Being able to wonder doesn't seem to have much to do with emotion. Rather, it is a function of being able to recognize possibility. Most organisms are immersed in the matter of fact, and cannot stop to wonder about what could have been. Wonder seems to have more to do with our linguistic capacities. We recognize other possibilities because we can creatively express propositions independent of fact.
Nope. Its not that they dont exist, is that they dont exist in the vocabulary of folk psychology. They do "exist", but they have to be precised by neurology, the thesis is daring but strong actualy. Sry for english..
First off she’s not using the term literally. She’s (actually) talking about beliefs, not feelings, in that sentence starting at 1:03. She just used a weird word. Colloquial meanings of words don’t equate to their scientific/ philosophical counterparts. Also, eliminativism does not say the neurological states of feelings don’t exist. Like she’d probably say that there’s chemicals that react within us which produce love and anger and other emotions. Whether or not eliminative materialism is true, it IS an appeal to common sense fallacy to say that folk psychology is true on the grounds of “it makes sense to me”.
1:35 - Getting rid of the representational model of mental processes would be the first step toward eliminating dualistic philosophies of mind. The mind is embodied! It isn't an information-processor. We don't "internally" represent the world, we are coupled to it via our sensorimotor activities. 5:50 - I agree that will isn't located somewhere in the brain. It seems more like an emergent function of the organism as a whole.
Viral infections themselves are not socially constructed, but how we interpret, medicalize, and attempt to treat them obviously is. The examples I gave of mental disorder (neurosis, depression, schizophrenia) are not caused either by brain injury/malfunction or by social context alone, but by a complex interaction of one with the other. Try "The Social Construction of What?" by Ian Hacking, or Alva Noe's new book "Out of Our Heads"
In defense of Pat Churchland, the motivation for eliminative materialism is in the premise that dualism cannot be right as it explains nothing about what the mind is or how it works. This is true regardless of whether or not you're a substance dualist or property dualist. Stating that the mind is immaterial is the same as saying that it is beyond coherent description. And, that all other theories of mind cannot eliminate dualism because of the prescientific language that they use.' Well said
I understand the motivation of avoiding dualism, but eliminating consciousness is contradictory. If we are going to eliminate anything it would be the body, not the mind.
@@MonisticIdealism Have you read Chomsky's thoughts on the matter, especially re:Descartes 'ghost in the machine'? He makes some interesting comments about how the concept of body is what needs definition, and not so much the mind.
@@louiswilliamson5937Yes I have and I think that's a great point that Chomsky makes. Far too often I hear people take matter as if it is clearly defined and that it is consciousness which is mysterious, but as Chomsky shows us it's the other way around. We are directly acquainted with consciousness, but not matter.
@@MonisticIdealism Laruelle's Non-philosophy offers an original (albeit complicated) framework that allows to describe matter in purely theoretical terms that are akin to scientific reasoning. He, like the Churchlands, does away with the mind-body problem, but instead of operating via a scientific empirical paradigm, uses a purely transcendental/axiomatic framework; it claims to provide minimal and irreducible descriptions of matter (or of individuals) that don't relapse into the same old philosophical problems of language (gap between representation and represented), inconstency/incompleteness etc.
I applaud Ms. Churchland. What she says is extremely important. The only thing I would add to this presentation is the phenomenon of emergence. It is a phenomenon that occurs around us much of the time. It explains how there can be a discontinuous leap in performance over the performance of the aggregate of elements in a complex system. For example it can explain how we humans can perform tasks that are far beyond what one might expect from a three-pound mass of brain cells.
Being insulted is not a scientific argument. Scientific research is confirming materialistic theories, whether we like it or not. I think diseases, catastrophes, misery whatever is insulting tot mankind, but is is part of it. Prof. Churchland is one of the pioneers in a new understanding of mankind. Brilliant!
Your comment perplexes me. Are you suggesting that there are lots of scientists out there who conduct themselves poorly? Maybe they chew with their mouths open or something? Also, how can someone who is not a scientist (she is a philosopher) conduct themselves as a real scientist?
Yeah by making blatant statements that something is "clear" without giving any evidence for such a statement. And she is very far from being a Scientist.
@hellomate639 "if you think that is a so-called "scientific fact."" Really? Go ask Anton Zeilinger, (the inventor of quantum teleportation) David Deutsch, Seth Lloyd (quantum computer scientists) and Lee Smolin (loop quantum gravity theorist). Trust me this isn't "new age crap" or "quantum mysticism," as you are thinking. You haven't done your homework. A lot of people say this at first, until later on, and they end up agreeing.
Scientists, theologians and philosophers all have a common underlying link: they are all correct and can find the proof to back them if so desired. In fact, no one can ever be presently wrong if they have strong beliefs. If you change your core belief structure and replace it with another, you are at present right still. Ego guides us in this respect. You may be able to admit you were wrong in the past, but presently your construct of reality is true. Those who believe differently are wrong.
I didn't say science composes "just so" stories. That comment was specifically about the adaptationist paradigm in evolutionary biology that tries to explain everything under the sun based on speculation. As for hydrogen atoms, gravity works against entropy in the case of the formation of stars. Entropy is arguably already a directional (teleological) movement toward disorder, but gravity is obviously so (toward order). If we hope to explain human purpose, it has to have precursors in nature.
I am getting the feeling that she doesn't understand her own theory or that she's trying to downplay the ontological dimensions of EM. Reductionism means that something is reduced to something more basic (water to H20) so water exists in our reality (and doesn't disappear) because it is an actual object that has been explanied by something more fundamental. I say this in reference to her allusion to light. In philosophy of mind, reductionists try to reduce consciousness to brain processes or at least that's the formal intent (I agree with Galen Strawson in that they are actually eliminating consciousness). Eliminativists, like Pautricia Churchland, say that consciousness doesn't exist. it doesn't have any actual properties. And if it doesn't have any actual properties, then everything that can be said about our feelings, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, or anything else, should be describible in terms of the brain. So, a propisition like "I am in love" should mean the same thing as "I am in X brain process". Very well, but that implies that our experiences can't give us any new information. I am not actually suffering pain, my brain is merely producing certain neurological state. That's the logical implication of her theory. In this interview she seems to be saying that our consciousness depends on our brain and that we do experience love, sadness, pain and all these other things. It's just that those mental states depend on the brain and we can understand them better through neuroscience. That seems reasonable, but that's not what eliminative materialism implies. That's biological naturalism (to use the term of John Searle). With biological naturalism you can say that there is only one substance (physical or material substance) but you can still affirm that there are phenomenological experiences. So what am I missing?
I think you're confusing eliminative materialism with behaviourism when you say that "I am in love" translated to "X brain process" or something of that sort. It's behaviourism that reduces mental states to physical states, not EM
Many quantum experiments have shown our predispositions and intentions have an effect on the study's outcome. If this is true then how can you use what anyone has "proven" as fact? In this case fact is relative.
I'm not asking about perception, I'm just pointing out that scientific descriptions of the world, while helpful in trying to manipulate and partially predict nature, do not get rid of the wonder the phenomenon of "light" evokes. Science doesn't explain away mystery, it just helps elucidate our experience of mystery.
I've used the term connected instead of what I actually meant: Brain is the generator of all normal mental activity/physiology or its abnormal counterpart/pathophysiology. Functional disturbances are caused either by trauma/injury or by its genetic constitution and predispositions. What kind of socio-cultural factors can explain MS attacks (and its psychiatric manifestations) due to viral infection? Or do you mean to include viruses as socio-cultural psychopaths/mass murderers too?
(Copied from Wikipedia) "Appeal to Consequences is an argument that concludes a premise (typically a belief) to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences. This is based on an appeal to emotion and is a form of logical fallacy, since the desirability of a consequence does not address the truth value of the premise." I'm not sure I fully understood your question. Did that answer it?
@JohananRaatz You make a good point. I am going to use the "phenomenal state" of dreams. Isn't the mere fact that we actually dream rather than just experience our neural circuits when we sleep a significant event? Does not this mere fact point out TWO/DUAL elements at work (the neural circuits and the dreams themselves)?
However, if we understand the self as being identical to one's nervous system (rather than somehow floating above it), then one's "will" could simply refer to the causal decision making processes that lead up to an action. Could a computer be built to be conscious or have "freewill" in the compatibilist sense? I dont see why not. Could a computer be built to have contra-causal freewill? I dont think so.
If an individual suffers from alcoholism is there any room for his will to be involved or rather his brain tolerance and addictive tendency because of a genetic mutation in sets of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or haplotypes I-C-G-A2 and I-C-A-A1 which are supposed to induce a low DRD2 expression in the dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2) gene in the reinforcing and motivating effects of ethanol? Such examples are well known in almost every form of substance related addictions...
@LennyBound: Isnt freewill an emergent property of the brain? If so I always understood emergency to be unpredictable thus eliminating determinism from the picture. Also you mentioned causal determinism, I have come to understand that the further you in any chain of events, probability begins to take over as causality breaks down the closer we get to the quantum level. So as I see it, determinism is just an "illusion" for us to better understand this probabilistic universe we live in.
I wonder what kind of things we will be talking about when we consider all our experiences to be nonsensical illusions. What will we talk about after we eliminate our experiences of red/blue, the taste of apples, the warmth of family, and my desires and intentions toward these things and the rest of life from our conversation and our reality? I've translated the above passage into Churchland's language: "Since condition g and brain state x, brain state y. Brain state y demands condition h."
@LennyBound In short, I think that there are reasons to prefer love over hate, Beethoven over Bieber, but they have nothing to do with a non-physical mind. If you think such reasons require that dualism be true, please give me some rationale as to why.
If mental states such as 'belief' don't exist (in the same way that phlogiston doesn't exist) then how are you supposed to explain that to someone in terms of neuroscience? Moreover, in explaining things in terms of neuroscience, aren't you changing peoples beliefs? How can you make people believe they have no belief?!
@motomambo For that matter, what exactly is it about Beethoven that makes it valuable to humans if you exclude its emotional effect on humans or imagine it to be neutral or negative for selected individuals? Is it morally wrong to be bored by Beethoven? Can you really be mistaken about being bored by Beethoven and consequently not valuing it? Or does that indicate that someone is a defective human if they ever made such a call?
"A deeper understanding of mental phenomena in terms of the neurobiology of those phenomena doesn't make the phenomena go away, it just gives us a deeper and richer way of understanding." ~ Patricia Churchland
Smart lady. She briefly delves into the philosophy of determinism, which I enjoy. But there are unsubstantiated claims made by all kinds of people everyday, including myself, about all sorts of things. Does that mean those things aren't real? What about the yardstick of "real" we constantly measure things against? Is it possible that "reality" is yet another unsubstantiated claim?
imyouandurme I agree. Determinism is the key here, which quantum physics does nothing to disprove. Even a new cool book on the subject, The Evolution of Simulated Universes, which takes Determinism along with Churchland's notion of reality to their logical conclusions.
@hellomate639 "rather support eliminative materialism" Well no, because it gets rid of the matter. Thus there's nothing deep down to eliminitivize the mind to. It's kind of weird, it's a kind of scientific monistic idealism like that. "It's actually fun conceptualizing that idea by thinking about how mass is more literally a tendency to resist change in motion." I know I've done that before. It gives you a cool way of looking at the world.
Unless one's approach to philosophy is a thorough-going Skepticism, then one is engaged in endeavors like explaining, refining, exchanging, advancing, and refuting things we refer to as knowledge, ideas, theories, concepts, and many other similar items which many regard as being abstract. The salient feature of a nugget's worth of knowledge is not how many neurons are required in its representation in the brain. The salient feature is that we recognize this representation as knowledge in the abstract. This is no different than acknowledging that a novel on my desk is physical but nevertheless can, in reading it, convey knowledge, ideas, and still murkier outcomes like motivation or revulsion. Given the book's multi-faceted presentation to us, it would seem to be an error to regard this book as being merely physical. Likewise for the humble table, which is just as essentially the realization of a concept or a goal as it is a horizonal surface raised above the ground via a base. Imagine believing that Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat's Last Theorem, was only "following neurons running downhill". Our brains, and the brains in many species, are complex enough to house and recognize abstract objects. And we can manipulate these objects based on their abstract content and therefore reason. Again, this capability is predicated in, and essential to, the very practice of philosophy. There need not be anything spooky within the brain - no ghosts, no gods, nothing but naturalism. Not a single field or particle ever, ever violates physics. It's just that the reality of the abstract - like an algorithm - can guide physical processes. This is no different than an algorithm guiding the product of a computer.
Philosophy has become phenomenology since the 20th century, and so begins and ends with experience rather than abstraction. Cosmology is the study of the human in the universe, not just the universe in abstraction from the human attempt to relate to it. As for anthropomorphism, I repeat again that an account of nature entirely devoid of purpose leaves us unable to account for human consciousness without an incoherent dualism.
Never heard of this woman before, but from what I hear here, I think I just may just have a new mentor. "The answer to those questions will come out of the science, ... it's not going to come out of a philosopher analyzing a concept and using pure reason. Because it's a question of fact."
You're making it sound like I am putting down science! Science is wonderful, but it needs philosophy to constantly criticize its abstractions. Science produces theories with limited ranges of applicability. Philosophy, as metaphysics and cosmology, tries to put scientific facts into a larger scheme of general ideas that is logical, consistent, coherent, and necessary. The goal is to shed light on our actual experience as living beings--not to explain it away by reduction.
Eliminative materialism is simply self-refuting. To deny consciousness is to think that you don't have any thoughts at all, to believe that you do not have any beliefs at all.
Monistic Idealism Exactly. To believe that consciousness is simply a byproduct of the evolution of brain means to believe it's an illusion and not an already existing phenomena. If it's an illusion, who is viewing this illusion?
EM doesn't deny the existence of consciousness, only that consciousness can and should be understood and described in terms of brain function rather than what someone subjectively _thinks_ consciousness is or should be.
Eliminating Materialism is aptly named; it eliminates commonsense. She likes to bring up ‘folk’ thinking as if it is somehow stupid; something not based on or confined to matter. Folk wisdom does better than that; it knows there is consciousness and mind as well as elements. Ms. Churchland with her materialism that eliminates all else has not arrived at that level of perception yet, apparently.
@LennyBound Ok, so the question I have is, how do we distinguish between a neural pattern BEING the phenomenal state and a neural pattern CORRELATING to a phenomenal state. This is the crux of the problem, and it can't be solved by neuroscience -neuroscience only tells us about the empirical. It can't distinguish between these two scenarios with science alone.
An insane social setting does lead to chemical changes in the brain, but the point I was trying to make is that the cause of mental disorders should not be simply located in the brain. The cause may be in the society, which then leads to imbalances in neurotransmitters, etc.
Most definitely. Sorry for not being clear, but the last sentence was meant from the perspective of one who had replaced a belief system with another. Whichever way it is interpreted, though, I believe it reinforces my point that strong minded people are always right.
@JohananRaatz Furthermore, it doesn't rule out eliminative materialism. In fact, I'd say it would rather support eliminative materialism, since supports of that philosophy generally support the idea that the conscious experience is an informational process that doesn't depend on matter. In fact, you solve many problems that dualism brings up by conceptualizing the mind itself as information and not as the brain itself.
Interesting video In physics we dont even understand what time is so there is not much chance of understanding the brain. In my video The Paradox of Schrodingers Cat an artist view Time has symmetry and geometry could this explain the human brain and the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
It is true that science only operates in given principles, which we make an assumption about. Also, looking at another comment, materialism isn't exactly supposing the "existence of matter" so much as it is basically saying that everything operates in some spatial informational-mechanical way. That is, the actual objects not existing is more of a semantic thing than a major part of the philosophical idea of materialism.
@JaydedWun Ok, I see your point. But, I do not see how it changes anything that I said because I am not denying that there is a neural correlate with dreaming.
@HumanChemistry101 Scientific method is a product of philosophy, not of science itself, and natural science was called natural philosophy in its early days. The philosophy of empiricism spawned it and allowed it to blossom. In your zeal to see the humanities "reduced or eliminated," I hope you take this into consideration.
I think we have an illusion of contra-causal freewill. It seems obvious to me that when I decide to raise my hand that my choice was not caused or governed by electro-chemical laws. However, empirical research (as well as the conceptual problems associated with dualism) lends support to the idea that we are causally determined.
@prgalois The point of philosophy is to get scientists searching for answers to these empirical questions in the first place. If you like, the philosopher frames the question, and the scientist answers the question (as best as possible). Conversely, when a scientist makes a discovery, they report the data and how it fits with current theories, whereas the philosopher takes the leap to contrive contextual meaning to the data to show what wisdom, if any, can be gained from the knowledge as such.
Sue: What about free will? Rama(chandran): Free will. So what is required to create a meta-representation of a volitional action. In other words, you create a representation of your intention and your desire to perform the action, which comes in the anterior cingulate, along with the limbic structures. So you need to desire and to anticipate, and then you need to decide, and then you call it a volitional action, OK? ...(see next post)
Actually, I think the video you mention ("Raymond Tallis - Free Will and the Brain") argues against the idea that there are moral and legal problems that arise from adopting a mechanistic view of the self. He thinks that this belief (though widespread) stems from conceptual confusion (concerning what constitutes a "self") and also reading too much into our very limited understanding of the brain.
Yes, and how do we know we are who we say we are? And what does the answer make of EM? Think carefully here. These questions though, may be a little misdirected. Do you agree with the EM thesis, or are you just pulling my tail?
I don't see any comments I have neglected to address. More specifically, I have yet to see you present any substantial problems with eliminative materialism (this is *not* to say there are none, of course).
And just for the sake of full disclosure, to reveal any biases (conscious or not): I am a theist. That said, I've never yoked my understanding of the "soul" in a mind-body separation. Also, I'd like to clarify that I'm really not a dualist - I just see the emergent issues in a fully-materialist account, and acknowledge that it is incomplete.
0:26 - There is no "spooky stuff", but everyone should look into Andy Clark's "extended mind" hypothesis. He suggests that most of our cognition takes place thanks to extra-cranial language and other technologies that augment our organic abilities. Also, we shouldn't always look to the brain for the cause of mental diseases; sometimes social context plays just as large a role.
@motomambo "but there is no reason in a purely material world to think that experiencing love has any more value than experiencing hate" Love is a label we attach to a type of extremely positive value judgment. Similarly, hate is a label we attach to extremely negative value judgments. To suggest that there is no reason we should prefer love over hate is therefore just a contradiction in terms. Such feelings *are* the reason we prefer things, at least on the conscious level.
I'd want to make a distinction between third person neurological descriptions and first person phenomenological descriptions. Neither can be reduced to the other. I think we get lost in obsessive abstraction when we begin separating "internal" from "external." Our internal experience is always already in and of the world. There is no need to "internally" reconstruct anything because the whole organism has co-evolved to live in its environment.
I did not intend my comment to be contentious, so all apologies if that is it was interpreted. Eliminative materialism doesn't deny subjective experience; it seeks to find a neural basis for all so-called mental phenomena, and when there are no such bases, the concept which purports to describe such phenomena is 'eliminated'. So, the eliminative materialist does not deny that to you, a certain painting evokes a certain aesthetic experience, only that any such experiences are neural events.
I concede that the compatibilist's notion of "will" is a redefinition of what we normally think of as one's will. However, the history of human thought is littered with instances of conceptual revision in light of new empirical evidence. As we've come to learn more about the external world, we have deflated our pre-scientific understanding of phenomena and replaced it with a more penetrating description of reality. The exact same thing is happening here, but now it concerns the internal world.
I think you're greatly misunderstanding the position. The EM advocate believes that knowledge and truth exist, but that they are represented internally through physical states of the nervous system. Certain physical states more accurately represent the world and are therefore explanatorily superior, whereas less accurate internal representations distort reality and are therefore inferior.
Concerning freewill: I consider myself a "compatibilist" (i.e. that causal determinism and freewill are compatible with one another). However, for this view to be coherent the term "freewill" needs to be understood as referring to the process of decision making within the context of a physical universe. On the other hand, if your question is whether or not I believe in contra-causal freewill (i.e. freewill which can violate the laws of physics), then no, I don't believe that exists.
Science is based on certain assumptions, but these assumptions are themselves based on observation. Any assumption is based on the connection between a set of observations that we connect when we see patterns arising. But it is true that one can't prove the existence of things since we base all our assumptions on the association and patters between things which reside in our brain (a thing). However, there is no way out of this unless you accept religious dogma.
Philosophy is not just about the acquisition of empirical knowledge, but about analysis of ordinary discourse, whether its inquiries of ethical conduct, or just analysis of the logical structures of protocol sentences by using logic. Point of philosophy is not obvious because of several philosophers inability to implement philosophy to practical use.
@LennyBound Well, if materialists are claiming that our mental states ARE material brain processes, then the question should be: In which sense do they use the word "are"? If it's meant to be a conjugation of "to be" in the sense of an ontological statement, then you should first have a solid theory of an ontology that can deal with the undeniable "being" (putting beside the question, in which sense we use this...) of consciousness. You say, that human beings can make experiences: (continues...)
@motomambo It depends on what you mean by "reason." If you're conceiving of having a "reason" as dependent on a non-physical mind, then you're presupposing dualism and begging the question against the materialist. If, however, you don't think that reasons are necessarily dependent on a non-physical mind, then I see no reason why such reasons can't be accommodated within a materialist framework.
Yes, I think eliminative materialism is the only plausible view of the mind. To address your first question, I should like to say it is a bit unclear. On one construal, the question concerns itself with epistemological issues which eliminative materialism need not address. On another construal, it is off point: EM seeks only to construe so-called mental events as physical events. It does *not* comment on personal identity in any substantial way. EM is consistent with various views on PI.
@hellomate639 EDIT: that doesn't depend on matter being an actual physical object. I can understand why many physicists would look at the universe as being a purely informational process. It's not a proven thing at all, but it's a fascinating idea. It's actually fun conceptualizing that idea by thinking about how mass is more literally a tendency to resist change in motion. We conceptualize it physically, but really it's a function of matter to not move in relationship to other matter.
Who is this "you" you speak of? What is it "like" to exist, if "we" exist at all? If not, must the facts "we" "conceive" of be simply taken as a given? Is it only a brute fact that we are who we are? The nature of "our" existence, as I mentioned earlier is quite a confusing issue in EM.
@JohananRaatz Yes, it does support it because eliminative materialism bases itself on the idea that the mind itself is information and not the brain. That is, it solves the paradox that you can replace every electron and atom in the brain bit by bit without the person being a different person. Even if it turned out that reality wasn't "material" it would still be physical and mechanistic. It's just that our sense of what is mechanistic and physical would change.
We are at a very early age in acquiring and synthesizing the information about things that might give us anything like definitive answers, if they are possible at all. Maybe in another hundred years we will have built enough of a database and the necessary indices so our brains can have a more probable basis for the heuristic speculation they love so much.
Churchland makes two errors: 1) "Consciousness" is not the same thing as "thought" or "cognitive behavior." Consciousness is "understanding" or "unique perspective" (see Penrose on his views). If eliminative philosophy were true, "perspective" would have no reason to exist, yet it does. Essentially, we'd be androids. 2) Using the word "illusory" to describe consciousness may be antiquated or ill-suited. Even if consciousness doesn't work the way we thought, there'd be no reason to eliminate consciousness as an "illusion."
That was his conclusion, which I took to mean that believing that there are legal implications to the findings in neuroscience is presently (and for the foreseeable future) unjustified. Maybe I misunderstood him, but that's what I took away from it.
If mentality is truly to be found in the nervous system, then I highly doubt that quantum mechanics will help us better understand it. Instead, it might be that quantum mechanical laws are required for establishing the necessary micro-structure so as to enable complex physical systems like ourselves to exist and evolve at the specific order of magnitude in which we live.
Also, even if we assume (for the sake of argument) that causal determinism is true; from the first-person perspective it would still appear AS IF one possessed contra-causal freewill. I uploaded a video concerning this "epistemic horizon" a few days ago entitled "Dennett on Determinism." Feel free to check it out if you are interested.
Then tell me what it is then. From what I can tell, eliminative materialism means there is no subjective character of experience to explain (the hard problem). From the video, though, the idea is not too clear for me, but even then I was careful to point out the position what I was objecting to.
Also, we may have to touch upon what constitutes an entity as well. My apologies. I may be asking more questions then answers, but unfortunately, with the youtube limit, I cannot be any more comprehensive.
If the ball was observed moving it could have been from experimental error or an unknown force. If no error could be found, then I'd say we'd be dealing with an unknown force.
@hellomate639 There's no other way to reasonably explain the experiments. You could argue superdeterminism, but that's like arguing that God put all of the fossils in the ground to test the faith of creationists. And then there's quantum gravity. GR treats gravity as bent space-time, thus to explain GR in terms of something more fundamental, you need to go beneath space-time -which gets us to the "universe as computer" idea from a different angle. Just look up "it from bit."
Of course the brain is 'connected' to all mental disorders/diseases. My contention is about causation. Can schizophrenia, depression, and neurosis, etc., really be understood simply as brain abnormalities? Don't we also need to consider socio-cultural factors? In many cases, Alzheimer's sets in after one's spouse passes away, so perhaps a lack of intimate relationships leads to neural plaques and memory-loss.
Berkley didn't doubt the existence of the world, but he doubted the representation we have of the world, and that this representation is completely subjective. However, because he believed in a deity he, like Descartes, devised dogmatic ways of getting out of such stalemates. It's not until Hume that a philosopher really performed a true critique of knowledge without resorting to dogma.
i see many got ticked about simplification of humans as species. Im sure thats the right approach. Simplifying means taking off that mystical sugar-coat and realizing what we really are. Besides, doesnt even matter what we think - we are and will be bio-chemical mechanisms on the fundamental level. Putting a "special" label does us no good. Positive decision is to understand what we are, not to create what we are not.
Just try responding to my current comments and then we will see where it goes. And there are some other questions I've made that have yet to be addressed as well. I was partly venting my frustration at chopping down my post length during these YT discussions. But then again, most of my thoughts are better phrased into questions anyways, LOL.
in saying that AFTER it becomes empirical fact, it restrains philosophy. But Philosophy comes first. Science considers the logical possibilities of philosophy & follows up on philosophical speculation which makes sense. E.g., the possible characteristics of light were mapped out long before the science was there to test it.
The Churchlands are always very interesting to listen to, and it's unfortunate that their views get misrepresented all the time: My philosophy prof called them "the husband and wife couple who says that love doesn't exist!" Well it turns out my prof was a libertarian-free-will dualist, so it's no wonder he felt threatened by the Churchlands and felt the need to misrepresent them
Another aid in conceptualizing that difference is to think of this thought experiment: Imagine that your brain is gradually deconstructed and reconstructed atom by atom, very quickly, while running. That is, an atom is removed and an identical atom is swapped out before any change in thought can happen. And lets say this happens over many years. You would have the same mind and a completely different brain. You could do the same with a computer.
@Alexdurrant7 "nothing but logically nonsensical intuitions." Including that part of our self-awareness which is our "intuition" of the laws of logic themselves I suppose! Right? LOL ;-D
... If thats uncoupled, then the subject has apraxia. Its a classic example; its all about free will caused by an uncoupling of the meta-representation from the representation. So an animal has a representation of the action, but it does not have a meta-representation, which is unique to humans with the emergence of sophisticated new circuits in the supramarginal gyrus and anterior cingulate. (Susan Blackmore, Conversations on consciousness, p.195, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005)
@LennyBound I would add: By the fact, that we are experiencing it, we can not deny it's "existing" (how unclear this term is was my concern to ask for a new theory of ontology) in some way. Coming back to Materialism: material qualities like length, width, height, weight are not capable of describing the essential qualities of undeniable consciousness. I hope some day we will be able to accept a kind of monism, that is neither mind or body but an ontology of both (must-read: Spinoza!)
@JohananRaatz The universe being a computer is a hypothetical idea, not a proven idea. And I think you're misinterpreting what quantum physicists would mean by that. They wouldn't mean to say that the universe is truly a computer that would have been made by some other being. They'd only mean (and in purely philosophical terms) that the universe is made up of information (mass and energy being function of information), and I can conceptualize that idea and it's not a scientific fact.
This exposition only works on the assumption that materialism is fact. It seems that what the speaker says about traditional mental concepts (will, etc) can equally apply to the concepts in materialism - e.g that all is reducible to matter-energy. But this is what is at issue, so Churchland begs the question.
@prgalois “Philosophy is what you do when you don’t yet know what the right questions are to ask.” -Daniel Dennett, philosopher (“in response to the question, What is philosophy?”)
@metaldude82 To quickly interject with my 2 cents, I do not believe so because (as we still know very little about sleep) it's entirely possible that DMT creation and dreams are a necessity or even completely accidental way for us to be protected from taking in too much information or something of the like, as the brain tries to work out what is and isn't worth storing.
Being able to wonder doesn't seem to have much to do with emotion. Rather, it is a function of being able to recognize possibility. Most organisms are immersed in the matter of fact, and cannot stop to wonder about what could have been. Wonder seems to have more to do with our linguistic capacities. We recognize other possibilities because we can creatively express propositions independent of fact.
(1:03) "My Feeling"?
Oops.... don't forget, mental states do not exist for the Eliminative Materialist.
Nope. Its not that they dont exist, is that they dont exist in the vocabulary of folk psychology. They do "exist", but they have to be precised by neurology, the thesis is daring but strong actualy. Sry for english..
First off she’s not using the term literally. She’s (actually) talking about beliefs, not feelings, in that sentence starting at 1:03. She just used a weird word. Colloquial meanings of words don’t equate to their scientific/ philosophical counterparts.
Also, eliminativism does not say the neurological states of feelings don’t exist. Like she’d probably say that there’s chemicals that react within us which produce love and anger and other emotions.
Whether or not eliminative materialism is true, it IS an appeal to common sense fallacy to say that folk psychology is true on the grounds of “it makes sense to me”.
8:10 - So changing the name from "light" to "electromagnetic radiation" explains light? I want her to explain EM radiation! I don't understand yet...
1:35 - Getting rid of the representational model of mental processes would be the first step toward eliminating dualistic philosophies of mind. The mind is embodied! It isn't an information-processor. We don't
"internally" represent the world, we are coupled to it via our sensorimotor activities.
5:50 - I agree that will isn't located somewhere in the brain. It seems more like an emergent function of the organism as a whole.
Viral infections themselves are not socially constructed, but how we interpret, medicalize, and attempt to treat them obviously is. The examples I gave of mental disorder (neurosis, depression, schizophrenia) are not caused either by brain injury/malfunction or by social context alone, but by a complex interaction of one with the other.
Try "The Social Construction of What?" by Ian Hacking, or Alva Noe's new book "Out of Our Heads"
In defense of Pat Churchland, the motivation for eliminative materialism is in the premise that dualism cannot be right as it explains nothing about what the mind is or how it works. This is true regardless of whether or not you're a substance dualist or property dualist. Stating that the mind is immaterial is the same as saying that it is beyond coherent description. And, that all other theories of mind cannot eliminate dualism because of the prescientific language that they use.' Well said
I understand the motivation of avoiding dualism, but eliminating consciousness is contradictory. If we are going to eliminate anything it would be the body, not the mind.
@@MonisticIdealism Have you read Chomsky's thoughts on the matter, especially re:Descartes 'ghost in the machine'? He makes some interesting comments about how the concept of body is what needs definition, and not so much the mind.
@@louiswilliamson5937Yes I have and I think that's a great point that Chomsky makes. Far too often I hear people take matter as if it is clearly defined and that it is consciousness which is mysterious, but as Chomsky shows us it's the other way around. We are directly acquainted with consciousness, but not matter.
@@MonisticIdealism Laruelle's Non-philosophy offers an original (albeit complicated) framework that allows to describe matter in purely theoretical terms that are akin to scientific reasoning. He, like the Churchlands, does away with the mind-body problem, but instead of operating via a scientific empirical paradigm, uses a purely transcendental/axiomatic framework; it claims to provide minimal and irreducible descriptions of matter (or of individuals) that don't relapse into the same old philosophical problems of language (gap between representation and represented), inconstency/incompleteness etc.
I applaud Ms. Churchland. What she says is extremely important.
The only thing I would add to this presentation is the phenomenon of emergence.
It is a phenomenon that occurs around us much of the time. It explains how there can be a discontinuous leap in performance over the performance of the aggregate of elements in a complex system. For example it can explain how we humans can perform tasks that are far beyond what one might expect from a three-pound mass of brain cells.
Being insulted is not a scientific argument. Scientific research is confirming materialistic theories, whether we like it or not. I think diseases, catastrophes, misery whatever is insulting tot mankind, but is is part of it.
Prof. Churchland is one of the pioneers in a new understanding of mankind. Brilliant!
This how a real scientist, real professional conducts herself.
Respect to you, Patricia Churchland.
Your comment perplexes me. Are you suggesting that there are lots of scientists out there who conduct themselves poorly? Maybe they chew with their mouths open or something? Also, how can someone who is not a scientist (she is a philosopher) conduct themselves as a real scientist?
+Dan Phillips Agreed.
Dan Phillips
A=A
@@carmel1119 www.owl232.net/papers/rand.htm#1
Yeah by making blatant statements that something is "clear" without giving any evidence for such a statement. And she is very far from being a Scientist.
@hellomate639 "if you think that is a so-called "scientific fact.""
Really? Go ask Anton Zeilinger, (the inventor of quantum teleportation) David Deutsch, Seth Lloyd (quantum computer scientists) and Lee Smolin (loop quantum gravity theorist). Trust me this isn't "new age crap" or "quantum mysticism," as you are thinking. You haven't done your homework. A lot of people say this at first, until later on, and they end up agreeing.
Scientists, theologians and philosophers all have a common underlying link: they are all correct and can find the proof to back them if so desired. In fact, no one can ever be presently wrong if they have strong beliefs. If you change your core belief structure and replace it with another, you are at present right still. Ego guides us in this respect. You may be able to admit you were wrong in the past, but presently your construct of reality is true. Those who believe differently are wrong.
I didn't say science composes "just so" stories. That comment was specifically about the adaptationist paradigm in evolutionary biology that tries to explain everything under the sun based on speculation.
As for hydrogen atoms, gravity works against entropy in the case of the formation of stars. Entropy is arguably already a directional (teleological) movement toward disorder, but gravity is obviously so (toward order). If we hope to explain human purpose, it has to have precursors in nature.
Neurophilosophy is the way. All these years later and Prof Churchland is still blazing the trail.
I am getting the feeling that she doesn't understand her own theory or that she's trying to downplay the ontological dimensions of EM. Reductionism means that something is reduced to something more basic (water to H20) so water exists in our reality (and doesn't disappear) because it is an actual object that has been explanied by something more fundamental. I say this in reference to her allusion to light. In philosophy of mind, reductionists try to reduce consciousness to brain processes or at least that's the formal intent (I agree with Galen Strawson in that they are actually eliminating consciousness).
Eliminativists, like Pautricia Churchland, say that consciousness doesn't exist. it doesn't have any actual properties. And if it doesn't have any actual properties, then everything that can be said about our feelings, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, or anything else, should be describible in terms of the brain. So, a propisition like "I am in love" should mean the same thing as "I am in X brain process". Very well, but that implies that our experiences can't give us any new information. I am not actually suffering pain, my brain is merely producing certain neurological state. That's the logical implication of her theory.
In this interview she seems to be saying that our consciousness depends on our brain and that we do experience love, sadness, pain and all these other things. It's just that those mental states depend on the brain and we can understand them better through neuroscience. That seems reasonable, but that's not what eliminative materialism implies. That's biological naturalism (to use the term of John Searle). With biological naturalism you can say that there is only one substance (physical or material substance) but you can still affirm that there are phenomenological experiences.
So what am I missing?
I think you're confusing eliminative materialism with behaviourism when you say that "I am in love" translated to "X brain process" or something of that sort. It's behaviourism that reduces mental states to physical states, not EM
Many quantum experiments have shown our predispositions and intentions have an effect on the study's outcome. If this is true then how can you use what anyone has "proven" as fact? In this case fact is relative.
I'm not asking about perception, I'm just pointing out that scientific descriptions of the world, while helpful in trying to manipulate and partially predict nature, do not get rid of the wonder the phenomenon of "light" evokes. Science doesn't explain away mystery, it just helps elucidate our experience of mystery.
I've used the term connected instead of what I actually meant: Brain is the generator of all normal mental activity/physiology or its abnormal counterpart/pathophysiology. Functional disturbances are caused either by trauma/injury or by its genetic constitution and predispositions. What kind of socio-cultural factors can explain MS attacks (and its psychiatric manifestations) due to viral infection? Or do you mean to include viruses as socio-cultural psychopaths/mass murderers too?
(Copied from Wikipedia)
"Appeal to Consequences is an argument that concludes a premise (typically a belief) to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences. This is based on an appeal to emotion and is a form of logical fallacy, since the desirability of a consequence does not address the truth value of the premise."
I'm not sure I fully understood your question. Did that answer it?
@JohananRaatz You make a good point. I am going to use the "phenomenal state" of dreams. Isn't the mere fact that we actually dream rather than just experience our neural circuits when we sleep a significant event? Does not this mere fact point out TWO/DUAL elements at work (the neural circuits and the dreams themselves)?
If there is no pysical faculty of "the will" then how can we reach any scientific conclusions about it's influences?
However, if we understand the self as being identical to one's nervous system (rather than somehow floating above it), then one's "will" could simply refer to the causal decision making processes that lead up to an action.
Could a computer be built to be conscious or have "freewill" in the compatibilist sense? I dont see why not. Could a computer be built to have contra-causal freewill? I dont think so.
If an individual suffers from alcoholism is there any room for his will to be involved or rather his brain tolerance and addictive tendency because of a genetic mutation in sets of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or haplotypes I-C-G-A2 and I-C-A-A1 which are supposed to induce a low DRD2 expression in the dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2) gene in the reinforcing and motivating effects of ethanol? Such examples are well known in almost every form of substance related addictions...
@LennyBound:
Isnt freewill an emergent property of the brain? If so I always understood emergency to be unpredictable thus eliminating determinism from the picture. Also you mentioned causal determinism, I have come to understand that the further you in any chain of events, probability begins to take over as causality breaks down the closer we get to the quantum level.
So as I see it, determinism is just an "illusion" for us to better understand this probabilistic universe we live in.
I wonder what kind of things we will be talking about when we consider all our experiences to be nonsensical illusions. What will we talk about after we eliminate our experiences of red/blue, the taste of apples, the warmth of family, and my desires and intentions toward these things and the rest of life from our conversation and our reality?
I've translated the above passage into Churchland's language:
"Since condition g and brain state x, brain state y. Brain state y demands condition h."
@LennyBound In short, I think that there are reasons to prefer love over hate, Beethoven over Bieber, but they have nothing to do with a non-physical mind. If you think such reasons require that dualism be true, please give me some rationale as to why.
If mental states such as 'belief' don't exist (in the same way that phlogiston doesn't exist) then how are you supposed to explain that to someone in terms of neuroscience? Moreover, in explaining things in terms of neuroscience, aren't you changing peoples beliefs? How can you make people believe they have no belief?!
@motomambo For that matter, what exactly is it about Beethoven that makes it valuable to humans if you exclude its emotional effect on humans or imagine it to be neutral or negative for selected individuals?
Is it morally wrong to be bored by Beethoven? Can you really be mistaken about being bored by Beethoven and consequently not valuing it? Or does that indicate that someone is a defective human if they ever made such a call?
"It is better to remain silent and be thought of as a fool, than to speak up and remove all doubt..." Samuel Clemens
"A deeper understanding of mental phenomena in terms of the neurobiology of those phenomena doesn't make the phenomena go away, it just gives us a deeper and richer way of understanding." ~ Patricia Churchland
Smart lady. She briefly delves into the philosophy of determinism, which I enjoy. But there are unsubstantiated claims made by all kinds of people everyday, including myself, about all sorts of things. Does that mean those things aren't real? What about the yardstick of "real" we constantly measure things against? Is it possible that "reality" is yet another unsubstantiated claim?
imyouandurme
I agree. Determinism is the key here, which quantum physics does nothing to disprove. Even a new cool book on the subject, The Evolution of Simulated Universes, which takes Determinism along with Churchland's notion of reality to their logical conclusions.
this isn't actually true. understanding a qualitative phenomenon brings about a huge cognitive shift which can actually affect the phenomenon
@hellomate639 "rather support eliminative materialism"
Well no, because it gets rid of the matter. Thus there's nothing deep down to eliminitivize the mind to. It's kind of weird, it's a kind of scientific monistic idealism like that.
"It's actually fun conceptualizing that idea by thinking about how mass is more literally a tendency to resist change in motion."
I know I've done that before. It gives you a cool way of looking at the world.
Unless one's approach to philosophy is a thorough-going Skepticism, then one is engaged in endeavors like explaining, refining, exchanging, advancing, and refuting things we refer to as knowledge, ideas, theories, concepts, and many other similar items which many regard as being abstract. The salient feature of a nugget's worth of knowledge is not how many neurons are required in its representation in the brain. The salient feature is that we recognize this representation as knowledge in the abstract. This is no different than acknowledging that a novel on my desk is physical but nevertheless can, in reading it, convey knowledge, ideas, and still murkier outcomes like motivation or revulsion. Given the book's multi-faceted presentation to us, it would seem to be an error to regard this book as being merely physical. Likewise for the humble table, which is just as essentially the realization of a concept or a goal as it is a horizonal surface raised above the ground via a base. Imagine believing that Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat's Last Theorem, was only "following neurons running downhill". Our brains, and the brains in many species, are complex enough to house and recognize abstract objects. And we can manipulate these objects based on their abstract content and therefore reason. Again, this capability is predicated in, and essential to, the very practice of philosophy. There need not be anything spooky within the brain - no ghosts, no gods, nothing but naturalism. Not a single field or particle ever, ever violates physics. It's just that the reality of the abstract - like an algorithm - can guide physical processes. This is no different than an algorithm guiding the product of a computer.
Philosophy has become phenomenology since the 20th century, and so begins and ends with experience rather than abstraction.
Cosmology is the study of the human in the universe, not just the universe in abstraction from the human attempt to relate to it. As for anthropomorphism, I repeat again that an account of nature entirely devoid of purpose leaves us unable to account for human consciousness without an incoherent dualism.
I had the director of this documentary as a professor. Does anyone know where I can watch the rest of "Mastermind" by Pierre Faye?
Why does Patricia Churchland reject mind/body dualism?
Never heard of this woman before, but from what I hear here, I think I just may just have a new mentor.
"The answer to those questions will come out of the science, ... it's not going to come out of a philosopher analyzing a concept and using pure reason. Because it's a question of fact."
You're making it sound like I am putting down science! Science is wonderful, but it needs philosophy to constantly criticize its abstractions. Science produces theories with limited ranges of applicability. Philosophy, as metaphysics and cosmology, tries to put scientific facts into a larger scheme of general ideas that is logical, consistent, coherent, and necessary. The goal is to shed light on our actual experience as living beings--not to explain it away by reduction.
Eliminative materialism is simply self-refuting. To deny consciousness is to think that you don't have any thoughts at all, to believe that you do not have any beliefs at all.
Monistic Idealism Exactly. To believe that consciousness is simply a byproduct of the evolution of brain means to believe it's an illusion and not an already existing phenomena. If it's an illusion, who is viewing this illusion?
EM doesn't deny the existence of consciousness, only that consciousness can and should be understood and described in terms of brain function rather than what someone subjectively _thinks_ consciousness is or should be.
Eliminating Materialism is aptly named; it eliminates commonsense. She likes to bring up ‘folk’ thinking as if it is somehow stupid; something not based on or confined to matter. Folk wisdom does better than that; it knows there is consciousness and mind as well as elements. Ms. Churchland with her materialism that eliminates all else has not arrived at that level of perception yet, apparently.
Wait...but doesn't saying "X is still there" entail that "X exists" and that, therefore, X is still real?
@LennyBound Ok, so the question I have is, how do we distinguish between a neural pattern BEING the phenomenal state and a neural pattern CORRELATING to a phenomenal state.
This is the crux of the problem, and it can't be solved by neuroscience -neuroscience only tells us about the empirical. It can't distinguish between these two scenarios with science alone.
An insane social setting does lead to chemical changes in the brain, but the point I was trying to make is that the cause of mental disorders should not be simply located in the brain. The cause may be in the society, which then leads to imbalances in neurotransmitters, etc.
Most definitely. Sorry for not being clear, but the last sentence was meant from the perspective of one who had replaced a belief system with another. Whichever way it is interpreted, though, I believe it reinforces my point that strong minded people are always right.
@JohananRaatz
Furthermore, it doesn't rule out eliminative materialism. In fact, I'd say it would rather support eliminative materialism, since supports of that philosophy generally support the idea that the conscious experience is an informational process that doesn't depend on matter.
In fact, you solve many problems that dualism brings up by conceptualizing the mind itself as information and not as the brain itself.
Interesting video
In physics we dont even understand what time is so there is not much chance of understanding the brain. In my video The Paradox of Schrodingers Cat an artist view Time has symmetry and geometry could this explain the human brain and the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?
It is true that science only operates in given principles, which we make an assumption about.
Also, looking at another comment, materialism isn't exactly supposing the "existence of matter" so much as it is basically saying that everything operates in some spatial informational-mechanical way. That is, the actual objects not existing is more of a semantic thing than a major part of the philosophical idea of materialism.
@JaydedWun Ok, I see your point. But, I do not see how it changes anything that I said because I am not denying that there is a neural correlate with dreaming.
@HumanChemistry101 Scientific method is a product of philosophy, not of science itself, and natural science was called natural philosophy in its early days. The philosophy of empiricism spawned it and allowed it to blossom. In your zeal to see the humanities "reduced or eliminated," I hope you take this into consideration.
I think we have an illusion of contra-causal freewill. It seems obvious to me that when I decide to raise my hand that my choice was not caused or governed by electro-chemical laws. However, empirical research (as well as the conceptual problems associated with dualism) lends support to the idea that we are causally determined.
@prgalois The point of philosophy is to get scientists searching for answers to these empirical questions in the first place. If you like, the philosopher frames the question, and the scientist answers the question (as best as possible). Conversely, when a scientist makes a discovery, they report the data and how it fits with current theories, whereas the philosopher takes the leap to contrive contextual meaning to the data to show what wisdom, if any, can be gained from the knowledge as such.
Sue: What about free will?
Rama(chandran): Free will. So what is required to create a meta-representation of a volitional action. In other words, you create a representation of your intention and your desire to perform the action, which comes in the anterior cingulate, along with the limbic structures. So you need to desire and to anticipate, and then you need to decide, and then you call it a volitional action, OK? ...(see next post)
Actually, I think the video you mention ("Raymond Tallis - Free Will and the Brain") argues against the idea that there are moral and legal problems that arise from adopting a mechanistic view of the self.
He thinks that this belief (though widespread) stems from conceptual confusion (concerning what constitutes a "self") and also reading too much into our very limited understanding of the brain.
Yes, and how do we know we are who we say we are? And what does the answer make of EM? Think carefully here.
These questions though, may be a little misdirected. Do you agree with the EM thesis, or are you just pulling my tail?
I don't see any comments I have neglected to address. More specifically, I have yet to see you present any substantial problems with eliminative materialism (this is *not* to say there are none, of course).
And just for the sake of full disclosure, to reveal any biases (conscious or not): I am a theist. That said, I've never yoked my understanding of the "soul" in a mind-body separation. Also, I'd like to clarify that I'm really not a dualist - I just see the emergent issues in a fully-materialist account, and acknowledge that it is incomplete.
0:26 - There is no "spooky stuff", but everyone should look into Andy Clark's "extended mind" hypothesis. He suggests that most of our cognition takes place thanks to extra-cranial language and other technologies that augment our organic abilities. Also, we shouldn't always look to the brain for the cause of mental diseases; sometimes social context plays just as large a role.
@motomambo "but there is no reason in a purely material world to think that experiencing love has any more value than experiencing hate"
Love is a label we attach to a type of extremely positive value judgment. Similarly, hate is a label we attach to extremely negative value judgments. To suggest that there is no reason we should prefer love over hate is therefore just a contradiction in terms. Such feelings *are* the reason we prefer things, at least on the conscious level.
I'd want to make a distinction between third person neurological descriptions and first person phenomenological descriptions. Neither can be reduced to the other. I think we get lost in obsessive abstraction when we begin separating "internal" from "external." Our internal experience is always already in and of the world. There is no need to "internally" reconstruct anything because the whole organism has co-evolved to live in its environment.
I did not intend my comment to be contentious, so all apologies if that is it was interpreted. Eliminative materialism doesn't deny subjective experience; it seeks to find a neural basis for all so-called mental phenomena, and when there are no such bases, the concept which purports to describe such phenomena is 'eliminated'. So, the eliminative materialist does not deny that to you, a certain painting evokes a certain aesthetic experience, only that any such experiences are neural events.
I concede that the compatibilist's notion of "will" is a redefinition of what we normally think of as one's will. However, the history of human thought is littered with instances of conceptual revision in light of new empirical evidence.
As we've come to learn more about the external world, we have deflated our pre-scientific understanding of phenomena and replaced it with a more penetrating description of reality. The exact same thing is happening here, but now it concerns the internal world.
I think you're greatly misunderstanding the position. The EM advocate believes that knowledge and truth exist, but that they are represented internally through physical states of the nervous system. Certain physical states more accurately represent the world and are therefore explanatorily superior, whereas less accurate internal representations distort reality and are therefore inferior.
Concerning freewill: I consider myself a "compatibilist" (i.e. that causal determinism and freewill are compatible with one another). However, for this view to be coherent the term "freewill" needs to be understood as referring to the process of decision making within the context of a physical universe.
On the other hand, if your question is whether or not I believe in contra-causal freewill (i.e. freewill which can violate the laws of physics), then no, I don't believe that exists.
Science is based on certain assumptions, but these assumptions are themselves based on observation. Any assumption is based on the connection between a set of observations that we connect when we see patterns arising. But it is true that one can't prove the existence of things since we base all our assumptions on the association and patters between things which reside in our brain (a thing). However, there is no way out of this unless you accept religious dogma.
Philosophy is not just about the acquisition of empirical knowledge, but about analysis of ordinary discourse, whether its inquiries of ethical conduct, or just analysis of the logical structures of protocol sentences by using logic. Point of philosophy is not obvious because of several philosophers inability to implement philosophy to practical use.
@LennyBound Well, if materialists are claiming that our mental states ARE material brain processes, then the question should be: In which sense do they use the word "are"?
If it's meant to be a conjugation of "to be" in the sense of an ontological statement, then you should first have a solid theory of an ontology that can deal with the undeniable "being" (putting beside the question, in which sense we use this...) of consciousness. You say, that human beings can make experiences: (continues...)
@motomambo It depends on what you mean by "reason." If you're conceiving of having a "reason" as dependent on a non-physical mind, then you're presupposing dualism and begging the question against the materialist. If, however, you don't think that reasons are necessarily dependent on a non-physical mind, then I see no reason why such reasons can't be accommodated within a materialist framework.
Yes, I think eliminative materialism is the only plausible view of the mind. To address your first question, I should like to say it is a bit unclear. On one construal, the question concerns itself with epistemological issues which eliminative materialism need not address. On another construal, it is off point: EM seeks only to construe so-called mental events as physical events. It does *not* comment on personal identity in any substantial way. EM is consistent with various views on PI.
@hellomate639
EDIT: that doesn't depend on matter being an actual physical object.
I can understand why many physicists would look at the universe as being a purely informational process. It's not a proven thing at all, but it's a fascinating idea.
It's actually fun conceptualizing that idea by thinking about how mass is more literally a tendency to resist change in motion. We conceptualize it physically, but really it's a function of matter to not move in relationship to other matter.
Who is this "you" you speak of? What is it "like" to exist, if "we" exist at all? If not, must the facts "we" "conceive" of be simply taken as a given? Is it only a brute fact that we are who we are?
The nature of "our" existence, as I mentioned earlier is quite a confusing issue in EM.
@JohananRaatz
Yes, it does support it because eliminative materialism bases itself on the idea that the mind itself is information and not the brain. That is, it solves the paradox that you can replace every electron and atom in the brain bit by bit without the person being a different person.
Even if it turned out that reality wasn't "material" it would still be physical and mechanistic. It's just that our sense of what is mechanistic and physical would change.
Look up "Eliminative Materialism" and "Folk Psychology" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) to learn more about this debate.
what does physical mean?
We are at a very early age in acquiring and synthesizing the information about things that might give us anything like definitive answers, if they are possible at all.
Maybe in another hundred years we will have built enough of a database and the necessary indices so our brains can have a more probable basis for the heuristic speculation they love so much.
Churchland makes two errors:
1) "Consciousness" is not the same thing as "thought" or "cognitive behavior." Consciousness is "understanding" or "unique perspective" (see Penrose on his views). If eliminative philosophy were true, "perspective" would have no reason to exist, yet it does. Essentially, we'd be androids.
2) Using the word "illusory" to describe consciousness may be antiquated or ill-suited. Even if consciousness doesn't work the way we thought, there'd be no reason to eliminate consciousness as an "illusion."
That is different. that would be an just an assertion. Try doubting that you yourself exists. That you're thinking this very moment. It's impossible.
That was his conclusion, which I took to mean that believing that there are legal implications to the findings in neuroscience is presently (and for the foreseeable future) unjustified. Maybe I misunderstood him, but that's what I took away from it.
If mentality is truly to be found in the nervous system, then I highly doubt that quantum mechanics will help us better understand it. Instead, it might be that quantum mechanical laws are required for establishing the necessary micro-structure so as to enable complex physical systems like ourselves to exist and evolve at the specific order of magnitude in which we live.
Also, even if we assume (for the sake of argument) that causal determinism is true; from the first-person perspective it would still appear AS IF one possessed contra-causal freewill.
I uploaded a video concerning this "epistemic horizon" a few days ago entitled "Dennett on Determinism." Feel free to check it out if you are interested.
Then tell me what it is then. From what I can tell, eliminative materialism means there is no subjective character of experience to explain (the hard problem). From the video, though, the idea is not too clear for me, but even then I was careful to point out the position what I was objecting to.
For those who know:
Not to mention that The Extended Mind is a collaborative paper/work of Andy Clark and David Chalmers !!!
what do you mean by folk psychological? We think, there is no way around it, no matter what you call it.
the eliminative materialists are pretty much suggesting we all go live in a virtual world devoid of all experience
Also, we may have to touch upon what constitutes an entity as well.
My apologies. I may be asking more questions then answers, but unfortunately, with the youtube limit, I cannot be any more comprehensive.
she is very good...
If the ball was observed moving it could have been from experimental error or an unknown force. If no error could be found, then I'd say we'd be dealing with an unknown force.
@hellomate639 There's no other way to reasonably explain the experiments. You could argue superdeterminism, but that's like arguing that God put all of the fossils in the ground to test the faith of creationists.
And then there's quantum gravity. GR treats gravity as bent space-time, thus to explain GR in terms of something more fundamental, you need to go beneath space-time -which gets us to the "universe as computer" idea from a different angle.
Just look up "it from bit."
Of course the brain is 'connected' to all mental disorders/diseases. My contention is about causation. Can schizophrenia, depression, and neurosis, etc., really be understood simply as brain abnormalities? Don't we also need to consider socio-cultural factors? In many cases, Alzheimer's sets in after one's spouse passes away, so perhaps a lack of intimate relationships leads to neural plaques and memory-loss.
how is it beyond coherent description just because its immaterial? v
you're comparing "I think therefore I am" to claiming someone is a witch?
Berkley didn't doubt the existence of the world, but he doubted the representation we have of the world, and that this representation is completely subjective. However, because he believed in a deity he, like Descartes, devised dogmatic ways of getting out of such stalemates. It's not until Hume that a philosopher really performed a true critique of knowledge without resorting to dogma.
i see many got ticked about simplification of humans as species. Im sure thats the right approach. Simplifying means taking off that mystical sugar-coat and realizing what we really are. Besides, doesnt even matter what we think - we are and will be bio-chemical mechanisms on the fundamental level. Putting a "special" label does us no good. Positive decision is to understand what we are, not to create what we are not.
Just try responding to my current comments and then we will see where it goes. And there are some other questions I've made that have yet to be addressed as well. I was partly venting my frustration at chopping down my post length during these YT discussions. But then again, most of my thoughts are better phrased into questions anyways, LOL.
in saying that AFTER it becomes empirical fact, it restrains philosophy. But Philosophy comes first. Science considers the logical possibilities of philosophy & follows up on philosophical speculation which makes sense. E.g., the possible characteristics of light were mapped out long before the science was there to test it.
The Churchlands are always very interesting to listen to, and it's unfortunate that their views get misrepresented all the time: My philosophy prof called them "the husband and wife couple who says that love doesn't exist!"
Well it turns out my prof was a libertarian-free-will dualist, so it's no wonder he felt threatened by the Churchlands and felt the need to misrepresent them
Another aid in conceptualizing that difference is to think of this thought experiment:
Imagine that your brain is gradually deconstructed and reconstructed atom by atom, very quickly, while running. That is, an atom is removed and an identical atom is swapped out before any change in thought can happen. And lets say this happens over many years.
You would have the same mind and a completely different brain. You could do the same with a computer.
How do you know you’d have the exact same mind? The amount changed in the brain would be proportional to the change in the mind.
@Alexdurrant7 "nothing but logically nonsensical intuitions."
Including that part of our self-awareness which is our "intuition" of the laws of logic themselves I suppose! Right?
LOL ;-D
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If thats uncoupled, then the subject has apraxia. Its a classic example; its all about free will caused by an uncoupling of the meta-representation from the representation. So an animal has a representation of the action, but it does not have a meta-representation,
which is unique to humans with the emergence of sophisticated new circuits in the supramarginal gyrus and anterior cingulate.
(Susan Blackmore, Conversations on consciousness, p.195, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005)
@LennyBound I would add: By the fact, that we are experiencing it, we can not deny it's "existing" (how unclear this term is was my concern to ask for a new theory of ontology) in some way. Coming back to Materialism: material qualities like length, width, height, weight are not capable of describing the essential qualities of undeniable consciousness. I hope some day we will be able to accept a kind of monism, that is neither mind or body but an ontology of both (must-read: Spinoza!)
@JohananRaatz
The universe being a computer is a hypothetical idea, not a proven idea.
And I think you're misinterpreting what quantum physicists would mean by that. They wouldn't mean to say that the universe is truly a computer that would have been made by some other being. They'd only mean (and in purely philosophical terms) that the universe is made up of information (mass and energy being function of information), and I can conceptualize that idea and it's not a scientific fact.
This exposition only works on the assumption that materialism is fact.
It seems that what the speaker says about traditional mental concepts (will, etc) can equally apply to the concepts in materialism - e.g that all is reducible to matter-energy.
But this is what is at issue, so Churchland begs the question.
@prgalois “Philosophy is what you do when you don’t yet know what the right questions are to ask.”
-Daniel Dennett, philosopher (“in response to the question, What is philosophy?”)
@metaldude82 To quickly interject with my 2 cents, I do not believe so because (as we still know very little about sleep) it's entirely possible that DMT creation and dreams are a necessity or even completely accidental way for us to be protected from taking in too much information or something of the like, as the brain tries to work out what is and isn't worth storing.