that there are no such things as meaning, purpose, consciousness, or personal self-control? Will the assumption of personhood itself one day prove as ridiculous as the presumption that some audacious individuals can make a pact with the devil?

Progress and a World of Mechanisms

According to this radical interpretation of contemporary science, everything is natural and nature consists of causal relationships between material aggregates that form systems or mechanisms. The universe is thus like an enormous machine except that it has no intelligent designer or engineer. Atoms evolve into molecules, stars into planets, and at least one planet has evolved life on its surface. But living things are really just material objects with no special properties. The only efficacious or real property in nature, very generally speaking, is causality, and thus the real question is always just what something can do, given its material structure, initial conditions, and the laws of nature. As one of the villains of The Matrix Reloaded declares, “We are slaves to causality.” Thus, instead of there being people or conscious, autonomous minds who use symbols to think about things and to achieve their goals, there are only mechanisms, which is to say forces acting on complex assemblies of material components, causing the system to behave in one way rather than another. Just as the sun acts on the Earth’s water cycle, causing oceans to evaporate and thus forming clouds that eventually rain and return the water via snowmelt runoff and groundwater flow to the oceans, the environment acts on an animal’s senses, which send signals to its brain whereupon the brain outputs a more or less naturally selected response, depending on whether the genes exercise direct or indirect control over their host. Systems interacting with systems, as dictated by natural laws and probabilities—that’s all there is, according to this interpretation of science.

How, then, do myths form that get the facts so utterly wrong? Myths in the pejorative sense form as a result of natural illusions. Omniscience isn’t given to lowly mammals. To compensate for their being thrown into the world without due preparation, as a result of the world’s dreadful godlessness, some creatures may develop the survival strategy of being excessively curious, which drives them often to err on the side not of caution but of creativity. We track not just the patterns that lead us to food or shelter, but myriad other structures on the off-chance that they’re useful. And as we evolve more intelligence than wisdom, we creatively interpret these patterns, filling the blanks in our experience with placeholder notions that indicate both our underlying ignorance and our presumptuousness. In the case of witches, for example, we mistake some hapless individual’s introversion and foreignness for some evil complicity in suffering that’s actually due merely to bad luck and to nature’s heartlessness. Given enough bumbling and sanctimony, that lack of information about a shy foreigner results in the burning of a primate for allegedly being a witch. A suitably grotesque absurdity for our monstrously undead universe.

6 comments:

  1. I am not quite sure where the logic in this piece goes awry for me, maybe it is when it says 'the universe is an enormous machine... ...with no intelligent designer', but I am not going to debate any sort of post-Newtonian theology here. Newton lived in Protestant times and at every stage of human history theology has been rewritten to make sense of the past, for it's own age. My beef here is the phrase 'As one of the villains of The Matrix Reloaded declares, “We are slaves to causality.” '. Now if causality is true to itself all it can create is more causality, and in a non-hierarchy at that. Causality cannot create slavery-slavery is very much a product of intelligence and the lack of it combining in a hierarchy, guile used against a lack of guile for perceived gain. The women that usually got accused of being witches were usually isolated non-family figures who in times of war and societal pressure to conform have nothing to conform with-they are too old to breed and their very autonomy is 'suspicious'. That the irrationality and what we now see as a lack of intelligence was in the minds of their accusers is something that is usually far less commented on. C.F. James the 1st/6th interest in witches http://journals.chapman.edu/ojs/index.php/VocesNovae/article/view/12/90 James was in power, the witches were not. From here we don't know who was the more 'intelligent', but James saw the causality of his tempestuous journey from Denmark to Scotland and persecuted/tortured the witches. It is actually probable that he was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, but that is what we say five centuries on. Labels change all the time.

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    1. The article isn't meant to justify the persecution of witches and it doesn't assume any supernatural power exists. In fact, the logic of the argument doesn't even conclude that we're slaves to causality. Instead, the logic takes the form of a critique of radical, eliminativistic naturalism. The point is that if we start from that mechanistic framework, which is deterministic, we end up as instrumentalists or quasi-pragmatists, once we eliminate semantics and normativity, in which case the latter two pop up again because they have non-zero utility. So radical naturalism undermines itself, to some extent, and we end up with personal qualities and thus autonomy (freewill), after all.

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  2. Scott didn't seem to acknowledge the radical naturalists 'truth' concept will have anomalies compared to scientific determinations. Ie, it's an illusion - and illusions obviously come with anomalies compared to reality. Not sure if it was put to Scott clearly enough or not?

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    1. Yeah, Callan, it looks that way. As usual, I don't see how I could have made my point clearer, but the disagreement continues. Scott admitted later in the comment section that he might have read too much intentionalism into the article, so that's one source of the disagreement: my responses to BBT develop, but Scott keeps the earlier formulations in mind.

      The main sticking point now seems to be that even if he agrees that eliminativism leads to some kind of pragmatism, he doesn't see how my positive solution (my aesthetic version of morality) gets off the ground since all values would be instrumental (means to ends) and there would be no evaluation of the ends themselves. I address that challenge in "Science, Nihilism and the Artistry of Nature," "Life as Art," and elsewhere in the Ethics section of the Map of the Rants.

      https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/science-nihilism-and-the-artistry-of-nature-by-ben-cain/

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/11/life-as-art-morality-and-natures.html

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    2. Have to say though, you did seem to come from intentionalism before. What changed?

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    3. I still think intentional properties end up being real enough, but what changed are the arguments I use. I started using the presuppositional or transcendental arguments, which aim to show that the eliminativist presupposes that those properties exist, because it's impossible to formulate eliminativism without using meaningful symbols, for example.

      But more recently, I've been trying to start from Scott's assumptions and then showing how they're consistent with a form of intentionalism. He grants that meaning and normativity are illusions, but he thinks those concepts are useless at the philosophical, meta-theoretical level, that we gain little when we try to explain behaviour in such naive terms. Neuroscience will make folk psychology obsolete. But I've been arguing that what starts off as an illusion puffs up our ego, changes the environment, and retrains our behaviour so that the intentional patterns end up being real enough in our behaviour. Meaning and normativity may not be found in the brain, but they are found in our artificial (technoscientifically re-enchanted) environment and in our domesticated, civilized, non-animalistic behaviour.

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