Is the mind anything distinct from the body?

Here's another, perhaps more precise, way of asking the question:

Are mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires, sensations, fears) states of the brain or are mental states distinct from brain states?

Please provide support for your claims. I would like to hear from people who hold different views about this, so kindly support your view or any claims you make with reasons so that those who don't hold your view can see where you are coming from and why you think what you think.

Thank you in advance.

As far as I know, no mind has ever been observed distinct from a body.

Yes, mental states are states of the brain which is itself "informed" by the body through the body's senses, chemistry, hormones, etc.

I don't know how to prove those statements other than to say they seem self-evident to me.

You might be interested to know that medical doctors and scientists are currently running experiments to test the verification of out of body experiences (OBE)s- when the mind and body would be said to have disengaged.

They place random pictures in hospital crash rooms on high selves facing upward- unseen to occupants of the room, unless they have an out of body experience and float upward to observed their resuscitation from afar. If somebody in that room claims to have experienced an OBE they can test them on what the picture was. If somebody described it right it would support the claim.

In an ideal world they would get laptops cycling random images to ensure no foul play, but this would cause a cost that most funding bodies would not pay for such an experiment.

They have not found anything yet, but I'm sure we would all here if they did.

As far as I know, no mind has ever been observed distinct from a body.

Yes, mental states are states of the brain which is itself "informed" by the body through the body's senses, chemistry, hormones, etc.

I don't know how to prove those statements other than to say they seem self-evident to me.

You say it seems self-evident to you. Perhaps I can try to draw you out a bit with some questions.

1. Physical states and events obey physical laws. If mental states just are physical states (of the brain), that might seem to jeopardize the freedom that we often take to characterize our mental life. Do you find the prospect that your thoughts and desires and feelings (etc.) are governed by physical laws unpalatable? Do you think that this imperils free will, since not only your beliefs and desires, but your choices as well would appear to be governed not by your consciousness or your will but by purely physical factors governed by physical laws?

2. If the brain state you are in when you entertain the belief that 2+2=4 is, well, let's just call it N-4, does that mean that a person whose brain is not in N-4 does not hold the belief that 2+2=4?

3. We are capable of an infinite number of mental states. And yet the brain is finite, so it isn't capable of being in an infinite number of states. Do you see this as posing a difficulty for your view?

4. Could an organism with a radically different brain from ours be said to have mental states? What about an organism with no brain?

I intend these follow-up questions only to provide a way of unpacking the seeming self-evidence of the view that mental states just are states of the brain. It would be great to hear your thoughts about any or all of them. Then we can see where things go from there.

You might be interested to know that medical doctors and scientists are currently running experiments to test the verification of out of body experiences (OBE)s- when the mind and body would be said to have disengaged.

They place random pictures in hospital crash rooms on high selves facing upward- unseen to occupants of the room, unless they have an out of body experience and float upward to observed their resuscitation from afar. If somebody in that room claims to have experienced an OBE they can test them on what the picture was. If somebody described it right it would support the claim.

In an ideal world they would get laptops cycling random images to ensure no foul play, but this would cause a cost that most funding bodies would not pay for such an experiment.

They have not found anything yet, but I'm sure we would all here if they did.

Yes, I am interested to learn of this. I have always found the idea of an out of body experience to be rather dubious, but I'd love to hear what their findings are. Do you have any information about these experiments (where they're being conducted, etc.)? It would be nice to get ahold of some more of the details.

You say it seems self-evident to you. Perhaps I can try to draw you out a bit with some questions.

1. Physical states and events obey physical laws. If mental states just are physical states (of the brain), that might seem to jeopardize the freedom that we often take to characterize our mental life. Do you find the prospect that your thoughts and desires and feelings (etc.) are governed by physical laws unpalatable? Do you think that this imperils free will, since not only your beliefs and desires, but your choices as well would appear to be governed not by your consciousness or your will but by purely physical factors governed by physical laws?

2. If the brain state you are in when you entertain the belief that 2+2=4 is, well, let's just call it N-4, does that mean that a person whose brain is not in N-4 does not hold the belief that 2+2=4?

3. We are capable of an infinite number of mental states. And yet the brain is finite, so it isn't capable of being in an infinite number of states. Do you see this as posing a difficulty for your view?

4. Could an organism with a radically different brain from ours be said to have mental states? What about an organism with no brain?

I intend these follow-up questions only to provide a way of unpacking the seeming self-evidence of the view that mental states just are states of the brain. It would be great to hear your thoughts about any or all of them. Then we can see where things go from there.

1. I think you're making a lot of assumptions here. You seem to be suggesting that physical states are a simple either/or proposition. I suspect they're enormously more complex than that. So complex, in fact, that freedom is not affected (unless we follow the proposition to its nth degree which, in any case, would have an infinitesimal effect on ordinary existence - something like the gravity of a baseball affecting the sun). No, I don't think this affects free will in any significant sense (although a case could be made for, say, a toothache directing all my energies to see a dentist even though I would prefer to do something else). Since consciousness itself is a function of the brain, and governed by physical laws, then, yes, free will is "imperiled" but, as stated above, in a very limited way. But the real problem I see with what you've written is the notion that physical laws are somehow deterministic in an absolute sense. This does not seem to be the case on the quantum level.

2. Isn't this a tautology? It is true that someone who does not believe what A believes - does not believe what A believes.

3. Who or what is the "we" in this sentence? Humans with a mind/brain? Then, in my view, you are saying that the brain is capable of infinite states while at the same time you are saying the brain is capable only of finite states. I think you first have to establish that whatever you mean by "we" exists separately from consciousness/mind/brain. I don't think you've done that.

4. If by organism you mean something living, then I think any organism is capable of a mental state broadly defined. I don't know how else a bacterium, say, would "know" how to eat and reproduce. Something is directing it to purposeful action. That something is a state that is more than its constituent parts and yet still a part of the whole.


"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". Like Hamlet, I think these things are not yet absolutely knowable - if ever they will be. But there you have my first salvo at the thing. I will be interested in reading whatever response you may have, and, who knows, you may even convince me.

Here you go, I read it in new scientist but here is a bbc report on the study
BBC NEWS | Health | Study into near-death experiences (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7621608.stm)

I can't say I think they'll find anything though...

Is the mind anything distinct from the body?

Yes. But not as a separate entity.

The mind is distinct from the body in the way that the behavior of a crowd is distinct from the behavior of individuals. You can see this effect when looking at traffic patterns, flocks of birds, and groups of cells. To me the mind is just a word for higher order function of the brain, an emergent property. So in a sense it is distinct. It does not reside in individual neurons, but in the interactions among all of the neurons.


Are mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires, sensations, fears) states of the brain or are mental states distinct from brain states?

This doesn't seem like a precise question to me. Or maybe it just seems like a wrong question. Or maybe I'm not understanding it.

First of all, mental states are not purely the result of brain states. The mind, in my opinion, is a product of the processes of the whole body. To give a single example, hormones, which affect behavior, are produced all over the body.

Second, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between brain states and mental states, unless you define the brain state very narrowly--meaning that any given brain state is completely unique. (In that case, a person could argue that any mental state linked to that completely unique brain state (unique in both time and space) is itself unique -- by definition. I don't think that's a very interesting proposition, since it has no general usefulness.) I think multiple brain states can almost certainly produce a standard mental state such as fear. Otherwise unique individuals--people with different genes and experiences--would not be able to share their mental states so easily.

There's a word for multiple ground states leading to a standard outcome, which is canalization. It's used in developmental biology, but I am going to introduce it hear since it conveys my meaning. Maybe philosophy has another word already.

To address Akoue's four points.

First, I agree with Athos' response to question 1.
Not sure about 2. I found question #2 hard to understand.
I do not understand Athos's answer to #3.
I disagree that a bacterium has a mind. I think of a mind as a product of neural activity, so I may have an excessively narrow view of what mind is. If you both mean apparent intent, as perceived by others, that would broaden the definition considerably. I think we need to nail this down.

1. The matter of freedom of will is a non issue for me. Whatever free will I have is not going to change as a result of this discussion. Whatever free will I have, I am content with as it is. It cannot change from what it is. So if you decide as a result of this discussion that the mind having a physical basis means that there is no such thing as free will as you define free will, then that's fine with me. I feel this argument is defective. It's nearly a threat. Like this: "The mind CAN'T have a physical basis or You won't have free will, and you wouldn't like that would you?"

But it's an empty threat. Nothing is going to change for me except a series of theological and philosophical arguments with which I am mostly unfamiliar. I'm still going to be able to go the store and decide whether to buy veal (no).

I do not think you mean it as a threat yourself. But I think you have accepted the unreasonable ground rules that produced this standard argument.

2. It means that the person in brain state N = 4 may be in 1 + 3 = 4 or 0 + 4 = 4. You cannot predict absolute brain state backwards from superficial classifications of mental state. But if you define mental states so narrowly that they only refer to a single individual brain state at a single moment in time, there is no usefulness to the discussion, I think. Science deals with general principles. So I would tend to group mental states in general categories based on whether the differences do or do not affect behavior. If the differences in mental state do not produce different behavior, it is all essentially the same mental state for my purposes.

3.
We are capable of an infinite number of mental states.

We are capable of finer and finer distinctions but we are certainly not capable of an infinite number of mental states in any other sense. You are not capable of assuming the exact mental state of me or an octopus or an eocene fish. So you are not in fact capable of an infiinite number of mental states. I would say our mental states are quite limited--especially if you set aside abnormal ones that we call insanity. So, no, this assertion poses no difficulty for my view.

4. Yes. I think (obviously) that other organisms have mental states. I do not think that an organism with no brain can be said to have a mental state in any usual sense of the phrase. I would not attribute a mental state to a bacterium or to an amoeba. I think a flatworm probably has a mental state roughly comparable to my Roomba.

Hello A:

I LOVE this stuff. I just wish I was smart enough to add to the conversation.

I do have a couple questions, though. If the mind is really just the brain and/or body at work, that would mean even non sentient beings have minds.

Does it mean that? I thought a mind was a product of intelligence.

Is a non sentient mind different than a sentient one? Does having a mind indicate at least a modicum of intelligence? Or is the mind only the property of man?

I hope these questions are relevant. I don't want to head the thread off in a different direction. But, as I read, these questions came up for me, and I know you guys can explain it to me.

excon

Welcome!

I think it would depend on what "sentient" means.
I hear people use it in all different ways.

I think it would depend on what "sentient" means.
I hear people use it in all different ways.Hello asking:

I didn't consider that it meant different things. Without looking it up, I always thought it meant the ability to contemplate one's own existence.

That means my cat doesn't know she's going to die - or does she?

excon

Hello asking:


That means my cat doesn't know she's going to die - or does she?

excon

Maybe she does,isn't that why animals procreate?

Well, excon, that's a good definition of sentient.

But I have heard people talk about dogs and cats as sentient, meaning basically that they have an emotional life or, alternatively, that they can formulate a plan of some kind. (To me that's a variety of cognition.)

As for the cat, she may not know about death in the intellectual way that you and I do, but if she is quite sick, she probably has a sense of impending doom as well as a healthy aversion to cat-eating predators. I think there are different ways to understand death. Again, I'm making distinctions. Because how we use these words will alter our conclusions a lot.

I never expected to find so many juicy posts waiting for me today. The embarrassment of riches! Well, I have to start somewhere so I think, for no particular reason, with this post by asking.

My fingers are going to be exhausted by the time I respond to all these cool posts. That doesn't suck.


1. The matter of freedom of will is a non issue for me. Whatever free will I have is not going to change as a result of this discussion. Whatever free will I have, I am content with as it is. It cannot change from what it is. So if you decide as a result of this discussion that the mind having a physical basis means that there is no such thing as free will as you define free will, then that's fine with me. I feel this argument is defective. It's nearly a threat. Like this: "The mind CAN'T have a physical basis or You won't have free will, and you wouldn't like that would you?"

But it's an empty threat. Nothing is going to change for me except a series of theological and philosophical arguments with which I am mostly unfamiliar. I'm still going to be able to go the store and decide whether to buy veal (no).

I do not think you mean it as a threat yourself. But I think you have accepted the unreasonable ground rules that produced this standard argument.

No, I didn't mean it as a threat. I wanted to throw out a few different ideas in order to try to get to the meaty center of Athos's first post and I thought one way of doing that migh be to ask about the implications of his view for other sorts of theoretical commitments that we might have.

Like you, I think it far from obvious that the truth of the claim that mental states are states of the brain entails the absence of free will. But many have thought that it does, and there may be reasons for that. If we accept a libertarian conception of free will, according to which I am free just in case I have the ability to choose between contraries, then it might be thought that free will is in some sense a myth. If my choices are governed by the micro-structure of my physical anatomy and the probabilistic laws that obtain at that level of complexity, then the engine driving the machine of choice might be thought to be not processes of rational deliberation but something over which I do not myself exercise any control.

I have been careful to put this in the subjective [EDIT: Oops. I meant to say SUBJUNCTIVE] so as not to be seen to endorse it. I do this because I do not want to endorse it. But neither do I wan to dismiss it. We may well have to decide to let the free will chips fall where they may. But if--and it's a big "if", I grant you--the truth of materialism entails that we do not freely choose as a matter of rational deliberation, then it's not clear what sense is to be made of punishing people for making bad choices or rewarding them for making good ones. So no, not a threat. But food for thought nonetheless.



2. It means that the person in brain state N = 4 may be in 1 + 3 = 4 or 0 + 4 = 4. You cannot predict absolute brain state backwards from superficial classifications of mental state. But if you define mental states so narrowly that they only refer to a single individual brain state at a single moment in time, there is no usefulness to the discussion, I think. Science deals with general principles. So I would tend to group mental states in general categories based on whether the differences do or do not affect behavior. If the differences in mental state do not produce different behavior, it is all essentially the same mental state for my purposes.

So how do we type, say, belief states? One way to go might be dispositional: The belief that 2+2=4 consists in the disposition to assent to the claim "2+2=4", whereas the belief that 2+2=5" consists in the dispostion to withhold assent from the claim "2+2=5". This isn't going to be a terribly fine-grained way of discriminating among beliefs, though, since the belief that 2+2=4 is going to end up on all fours with the belief that 3+1=4. But those beliefs have different contents: One includes the concept "2" and the other doesn't; one includes that concepts "3" and "1" and the other doesn't. I could know that " and the other doesn't. I could know that " is true without knowing that "3+1=4" is true. So they are different states. Do we go by content then? If so, the basis for differentiating belief states isn't going to be anything physical. At least, not overtly.



3.

We are capable of finer and finer distinctions but we are certainly not capable of an infinite number of mental states in any other sense. You are not capable of assuming the exact mental state of me or an octopus or an eocene fish. So you are not in fact capable of an infiinite number of mental states. I would say our mental states are quite limited--especially if you set aside abnormal ones that we call insanity. So, no, this assertion poses no difficulty for my view.

I think we are capable of an infinite number of mental states. In fact, we are capable of an infinite number of belief states. This is vouchsafed by the compositionality of language. Take the following series as a pointer: " is true without knowing that ", "1+1=2", "2+2=4", "3+3=6", and so on. We can generate an infinite number of belief states just by performing the addition function on natural numbers. And this is only a small part of the number of beliefs of which we are capable. So we are capable of greater than Aleph-null mental states. That's a massively big set. How does this capacity get realized physically?


4. Yes. I think (obviously) that other organisms have mental states. I do not think that an organism with no brain can be said to have a mental state in any usual sense of the phrase. I would not attribute a mental state to a bacterium or to an amoeba. I think a flatworm probably has a mental state roughly comparable to my Roomba.

If we discovered life on another planet that exhibited highly complex patterns of behavior (they have cities and literature and are doing advanced science) but whose anatomy gave evidence of nothing even remotely resembling a brain, would you want to say that they lack mental states? How, in other words, do we define a physical criterion for mentality that isn't chauvinistic?

These are a few thoughts that came to me while reading Athos's and asking's posts. They aren't the last word by a long shot, but I'm hopeful that they're enough to elicit a reaction from the materialists in the room.

Time for coffee and a few cigarettes before I try to tackle Athos and excon.

But if--and it's a big "if", I grant you--the truth of materialism entails that we do not freely choose as a matter of rational deliberation, then it's not clear what sense is to be made of punishing people for making bad choices or rewarding them for making good ones.

We talk about crime as a function of free will, but I don't think we actually enforce laws based on that. For example, we already know that upbringing influences people's behavior, yet we do not imprison parents whose sons commit murder.


The belief that 2+2=4 consists in the disposition to assent to the claim "2+2=4", whereas the belief that 2+2=5" consists in the dispostion to withhold assent from the claim "2+2=5".

I have no idea what you mean.
Same for rest of paragraph, alas.



I think we are capable of an infinite number of mental states. In fact, we are capable of an infinite number of belief states. This is vouchsafed by the compositionality of language. Take the following series as a pointer: "1+1=2", "2+2=4", "3+3=6", "4+4=8", and so on. We can generate an infinite number of belief states just by performing the addition function on natural numbers. And this is only a small part of the number of beliefs of which we are capable. So we are capable of greater than Aleph-null mental states. That's a massively big set.

It's a massively big set, but like I said before within extremely narrow bounds. To me the distinctions between my mental state when I woke up on Thursday morning and my mental state when I woke up on Sunday are distinct and yet the differences are trivial. Whereas the difference between my mental state and that of an octopus--the most intelligent invertebrate known--well that's an interesting proposition. And I want to know what it's like to be a butterfly on a summer day. And when it rains, what does the butterfly think about?

Akoue, could you please distinguish between mental states and belief states? I don't know what you mean.


If we discovered life on another planet that exhibited highly complex patterns of behavior (they have cities and literature and are doing advanced science) but whose anatomy gave evidence of nothing even remotely resembling a brain, would you want to say that they lack mental states? How, in other words, do we define a physical criterion for mentality that isn't chauvinistic?

I don't believe I'm being chauvinistic. That's one reason I have not dismissed the possibility of plants having a mental life until we define mental, sentient, etc. I would be open to another kind of sentience, which I think excon has rightly introduced.

But I don't believe it's possible to have an advanced civilization with "nothing even remotely resembling a brain." I think although they might not have neurons as we understand them, they would HAVE to have something remotely resembling a brain.
A brain is a node for processing incoming information and modulating outgoing information and directions to other parts of the body. Without that, you cannot have beings that can respond in short periods to their environments. Plants respond to their environments, but with a few exceptions, over rather long periods. They basically don't have brains because they don't need brains.

I'll have to think about what a brain is in its essence.

Materialistically,

I have no idea what you mean.
Same for rest of paragraph, alas.

Okay, let me try again. I am more highly caffeinated now, so there's a chance I'm thinking more clearly.

Here's the paragraph that didn't work for you:

So how do we type, say, belief states? One way to go might be dispositional: The belief that 2+2=4 consists in the disposition to assent to the claim "2+2=4", whereas the belief that 2+2=5" consists in the dispostion to withhold assent from the claim "2+2=5". This isn't going to be a terribly fine-grained way of discriminating among beliefs, though, since the belief that 2+2=4 is going to end up on all fours with the belief that 3+1=4. But those beliefs have different contents: One includes the concept "2" and the other doesn't; one includes that concepts "3" and "1" and the other doesn't. I could know that " and the other doesn't. I could know that " is true without knowing that "3+1=4" is true. So they are different states. Do we go by content then? If so, the basis for differentiating belief states isn't going to be anything physical. At least, not overtly.

And here's the idea I was trying to get at:

What makes a particular mental state the state that it is? What are its defining properties?

First, some terminologicall clarification. Beliefs are one type of mental states. Other types of mental states are desires, sensations, fears, expectations, and so on. A belief state is a particular belief that you hold, a mental episode or event. If I look up and see snow on the ground, and believe that there is snow on the ground, I am having the mental state (the belief state) that there is snow on the ground. Since you bring up the octupus example, I suppose we could distinguish between *mental state*, understood as a particular episode of belief or desire that I entertain, and *total mental state*, understood as all of my occurrent mental episodes. It's likely that no two people ever have the same total mental state, this beecause it's very unlikely that two subjects could ever share the same mental history. But, in some sense at least, two people can share the same mental state (we both probably hold the belief that 2+2=4).

So, then, what makes a mental state the thing that it is? In virtue of what is my particular belief that 2+2=4 the belief, my belief, that 2+2=4? Is it that I am in such-and-such a brain state? If a mental state just is a brain state (and I know you have not endorsed this claim), then to believe that 2+2=4 just is to be in such-and-such a brain state. I have called it N-4. If the belief that 2+2=4 IS N-4, then I can be said to entertain the belief thar 2+2=4 just in case I am in N-4. The difficulty with saying that the belief that 2+2=4 just is N-4 is that there appears to be no good reason to suppose that every subject who entertains the belief is in exactly the same brain state (namely N-4). It may well be the case, and almost certainly is, that while I may be in N-4 when I entertain the belief that 2+2=4, you are in a slightly different brain state, call it N-4*, and someone else is in N-4**. In other words, while certain types of mental episodes correlate well with activity in certain regions of the brain, there is no reason to suppose that precisely the same brain activity occurs for everyone who entertains the belief that 2+2=4. And this seems to suggest that there is no specifiable brain state that just is the belief that 2+2=4. And this seems, in turn, to suggest that the belief that 2+2=4 is not identical to any given brain state. Moreover, should we discover another species of organism, be it terrestrial or extraterrestrial, that has a significantly different brain from ours, but whose members are nonetheless capable of entertaining the belief that 2+2=4, then we couldn't say that that belief is identical to, again say N-4, since they can't be in N-4 (their brains don't work the way ours do, they have a different structure). It would be chauvinistic to say that they are incapable of entertaining the belief simply because their brains can't enter into the same states as ours.

The content of my belief is the proposition " is true without knowing that ". One might think that what makes my mental state the particular state that it is (i.e. the belief that 2+2=4) is not the brain event N-4 but rather something else, namely the *content* of the belief. In other words, I am in this belief state just in case the content of my occurent mental episode is the proposition "2+2=4" and I assent to that proposition. People often refer to mental states of this sort as a propositional attitude because I am taking a certain attitude (belief, assent) to a propositional content ("2+2=4"). This might suggest an alternative to the view that what makes a mental state the state that it is is just the subject's being in a certain brain state (such-and-such neurons firing), but rather the content that is being entertained by the subject.

Before I go any further I just want to float this out there and see if it is clear or whether I need to drink another pot of coffee and try again. Does this make sense?

Hello asking:

I didn't consider that it meant different things. Without looking it up, I always thought it meant the ability to contemplate one's own existence.

That means my cat doesn't know she's going to die - or does she?

excon

This comes pretty close to the way I've heard it used. I've rarely seen it defined, but the use to which it gets put with some frequency seems to suggest something like this: A subject (human, animal, other) is sentient if and only if it is aware of itself and its environment, where this in turn seems to mean that the subject is reflectively self-aware. In other words, it doesn't have to look around and say, "Nope, I'm not that. And I'm not that. I'm not that either. Oh, this is me!" Sentience often seems, in other words, to mean something like being self-aware from inside. Philosophers and cog-sci people generally refer to this as consciousness.

CAVEAT regarding the word "consciousness": This is also frequently used to refer to the fact that there is something that it is like to have an experience. In other words, there is something that it is like to see the color red, or to taste chocolate. The philosopher Frank Jackson used a famous example to make this point: Imagine a person named Mary who has lived her whole life in a monochromatic world. The only colors she has ever seen are her hair, eyes, and the pigmentation of her skin. She has never seen the color red (a deep vibrant red--suppose she has neever cut herself or otherwise seen blood). She has spent her life in this black and white and gray world and she has learned all there is to learn from study what is involved in the perception of color. Then one day the door to her monochromatic world opens and she steps out. Sitting on a table in front of her is a bright red apple. Did she just learn something new?

A lot of people want to say, yes, she learned what it is like to see red. There was something about color perception that she didn't know before, and now she does, so she has just acquired a new bit of knowledge.

There is another famous example, due to Thomas Nagel. It goes like this: Bats navigate by means of echolocation. I do not. I might be able to imagine what it would be like to sprout wings and fly. I might be able to imagine myself turning into a bat, even. What I can't know is what it is like for a bat to be a bat. I cannot know what it is like to navigate by means of echolocation. In fact, Nagel argues, I can't even imagine what it is like to be a bat. There is an irreducibly subjective character to sensation that cannot be captured in any objective, physical description of sensation.

Nagel's version has been thought by many to pose a very serious problem for materialism, since there is something really important about our mental life that cannot be captured by science, namely what it is like for a subject to have an experience.

This comes pretty close to the way I've heard it used. I've rarely seen it defined, but the use to which it gets put with some frequency seems to suggest something like this: A subject (human, animal, other) is sentient if and only if it is aware of itself and its environment, where this in turn seems to mean that the subject is reflectively self-aware. In other words, it doesn't have to look around and say, "Nope, I'm not that. And I'm not that. I'm not that either. Oh, this is me!" Sentience often seems, in other words, to mean something like being self-aware from inside. Philosophers and cog-sci people generally refer to this as consciousness.
I am no philosopher but have this deep need to respond to the animal sentience thing. Is my (soulcat) Thomas Jefferson aware of himself and his environment and therefore reflectively self-aware, conscious of himself as to his place in the world? I say yes. When he lies on top of my opened-up morning newspaper and I shoo him away so I can read about the newest antics of ex-Gov. Blago or Sen. Burris (both of whom seem to lack sentience, btw), he moves over to the corner of the table and not only faces away from me ("Hrrrumph!") but also sits so his tail does a rhythmic sweep-sweep-sweep back and forth over the surface of the newspaper, thereby interrupting my reading, making it difficult to turn the page, and annoying the heck out of me. Occasionally, he glances back at me to see if I am properly annoyed. I can cite other personal experiences, but my belief is that (at least) mammals are sentient beings.


In other words, there is something that it is like to see the color red, or to taste chocolate... There is an irreducibly subjective character to sensation that cannot be captured in any objective, physical description of sensation.
I've often wondered -- is my experience of the taste and flavor of, say, chocolate the same as anyone/everyone else's? I can use many adjectives to describe the senory experience of chocolate, but when push comes to shove, does everyone else have the same experience?

The philosopher Frank Jackson used a famous example to make this point: Imagine a person named Mary who has lived her whole life in a monochromatic world.
This reminds me of Oliver Sacks' The Island of the Color Blind, the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap, where Dr. Sacks visited an isolated community in which a number of islanders had been born achromatopsic, i.e. totally colorblind. Despite that supposed disability, they were able to describe their colorless world in rich terms of pattern and tone, light and shadow. Or, in contrast, Sacks' story "The Case of the Colorblind Painter" in which he introduces the reader to an accomplished artist who is suddenly struck by cerebral achromatopsia, the inability to perceive color due to brain damage.

(Thank you for allowing me to get all that off my chest.)

A subject (human, animal, other) is sentient if and only if it is aware of itself and its environment, where this in turn seems to mean that the subject is reflectively self-aware.

So we don't mean the ability to suffer, which, I gather, is the animal rights position. This seems like a simple definition I can at least grasp. I'm not sure what it means to be self aware (or how that's different from having consciousness), but to the extent that I can grasp it, I think self-awareness is far more general among animals than most people think.


In other words, it doesn't have to look around and say, "Nope, I'm not that. And I'm not that. I'm not that either. Oh, this is me!" Sentience often seems, in other words, to mean something like being self-aware from inside. Philosophers and cog-sci people generally refer to this as consciousness.

I don't think any animal goes around doing that. Maybe I'm the one who needs more coffee! I can't imagine a caterpillar looking at a leaf and saying to itself "I'm not that." Nor can I imagine a mouse having any doubt about being itself distinct from other individual mice, to say nothing of acorns and cats. I have the feeling we are speaking a different language.


Sitting on a table in front of her is a bright red apple. Did she just learn something new?

I don't see how she could not if she can see the apple. I don't understand the point of this story. For me, the story raises the question of whether she would even be capable of seeing red. Kittens who were only allowed to see vertical lines during the critical period of vision development, later could not see horizontal lines or at least did not know how to interpret them (I know, awful). We have to learn to see during infancy.


There is an irreducibly subjective character to sensation that cannot be captured in any objective, physical description of sensation.

I guess that's true. But I'd be very surprised if pain for my cat is different from pain for me. Same for hunger, pleasure, textures, colors, sounds. Occam's razor suggests that what seems the same is in fact the same. You can posit otherwise, but there's no great support for it. And good reasons to think that other vertebrates' perceptions are similar to our own.

Here's another example. A man loses his hand in an accident in his 20s and, over many decades, his brain rewires itself, rededicating the areas of the brain that used to feel the fur of his dog's head under his hand. Now those same brain cells respond to something else. In his 50s, the man is given a hand transplant and the neurons rewire themselves again to respond to the nerve signals now coming from the new hand. Since this is not HIS hand, does the fur feel different? Or is the sensation a product of his brain? Or is the sensation pretty standardized among humans?


Nagel's version has been thought by many to pose a very serious problem for materialism, since there is something really important about our mental life that cannot be captured by science, namely what it is like for a subject to have an experience.

Hmm. This is a lot like God. I can't prove He's not there and you can't prove He is. I can't prove that red looks about the same for everyone here, and you can't prove that red looks different for each of us. But, if you give credence to biology and evolution, it's unlikely that perceptions are going to be substantively different. Why would they be? Our cells are the same, our tissues and organs are the same. Why should the one thing that's difficult to assess be different in any substantive way?

Nagel's story doesn't speak to me.

Occasionally, he glances back at me to see if I am properly annoyed. I can cite other personal experiences, but my belief is that (at least) mammals are sentient beings.

To me, this is totally reasonable and consistent with what I know about animals. It's not that we can't EVER misread their intentions, but their behavior and thoughts are not opaque to us either. We are ourselves mammal, which have evolved to read one another's intentions and to read the intentions of animals that are not of our species. We recognize a predatory look, anger, fear. These mental states are universal, certainly in mammals, and probably in a lot of other vertebrates too. To propose that a predatory look that is followed by predatory behavior is not accompanied by predatory feelings seems contrary to common sense to me. (I'm not sure anyone is saying that... )

We experience what others experience. Perhaps it feels different to us, but if it causes us to behave in exactly the same way, by what measure do we posit a difference in the experience?


I've often wondered -- is my experience of the taste and flavor of, say, chocolate the same as anyone/everyone else's?


I think probably mostly. We know there are alleles that make some flavors taste bitter to some people and unobjectionable to others. It's quite likely that hay tastes better to a horse than it does to us. But chocolate *probably* tastes the same to you as your parents and most of your neighbors.

If someone hates chocolate, that suggests maybe it tastes different to them.


(Thank you for allowing me to get all that off my chest.)

Well, but don't stop.:)

So we don't mean the ability to suffer, which, I gather, is the animal rights position. This seems like a simple definition I can at least grasp. I'm not sure what it means to be self aware (or how that's different from having consciousness), but to the extent that I can grasp it, I think self-awareness is far more general among animals than most people think.

Agreed (no surprise there!). I think the same goes for other sorts of cognitive ability. Dogs may not do linear algebra, but I'm quite confidant there is a rich and complex interior life behind those big brown eyes.


I don't think any animal goes around doing that. Maybe I'm the one who needs more coffee! I can't imagine a caterpillar looking at a leaf and saying to itself "I'm not that." Nor can I imagine a mouse having any doubt about being itself distinct from other individual mice, to say nothing of acorns and cats. I have the feeling we are speaking a different language.

No, of course they don't. And that's the point, they don't need to. They are aware of themselves without the need to check first with their surroundings in order to figure which object in their sensory field is "me". So not a different language so much as I was calling attention to something that, for you, is sufficiently obvious that attention needn't be called to it. Sadly, lots of people take a different view (remember those nasty Cartesians and their modern dog-fighting progeny).


I don't see how she could not if she can see the apple. I don't understand the point of this story. For me, the story raises the question of whether she would even be capable of seeing red. Kittens who were only allowed to see vertical lines during the critical period of vision development, later could not see horizontal lines or at least did not know how to interpret them (I know, awful). We have to learn to see during infancy.

I'm not so sure about that. We get exposed to new colors throughout our lives. We needn't have seen them during infancy in order to perceive them as adults. Adults can detect gaps in color spaces. But it is quite possible that people can be "spectrum inverted" relative to each other, so that the "raw feel" or qualitative character (what it's like) isn't the same for each. Subject 1 sees a red patch and it has a certain qualitative character. Subject 2 sees a yellow patch and it too has a certain qualitative character. The qualitative character is part of what it is for each subject to have that experience. If Subject 1 could see yellow from the point of view of Subject 2, if she could experience it as Subject 2 experiences it, she might very well think, "Huh, that's what red feels like to me", even though, of course, it is yellow. It's seems unlikely that such differences in qualitative character would be behaviorally detectable, and because of this it is difficult to see how any objective description of mentality could account for the qualitative character of experience. But to leave this out is to leave out a whole lot. There appears to be something irreducibly subjective about having a mental life.


I guess that's true. But I'd be very surprised if pain for my cat is different from pain for me. Same for hunger, pleasure, textures, colors, sounds. Occam's razor suggests that what seems the same is in fact the same. You can posit otherwise, but there's no great support for it. And good reasons to think that other vertebrates' perceptions are similar to our own.

But this is a real issue since part of what pain is involves there being something that it is like to be in pain. In a general way I certainly don't wish to quarrel with the claim that pain for a cat is still pain, anymore than I want to call into question that another human feels pain in at least something like the way I do. But what about the S & M subculture? Part of our commonsense understanding of pain is that it is associated with avoidance behavior. And yet some people don't exhibit avoidance behavior; they may not even wince or moan; they may in fact smile. Do we say that someone who's back is being wipped with leather straps isn't in pain because he is smiling and eager for more? What do we say about Severin in Venus in Furs?

Ockham's Razor cautions against the needless proliferation of entities in our ontology. Some people hold that these qualitative characters that we've been talking about are entities, called "qualia" (in the plural, "quale" in the singular), but I don't think we need to go that far at all. Let's just say that sensory experiences have a qualitative character that is accessible to the subject of the experience but that is not intersubjectively accessible. So the question doesn't turn on whether other species have any experiences in this sense, i.e. experiences which have a raw feel to them, but how we could ever know about the raw feel of experience to anyone other than oneself. If we lack intersubjective access to these features of experience, how can we ever be in a position to give a physical description of these sorts of mental states (i.e. mental states which have a raw feel)? Looked at in this light, it can appear (and does appear to a great many people) that a massive part of our psychology is closed to scientific understanding.

(By the way, I am not myself endorsing that view, although I do have some genuine sympathy with it.)

Wondergirl's point about chocolate may have a deeper theoretical bite than is apparent at first blush. I can't know what chocolate tastes like to you, because, of course, I can't experience chocolate from your unique point of view. What I can do is interpret your behavior: You tell me that this piece of dark chocolate is too bitter, that piece of milk chocolate is too sweet, etc. but I have to fill in the blanks by drawing on my own experiences of bitterness and sweetness. I can't even know what exactly words like "bitter" and "sweet" refer too in your mouth because they refer to qualitative features of your experience to which you alone have access.

That said, I am inclined to agree with Nagel that the more similar an organism is to us the better sense we are likely to have of the qualities of its experiences. So a cat may not be so difficult to interpret as a mollusk. But with the cat as with other humans, we have to translate their behavior into our own cognitive idiom: I see you stub your toe and yell "Ouch!' as you hobble away. I infer on the strength of your linguistic and other behavior that stubbing your toe caused you pain. And I do this because I recognize those behaviors as the one's I too exhibit when I stub my toe. We don't seem to be able to abstract away from our own subjective point of view and this makes it very difficult so much as to communicate in a public language about what it is like for us to have the experiences we do. Just try to describe to someone who has never tasted chocolate what the experience is like. As thorough and accurate and your description may be, it's not going to be sufficient to elicit in them the same experience. They have to taste it for themselves to know what it is like.


But, if you give credence to biology and evolution, it's unlikely that perceptions are going to be substantively different. Why would they be? Our cells are the same, our tissues and organs are the same. Why should the one thing that's difficult to assess be different in any substantive way?

Isn't this to beg the question against the anti-materialists (of which I am not one, even though I seem to be speaking up for them at the present time)? If you assume that mentality is determined by our physiology, then sure, it's a natural supposition. But if you don't assume that, if you hold that mental states aren't physical states of an organism, then there is no reason to suppose that similarity of physical constitution guarantees sameness of mentality.

I am no philosopher but have this deep need to respond to the animal sentience thing. Is my (soulcat) Thomas Jefferson aware of himself and his environment and therefore reflectively self-aware, conscious of himself as to his place in the world? I say yes. When he lies on top of my opened-up morning newspaper and I shoo him away so I can read about the newest antics of ex-Gov. Blago or Sen. Burris (both of whom seem to lack sentience, btw), he moves over to the corner of the table and not only faces away from me ("Hrrrumph!") but also sits so his tail does a rhythmic sweep-sweep-sweep back and forth over the surface of the newspaper, thereby interrupting my reading, making it difficult to turn the page, and annoying the heck out of me. Occasionally, he glances back at me to see if I am properly annoyed. I can cite other personal experiences, but my belief is that (at least) mammals are sentient beings.


I am, of course, with you on this. I am deeply puzzled by the view, apparently still held by a great many people, that animals lack sentience in any meanignful sense of that term. Were I to withhold the ascription of a complex mental life to the cats and dog with which I live I would be utterly helpless to make any sense at all of our interactions.


I've often wondered -- is my experience of the taste and flavor of, say, chocolate the same as anyone/everyone else's? I can use many adjectives to describe the senory experience of chocolate, but when push comes to shove, does everyone else have the same experience?

You can see with my response to asking that I decided to steal your chocolate example and run (amok) with it. I share your puzzlement. And although I have some familiarity with the range of possible answers to this question, my jury is still out. In other words, I'm not entirely sure what I think. One of the reasons I started the thread, actually. I tend to think that both sides make a pretty convincing case... which is a problem if, like me, you aren't comfortable with cognitive dissonance.


This reminds me of Oliver Sacks' The Island of the Color Blind, the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap, where Dr. Sacks visited an isolated community in which a number of islanders had been born achromatopsic, i.e. totally colorblind. Despite that supposed disability, they were able to describe their colorless world in rich terms of pattern and tone, light and shadow. Or, in contrast, Sacks' story "The Case of the Colorblind Painter" in which he introduces the reader to an accomplished artist who is suddenly struck by cerebral achromatopsia, the inability to perceive color due to brain damage.

(Thank you for allowing me to get all that off my chest.)

I hope there will be more to come. Please?

We needn't have seen [colors] during infancy in order to perceive them as adults.

Yes and no. If we don't see certain things in infancy, during critical periods, those part of our brains that would process those things can atrophy. That doesn't mean we can't see them at all later. But it does impair perception. What the following actually translates into as experience, I'm not sure.


Although the ocular dominance columns do not require visual experience for their formation, they can be altered drastically by post-natal visual deprivation occurring during the critical period. In their classic studies, Hubel and Wiesel showed that visual deprivation causes shrinkage of the eye's ocular dominance columns in the cortex. This phenomenon is presumed to contribute to the occurrence of amblyopia. Shrinkage of the ocular dominance columns reflects a loss of input from laminae of the lateral geniculate body conveying information from the deprived eye. This loss of input means that fewer cells are available in the cortex to handle information emanating from the deprived eye.
Dr. Jonathan Horton - UCSF (http://vision.ucsf.edu/hortonlab/ResearchProgram.html)

I think it would be hard to get through infancy without seeing several shades of red unless the person was completely blind.

People who recover their vision late in life cannot process the information from their eyes as we do, or at least that's what I've heard, that they just see meaningless patches of color.


It is quite possible that people can be "spectrum inverted" relative to each other, so that the "raw feel" or qualitative character (what it's like) isn't the same for each.

I accept that this is possible. I accept that senses vary in how they operate--which has a clear biological basis. For example, some garter snakes like to eat slugs. Others won't touch them. They are revolted. Separate from the senses is perception as a product of the brain (or mind, depending on your bent).


It's seems unlikely that such differences in qualitative character would be behaviorally detectable,

It MIGHT be possible to see differences in brain imaging. But even then there would be no external trait to associate that with, so still no way to ever know how something looks like inside someone's mind. If it doesn't affect the physical body or behavior, then it's inaccessible to study. And, frankly, there's no evidence that it exists.


Part of our commonsense understanding of pain is that it is associated with avoidance behavior. And yet some people don't exhibit avoidance behavior; they may not even wince or moan; they may in fact smile.

Certainly there are differences in pain perception and also the psychological states that different people associate with pain. Some people are terrified of pain, some people can distance themselves from a fair amount of it. Likewise there are people who feel no pain due to (I guess) genetic anomalies. And you say, people who are attracted to modest amounts of it.

I'm not arguing for no variation in perception. But I am arguing that in most mammals, pain is an unpleasant experience, by definition. And while some people may feel no pain at all (and so jump off buildings and break their legs), such variants are anomalous not only among humans, but among vertebrates generally.


Looked at in this light, it can appear (and does appear to a great many people) that a massive part of our psychology is closed to scientific understanding.

Okay. No one will ever know if you see yellow to my red. Or if Wondergirl tastes bittersweet to my milk chocolate. But I'm not yet convinced that this is a massive part of our psychology. There is good behavioral evidence that pain perception varies. Of course, preferences vary and we know they have a physical basis. But the mechanism for that is not likely to be something totally inaccessible to science.

If I prefer yellow because to me it looks like your red, and you prefer red because it looks like red--so that we both really prefer the interior experience of red--all you've really done is redefine a way of understanding color preferences, and without being able to demonstrate that your mechanism has any reality.


That said, I am inclined to agree with Nagel that the more similar an organism is to us the better sense we are likely to have of the qualities of its experiences.

I agree. Same brain, same experiences (within limits).
But similarity isn't only a function of relatedness, it's also a function of habits. Think of parrots. They are social, fruit-eating, tropical animals that move in three dimensions--a lot like our ancestors. We are not related but we both have color vision, talk a lot, socialize with others. We have a lot in common with parrots.

From my perspective, if you can't evaluate a mental state from behavior or other physical measures, it effectively doesn't exist.


Just try to describe to someone who has never tasted chocolate what the experience is like. As thorough and accurate and your description may be, it's not going to be sufficient to elicit in them the same experience. They have to taste it for themselves to know what it is like.

Well, some of that inaccessibility is because the sense of smell is connected to the older parts of the brain and our vocabulary for odor is hugely impoverished. By comparison, it's relatively easy to describe how something looks or how we feel. It's even possible to describe pain in fairly accurate terms despite its subjective nature.


But... if you hold that mental states aren't physical states of an organism, then there is no reason to suppose that similarity of physical constitution guarantees sameness of mentality.

Why would I assume that some natural expression of an organism is totally unrelated to its evolutionary history, its genetics, its development, or its lifelong experiences?

I am laughing. But quite seriously, why would I assume that? I could likewise assume that about a great many things. I could assume that blood pressure, which is certainly affected by thoughts, is not just a biological problem but a psychological or theological one. Once you make that assumption, you are outside of science and you are operating without rules that can be tested against reality (from my perspective). Since science is consistently predictive--that is, it works--I'm satisfied to stay in my cozy box.

I think it would be hard to get through infancy without seeing several shades of red unless the person was completely blind.

Hence Jackson's thought experiment.

The question isn't what's serviceable: For nearly all non-philosophical purposes it works perfectly well to assume that Mary-style cases never present themselves. But the question here is what is a mental state, and to answer this question we have to consider counterfactuals. Thus, what would it be like for Mary, etc. The question I asked isn't on its face an empirical one, although a case can curely be made that the answer to that question is. But I don't think there's anything problematic about casting about for an account of mentality that isn't just an empirical generalization from cases but that is criterial, that speaks to counterfactual cases. I don't think that's idle--at least, not on its face.


I accept that this is possible. I accept that senses vary in how they operate--which has a clear biological basis. For example, some garter snakes like to eat slugs. Others won't touch them. They are revolted. Separate from the senses is perception as a product of the brain (or mind, depending on your bent).

Sure, but the issue isn't about whether senses differ in how they operate. The issue is whether there is something irreducibly subjective about mentality and what, if anything, that means for the prospects of a science of mentality.


It MIGHT be possible to see differences in brain imaging. But even then there would be no external trait to associate that with, so still no way to ever know how something looks like inside someone's mind. If it doesn't affect the physical body or behavior, then it's inaccessible to study. And, frankly, there's no evidence that it exists.


Inaccessibility to (scientific) study certainly doesn't entail absence of evidence. There are lots of things that aren't objects of scientific study: aesthetics, literary studies, etc. These aren't science, but they aren't fantasyland either. And, as it happens, I have plenty of evidence, as do you. My evidence is that there is something that it is like for me to be me, to have the experiences that I have; and yours is that there is something that it is like for you to be you and have the experiences that you have. It's just that this evidence isn't intersubjectively accessible. Maybe you want to say that means it doesn't count as evidence. But testimony does, and there's plenty of testimonial evidence for its existence. Again, it would be question-begging for the purposes of this discussion to assume that the standard of evidence is what counts as evidence in the physical sciences, this because we aren't taking it for granted that mentality is an object for scientific scrutiny. That can't be assumed; it has to be argued for. My interest is less in the question whether science is the measure of all things than whether mental states are through-and-through physical. If they are, then it is a further question whether and how they are to be studied scientifically.


I'm not arguing for no variation in perception. But I am arguing that in most mammals, pain is an unpleasant experience, by definition. And while some people may feel no pain at all (and so jump off buildings and break their legs), such variants are anomalous not only among humans, but among vertebrates generally.

Fair enough. But notice, then, that the definition of pain is one that invokes its qualitative character and not its physical properties. And there is good reason to favor this sort of definition: Pain is multiply realizable, which is to say that the sensation of pain can be realized in different sorts of physical systems. The physical realization of pain may be very different in humans than in octopi or extraterrestrials. This suggests that pain is not identical to any given physical property or event and so is not itself physical, even though its realizations are physical. Behavioral criteria for pain also fail since although the vast majority of the members of a population will exhibit avoidance behavior in the face of pain some members do not. Behavior cannot therefore serve as a criterion for being in pain. There are regularities, that much is uncontroversial; the controversy erupts when we try to discern anything like a criterion (even a really long disjunctive criterion) for pain.

A really long disjunctive criterion might look something like this: A subject S is in pain just in case S exhibits behavior x, or S exhibits behavior y, or S exhibits behavior z...

The list of disjuncts would have to be massively long, and it would leave us without a way of handling counterfactual cases (like extraterrestrials or massively abnormal human beings, say). And at some point at least some of those disjuncts are going to overlap with the criteria by which other states are defined, this because for some people pain looks like pleasure.


Okay. No one will ever know if you see yellow to my red. Or if Wondergirl tastes bittersweet to my milk chocolate. But I'm not yet convinced that this is a massive part of our psychology. There is good behavioral evidence that pain perception varies. Of course, preferences vary and we know they have a physical basis. But the mechanism for that is not likely to be something totally inaccessible to science.

Whether the mechanisms of variation are accessible to science or not, the qualitative properties of experience are. Science cannot even look for the physical realizations of these properties because it would first have to describe them. But they aren't even linguistic. The question whether this account for a massive part of our psychology is something that may or may not have stakes. I'm inclined to think that it is, in fact, of great importance, and fundamentally related to our ability to have an interior life at all. And surely interiority, access from within, is a huge deal.


If I prefer yellow because to me it looks like your red, and you prefer red because it looks like red--so that we both really prefer the interior experience of red--all you've really done is redefine a way of understanding color preferences, and without being able to demonstrate that your mechanism has any reality.

Color preferences is peripheral to the central point, though. Color preferences surely are related in all sorts of ways to color experiences, but it is the experiences that are the issue. If the preferences turn on the experiences, and the experiences aren't accessible outside the subject's point of view, then it is difficult for me to see how there could ever be anything like an adequate account of the mechanisms of preference. Not that I really care why some people prefer blue to green. They are clearly just bad people if they do.


I agree. Same brain, same experiences (within limits).
But similarity isn't only a function of relatedness, it's also a function of habits. Think of parrots. They are social, fruit-eating, tropical animals that move in three dimensions--a lot like our ancestors. We are not related but we both have color vision, talk a lot, socialize with others. We have a lot in common with parrots.

This paragraph threw me. I don't think I understand what you're saying.


From my perspective, if you can't evaluate a mental state from behavior or other physical measures, it effectively doesn't exist.

I guess a lot turns on what you mean by "effectively". If you mean that it isn't an object of study by the physical sciences, then sure. But I can't see any good reason why that should the standard of existence. Science is just one field of human endeavor, it isn't the be all and end all, even of knowledge. To say that mentality is something that science cannot explain isn't at all to say that mentality doesn't exist. And, besides, that begs the question against the anti-materialist. This is in no way a shot at science. It's just to say that there are certain things for which science isn't a good tool. After all, being a good chemist doesn't make you a good art critic.


Well, some of that inaccessibility is because the sense of smell is connected to the older parts of the brain and our vocabulary for odor is hugely impoverished. By comparison, it's relatively easy to describe how something looks or how we feel. It's even possible to describe pain in fairly accurate terms despite its subjective nature.

The word "fairly" is doing a lot of work there.


Why would I assume that some natural expression of an organism is totally unrelated to its evolutionary history, its genetics, its development, or its lifelong experiences?

I'm not suggesting that you assume any such thing. I am just pointing out that there is an alternative to materialism, in fact there are several, and to assert that similarity of physical constitution guarantees sameness of mentality begs the question against those. If mental states are in each case realized in some physical system, then the mental states aren't identical to a physical state of the system but similarity of physical constitution would guarantee similarity of mentality. But that is something that has to be argued for, otherwise it is question-begging.


I am laughing. But quite seriously, why would I assume that? I could likewise assume that about a great many things. I could assume that blood pressure, which is certainly affected by thoughts, is not just a biological problem but a psychological or theological one. Once you make that assumption, you are outside of science and you are operating without rules that can be tested against reality (from my perspective). Since science is consistently predictive--that is, it works--I'm satisfied to stay in my cozy box.

Again, you're not being asked to assume that. I'm simply saying that you can't *assume* that similarity of physical constitution guarantees sameness of mentality.

And, again, there is a question whether when we talk about mentality we are outside of science. That's what the argument is about. Which view is the right view, and why? The physical sciences are very successful regarding physical phenomena. But we aren't entitled just to assume that mental states are physical phenomena. That's precisely the point under consideration. Besides, psychology isn't exactly a rigorous science in any case.

People who recover their vision late in life cannot process the information from their eyes as we do, or at least that's what I've heard, that they just see meaningless patches of color.
Sight needs far more than the simple ability to open one's eyes and let reality in. Perception is a learned thing and an acquired taste. Infants begin to make visual sense of the world by looking at, for instance, faces that peer into the stroller or crib (there have been many studies using face shapes, familiar/stranger faces, irregular faces). As an individual matures, his view of the world feeds off his past experiences with three-dimensional space, the physical details of particular settings, and the predictable shapes and colors of various items.

In another Sacks' book, An Anthropologist On Mars, Virgil is a man who saw little until having cataract surgery at age 50. Sacks calls Virgil's behavior after cataract removal that of a "mentally blind" person—someone who sees but can't decipher what's out there. Virgil's perceptual identity, his sense of himself (unlike those who've developed normally), was tied to experiences that had nothing to do with sight. He was used to touching objects to "see" them; with sight he became visually overloaded, closed his eyes, and pretended he was still blind. Often confused, he even begged to become blind again.

Yes. But not as a separate entity.

The mind is distinct from the body in the way that the behavior of a crowd is distinct from the behavior of individuals. You can see this effect when looking at traffic patterns, flocks of birds, and groups of cells. To me the mind is just a word for higher order function of the brain, an emergent property. So in a sense it is distinct. It does not reside in individual neurons, but in the interactions among all of the neurons.

I really like what you said here, and have been meaning to ask you to say a bit more about what you have in mind. Unfortunately, I got sidetracked prattling on about colors and whatnot. Anyway, could I ask you to elaborate on what you have in mind, since it looks both promising and very interesting to me. Also, I'm kind of counting on your expertise to put a couple of good examples to it!

Pretty please!

The issue is whether there is something irreducibly subjective about mentality

I have completed conceded this point.
(That is, for now, there is no way to objectively evaluate our inner impressions. So for now it's purely subjective. I think that could change at some point.)


and what, if anything, that means for the prospects of a science of mentality.

That's another issue. If you define mentality as everything within the mind that it not subject to description and, apparently, the ways in which two minds MIGHT differ, then "mind" is by definition inaccessible to science. There cannot be a science of something that cannot be detected.


And, as it happens, I have plenty of evidence, as do you. My evidence is that there is something that it is like for me to be me, to have the experiences that I have; and yours is that there is something that it is like for you to be you and have the experiences that you have.

Nope. I do not concede this at all. Each of us knows the experience of being "me." But what is at issue is whether your subjective experience (not counting differences in sensory apparatus and other physical inputs) is different from mine and for that, we have no evidence at all--either for or against.


Again, it would be question-begging for the purposes of this discussion to assume that the standard of evidence is what counts as evidence in the physical sciences, this because we aren't taking it for granted that mentality is an object for scientific scrutiny. That can't be assumed; it has to be argued for.

I don't use the "begging the question," so I had to look it up.
Wikipedia says, "a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises."

If I understand the term, it would appear that the same argument can be made back?

That is, if you assume there's a difference between two minds, all physical things being equal, then your premise implies your proposition.

I assume either (1) IF there's a difference as you define it, it's inaccessible to inquiry (through science) or else (2) if there's no difference, the thing does not exist and is inaccessible to scientific inquiry.



Fair enough. But notice, then, that the definition of pain is one that invokes its qualitative character and not its physical properties.


No. Something can be both qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) and still completely physical. Qualitative phenomena are available to science. Are we using "qualitative" differently?

...
Oh, I don't agree with any of what comes next! I don't want to argue with every line though...


A subject S is in pain just in case S exhibits behavior x, or S exhibits behavior y, or S exhibits behavior z...

The list of disjuncts would have to be massively long, and it would leave us without a way of handling counterfactual cases (like extraterrestrials or massively abnormal human beings, say). And at some point at least some of those disjuncts are going to overlap with the criteria by which other states are defined, this because for some people pain looks like pleasure.

I think you'd find this all very difficult to demonstrate. It's contrary to my understanding of both animals and pain. In any case, I'm not sure where it gets you in this discussion. So there are many varieties of pain experience. Then what?


Whether the mechanisms of variation are accessible to science or not, the qualitative properties of experience are. Science cannot even look for the physical realizations of these properties because it would first have to describe* them. But they aren't even linguistic. The question whether this account for a massive part of our psychology is something that may or may not have stakes. I'm inclined to think that it is, in fact, of great importance, and fundamentally related to our ability to have an interior life at all. And surely interiority, access from within, is a huge deal.

*Not describe, but detect.

But, as I understand you, you've limited interiority to just those things that are undetectable--like what red looks like. There is so much else that IS detectable and accessible to science. Why limit your inquiry to what cannot be known?


Not that I really care why some people prefer blue to green. They are clearly just bad people if they do.

Yes. Just awful people. I once knew someone like that. He came to bad end.


This paragraph threw me. I don't think I understand what you're saying.

I meant a human mind might be more similar to a parrot's than to a gopher's even though we are more closely related to a gopher. A mere digression.


I guess a lot turns on what you mean by "effectively". If you mean that it isn't an object of study by the physical sciences, then sure.

Yes. That's what I mean, if by physical sciences you mean science.


But I can't see any good reason why that should the standard of existence.

What's accessible to science is not the standard of existence.
But it's the standard of what interests scientists. When scientists discovered they could detect extrasolar planets, they became extremely interested in them. Before that, they were a matter of conjecture. When technology exists to tell us whether two people sense chocolate in the same way, science will be all over it.


To say that mentality is something that science cannot explain isn't at all to say that mentality doesn't exist.

It isn't about science explaining mentality. It's about being able to ask any coherent question at all. Those are distinct propositions. I want to convey that clearly.

Also, you talked at the beginning about a *science of mentality,* so I'm still on that.


I'm simply saying that you can't *assume* that similarity of physical constitution guarantees sameness of mentality.

Just to be clear, at no point in this discussion have I assumed that. I'm good at maintaining two possibilities in my head at once. But in this case, they lead to the same outcome, which is that we can't know. At least not yet as far as I know.


And, again, there is a question whether when we talk about mentality we are outside of science.

If you define it as I think you have, yes.


That's what the argument is about. Which view is the right view, and why?

I consider this unknowable.


But we aren't entitled just to assume that mental states are physical phenomena.

Nor are we entitled to assume that mental states have no physical basis.
We are left having to accept that we can't answer this question.

Sight needs far more than the simple ability to open one's eyes and let reality in. Perception is a learned thing and an acquired taste. Infants begin to make visual sense of the world by looking at, for instance, faces that peer into the stroller or crib (there have been many studies using face shapes, familiar/stranger faces, irregular faces). As an individual matures, his view of the world feeds off his past experiences with three-dimensional space, the physical details of particular settings, and the predictable shapes and colors of various items.

In another Sacks' book, An Anthropologist On Mars, Virgil is a man who saw little until having cataract surgery at age 50. Sacks calls Virgil's behavior after cataract removal that of a "mentally blind" person—someone who sees but can't decipher what's out there. Virgil's perceptual identity, his sense of himself (unlike those who've developed normally), was tied to experiences that had nothing to do with sight. He was used to touching objects to "see" them; with sight he became visually overloaded, closed his eyes, and pretended he was still blind. Often confused, he even begged to become blind again.

Yes and Interesting examples.

Reading today, I learned that newborns cannot see much in the first two months, as if they were looking through wax paper.

(That is, for now, there is no way to objectively evaluate our inner impressions. So for now it's purely subjective. I think that could change at some point.)

Yes. Some people want to argue that it is not in principle possible (that it is logically impossible). I am not one of those people.


That's another issue. If you define mentality as everything within the mind that it not subject to description and, apparently, the ways in which two minds MIGHT differ, then "mind" is by definition inaccessible to science. There cannot be a science of something that cannot be detected.

I hope I didn't advocate that view of mentality, at least I didn't mean to. The inaccessibility point only holds for some features of mentality. Man, things would really be messy if that were true of all of it. Yikes!


Nope. I do not concede this at all. Each of us knows the experience of being "me." But what is at issue is whether your subjective experience (not counting differences in sensory apparatus and other physical inputs) is different from mine and for that, we have no evidence at all--either for or against.

Yes, thank you for correcting me. You're absolutely right.


I don't use the "begging the question," so I had to look it up.
Wikipedia says, "a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises."

If I understand the term, it would appear that the same argument can be made back?

That is, if you assume there's a difference between two minds, all physical things being equal, then your premise implies your proposition.

Yes, that would be question-begging. The non-materialist would have to adduce an argument to show that the difference is a difference in non-physical properties. That can't be taken for granted without begging the question against you. And it wouldn't be enough to say something along the following lines: Science cannot show that these properties by virtue of which two minds differ are physical properties, therefore materialism is false. That would also beg the question against you.

(I probably haven't given this impression so far, but I actually think that non-materialism is a much harder view to defend than is materialism. The real trick, as I see it anyway, is getting the right sort of materialist view in place. I asked you to flesh out a claim you made earlier because I suspect it points in the direction of a form of materialism that has good prospects.)


I assume either (1) IF there's a difference as you define it, it's inaccessible to inquiry (through science) or else (2) if there's no difference, the thing does not exist and is inaccessible to scientific inquiry.

That seem fair to me. My apologies for ascribing to you a stronger claim that you intended. I'll be more careful next time.


No. Something can be both qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) and still completely physical. Qualitative phenomena are available to science. Are we using "qualitative" differently?

I don't think we're using it differently. One thing I really should have been more clear about is this: If there are qualitative inversions of the sort I've described in previous posts, that wouldn't show that materialism is false. It would only show that materialism cannot be proven to be true.


...
Oh, I don't agree with any of what comes next! I don't want to argue with every line though...

Why do I have the feeling I just dodged a bullet?


But, as I understand you, you've limited interiority to just those things that are undetectable--like what red looks like. There is so much else that IS detectable and accessible to science. Why limit your inquiry to what cannot be known?

I definitely don't want to restrict interiority to just these undetectables. I only mean to say that they are an important part of our interior life. But you're right: There's lots that's interior and is detectable. Otherwise it wouldn't make sense to ask people how they feel or what's on their minds.


It isn't about science explaining mentality. It's about being able to ask any coherent question at all. Those are distinct propositions. I want to convey that clearly.

Absolutely. The point about asking coherent questions is one that is very much on my mind/in my brain.


Just to be clear, at no point in this discussion have I assumed that. I'm good at maintaining two possibilities in my head at once. But in this case, they lead to the same outcome, which is that we can't know. At least not yet as far as I know.

Oh, I definitely know better than to underestimate your cognitive abilities! Ooh, boy!

But it did look to me like that was being taken for granted. In any case, I have a better understanding of where you're coming from thanks to this post (i.e. the one I'm responding to this very now).


Nor are we entitled to assume that mental states have no physical basis.
We are left having to accept that we can't answer this question.

I agree with the first and disagree with the second. In fact, as I've mentioned, I think you've already suggested a plausible answer to the question whether mental states are physical phenomena. Also, if a non-materialist can demonstrate that it isn't logically possible for mental states to be phenomena, that would be an answer to the question. I guess what I am saying is that I don't believe this to be a question that is irresoluble until such time as science answers it definitively. (I'm not ascribing that view to you; it's just something lots of people say--"when we have a complete science all these questions about the mind will have been answered"... as if we have any idea what a "complete science" would be or even look like.) In fact, I posted the OP confidant that there is a lot we can learn about this, and that there are many questions that we are able to answer. But, then, as is pretty obvious, I don't take it for granted that it is an empirical question awaiting a scientific answer. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. We won't know unless we keep digging into it.

Our primary data are not things but thoughts. We infer the existence of physical objects from the evidence of our senses. So Descartes was not so far from the truth. It is uneconomical and incoherent to regard a multitude of thoughts, sensations, feelings and images as our starting point. A more adequate and intelligible explanation is that they occur within an intangible entity we call the mind. Our starting point is therefore the mind rather than the brain.

To argue that all mental events are produced by events in the brain overlooks the limitations of the brain. It is a physical organ functioning according to the laws of science and cannot control itself because it has no control-centre - whereas we make decisions for which we held responsible. An ape has a highly developed brain but it cannot distinguish between good and evil, lacks the power of abstract thought and is incapable of self-determination.

The only way to evade the conclusion that the human mind transcends the body is to regard a person as an advanced ape which has invented meaningless sounds and symbols like "truth", "goodness", "freedom", "justice", "purpose" and "love". Yet this hypothesis is self-destructive because it presupposes insight into the nature of reality and therefore the ability to arrive at the truth!

tonyrey,

I will take you on respecting at least part of this argument.

It's not at all clear that an ape cannot distinguish between good and evil or that an intermediate ape would regard justice as a "meaningless sound."

First of all, just for example, there is evidence that apes and even monkeys have a strong sense of fair play. This is, apparently, particularly well developed in females, make of that what you will. They will pass up good food rather than allow themselves to be treated unfairly.

Second, there are two kinds of good and evil--those that are almost universally agreed on among social animals and a great number that are culturally determined. For example, were you to try to kill an ape's baby, I'm sure she would consider that an evil. Likewise, a lioness. But if you offered either creature shellfish, I seriously doubt either would object (although they might not partake). And neither would I, despite being unquestionably human. And yet for many people eating shellfish is proscribed.

Obviously, these are extreme examples. You may be able to come up with evils that are universal of among humans, but not found in our close relatives. But that is true of a lot of traits and such patterns are characteristic of inherited traits, whether in families close to home or in the greater families of evolutionary lineages.

(That is, for now, there is no way to objectively evaluate our inner impressions. So for now it's purely subjective. I think that could change at some point.)


Yes. Some people want to argue that it is not in principle possible (that it is logically impossible). I am not one of those people.

I had an idea how this could be done in principle. There are examples of people who have lost the connection between the two halves of their brain. You can show an object to one eye that the corresponding half of the brain cannot see.

If it were possible to connect and disconnect the two halves of the brain at will you could separately show a colored object to one half of the brain and then the other and then, after a bit, let them talk to one another about what they saw. If, furthermore, one side of the brain was a transplant from another person, you MIGHT have an answer to your question. This is obviously not technologically possible now, but it's not unimaginable. And there might be a way to do it with animals that I have not thought of.

That is, if you assume there's a difference between two minds, all physical things being equal, then your premise implies your proposition.


Science cannot show that these properties by virtue of which two minds differ are physical properties, therefore materialism is false. That would also beg the question against you.

It would only show that materialism cannot be proven to be true.


Let me clarify. I don't think materialism can ever be proven to be true, at least not through science. In order to prove materialism, you would have to disprove the existence of anything nonmaterial, which, by definition, is inaccessible to science.

Importantly, I hedged in the first statement when I said "all physical things being equal," because all physical things can probably never be equal.


why do I have the feeling I just dodged a bullet?

You just wore down a friendly opponent with a headache.
If you want me to go back...


Nor are we entitled to assume that mental states have no physical basis.
We are left having to accept that we can't answer this question.


... I think you've already suggested a plausible answer to the question whether mental states are physical phenomena. [[Minds as emergent properties, like flocking behavior in birds, or foot and vehicle traffic.]]

I want to make another distinction and expand on what I just said. I can--in principle-- make an argument for a materialist explanation for the mind that is coherent, far reaching, and predictive. But this does not disprove a non materialist mind, for the following reason. We can never explain every last detail of brain behavior--including the mind and what people call consciousness--based on the physical properties of the brain. We cannot do this anymore than we can predict the exact final placement of every molecule of a cake rising in the oven. In order to make a predictive model of the brain that was so exact as to rule out a non material role for a sense of self, you would need two identical brains, which (I believe) it is not possible to create.

Therefore, no matter how good the science, there will always be room for someone to argue for a non material role in the mind. It may not explain anything that I would consider interesting, since presumably science would have explained all the juicy stuff, but you cannot rule it out entirely.

Plus, see my more general argument about materialism above. You can never rule out what is not apparently there but someone insists is there...

(I can likewise argue that a rising cake is not simply a physical process but that it has a spiritual essence that determines how good it will be, and no one can prove me wrong.)


Also, if a non-materialist can demonstrate that it isn't logically possible for mental states to be phenomena, that would be an answer to the question.

All I can say is, good luck with that.

I had an idea how this could be done in principle. There are examples of people who have lost the connection between the two halves of their brain. You can show an object to one eye that the corresponding half of the brain cannot see.

If it were possible to connect and disconnect the two halves of the brain at will you could separately show a colored object to one half of the brain and then the other and then, after a bit, let them talk to one another about what they saw. If, furthermore, one side of the brain was a transplant from another person, you MIGHT have an answer to your question. This is obviously not technologically possible now, but it's not unimaginable. And there might be a way to do it with animals that I have not thought of.

I've always thought brain-transplantation has interesting implications for all of this. For instance, if another's brain were transplanted into my head would I retain his memories, and would I retain them as my own? Presumably, yes. What if two consciousnesses could merge, by establishing an informational link between two brains? Here we could have two consciousnesses merging into a single consciousness--if materialism is true (and maybe even if it isn't).

I have only one complaint. Why did you have to bring up experimenting on animals? Dammit! Couldn't we just do experiments on morally unsavory humans? I know several whose services, I mean brains, I'd be prepared to offer.

Yet this hypothesis is self-destructive because it presupposes insight into the nature of reality and therefore the ability to arrive at the truth!

I don't get how this follows. Even if we accept your premise that the primary givens aren't extra-mental objects but rather mental states themselves, it doesn't follow from this that we have no purchase on the nature of (extra-mental) reality.

I really like what you said here, and have been meaning to ask you to say a bit more about what you have in mind. Unfortunately, I got sidetracked prattling on about colors and whatnot. Anyway, could I ask you to elaborate on what you have in mind, since it looks both promising and very interesting to me. Also, I'm kind of counting on your expertise to put a couple of good examples to it!

Pretty please!

Okay. After checking definitions at Wikipedia, I think I can say I am talking about "weak emergence." So, for example, the simple attraction between two masses we know as gravity doesn't immediately suggest stars with systems of orbiting planets and moons, which appear to be engineered, but in fact that is what you get. Planetary orbitals are an emergent property of moving masses in space that are interacting with one another. I'm sure there's a more elegant way to say this.

If you look at a section of an impressionist painting up close, you see patches of color that have no pattern or meaning. But if you step back and look at the whole painting from several feet away, a beautiful image emerges. No matter how much time you spend going over the painting with a magnifying glass, you are unlikely to see the whole picture unless you study it at the correct level of complexity.

Often, when we look at a the behavior of, say, five different molecules in a cell, we don't see what role they play in the whole body over the course of a lifetime--in other words, how they interact with all the other molecules and cells in the body to create higher orders of function and pattern. The same is true of genes.

For example, the hungtingtin gene, whose mutant allele causes Huntington's Disease is expressed in cells all over the body. As far as anyone knows, Huntington's is a disease of the brain. What does the protein huntingtin do in these other cells? Does it matter if it's the mutant form or not in these other cells? I'm digressing here and arguing for complexity, but it's related to emergent properties. Simple rules that govern the interactions of simple objects can lead to complex properties.

Consider the moon's influence on the tides. The moon's gravity pulls on our oceans. Daily changes in water level affect the ecology and evolution of intertidal animals and seaweeds in ways that can only be studied by looking at these communities. (Most of these organisms would not even exist if we had no moon.) If you brought them into the lab and studied them individually--or ground them up and looked at their constituent molecules--you would never be able to decide why they do the things they do, let alone THAT they do them. To find out what they do and why, you need to study them do in situ-- at least for a time.

If anyone has got this far, here's your reward, flocking starlings in Rome.
YouTube - Mesmerizing Starlings - Rome (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YadP3w7vkJA)

The pattern of their movements -- as a flock -- is an emergent property of their individual interactions with one another. No single bird is responsible for the pattern--which is neither random nor hierarchically imposed by a leader. Yet there is a pattern that is based on simple interactions between each bird and those immediately nearby it.

Cells in developing embryos behave in similar ways, adjusting their movements and differentiation according to who is nearby and thereby creating beautiful and functional forms.

In the movie below, you can see individual cells marked with different colored dyes moving into the interior of a ball of cells in a process called gastrulation. These embryos are not human, but human embryos also gastrulate, which is the first stage in the formation of layers of tissues. All animals and plants are made of layers of tissues, which are an emergent property of groups of cells.

Notice that all the red cells disappear into the interior of the embryo.
http://academic.reed.edu/biology/professors/sblack/movies/spider-05.mov

Edit: To clarify, two things are occurring here. The cells are dividing so that there are more and more smaller and smaller cells, and they are also "invaginating" into the interior of the ball of cells to form the gastrula. There is no one gene that directs this process. It's the product of individual interactions among cells. (In fact, some eggs can get pretty far in development without any nuclear DNA at all.)

tonyrey,

I will take you on respecting at least part of this argument.

It's not at all clear that an ape cannot distinguish between good and evil or that an intermediate ape would regard justice as a "meaningless sound."

First of all, just for example, there is evidence that apes and even monkeys have a strong sense of fair play. This is, apparently, particularly well developed in females, make of that what you will. They will pass up good food rather than allow themselves to be treated unfairly.

Second, there are two kinds of good and evil--those that are almost universally agreed on among social animals and a great number that are culturally determined. For example, were you to try to kill an ape's baby, I'm sure she would consider that an evil. Likewise, a lioness. But if you offered either creature shellfish, I seriously doubt either would object (although they might not partake). And neither would I, despite being unquestionably human. And yet for many people eating shellfish is proscribed.

Obviously, these are extreme examples. You may be able to come up with evils that are universal of among humans, but not found in our close relatives. But that is true of a lot of traits and such patterns are characteristic of inherited traits, whether in families close to home or in the greater families of evolutionary lineages.

asking,

Some animals have a rudimentary sense of fair play just as they have a rudimentary language but this is far removed from abstract concepts of justice like the universal right to life. They are not considered responsible for their behaviour or capable of self-determination or sacrificing themselves for an ideal.

Your view that there are two kinds of good and evil- those that are almost universally agreed on among social animals and a great number that are culturally determined - implies that morality is no more than a convention. If it were, there is no reason why we should not choose to be unconventional and kill those who prevent us from acquiring power or wealth - provided that we are skilful enough to remain undetected. In other words, the right to life is regarded as no more than a useful fiction...

Your last paragraph suggests that all our thoughts, values and decisions are ultimately determined by our heredity and environment.. Do you believe that is the case?

asking,

Some animals have a rudimentary sense of fair play just as they have a rudimentary language but this is far removed from abstract concepts of justice like the universal right to life. They are not considered responsible for their behaviour or capable of self-determination or sacrificing themselves for an ideal.

Your view that there are two kinds of good and evil- those that are almost universally agreed on among social animals and a great number that are culturally determined - implies that morality is no more than a convention. If it were, there is no reason why we should not choose to be unconventional and kill those who prevent us from acquiring power or wealth - provided that we are skilful enough to remain undetected. In other words, the right to life is regarded as no more than a useful fiction...

Your last paragraph suggests that all our thoughts, values and decisions are ultimately determined by our heredity and environment.. Do you believe that is the case?

tonyrey
The two kinds of moral distinctions were intended to answer this question. Those that are universal among social animals are, I think, basically hard wired. Or perhaps some combination of hard wired and learned. This is an important distinction. Our tendency to learn language is hard wired; the specific language we learn as infants is learned. Likewise our tendency to learn to walk at age two is hard wired;our style of walking as adults is partly learned.

On the other hand, proscriptions against eating certain foods or wearing certain clothes are clearly "social conventions," although I think that is a rather weak way to put it. Cultural mandates are much stronger than the word "convention" suggests. But perhaps you were engaging in some rhetorical play.

As for your assertion that animals' sense of fair play is "rudimentary" compared to ours, I don't think there's any evidence for that.

Here are some of the 10 commandments.
Either they are social conventions OR you will get into trouble if you do something different*, whether you are a human being or a chimpanzee. I put a star next to the ones that would cause trouble in a troop of chimpanzees.

Both animals and humans sometimes do them anyway. We have proscriptions against these sorts of things because we humans often do them and they cause social disruption. We do not have proscriptions against things that we never do or which do not cause social disruption.

11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it. (By social agreement only.)

*12 Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

*13 You shall not kill

*14 You shall not commit adultery. (You shall not be near a female in heat when an alpha male or his buddies are nearby.)

*15 You shall not steal.

*16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

*17 You shall not covet your neighbour's house; you shall not covet your neighbour's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.

I've always thought brain-transplantation has interesting implications for all of this. For instance, if another's brain were transplanted into my head would I retain his memories, and would I retain them as my own? Presumably, yes.

I would think the memories would be your new friend's but that this person would not feel himself at all, as he would be experiencing a different qualitative existence with different hormonal responses from almost every hormone system in the body.


What if two consciousnesses could merge, by establishing an informational link between two brains? Here we could have two consciousnesses merging into a single consciousness--if materialism is true (and maybe even if it isn't).

This isn't out of the question in the future, since a lot is being done technologically to allow brains to receive input from sensing devices or, alternatively, to control mechanical devices.


I have only one complaint. Why did you have to bring up experimenting on animals? Dammit! Couldn't we just do experiments on morally unsavory humans? I know several whose services, I mean brains, I'd be prepared to offer.

Sorry. I knew this would be upsetting, but it is in fact how things get done still. I feel that it's not honest to sweep it under the rug and not acknowledge all those little lives. It's legitimate to protest and accept ignorance of all kinds of things as a reasonable price. It's not legitimate to just not mention it (I think).

The body is somewhat a dormant slave of the mind, the mind has its own frequency of working its through thoughts and the environment that's around the body.
At a certain level the mind has free play when we don't think about it!

the body is somewhat a dormant slave of the mind, the mind has its own frequency of working its through thoughts and the environment that's around the body.
at a certain level the mind has free play when we don't think about it!

I'm not sure what this means.

Okay. After checking definitions at Wikipedia, I think I can say I am talking about "weak emergence." So, for example, the simple attraction between two masses we know as gravity doesn't immediately suggest stars with systems of orbiting planets and moons, which appear to be engineered, but in fact that is what you get. Planetary orbitals are an emergent property of moving masses in space that are interacting with one another. I'm sure there's a more elegant way to say this.

If you look at a section of an impressionist painting up close, you see patches of color that have no pattern or meaning. But if you step back and look at the whole painting from several feet away, a beautiful image emerges. No matter how much time you spend going over the painting with a magnifying glass, you are unlikely to see the whole picture unless you study it at the correct level of complexity.

Often, when we look at a the behavior of, say, five different molecules in a cell, we don't see what role they play in the whole body over the course of a lifetime--in other words, how they interact with all the other molecules and cells in the body to create higher orders of function and pattern. The same is true of genes.

For example, the hungtingtin gene, whose mutant allele causes Huntington's Disease is expressed in cells all over the body. As far as anyone knows, Huntington's is a disease of the brain. What does the protein huntingtin do in these other cells? Does it matter if it's the mutant form or not in these other cells? I'm digressing here and arguing for complexity, but it's related to emergent properties. Simple rules that govern the interactions of simple objects can lead to complex properties.

Consider the moon's influence on the tides. The moon's gravity pulls on our oceans. Daily changes in water level affect the ecology and evolution of intertidal animals and seaweeds in ways that can only be studied by looking at these communities. (Most of these organisms would not even exist if we had no moon.) If you brought them into the lab and studied them individually--or ground them up and looked at their constituent molecules--you would never be able to decide why they do the things they do, let alone THAT they do them. To find out what they do and why, you need to study them do in situ-- at least for a time.

If anyone has got this far, here's your reward, flocking starlings in Rome.
YouTube - Mesmerizing Starlings - Rome (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YadP3w7vkJA)

The pattern of their movements -- as a flock -- is an emergent property of their individual interactions with one another. No single bird is responsible for the pattern--which is neither random nor hierarchically imposed by a leader. Yet there is a pattern that is based on simple interactions between each bird and those immediately nearby it.

Cells in developing embryos behave in similar ways, adjusting their movements and differentiation according to who is nearby and thereby creating beautiful and functional forms.

In the movie below, you can see individual cells marked with different colored dyes moving into the interior of a ball of cells in a process called gastrulation. These embryos are not human, but human embryos also gastrulate, which is the first stage in the formation of layers of tissues. All animals and plants are made of layers of tissues, which are an emergent property of groups of cells.

Notice that all the red cells disappear into the interior of the embryo.
http://academic.reed.edu/biology/professors/sblack/movies/spider-05.mov

Edit: To clarify, two things are occurring here. The cells are dividing so that there are more and more smaller and smaller cells, and they are also "invaginating" into the interior of the ball of cells to form the gastrula. There is no one gene that directs this process. It's the product of individual interactions among cells. (In fact, some eggs can get pretty far in development without any nuclear DNA at all.)

This is all really helpful. I must confess, however--and I'm not doing this to be a jerk--I'm not quite sure how this maps on to mental states. I get that you take the mind or mentality to be an emergent property, but I'm not quite seeing how my belief that 2+2=4 is analogous to a flock of birds. Or rather, I think I get it if I squint my eyes so that things become blurry. But when I open them wide again I feel a bit confused. I have the sense that you've laid all the pieces right out in front of me but that I'm not quite able to see how they fit together.

BTW, I know that you're not saying that my belief that 2+2=4 is like a flock of birds. What I meant to get at with that is that I'm having difficulty connecting your really nice discussion of emergent properties with determinate mental states. I just wanted to make sure it doesn't seem like I'm trying to be snotty. Right now it all looks to me like a really cool metaphor. But still a metaphor.

This is all really helpful. I must confess, however--and I'm not doing this to be a jerk--I'm not quite sure how this maps on to mental states. I get that you take the mind or mentality to be an emergent property, but I'm not quite seeing how my belief that 2+2=4 is analogous to a flock of birds. Or rather, I think I get it if I squint my eyes so that things become blurry. But when I open them wide again I feel a bit confused. I have the sense that you've laid all the pieces right out in front of me but that I'm not quite able to see how they fit together.

BTW, I know that you're not saying that my belief that 2+2=4 is like a flock of birds. What I meant to get at with that is that I'm having difficulty connecting your really nice discussion of emergent properties with determinate mental states. I just wanted to make sure it doesn't seem like I'm trying to be snotty. Right now it all looks to me like a really cool metaphor. But still a metaphor.

Could we use some other mental state besides 2 +2 = 4? How about your intention to have a tuna sandwich tomorrow? It would help me to have an array of examples so that I know what you mean by "determinate mental states." Right now, I don't really know what is and isn't "determinate" in your view.

I can't offer a mechanism because (a) I'm not a neuroscientist and don't follow all this. Stuff and (b) I'm not sure anyone really knows at this point. I supect though that if I went and did some digging I could come up with some examples of what I mean. I'm for hire as a researcher. :)

This really just an opinion. I'm telling you want I think is how it will turn out based on my half a lifetime of thinking about biology. I'm moderately confident that I'm right and I guess I'd say it's closer to a model than a metaphor. It's not LIKE an emergent property. It is one.

I gave flocking birds and migrating cells as examples of emergence so that you could better understand what emergent properties are, since you seemed skeptical and doubtful about even their existence. They are simply understanding things at a higher order of organization.

Could we use some other mental state besides 2 +2 = 4? How about your intention to have a tuna sandwich tomorrow? It would help me to have an array of examples so that I know what you mean by "determinate mental states." Right now, I don't really know what is and isn't "determinate" in your view.

I can't offer a mechanism because (a) I'm not a neuroscientist and don't follow all this. stuff and (b) I'm not sure anyone really knows at this point. I supect though that if I went and did some digging I could come up with some examples of what I mean. I'm for hire as a researcher. :)

This really just an opinion. I'm telling you want I think is how it will turn out based on my half a lifetime of thinking about biology. I'm moderately confident that I'm right and I guess I'd say it's closer to a model than a metaphor. It's not LIKE an emergent property. It is one.

I gave flocking birds and migrating cells as examples of emergence so that you could better understand what emergent properties are, since you seemed skeptical and doubtful about even their existence. They are simply understanding things at a higher order of organization.

I definitely don't want you to spend time digging around for neurosciencey stuff. I am perfectly happy to accede to your far greater expertise with regard to the biology of all this. (In fact, it's one of the reasons you're fun to talk to about this.) And I don't want to quarrel with the existence of emergent properties. I thought your post about this made a lot of sense (hence the "greenie"). It's just that the more I think about that post the less I feel I understand how it maps on to the mental. I am entirely open to the possibility that the fault for this is my own. But there it is; I appear to be a bit stuck.

Oh, and on the determinate mental states thing. Yes, by all means, use whatever example you like. 2+2=4 was just the one that popped into my head and so I've been working with it (and probably beating it to death). Let's go with the intention to eat a tuna sandwich. By a determinate mental state I just mean a mental state that has some specific content. The belief that 2+2=4, say, or the intention to eat a tuna sandwich tomorrow. I'm afraid I inadvertently got jargonny on you. I don't think anything hangs on the use of the word "determinate" as I've been thinking of it.

So, using a better example, can you sketch, even roughly, how you see the stuff about emergent properties giving us a way to think about a mental state? I promise I will treat anything you say as provisional. And I really don't expect you to come armed with lots of neuroscience. I'm just looking for a better understanding of the way you see this stuff fitting together.

I will think about a mechanism. I guess that's what you are asking, but I doubt I can come up with anything without a serious dip into the neuro/mind literature, which I have basically avoided as it has some of the same flaws (in my opinion) as the cosmological.

I don't even know what you mean by "a better way to think about a mental state." Is there a way to think about it already? What exactly should I be thinking about mental states? Why should I think about them. I'm happy to have one!

I really don't know what you are after if not a specific mechanism for how a particular combination of neurons firing and not firing produces a specific memory or intention. I know there's research in this area... An actual mechanism for the mind is the stuff of real experiments, not thought experiments as far as I know. There will be simple rules that, when they are operating in large sections of the brain, will produce understanding, knowing, intention. There is already research on inspiration, which I found very interesting.

It's just that the more I think about that post the less I feel I understand how it maps on to the mental. I am entirely open to the possibility that the fault for this is my own. But there it is; I appear to be a bit stuck.

I have given this a bit more thought and I will sleep on it, but what I'm thinking right now is that your understanding of "mental" is quite philosophical and abstract, and probably derived from centuries of thought in the absence of anything tangible to hinge the concept on beyond the bare existence of a brain. Whereas I'm talking (extremely vaguely) about something concrete and physical. I think even if I had a concrete answer to your question, which I don't, we might be having some of the same problems we are having with the species question. Just a thought.

tonyrey
The two kinds of moral distinctions were intended to answer this question. Those that are universal among social animals are, I think, basically hard wired. Or perhaps some combination of hard wired and learned. This is an important distinction. Our tendency to learn language is hard wired; the specific language we learn as infants is learned. Likewise our tendency to learn to walk at age two is hard wired;our style of walking as adults is partly learned.

On the other hand, proscriptions against eating certain foods or wearing certain clothes are clearly "social conventions," although I think that is a rather weak way to put it. Cultural mandates are much stronger than the word "convention" suggests. But perhaps you were engaging in some rhetorical play.

As for your assertion that animals' sense of fair play is "rudimentary" compared to ours, I don't think there's any evidence for that.

Here are some of the 10 commandments.
Either they are social conventions OR you will get into trouble if you do something different*, whether you are a human being or a chimpanzee. I put a star next to the ones that would cause trouble in a troop of chimpanzees.

Both animals and humans sometimes do them anyway. We have proscriptions against these sorts of things because we humans often do them and they cause social disruption. We do not have proscriptions against things that we never do or which do not cause social disruption.

11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it. (By social agreement only.)

*12 Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

*13 You shall not kill

*14 You shall not commit adultery. (You shall not be near a female in heat when an alpha male or his buddies are nearby.)

*15 You shall not steal.

*16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

*17 You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.

Why are animals not considered responsible for their behaviour? Isn't that evidence that animals' sense of fair play is "rudimentary" compared to ours? Do you believe all our thoughts, values and decisions are ultimately determined by our heredity and environment?

The dichotomy that the ten commandments are "either social conventions OR you will get into trouble if you do something different" is invalid. They are both. They are social conventions based on facts about co-existence. We ignore them at our peril. Morality also includes proscriptions against things which do not necessarily cause social disruption. It is concerned with the welfare and happiness of the individual. The first commandment, for example, is intended to avert the dangers of idolatry: obsession with false gods like power and wealth, and above all "egolatry" - the worship of oneself.

I don't get how this follows. Even if we accept your premise that the primary givens aren't extra-mental objects but rather mental states themselves, it doesn't follow from this that we have no purchase on the nature of (extra-mental) reality.

Let me put it another way. If the mind is simply the functioning of the brain then "truth", "goodness", "freedom", "justice", "purpose" and "love" are mere symbols that refer to nothing. (Bertrand Russell could not evade the reality of "similarity" and concluded materialism must be false). If the mind itself is not an intangible reality why believe in other intangible realities? How can a physical organ like the brain grasp abstractions?

The hypothesis that everything is physical is self-destructive because it leads to total scepticism: it presupposes the ability to arrive at the truth (which is non-existent!)...

I will think about a mechanism. I guess that's what you are asking, but I doubt I can come up with anything without a serious dip into the neuro/mind literature, which I have basically avoided as it has some of the same flaws (in my opinion) as the cosmological.

I don't even know what you mean by "a better way to think about a mental state." Is there a way to think about it already? What exactly should I be thinking about mental states? Why should I think about them. I'm happy to have one!

I really don't know what you are after if not a specific mechanism for how a particular combination of neurons firing and not firing produces a specific memory or intention. I know there's research in this area... An actual mechanism for the mind is the stuff of real experiments, not thought experiments as far as I know. There will be simple rules that, when they are operating in large sections of the brain, will produce understanding, knowing, intention. There is already research on inspiration, which I found very interesting.

If the mind is a biological machine all its activity is the result of physical events. If this is the case we cannot choose what to think nor are we responsible for anything we do! According to this hypothesis there is no guarantee that any of our thoughts correspond to reality...

Why are animals not considered responsible for their behaviour? Isn't that evidence that animals' sense of fair play is "rudimentary" compared to ours? Do you believe all our thoughts, values and decisions are ultimately determined by our heredity and environment?

The dichotomy that the ten commandments are "either social conventions OR you will get into trouble if you do something different" is invalid. They are both. They are social conventions based on facts about co-existence. We ignore them at our peril. Morality also includes proscriptions against things which do not necessarily cause social disruption. It is concerned with the welfare and happiness of the individual. The first commandment, for example, is intended to avert the dangers of idolatry: obsession with false gods like power and wealth, and above all "egolatry" - the worship of oneself.

I think to the extent that we incorporate animals into our lives we do hold them responsible for their behavior. Don't you hold your dog responsible for bad behavior such as biting? One of the reasons we like dogs is that they play by the same kinds of rules that we do. If we take the time we teach our pets and work animals what the rules are, they mostly abide by those.

The talk about human superiority in moral affairs is basically hot air. We have always been prone to setting ourselves above others, whether it is our next door neighbors, our colleagues at work, another nation, slaves, or animals. We are constantly looking for ways in which we are different and special. Talk about egolatry.

In any case, the extent to which WE hold animals responsible is not a measure of THEIR sense of fair play.

I don't think of my own thoughts as being predetermined in any final sense, if that is where you are going. But my thoughts will certainly trend in different ways depending on what species** I am, my particular genetic makeup, my development in the womb and as an infant, and my experiences throughout life.(** If I see an ant, I do not suddenly start thinking about dinner, as a pangolin might.)

For example, recent research shows that children who are abused have a permanently altered reaction to stress***. That change is going to alter someone's feelings and therefore their thoughts. No amount of willpower is going to make that alteration in feelings and thoughts go away entirely, although, I'm guessing, there are things that can be done to mitigate it. The brain is plastic. Plus, there is the matter of behavior, which is separate from thoughts. We hold people responsible for what they do, not for every passing thought or stress reaction.

So I guess I would say the dichotomy between determinate behavior and freewill is a false one and, for my purposes, unimportant. We are what we are, regardless of how you want to frame it philosophically.

Of course the dichotomy between social convention and *get you into trouble in a troop of chimps* is exaggerated. A sin can very much be both. But the things to which we object chimps object to too. A sin for us is a sin for them (with the obvious exception of things they wouldn't ever do, like painting icons or not covering their heads on the sabbath). And they ignore them at their peril (constantly, like us).

Furthermore, animals have culture. Populations of different kinds of social animals from elephants to apes whose societies have been disrupted by disaster or heavy hunting show a breakdown in social rules, not unlike the kind you see in humans. It's very difficult to lose elders with wisdom or the stability that comes with intact social structures. It leads to the loss of social codes that contribute to stability, happiness, mutual support, prosperity, and good health. All of these things are as important to other animals as they are for us.

***


Abuse Leaves Its Mark on the Brain

By Constance Holden
ScienceNOW Daily News
23 February 2009

Child abuse doesn't just cause emotional problems; it also causes long-lasting changes in the brain. A new study shows that in men who were abused as children, a gene involved in stress control is affected even decades later, following a pattern also seen in stressed baby rats.

Rat studies have revealed that maternal neglect alters the workings of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a system that secretes particular hormones in response to stress (ScienceNOW, 2 August 2004). In the abused animals, the regulatory region of a gene for the glucocorticoid receptor, responsible for damping down the HPA response, doesn't do its job properly. As a result, the animals experience chronically higher stress levels.

How can a physical organ like the brain grasp abstractions?

For example.
(This was the first hit in a Google search.)


Researchers home in on how brain handles abstract thought
Donna Coveney, News Office
July 18, 2001

MIT researchers reported in the June 21 issue of Nature that they have pinpointed how and where abstract thoughts are represented in the brain.

The study, in which monkeys apply rules about "same" and "different" to a myriad of images, shows that the prefrontal cortex -- the part of the brain directly behind the eyes -- works on the abstract assignment rather than simply recalling the pictures.

In other words, the MIT researchers have identified the part of the brain that figures out the rules of the game, but does not play the game. Most previous brain research has uncovered brain regions that perform concrete tasks, such as recognizing places or moving muscles.
Researchers home in on how brain handles abstract thought - MIT News Office (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/abstract-0718.html)

If the mind is a biological machine all its activity is the result of physical events. If this is the case we cannot choose what to think nor are we responsible for anything we do! According to this hypothesis there is no guarantee that any of our thoughts correspond to reality...

First, I don't buy the dichotomy that we are either responsible for everything we do or responsible for nothing.

Second, it doesn't follow that because we are biological "machines" we have no choices and do not make decisions. If a dog has a choice between getting up on the sofa where he's not supposed to be or staying on the carpet, we certainly can give ourselves no less credit for responsible behavior. The fact that we can make decisions does not prove that we are non physical beings.

A robot can make decisions. Ours are just more nuanced.

I don't get your point about thoughts and reality. Do you feel that a non material mind is more in touch with reality than a materially based mind?

As for our ability to choose what to think, I think the part of the brain that enforces inhibition is a good contrary argument. People with Tourettes have brains that don't function quite right and--depending on what kind of Tourettes they have--cannot inhibit their own thoughts and impulses to say inappropriate things as most people can. Unless you are arguing that Tourettes is a moral failing, I don't see how you can not accept that inhibition is physically mediated.

I think to the extent that we incorporate animals into our lives we do hold them responsible for their behavior. Don't you hold your dog responsible for bad behavior such as biting? One of the reasons we like dogs is that they play by the same kinds of rules that we do. If we take the time we teach our pets and work animals what the rules are, they mostly abide by those.

The talk about human superiority in moral affairs is basically hot air. We have always been prone to setting ourselves above others, whether it is our next door neighbors, our colleagues at work, another nation, slaves, or animals. We are constantly looking for ways in which we are different and special. Talk about egolatry.

In any case, the extent to which WE hold animals responsible is not a measure of THEIR sense of fair play.

I don't think of my own thoughts as being predetermined in any final sense, if that is where you are going. But my thoughts will certainly trend in different ways depending on what species** I am, my particular genetic makeup, my development in the womb and as an infant, and my experiences throughout life.(** If I see an ant, I do not suddenly start thinking about dinner, as a pangolin might.)

For example, recent research shows that children who are abused have a permanently altered reaction to stress***. That change is going to alter someone's feelings and therefore their thoughts. No amount of willpower is going to make that alteration in feelings and thoughts go away entirely, although, I'm guessing, there are things that can be done to mitigate it. The brain is plastic. Plus, there is the matter of behavior, which is separate from thoughts. We hold people responsible for what they do, not for every passing thought or stress reaction.

So I guess I would say the dichotomy between determinate behavior and freewill is a false one and, for my purposes, unimportant. We are what we are, regardless of how you want to frame it philosophically.

Of course the dichotomy between social convention and *get you into trouble in a troop of chimps* is exaggerated. A sin can very much be both. But the things to which we object to chimps do too. A sin for us is a sin for them (with the obvious exception of things they wouldn't ever do, like painting icons or not covering their heads on the sabbath). And they ignore them at their peril (constantly, like us).

Furthermore, animals have culture. Populations of different kinds of social animals from elephants to apes whose societies have been disrupted by disaster or heavy hunting show a breakdown in social rules, not unlike the kind you see in humans. It's very difficult to lose elders with wisdom or the stability that comes with intact social structures. It leads to the loss of social codes that contribute to stability, happiness, mutual support, prosperity, and good health. All of these things are as important to other animals as they are for us.

***

We don't hold animals morally responsible for their behaviour. We don't appeal to their conscience or reason with them to change the way they behave. They cannot choose to act in accordance with an abstract principle like "All animals are equal". We are not morally superior to them for the simple reason that they have no moral insight or responsibility. The false belief that we are superior to them is not egolatry but humanolatry! They are superior to us in at least one respect: they are not guilty of any premeditated crime or indeed any crime whatsoever whereas we have well nigh ruined this planet.

We are what we are, regardless of how we frame it philosophically, but robots are not held responsible for the way they function whereas we are. Why?

For example.
(This was the first hit in a google search.)


Researchers home in on how brain handles abstract thought - MIT News Office (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/abstract-0718.html)

Obviously abstract thoughts can be represented in the brain. Otherwise we would not be able to communicate them to others. But that is a far cry from grasping the meaning of abstract terms. Electrical activity alone cannot produce insight or consciousness.

We don't hold animals morally responsible for their behaviour.

I agree. But that is our decision, not something about them. (And I guess I do hold some of them morally responsble, if you want to know the truth.)

Animals are capable of premeditated murder of their own kind, including apes. But others as well. I have seen one male mouse kill another with my own eyes. There was no shortage food or space. I say it was premeditated because I put another male mouse in and he did the same a second time. (I learned my lesson and felt awful.)

I once inadvertently put a young female hamster into a cage with several males. When I returned in the morning, she could no longer walk, was paralyzed from the waist down, and the males were still crowding around her. I had to put her out of her misery. If there was criminal court for hamsters, I would have hauled there a$$es in. Of course, they were already in jail...


We don't appeal to their conscience or reason with them to change the way they behave. They cannot choose to act in accordance with an abstract principle like "All animals are equal". We are not morally superior to them for the simple reason that they have no moral insight or responsibility. The false belief that we are superior to them is not egolatry but humanolatry! They are superior to us in at least one respect: they are not guilty of any premeditated crime or indeed any crime whatsoever whereas we have well nigh ruined this planet.

Good points, all. But you are talking about differences in our ability to communicate with words, to use abstract concepts, and our cognitive abilities. I readily grant that we are far better at those. But I think morality itself is deeper seated and a separate thing. Yes we humans can TALK about morality and (mostly unsuccessfully) appeal to people's moral sensibility. But the moral impulse was already there and, like other animals, we depart from it quite often, depending on circumstance. The argument over the difference between "murder" and "killing" is a case in point. These fine arguments are mere rationalization for doing what we know is wrong. When we find it useful to kill, we find a way to justify it. Animals just don't think about it as much. But our behavior and theirs is fundamentally the same.


We are what we are, regardless of how we frame it philosophically, but robots are not held responsible for the way they function whereas we are. Why?

Hmm.. An awful lot of people shout at computers. :)

But seriously, you keep coming back to how we view things, not how they are.

Here's how they are: If a human murders, we have a trial and put him to death or jail him indefinitely. If a dog kills, we put it down after a certain amount of due process (because it belongs to someone). If a tiger kills a human, it too is put down. If a robot killed a human, I'm sure it would be destroyed unless it was a military robot, in which case we'd make another thousand of them. So how is that functionally different? If something is sufficiently dangerous we kill it. What's different is how we talk about it.

First, I don't buy the dichotomy that we are either responsible for everything we do or responsible for nothing.

Second, it doesn't follow that because we are biological "machines" we have no choices and do not make decisions. If a dog has a choice between getting up on the sofa where he's not supposed to be or staying on the carpet, we certainly can give ourselves no less credit for responsible behavior. The fact that we can make decisions does not prove that we are non physical beings.

A robot can make decisions. Ours are just more nuanced.

I don't get your point about thoughts and reality. Do you feel that a non material mind is more in touch with reality than a materially based mind?

As for our ability to choose what to think, I think the part of the brain that enforces inhibition is a good contrary argument. People with Tourettes have brains that don't function quite right and--depending on what kind of Tourettes they have--cannot inhibit their own thoughts and impulses to say inappropriate things as most people can. Unless you are arguing that Tourettes is a moral failing, I don't see how you can not accept that inhibition is physically mediated.

If the mind has a physical basis it cannot control itself or be capable of self-determination. The fact that inability to inhibit thoughts and impulses may be due to a physical (or mental) disorder does not explain our ability to choose for ourselves. In fact the self must be an illusion if our thoughts and choices emerge from the brain because the self is an intangible entity. Where would the self be located if it had a physical basis?

Where is the control-centre in the brain? If all your thoughts are produced by the brain those that are not predetermined must be indeterminate, i.e. fortuitous. There is certainly no scope for freedom of choice because such a choice would transcend physical laws.

Robots make choices and decisions because they are programmed to do so. Similarly a dog is conditioned by its training to behave in certain ways but if it makes a decision to act differently we don't regard it as morally defective. Why are we unique in this respect?

I agree. But that is our decision, not something about them. (And I guess I do hold some of them morally responsble, if you want to know the truth.)

Animals are capable of premeditated murder of their own kind, including apes. But others as well. I have seen one male mouse kill another with my own eyes. There was no shortage food or space. I say it was premeditated because I put another male mouse in and he did the same a second time. (I learned my lesson and felt awful.)

I once inadvertently put a young female hamster into a cage with several males. When I returned in the morning, she could no longer walk, was paralyzed from the waist down, and the males were still crowding around her. I had to put her out of her misery. If there was criminal court for hamsters, I would have hauled there a$$es in. Of course, they were already in jail...



Good points, all. But you are talking about differences in our ability to communicate with words, to use abstract concepts, and our cognitive abilities. I readily grant that we are far better at those. But I think morality itself is deeper seated and a separate thing. Yes we humans can TALK about morality and (mostly unsuccessfully) appeal to people's moral sensibility. But the moral impulse was already there and, like other animals, we depart from it quite often, depending on circumstance. The argument over the difference between "murder" and "killing" is a case in point. These fine arguments are mere rationalization for doing what we know is wrong. When we find it useful to kill, we find a way to justify it. Animals just don't think about it as much. But our behavior and theirs is fundamentally the same.



Hmm.. An awful lot of people shout at computers. :)

But seriously, you keep coming back to how we view things, not how they are.

Here's how they are: If a human murders, we have a trial and put him to death or jail him indefinitely. If a dog kills, we put it down after a certain amount of due process (because it belongs to someone). If a tiger kills a human, it too is put down. If a robot killed a human, I'm sure it would be destroyed unless it was a military robot, in which case we'd make another thousand of them. So how is that functionally different? If something is sufficiently dangerous we kill it. What's different is how we talk about it.
https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/images/smilies/rolleyes.gif
:rolleyes:
I find your experiments fascinating but sometimes gruesome. :rolleyes:

I agree that "morality itself is deeper seated and a separate thing" and "the moral impulse was already there". (Where? ):eek:

I do keep coming back to how we view things but I don't think humanity is all that misguided. The success of science is evidence of our insight into reality. In fact the onus is on the sceptic or cynic to explain why, for example, the UN Declaration of Human Rights contains no more than convenient fictions.

The essential difference between us and animals or robots is that unlike them we kill (when we are reasonable) if we regard it as the lesser of two evils. (We may be mistaken but we're not infallible). And in some instances we may choose to be killed rather than kill. Robots could certainly be programmed to do so but animals would not do so because of a moral principle.

The main point is that in our case the buck stops with each of us individually... and that needs explanation...

If the mind has a physical basis it cannot control itself or be capable of self-determination.

I think this statement is far from self evident.



The self must be an illusion if our thoughts and choices emerge from the brain because the self is an intangible entity. Where would the self be located if it had a physical basis?

Maybe the self is a kind of illusion, or at least simply a framework for how we behave.
The self need not be located in a single place. Do you mean the "self" is located in a particular place in the brain? That would surprise me.


Where is the control-centre in the brain?

This question assumes a hierarchical organization of the body, as well as the brain, with a single "master" in charge of everything. There is no evidence that the body works that way. Consider this: every "master switch" is also a "weak link."


If all your thoughts are produced by the brain those that are not predetermined must be indeterminate, i.e. fortuitous. There is certainly no scope for freedom of choice because such a choice would transcend physical laws.

I can't prove that any of this is wrong. But I don't think you can prove that any of it is true either. Can you support this statement?


Robots make choices and decisions because they are programmed to do so.

The more sophisticated the robot, the more sophisticated and nuanced its decisions appear to be. Can a robot pass a turing test? Not yet. But the decisions that humans make are not self evidently NOT flexibly programmed, allowing for innumerable alternatives. When you get out of bed in the morning, how many choices do you really allow yourself? We are creatures of habit, which, I'm thinking maybe, is another way of saying we are semi-programmed for most of what we do day to day.


Similarly a dog is conditioned by its training to behave in certain ways but if it makes a decision to act differently we don't regard it as morally defective.

First, a dog is not trained to love its owner and defend him against enemies. They do that of their own volition, although that's partly programmed. The dog is trained to respect its owner and to do less natural things like shake hands.

Second, again, WE may not regard the dog as morally defective. Although I've often heard "baaaad dog" which suggests you are mistaken. Either way, that's just our subjective opinion, a judgment based on what? The behavior of the dog is the same regardless of what label we decide to put on it.


Why are we unique in this respect?
I'm sorry. In what respect?

I think this statement is far from self evident.




Maybe the self is a kind of illusion, or at least simply a framework for how we behave.
The self need not be located in a single place. Do you mean the "self" is located in a particular place in the brain? That would surprise me.



This question assumes a hierarchical organization of the body, as well as the brain, with a single "master" in charge of everything. There is no evidence that the body works that way. Consider this: every "master switch" is also a "weak link."



I can't prove that any of this is wrong. But I don't think you can prove that any of it is true either. Can you support this statement?



The more sophisticated the robot, the more sophisticated and nuanced its decisions appear to be. Can a robot pass a turing test? Not yet. But the decisions that humans make are not self evidently NOT flexibly programmed, allowing for innumerable alternatives. When you get out of bed in the morning, how many choices do you really allow yourself? We are creatures of habit, which, I'm thinking maybe, is another way of saying we are semi-programmed for most of what we do day to day.



First, a dog is not trained to love its owner and defend him against enemies. They do that of their own volition, although that's partly programmed. The dog is trained to respect its owner and to do less natural things like shake hands.

Second, again, WE may not regard the dog as morally defective. Although I've often heard "baaaad dog" which suggests you are mistaken. Either way, that's just our subjective opinion, a judgment based on what? The behavior of the dog is the same regardless of what label we decide to put on it.


I'm sorry. In what respect?

Asking and Tonyrey - It is a pleasure to see such two fine minds at work.

asking--I tried to give you rep but apparently I have praised you too much recently. I love the way you think and the way you explain why you think the way you do. Your discussion of "emergent properties" should be in textbooks. You rock!

I find your experiments fascinating but sometimes gruesome. :rolleyes:

Tony,
I thought those were gruesome too, and I haven't told you the half of it. But I hope you don't think those WERE the experiments! In the first case, I was a college student looking that the difference between how two males interact and two females. I had NO idea that male mice would be so aggressive. I thought the first death was a fluke. Maybe it was sick? My naiveté is embarrassing now. (All the pairs of females lived in perfect harmony, sleeping together even... :rolleyes:)

In the second case, I was taking care of animals for a biotech company and didn't know that I'd mixed two sexes together (sexing hamsters takes some concentration). Again, I didn't realize how dangerous males could be... I was shocked.


I agree that "morality itself is deeper seated and a separate thing" and "the moral impulse was already there". (Where? ):eek:

I meant that our moral impulse has evolved. Here's another weird example. We think of altruism as being a uniquely human thing. But it's not; lots of animals take care of one another and even take significant risks for one another. But in most cases, biologists can show that animals are much more likely to sacrifice for close relatives than for strangers. They call it "kin selection" or "kin altruism." When it happens with non relatives, it's typically characterized as spillover behavior--like a dog raising a kitten. Her maternal instincts just kick in inappropriately. Of course, out own altruistic acts are never characterized that way--as just spillover behavior from our evolved tendency to take care of kin.

But in fact some animals engage in regular altruism with non relatives. In that case, it's more of a good karma situation, where if you do for someone else in your group, it'll come back to you at some point. A classic example of this is vampire bats, which starve very quickly if they don't get a meal every night. Fortunately, if someone in the colony doesn't manage to get a meal on one night, the other bats will share--and they need not be relatives. This is called "reciprocal altruism." Humans do this too when we save someone we don't know or share food with a street person. It's a moral impulse that is millions of years old.

In fact, I sometimes hear people on the radio tell listeners that it's better to donate to a charity than to give to street people and while I recognize that as a rational argument, I think it's contrary to human moral code, which is to help immediately in a tangible way if we see someone we think is in distress. How does it affect us morally to blunt that impulse over and over? (And I'm not arguing that everyone who begs is in distress.)


The essential difference between us and animals... is that unlike them we kill... if we regard it as the lesser of two evils.

What I'm arguing is that animals also kill under such circumstances. Humans and animals make similar moral decisions--if you just look at what we do. There is little that we do that other animals don't also do--whether it's helping one another or killing or raping. The big exceptions to that rule are our intelligence and ornate language and culture. I don't think our sense of right and wrong is one of those exceptions.


The main point is that in our case the buck stops with each of us individually... and that needs explanation...

Here I'm confused. I honestly don't see anything that needs explaining.

How does the buck stop with an individual in a way that's unique to humans? I would appreciate it if you gave a concrete and substantive example, as I don't know what you mean.

Here's one way we might approach it:

There are two complementary conceptual frameworks within which we think of ourselves.

1. Reasons-framework. We are rational agents and our actions can be justified by appeal to reasons which can be formulated and expressed linguistically in a way that renders those actions, and ourselves as the authors of those actions, subject to moral evaluation. (Of course they also render us subject to other sorts of evaluation as well: considerations of legality, where these differ from strictly moral considerations; considerations of practical rationality (given our ends, have we gone about realizing them in a rational way); prudential considerations (where these may be thought to be distinct from considerations of practical rationality); etiquette.

2. Causal framework. We are physical entities, organisms functioning in the ways that organisms of this type (i.e. the type that we are, human beings) function. Our actions are caused by massively complex physical processes and events occurring in our bodies and of which we are not reflectively* aware and over which we do not exercise control.

* When I say that we are not reflectively aware of these events and processes, I mean only to say that we have no access to them by means of introspection. I can be introspectively aware of myself wanting more light in the room (and so I reach for the lamp), but I am not introspectively aware of the neurochemical event that is simultaneous with, and perhaps identical to, my desire for more light.

The first framework is necessary in order for us to regard ourselves and each other as rational beings, as reflective, self-aware subjects with purposes and intentions which are morally evaluable. We can even challenge each others actions, and reasons for action: Suppose I tell a friend a lie. A friend asks me if her husband is cheating on her. I know perfectly well that he is and yet I disabuse her of her suspicions, assuring her that he is, in fact, faithful to her. Now suppose I chose to lie to her because I thought it inappropriate of me to meddle in the marital life of my friend and her husband. This reason for acting, for lying to my friend, is up for moral appraisal. One might think that my reason was a bad reason, that the duties of friendship obligated me to tell her the truth. Or one might think that I did the right thing but for the wrong reason: It was good not to tell her the truth, but only because what she doesn't know won't hurt her. Good reasons or bad, those reasons are justifications for acting in the ways that we do. And this, I am prepared to argue, is central to the very concept of a person. It is not, I would also argue, something with which we can dispense; it is part-and-parcel of how we understand ourselves at a very fundamental level.

Now the causal framework does not provide for reasons-explanations of action. A causal account of the same action would make no mention of persons and feelings and principles and the like. A causal explanation would tell us what, as a matter of empirical fact, was the physical (chemical and electrical) process by which I came to utter the words, "No, Rodney isn't having an affair". Were someone, perhaps the very friend to whom I told the lie, to ask me "Why did you lie about it?", it would be inappropriate to respond with a causal explanation (supposing I had one to hand). It would be inappropriate, that is, to say that such-and-such brain activity was occurring at the time I dissembled. And the inappropriateness isn't just the inappropriateness of the demands of etiquette: To give a causal explanation would be to give no explanation at all; it would rather amount to changing the subject. When asked why I did it, I am being asked what my reasons were, why I thought it was the thing to do.

The question is, are these two frameworks really complementary or can one be reduced to, or eliminated in favor of, the other? Materialists of a reductionistic bent would argue that the reasons-framework can be reduced to the causal framework, this for the reason that it is the physical events in the agent's brain (or, at any rate, body) that are doing all the work, and so only causal explanations are really explanatory. The other stuff is a sort of fiction... or is at least not the real story. If you want to understand agency, behavior, you have to locate the appropriate causal mechanisms.

Another way to answer the question would be to say that the two frameworks are genuinely complementary because they answer different, but equally legitimate, questions. We understand ourselves and each other by means of both reasons-explanations and causal-explanations. To try to make sense of ourselves and others without both sorts of framework would leave us with a radically deficient picture. This non-reductionistic complementarity view needn't be non-materialistic. In fact, many of the people who defend it roundly reject the sort of dualism that holds that the mental is a non-physical soul-stuff.

I propose this as a way of capturing intuitions which seem to be guiding both asking and tonyrey. This isn't to take a final stand vis-à-vis the OP, since the complementarity view is neutral regarding the question whether the mental (the stuff that pertains to the reasons framework) is itself through-and-through physical. One could very well develop it in the direction of a very strident dualism were one inclined to do so.

I would, though, urge that we extend these frameworks to organisms other than humans. And not without reason. There are, to be sure, causal mechanisms in play when a dog responds to the rattling of her dinner bowl by trotting into the kitchen with perky ears. But she also has good reason to act this way, since she expects that bowl to be presented to her with something tasty in it. And so for manifold other behaviors. If there is something special or unique about humans, I am inclined to think it lies in the ways in which we hold second-order desires, i.e. we can want to want certain things, and we can want not to want certain things. I am not at all sure what to say about non-humans. Do they too have second-order desires?

Perhaps our biology expert can shed some light on this? Or, at least, give us a sense whether there is any standing biological orthodoxy regarding the subject. For my part, I can well see it going either way.

[QUOTE=asking;1574809]
Humans and animals make similar moral decisions--if you just look at what we do. There is little that we do that other animals don't also do--whether it's helping one another or killing or raping. The big exceptions to that rule are our intelligence and ornate language and culture. I don't think our sense of right and wrong is one of those exceptions.

There is no evidence that animals make any moral decisions at all. Their actions are the result of their genetic makeup and their environment.They cannot choose to act according to a moral principle regardless of the consequences. The mouse which killed two male mice did not so as the result of premeditation: it did so as an instinctive response to the presence of a potential rival. The fact that people call a dog "bad" does not imply that the dog has a conscience and can distinguish between right and wrong. They are simply treating the animal as if it were a rational being capable of self-control whereas it is not.

The buck stops with us because we are unique in our power of hindsight, insight and foresight.To say that our behaviour and that of animals is fundamentally the same overlooks our ability to plan ahead, to establish priorities, to weigh the consequences, to resist our instincts and to die for the sake of a principle. I am not disputing the nobility, beauty and altruism of the sacrifices made by many animals but they are neither morally nor legally responsible for their actions.

Since this is the consensus of humanity the onus is on a dissenter to explain how and why other species should be considered moral agents. They certainly have rights but they do not have any moral or legal obligations.

Neither can robots be regarded as decision-makers in the full sense of the term. Their activity is entirely the result of the ways in which they have been programmed. It is either prededetermined or indeterminate (if randomised). The one thing it cannot be is self-determined. If the self is simply a framework it cannot exercise self-control or be a responsible entity. Your analogy of the mind with traffic patterns, flocks of birds and groups of birds does not account for the mind's unity, continuity and self-awareness.

If the mind is just a word for a higher order function of the brain and resides in the interactions between neurons it is, as you say, "a product of the whole body". This interpretation does not correspond with the belief that persons have the right to life, liberty and happiness. In daily life we do not regard other people as biological robots. This is because a mechanistic interpretation of reality does not account for the existence of purpose and values. When a theory conflicts with the fundamental tenets of civilised human beings one is entitled to be sceptical.

[QUOTE=asking;1574809]
Humans and animals make similar moral decisions--if you just look at what we do. There is little that we do that other animals don't also do--whether it's helping one another or killing or raping. The big exceptions to that rule are our intelligence and ornate language and culture. I don't think our sense of right and wrong is one of those exceptions.

There is no evidence that animals make any moral decisions at all. Their actions are the result of their genetic makeup and their environment.They cannot choose to act according to a moral principle regardless of the consequences. The mouse which killed two male mice did not so as the result of premeditation: it did so as an instinctive response to the presence of a potential rival. The fact that people call a dog "bad" does not imply that the dog has a conscience and can distinguish between right and wrong. They are simply treating the animal as if it were a rational being capable of self-control whereas it is not.

The buck stops with us because we are unique in our power of hindsight, insight and foresight.To say that our behaviour and that of animals is fundamentally the same overlooks our ability to plan ahead, to establish priorities, to weigh the consequences, to resist our instincts and to die for the sake of a principle. I am not disputing the nobility, beauty and altruism of the sacrifices made by many animals but they are neither morally nor legally responsible for their actions.

Since this is the consensus of humanity the onus is on a dissenter to explain how and why other species should be considered moral agents. They certainly have rights but they do not have any moral or legal obligations.

Neither can robots be regarded as decision-makers in the full sense of the term. Their activity is entirely the result of the ways in which they have been programmed. It is either prededetermined or indeterminate (if randomised). The one thing it cannot be is self-determined. If the self is simply a framework it cannot exercise self-control or be a responsible entity. Your analogy of the mind with traffic patterns, flocks of birds and groups of cells does not account for the mind's unity, continuity and self-awareness.

If the mind is just a word for a higher order function of the brain and resides in the interactions between neurons it is, as you say, "a product of the whole body". This interpretation does not correspond with the belief that persons have the right to life, liberty and happiness. In daily life we do not regard other people as biological robots. This is because a mechanistic interpretation of reality does not account for the existence of purpose and values. When a theory conflicts with the fundamental tenets of civilised human beings one is entitled to be sceptical.

(correction: groups of birds>groups of cells)

Tony,
I thought those were gruesome too, and I haven't told you the half of it. But I hope you don't think those WERE the experiments! In the first case, I was a college student looking that the difference between how two males interact and two females. I had NO idea that male mice would be so aggressive. I thought the first death was a fluke. Maybe it was sick?? My naiveté is embarrassing now. (All the pairs of females lived in perfect harmony, sleeping together even...:rolleyes:)

In the second case, I was taking care of animals for a biotech company and didn't know that I'd mixed two sexes together (sexing hamsters takes some concentration). Again, I didn't realize how dangerous males could be...I was shocked.



I meant that our moral impulse has evolved. Here's another weird example. We think of altruism as being a uniquely human thing. But it's not; lots of animals take care of one another and even take significant risks for one another. But in most cases, biologists can show that animals are much more likely to sacrifice for close relatives than for strangers. They call it "kin selection" or "kin altruism." When it happens with non relatives, it's typically characterized as spillover behavior--like a dog raising a kitten. Her maternal instincts just kick in inappropriately. Of course, out own altruistic acts are never characterized that way--as just spillover behavior from our evolved tendency to take care of kin.

But in fact some animals engage in regular altruism with non relatives. In that case, it's more of a good karma situation, where if you do for someone else in your group, it'll come back to you at some point. A classic example of this is vampire bats, which starve very quickly if they don't get a meal every night. Fortunately, if someone in the colony doesn't manage to get a meal on one night, the other bats will share--and they need not be relatives. This is called "reciprocal altruism." Humans do this too when we save someone we don't know or share food with a street person. It's a moral impulse that is millions of years old.

In fact, I sometimes hear people on the radio tell listeners that it's better to donate to a charity than to give to street people and while I recognize that as a rational argument, I think it's contrary to human moral code, which is to help immediately in a tangible way if we see someone we think is in distress. How does it affect us morally to blunt that impulse over and over? (And I'm not arguing that everyone who begs is in distress.)



What I'm arguing is that animals also kill under such circumstances. Humans and animals make similar moral decisions--if you just look at what we do. There is little that we do that other animals don't also do--whether it's helping one another or killing or raping. The big exceptions to that rule are our intelligence and ornate language and culture. I don't think our sense of right and wrong is one of those exceptions.



Here I'm confused. I honestly don't see anything that needs explaining.

How does the buck stop with an individual in a way that's unique to humans? I would appreciate it if you gave a concrete and substantive example, as I don't know what you mean.

Humble apologies for mishandling the system. Please forgive me...

There is no evidence that animals make any moral decisions at all. Their actions are the result of their genetic makeup and their environment.They cannot choose to act according to a moral principle regardless of the consequences. The mouse which killed two male mice did not so as the result of premeditation: it did so as an instinctive response to the presence of a potential rival. The fact that people call a dog "bad" does not imply that the dog has a conscience and can distinguish between right and wrong. They are simply treating the animal as if it were a rational being capable of self-control whereas it is not.

The buck stops with us because we are unique in our power of hindsight, insight and foresight.To say that our behaviour and that of animals is fundamentally the same overlooks our ability to plan ahead, to establish priorities, to weigh the consequences, to resist our instincts and to die for the sake of a principle. I am not disputing the nobility, beauty and altruism of the sacrifices made by many animals but they are neither morally nor legally responsible for their actions.

Since this is the consensus of humanity the onus is on a dissenter to explain how and why other species should be considered moral agents. They certainly have rights but they do not have any moral or legal obligations.

Neither can robots be regarded as decision-makers in the full sense of the term. Their activity is entirely the result of the ways in which they have been programmed. It is either prededetermined or indeterminate (if randomised). The one thing it cannot be is self-determined. If the self is simply a framework it cannot exercise self-control or be a responsible entity. Your analogy of the mind with traffic patterns, flocks of birds and groups of cells does not account for the mind's unity, continuity and self-awareness.

If the mind is just a word for a higher order function of the brain and resides in the interactions between neurons it is, as you say, "a product of the whole body". This interpretation does not correspond with the belief that persons have the right to life, liberty and happiness. In daily life we do not regard other people as biological robots. This is because a mechanistic interpretation of reality does not account for the existence of purpose and values. When a theory conflicts with the fundamental tenets of civilised human beings one is entitled to be sceptical.

Humble apologies for mishandling the system. Please forgive me...

No problem. It takes some getting used to.

I would argue the reverse. There is no evidence that animals DON'T make decisions. They decide to help one another, or not. They decide to eat the cupcakes or not. This dog has managed to resist the impulse to take a cupcake. Previously, it took food constantly.

YouTube - The ORIGINAL Stains from "It's Me or the Dog" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTuOr2vlC-c&feature=related)

He has learned that he's not supposed to take a cupcake, just as I know I'm not supposed to steal a Snicker's bar from the grocery store even though sometimes I would like to. In another scene, the trainer teaches the dog that "someone" is watching all the time, even when there appear to be no humans in the room, and he learns to leave the cupcakes alone even when he's all by himself. It's a staged learning process.

The trick to training animals to resist impulses is pretty much the same as for training children. Consequences must be significant and rewards and punishments consistent, otherwise they do not resist impulses. The habit of impulse control is learned, but impulse control is also located within a specific region of the brain, since certain forms of brain damage can obliterate it. Certain drugs can increase restraint in both humans and other animals.

Self control is a physical process. It is not a function of an abstract mind but a direct result of the functioning of the brain. And it is certainly not unique to humans. To call such restraint "instinct" in animals but high principle in humans is defining the same behavior in two different ways depending on who is doing it, and attributing more high mindedness to us than there is evidence for. I can't prove that dogs have learned principles, but you can't actually prove that some of them don't.


There is no evidence that animals make any moral decisions at all. Their actions are the result of their genetic makeup and their environment.They cannot choose to act according to a moral principle regardless of the consequences.

I don't think there is evidence for a difference between humans and other animals in this respect. When animals risk their lives to help others, we don't attribute this intention and planning to them, in part because we don't know what they are thinking, but we do with people, often even when people's motivations are significantly more complex than simple principle. That is, we often attribute more principle to people than is actually deserved.

For example, when a dog or a 7 year old boy rouses the family during a fire, and everyone gets out, both boy and dog are depicted in heroic terms. But in fact, they may have just been afraid and trying to get help or reassurance. They did nothing wrong and it all turned out well, but the heroism in these situations is consistently exaggerated for effect.


The mouse which killed two male mice did not so as the result of premeditation: it did so as an instinctive response to the presence of a potential rival.

Well, we'd have to discuss "instinctive." Speaking as a zoologist, I would not say this was instinctive behavior anymore than when my neighbor murders his wife's lover. I assume you would not call that instinctive.


The buck stops with us because we are unique in our power of hindsight, insight and foresight.To say that our behaviour and that of animals is fundamentally the same overlooks our ability to plan ahead, to establish priorities, to weigh the consequences, to resist our instincts and to die for the sake of a principle. I am not disputing the nobility, beauty and altruism of the sacrifices made by many animals but they are neither morally nor legally responsible for their actions.

You are making an argument for holding us more responsible for what we do. That's different from saying we are fundamentally different in our behavior. There is little evidence for the latter.


Since this is the consensus of humanity the onus is on a dissenter to explain how and why other species should be considered moral agents. They certainly have rights but they do not have any moral or legal obligations.

I am not going to address legal standing, which is a separate issue. Three year olds are not responsible for their behavior legally, but we do not say they have no minds.

I think your position that animals have no values and are not responsible for having any is far from a consensus opinion. A dog has no obligation to refrain from dragging human food off the counters? Even if it were a consensus opinion, that does not make it true.


Your analogy of the mind with traffic patterns, flocks of birds and groups of cells does not account for the mind's unity, continuity and self-awareness.

Certainly I can't provide any mechanistic details. But "mind" as a concept accounts for nothing either as far as I can tell. I'm arguing that at least there's a starting point for a model that might explain the mind. And certainly some aspects of our self awareness is beginning to be understood in mechanistic terms. It's a least a start and leaves less for a more mystical understanding of mind to explain.


In daily life we do not regard other people as biological robots.

I really object to the word "robot" here. I am sorry I mentioned the Roomba, which, if you'll recall I compared to a flatworm, the animal with the least developed brain of any animal that has an integrated nervous system at all. I think this is just rhetoric. Of course we do not regard our partners as robots. But they are not ethereal beings whose every motivation is a product of pure good and evil either. We eat because we are hungry. We hold our animals and children close because we crave intimacy, warmth, and love, all feelings we share with other animals.

This is because a mechanistic interpretation of reality does not account for the existence of purpose and values.

Yes, they do! This is what I am saying. Even my cats show purpose, foresight,and planning, and they have less need to plan that practically any animal on Earth. Most wild animals MUST plan, which means purpose. They have values, too. They just can't articulate them. That doesn't mean the values aren't there. A five year old cannot articulate a lot of the values she has picked up either, but she still abides by them.

I really object to the word "robot" here. I am sorry I mentioned the Roomba, which, if you'll recall I compared to a flatworm, the animal with the least developed brain of any animal that has an integrated nervous system at all. I think this is just rhetoric. Of course we do not regard our partners as robots. But they are not ethereal beings whose every motivation is a product of pure good and evil either.

I used the word "robot" only because you stated that a robot can make decisions and ours are just more nuanced, implying that we are no more than biological machines.

Self-control cannot be a physical process because it entails a self, a conscious entity. Restraint in animals is due to the effects of training whereas self-restraint results from the exercise of the intellect and free will. We are fundamentally different from animals because we can control ourselves in a situation where we have not been trained to do so.

Animals make decisions but they are not moral decisions. They cannot choose to act according to a universal moral principle regardless of the consequences.The man who murdered his wife's lover is guilty if there is sufficient evidence that he did so with malice aforethought. The mouse which killed another male is not guilty because it does not have a conscience and is motivated solely by biological factors. It cannot distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. . We exercise our judgment in a way that is impossible for an animal.

Legal responsibility is based on moral responsibility. A small child is not morally responsible because its intellect has not developed sufficiently whereas an animal's intelligence never even develops sufficiently for it to understand moral principles. Animals do have values but they are not moral values. Your cats behave purposefully but their attention is limited to the present and the immediate future. A dog is not taken to court because it has dragged food off a counter but its owner may be if he has allowed it to do so. He is to blame because he knows he should not let it steal whereas the pet's appetite simply overcomes its conditioned reflexes. We cannot appeal to its sense of fair play and say "How would you like it if some one stole your food?" Experimental evidence shows animals do not understand the mental state of other individuals. Nor can they understand or apply abstract rules like "Every animal has a right to life",
.
It is a false dilemma that we are either advanced animals or "ethereal beings whose every motivation is a product of pure good and evil". We have both a mind and a body which interact but the mind is the dominant partner. We have similar feelings of intimacy and warmth to animals but unlike them we cannot be genuinely fulfilled unless we pursue truth, goodness, justice, beauty and a love which embraces humans, animals, plants and even inanimate things like the earth and sky. We alone on this planet are responsible for its future destiny because we alone can deliberately alter the course of events on a vast scale.

The attempt to explain the mind in mechanistic terms is motivated by faith in the neoDarwinist theory of evolution which regards all life as the result of random combinations of molecules. Yet it has never been explained how intelligent and purposeful activity are produced by things which lack intelligence and purpose. To attribute reason to a chain of accidents is the height of unreason! If the mind had originated fortuitously it would hardly be capable of the sublime achievements of mankind in philosophy, religion, art, literature, music, science and technology - which presuppose an inexhaustible source of conscious creativity.

To attribute all this to minute electrical impulses in the lump of tissue we call the brain is a grossly inadequate hypothesis... In the words of Pascal, "Pensee fait la grandeur de l'homme" - our greatness stems from our power of thought. The concept of mind would not have emerged, still less survived to this day, if it accounted for nothing. The mind is aware of the brain but the brain is unaware of itself, let alone the mind. From the dawn of history humans have realised it is impossible to explain persons in terms of material objects. They have always looked for a reason and a purpose in their existence and that of the world. They know intuitively there is a dimension of reality beyond what they can see and touch.

Okay. After checking definitions at Wikipedia, I think I can say I am talking about "weak emergence." So, for example, the simple attraction between two masses we know as gravity doesn't immediately suggest stars with systems of orbiting planets and moons, which appear to be engineered, but in fact that is what you get. Planetary orbitals are an emergent property of moving masses in space that are interacting with one another. I'm sure there's a more elegant way to say this.

If you look at a section of an impressionist painting up close, you see patches of color that have no pattern or meaning. But if you step back and look at the whole painting from several feet away, a beautiful image emerges. No matter how much time you spend going over the painting with a magnifying glass, you are unlikely to see the whole picture unless you study it at the correct level of complexity.

Often, when we look at a the behavior of, say, five different molecules in a cell, we don't see what role they play in the whole body over the course of a lifetime--in other words, how they interact with all the other molecules and cells in the body to create higher orders of function and pattern. The same is true of genes.

For example, the hungtingtin gene, whose mutant allele causes Huntington's Disease is expressed in cells all over the body. As far as anyone knows, Huntington's is a disease of the brain. What does the protein huntingtin do in these other cells? Does it matter if it's the mutant form or not in these other cells? I'm digressing here and arguing for complexity, but it's related to emergent properties. Simple rules that govern the interactions of simple objects can lead to complex properties.

Consider the moon's influence on the tides. The moon's gravity pulls on our oceans. Daily changes in water level affect the ecology and evolution of intertidal animals and seaweeds in ways that can only be studied by looking at these communities. (Most of these organisms would not even exist if we had no moon.) If you brought them into the lab and studied them individually--or ground them up and looked at their constituent molecules--you would never be able to decide why they do the things they do, let alone THAT they do them. To find out what they do and why, you need to study them do in situ-- at least for a time.

If anyone has got this far, here's your reward, flocking starlings in Rome.
YouTube - Mesmerizing Starlings - Rome (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YadP3w7vkJA)

The pattern of their movements -- as a flock -- is an emergent property of their individual interactions with one another. No single bird is responsible for the pattern--which is neither random nor hierarchically imposed by a leader. Yet there is a pattern that is based on simple interactions between each bird and those immediately nearby it.

Cells in developing embryos behave in similar ways, adjusting their movements and differentiation according to who is nearby and thereby creating beautiful and functional forms.

In the movie below, you can see individual cells marked with different colored dyes moving into the interior of a ball of cells in a process called gastrulation. These embryos are not human, but human embryos also gastrulate, which is the first stage in the formation of layers of tissues. All animals and plants are made of layers of tissues, which are an emergent property of groups of cells.

Notice that all the red cells disappear into the interior of the embryo.
http://academic.reed.edu/biology/professors/sblack/movies/spider-05.mov

Edit: To clarify, two things are occurring here. The cells are dividing so that there are more and more smaller and smaller cells, and they are also "invaginating" into the interior of the ball of cells to form the gastrula. There is no one gene that directs this process. It's the product of individual interactions among cells. (In fact, some eggs can get pretty far in development without any nuclear DNA at all.)

I find this whole discussion of emergent properties of groups fascinating stuff. I ran across this discussion of "biofilms" -- large aggregations of microbes embedded in a slimy matrix--in today's Washington Post: Scientists Learning to Target Bacteria Where They Live (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/08/AR2009030801778.html?hpid=topnews).


Scientists have learned that bacteria that are vulnerable when floating around as individual cells in what is known as their "planktonic state" are much tougher to combat once they get established in a suitable place -- whether the hull of a ship or inside the lungs -- and come together in tightly bound biofilms. In that state, they can activate mechanisms like tiny pumps to expel antibiotics, share genes that confer protection against drugs, slow down their metabolism or become dormant, making them harder to kill.

I sincerely hope that there are some emergent properties of the human race that will make our species less vulnerable to being purged from the biosphere as a threat to life on the planet. In order for such properties to emerge, I'm guessing that some critical mass of individuals will have to relax their attachment to the more extreme forms of individualism. What do you think?

This is kind of what I was trying to get at in this thread (https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/spirituality/more-interesting-than-god-150964-2.html).

I sincerely hope that there are some emergent properties of the human race that will make our species less vulnerable to being purged from the biosphere as a threat to life on the planet. In order for such properties to emerge, I'm guessing that will have to relax their attachment to the more extreme forms of individualism. What do you think?



Your suggestion that"some critical mass of individuals will have to relax their attachment to the more extreme forms of individualism" seems to imply they can choose whether to do so. How can self-determinism emerge from that which is determined by the laws of nature?

Your suggestion that"some critical mass of individuals will have to relax their attachment to the more extreme forms of individualism" seems to imply they can choose whether to do so.
Yes, I guess it does assume a degree of individual choice about how closely to identify with the collective.

How can self-determinism emerge from that which is determined by the laws of nature?
I'm not sure I understand the question. I guess I don't see a contradiction between individual choice and "the laws of nature". I'm a rancher by trade, so I know something about the individual/herd dynamic in cattle. Individual cows can and do choose to abandon the herd, for various reasons in various situations, but the bovine species is a herd species, and most individuals "obey" the "laws" of herd behavior most of the time. The individual/social dynamic in human behavior seems essentially similar to me, and I don't see any of it as being inconsistent with the laws of nature as I understand them.

Reading back over a couple of your previous posts, your main concern seems to be to magnify and emphasize the differences between homo sapiens and other species, and to insist that these differences are so fundamental and so vast that they can't be accounted for by the impartial operation of "the laws of nature". Consequently, humans must be the product of something other than, or in addition to, those laws, while all other life forms are strictly subject to them. Do I have that about right?

I guess I don't see a contradiction between individual choice and "the laws of nature". I'm a rancher by trade, so I know something about the individual/herd dynamic in cattle. Individual cows can and do choose to abandon the herd, for various reasons in various situations, but the bovine species is a herd species, and most individuals "obey" the "laws" of herd behavior most of the time. The individual/social dynamic in human behavior seems essentially similar to me, and I don't see any of it as being inconsistent with the laws of nature as I understand them.

Reading back over a couple of your previous posts, your main concern seems to be to magnify and emphasize the differences between homo sapiens and other species, and to insist that these differences are so fundamental and so vast that they can't be accounted for by the impartial operation of "the laws of nature". Consequently, humans must be the product of something other than, or in addition to, those laws, while all other life forms are strictly subject to them. Do I have that about right?

Dead right :) We often behave like cows or sheep but we are the only beings on this planet who are morally responsible - at least sometimes - for what we choose. We are not bio- machines operating according to natural laws but free agents who can transcend our heredity and environment. How is this possible?

Dead right :) We often behave like cows or sheep but we are the only beings on this planet who are morally responsible - at least sometimes - for what we choose.
What do you mean by "morally responsible"? In every social species, individuals are held accountable by the group for transgressions of group norms. Are you talking about being held responsible by God for transgressions of Divine law?

We are not bio- machines operating according to natural laws but free agents who can transcend our heredity and environment. How is this possible?
I think this dichotomy you are trying to create is a false one. As I see it, there is no contradiction between "operating according to natural laws" and being "free agents". The operation of natural laws sets the boundaries within which free agency can function.

I think your preoccupation with the supposedly vast and fundamental differences between human and other species is misguided and unnecessary. It seems to me that you can still have a spiritual/religious dimension to human existence without having to claim that humans are dramatically and fundamentally different from other animal species. That's what motivates your claim, isn't it?

In every social species, individuals are held accountable by the group for transgressions of group norms.

Human accountability is based on our ability to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, whereas animal accountability is the result of their genetic makeup and environmental conditioning. We do not regard animals as innocent or guilty.



I think this dichotomy you are trying to create is a false one. As I see it, there is no contradiction between "operating according to natural laws" and being "free agents". The operation of natural laws sets the boundaries within which free agency can function.


The dichotomy between freedom and determinism is a fact not an opinion. There is no scope for choice if all mental events have biochemical causes. If our decisions are caused by what happens in our brain we are no more than biological machines.



I think your preoccupation with the supposedly vast and fundamental differences between human and other species is misguided and unnecessary. It seems to me that you can still have a spiritual/religious dimension to human existence without having to claim that humans are dramatically and fundamentally different from other animal species. That's what motivates your claim, isn't it?

If we are not fundamentally different from other animal species then their existence must also have a spiritual/religious dimension. If not, what does our spiritual/religious dimension consist of?

Human accountability is based on our ability to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, whereas animal accountability is the result of their genetic makeup and environmental conditioning. We do not regard animals as innocent or guilty.
We may not regard them that way, but they seem to regard each other that way, just as humans regard other humans that way.


The dichotomy between freedom and determinism is a fact not an opinion. There is no scope for choice if all mental events have biochemical causes. If our decisions are caused by what happens in our brain we are no more than biological machines.
I suppose it depends on how you define "freedom" and "determinism". The way I define them, they're not mutually exclusive, but you're certainly entitled to your own definitions. I always cringe when somebody proclaims something to be "a fact, not an opinion", because it usually represents an attempt to "upgrade" their opinion to something unassailable and beyond discussion.


If we are not fundamentally different from other animal species then their existence must also have a spiritual/religious dimension.
What would be so awful about that?


If not, what does our spiritual/religious dimension consist of?I think it consists of our desire to transcend the bounds of conscious existence within this physical body, within this physical world. Whether other species are capable of such a desire is irrelevant, as far as I can see. Why is so important to you that they NOT be capable of it?

We may not regard them that way, but they seem to regard each other that way, just as humans regard other humans that way.


Are you implying that there is no difference between the way animals and humans regard each other? That animals can distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong? That both we and they reason and behave in fundamentally the same way?



I suppose it depends on how you define "freedom" and "determinism". The way I define them, they're not mutually exclusive, but you're certainly entitled to your own definitions. I always cringe when somebody proclaims something to be "a fact, not an opinion", because it usually represents an attempt to "upgrade" their opinion to something unassailable and beyond discussion.


You may cringe but you haven't explained how you define "freedom" and "determinism", nor how there is scope for choice if all mental events have biochemical causes.



I think it consists of our desire to transcend the bounds of conscious existence within this physical body, within this physical world. Whether or not other species are capable of such a desire is irrelevant, as far as I can see. Why is so important to you that they NOT be capable of it?

If our spiritual/religious dimension consists solely of a desire to transcend the bounds of conscious existence within this physical world it is no more than a futile illusion doomed to bring us misery and frustration.

You may cringe but you haven't explained how you define "freedom" and "determinism", nor how there is scope for choice if all mental events have biochemical causes.
Wouldn't this highlight the difference between objective and subjective? The physiological process of the synapses connecting axons to dendrites with neurotransmitters flowing from one to the other cause the processes of thought and perception to occur. Thus, the objective physiological process is the "determinism," but the subjective processes that result are the "freedom."

Wouldn't this highlight the difference between objective and subjective? The physiological process of the synapses connecting axons to dendrites with neurotransmitters flowing from one to the other cause the processes of thought and perception to occur. Thus, the objective physiological process is the "determinism," but the subjective processes that result are the "freedom."

I don't see how results can constitute freedom :) I interpret freedom as the power of self-control. How can the conscious self be the effect of biochemical events which lack consciousness?

You may cringe but you haven't explained how you define "freedom" and "determinism", nor how there is scope for choice if all mental events have biochemical causes.

You seem to suppose that where there is causality there is determinism (or necessitation). But, at the same time, you clearly wish to see mental events and states as causes of behavior. So do you imagine that mental causes necessitate the behaviors to which they give rise?

If not, then why suppose that neurophysiological events and states are any more deterministic? Suppose that the mental event that causes me to perform action S is the desire D. Suppose further that D is token-identical to neurophysiological event N. Then, you seem to want to say, action S is not freely understaken, since N is causally necessitating. But this would be to take for granted a very primitive view of causality. Why suppose that the free performance of S is imperiled by the token-identity of D and N in a way that it isn't by the non-identity of D and N? What motivates this supposition?

I don't see how results can constitute freedom :) I interpret freedom as the power of self-control. How can the conscious self be the effect of biochemical events which lack consciousness?
The objective processes ("biochemical events") are the same for you and for me, but the results ("conscious self") are subjective, your experience different from mine. My neurotransmitters flow between my synapses (determinism), and I think to myself, "I want to eat a banana" (free will). Your neurotransmitters flow between your synapses (determinism), and you think to yourself, "I want to eat a mango" (free will).

You seem to suppose that where there is causality there is determinism (or necessitation). But, at the same time, you clearly wish to see mental events and states as causes of behavior. So do you imagine that mental causes necessitate the behaviors to which they give rise?


Mental events and states are not causes but effects and cannot be regarded as responsible for anything. Neither can the brain because it has no control-centre. If responsibility exists it must be attributed to the intangible entity we call the mind. To compare mental causality with physical causality presupposes they are comparable but they are not. The mind transcends the body with its power of hindsight, insight and foresight whereas the brain is not even aware it exists. The mind is the director whereas the body is the servant. Responsibility exists only when there is self-control and self-determinism that transcend the determinism and indeterminism of the physical world.

Are you implying that there is no difference between the way animals and humans regard each other? That animals can distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong? That both we and they reason and behave in fundamentally the same way?
No. The fact that there are similarities doesn't mean that there are no differences.


You may cringe but you haven't explained how you define "freedom" and "determinism", nor how there is scope for choice if all mental events have biochemical causes.
I'm not sure what you mean by "mental event", but if you mean "thoughts" I don't think I can agree with your premise that they "all have biochemical causes". I do agree that the capacity for thought arises out of the brain/body system. The ability to think (which is "determined" by our biochemical apparatus) is different than the process of thinking particular thoughts in a particular sequence (which is the realm where "freedom" can operate). So no, I still don't see the huge contradiction that you are so exercised about.


If our spiritual/religious dimension consists solely of a desire to transcend the bounds of conscious existence within this physical world it is no more than a futile illusion doomed to bring us misery and frustration.I don't think the fullness of spiritual life consists "solely" of a desire to transcend the limitations of material existence, but I do think this desire usually arises near the beginning of the spiritual journey. Are you suggesting that the spiritual impulse has to arise in some other way to avoid being "a futile illusion doomed to bring us misery and frustration"?

Mental events and states are not causes but effects and cannot be regarded as responsible for anything.

You have just committed yourself to the wildly implausible view that beliefs and desires are not causes of behavior.


Neither can the brain because it has no control-centre.

So the brain, like the mind, is causally inert? How then do you account for behavior.

How do you account for the fact that manipulation of the brain alters behavior? This would seem to fly in the face of your claim that the brain is not a cause of anything.


If responsibility exists it must be attributed to the intangible entity we call the mind.

But you have just said that mental events and states (events and states of the mind) are not causally efficaceous. You've also said that the mind (mental events and states) "cannot be regarded as responsible for anything".

You have contradicted yourself.


The mind transcends the body

This begs the question.


The mind is the director whereas the body is the servant.

But you've already committed yourself to the claim that mental states and events like belief and desire are not causes of behavior, that they are epiphenomenal. You are therefore not entitled to the claim that the mind directs the body.


Responsibility exists only when there is self-control and self-determinism that transcend the determinism and indeterminism of the physical world.

The physical world is deterministic and indeterministic?

Human beings are part of the physical world, yes? I exercise my agency by moving my body and interacting with other physical objects, yes? My mind had better be in intimate causal commerce with the physical world if my mind is to have anything at all to do.

I don't know what "self-determinism" means.

The objective processes ("biochemical events") are the same for you and for me, but the results ("conscious self") are subjective, your experience different from mine. My neurotransmitters flow between my synapses (determinism), and I think to myself, "I want to eat a banana" (free will). Your neurotransmitters flow between your synapses (determinism), and you think to yourself, "I want to eat a mango" (free will).

The biochemical events in our brains are not the same. Every brain has a different history. The fact that people think differently does not mean they are free to choose what to think. Freedom implies the ability to control our thoughts. Where is the control-centre in the brain?

QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]You have just committed yourself to the wildly implausible view that beliefs and desires are not causes of behavior.
[/QUOTE]

:eek: You are distorting my views by taking one sentence out of its context:

"Mental events and states are not causes but effects and cannot be regarded as responsible for anything. Neither can the brain because it has no control-centre. If responsibility exists it must be attributed to the intangible entity we call the mind."

Do you regard mental events and states as responsible for what happens? It is our mind that is responsible for the way we behave.

QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
So the brain, like the mind, is causally inert? How then do you account for behavior.
How do you account for the fact that manipulation of the brain alters behavior? This would seem to fly in the face of your claim that the brain is not a cause of anything.
[/QUOTE]

Complete and utter nonsense. Where have I suggested that the brain is causally inert ? I have stated that the brain is not aware than it exists and that it is not responsible for what we do. Obviously it produces activity. Otherwise the body would be inert.
QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
But you have just said that mental events and states (events and states of the mind) are not causally efficaceous. You've also said that the mind (mental events and states) "cannot be regarded as responsible for anything".
You have contradicted yourself.
[/QUOTE]

Not at all. Once again you have distorted the meaning of my statement by equating mental events and states with the mind. You may have an atomistic view of the mind but I regard it as an entity. It is the mind that is responsible, not mental events and states. ;)
QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
But you've already committed yourself to the claim that mental states and events like belief and desire are not causes of behavior, that they are epiphenomenal. You are therefore not entitled to the claim that the mind directs the body.
[/QUOTE]
Another distortion. Where have I used the term "epiphenomenal"? :p

QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
The physical world is deterministic and indeterministic?
[/QUOTE]
If you doubt this consult any physics textbook... :D
QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
Human beings are part of the physical world, yes? I exercise my agency by moving my body and interacting with other physical objects, yes? My mind had better be in intimate causal commerce with the physical world if my mind is to have anything at all to do.
[/QUOTE]
Who denied that it is?
QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
I don't know what "self-determinism" means.[/QUOTE]
QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]Then why not consult a dictionary? Perhaps you don't want to know... :rolleyes:.[/QUOTE]

QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]You have just committed yourself to the wildly implausible view that beliefs and desires are not causes of behavior.


:eek: You are distorting my views by taking one sentence out of its context:

"Mental events and states are not causes but effects and cannot be regarded as responsible for anything. Neither can the brain because it has no control-centre. If responsibility exists it must be attributed to the intangible entity we call the mind."

Do you regard mental events and states as responsible for what happens? It is our mind that is responsible for the way we behave.

And mental states and events are states and events of the mind. When you say


Mental events and states are not causes but effects and cannot be regarded as responsible for anything.

You commit yourself to the claim that, say, my desire to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich does not cause me to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich nor is is part of the causal etiology of my act of eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You commit yourself, in other words, to the denial of what philosophers call the "belief-desire" thesis. This holds that the explanation (or what is often called the "rationalization) of, say, my eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich includes (1) my desire to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and (2) my belief that eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich will satisfy that desire. If you mean to reject the belief-desire thesis you have given no grounds which might justify its rejection.



QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
So the brain, like the mind, is causally inert? How then do you account for behavior.
How do you account for the fact that manipulation of the brain alters behavior? This would seem to fly in the face of your claim that the brain is not a cause of anything.


Complete and utter nonsense. Where have I suggested that the brain is causally inert ? I have stated that the brain is not aware than it exists and that it is not responsible for what we do. Obviously it produces activity. Otherwise the body would be inert.

You suggested it here:


Neither can the brain

If the brain cannot be a cause, then it is causally inert.


QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
But you have just said that mental events and states (events and states of the mind) are not causally efficaceous. You've also said that the mind (mental events and states) "cannot be regarded as responsible for anything".
You have contradicted yourself.

Not at all. Once again you have distorted the meaning of my statement by equating mental events and states with the mind. You may have an atomistic view of the mind but I regard it as an entity. It is the mind that is responsible, not mental events and states. ;)


Well, let's see. What are mental events and states events and states of? The mind, right? This comports perfectly with the idea that the brain is an entity--and isn't at all tantamount to holding an atomistic view of the mind. Now, it isn't entirely clear what you mean by an "atomistic" view of the mind, but if you are thinking of the sort of view that Blackburn holds, or Hume, then I reject atomism.

Moreover, if you really wanted to reject atomism I would have expected you to say not that it is the mind that is responsible but the person (a la Hornsby).


QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
But you've already committed yourself to the claim that mental states and events like belief and desire are not causes of behavior, that they are epiphenomenal. You are therefore not entitled to the claim that the mind directs the body.

Another distortion. Where have I used the term "epiphenomenal"? :p

QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
The physical world is deterministic and indeterministic?

If you doubt this consult any physics textbook... :D

I have. They teach us that physical laws are probabilistic, not deterministic.

You might want to acquaint yourself with Hilary Putnam's notion of a probabilistic automaton.

As for the term "epiphenomenal": No, you have not used the term. But you have embraced the epiphenomenalism of the mental by committing yourself to the claim that mental states and events are not causes of behavior. Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental states and events are not causes of behavior. An even stronger form of epiphenomenalism would hold that mental states and events are causes neither of behavior nor of other mental states and events. You have so far committed yourself to the first, weaker, form of epiphenomenalism.


QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
Human beings are part of the physical world, yes? I exercise my agency by moving my body and interacting with other physical objects, yes? My mind had better be in intimate causal commerce with the physical world if my mind is to have anything at all to do.

Who denied that it is?

You did, when you wrote:


Mental events and states are not causes but effects and cannot be regarded as responsible for anything.


QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]
I don't know what "self-determinism" means.
QUOTE=Akoue;1673101]Then why not consult a dictionary? Perhaps you don't want to know... :rolleyes:.[/QUOTE]

Well, it isn't in my Oxford English Dictionary. Neither is it a term in common philosophical usage. Did you mean to say "self-determination"? Or do you have something else in mind? If the latter, then please don't keep it a secret.

Did you mean to say "self-determination"? Or do you have something else in mind? If the latter, then please don't keep it a secret.
It may help you to understand my viewpoint if I point out that the present stage of the discussion is concerned with freedom and responsibility. Obviously many of our thoughts, feelings, states and actions are not under our control, we do not cause them and are not responsible for them. We are responsible only for those caused by decisions we make consciously, rationally and deliberately. The explanation of eating a sandwich certainly includes a desire and a belief but the cause of eating the sandwich is the decision to do so - if mens rea exists. Self-control implies an intangible entity we call the "self". The brain is not responsible because it has no control-centre. Nor are the states and events that occur in the brain.

Why are we responsible for what we did in the past, given that our physical states have changed? It can only be because we have a continuous identity that is not located in the body. In this context the mind is the director whereas the body is the servant. That is why I referred to self-determinism. (The term can be found in Google, Merriam-Webster and many other sources). The self determines itself by transcending the determinism and indeterminism of the physical world. That is why the buck rests with us. We decide what we want out of life and, within limits, shape ourselves and our destiny. A more poetic view is implied in the words of John Keats that this world is "a vale of soul-making" ( although he was unorthodox in his belief that we create our soul!)

It is the first time I have ever been described as an epiphenomenalist :) The original meaning of the term is that mental states and events are mere epiphenomena, i.e. side-effects or by-products of physiological states and events in the brain. The exact opposite is true. I believe the mind or self is responsible for its rational activity, not the brain, beliefs, desires or whatever else you care to name.

Your view of the mind seems atomistic in the sense that you seem to regard it as a sequence of states and events. I may be mistaken but you apparently dispense with the idea of the self and attribute the causes of behavior to individual events and states. Yet how can individual events and states of the mind be responsible for their activity? And if they are not responsible what is?

capacity[/I] for thought arises out of the brain/body system. The ability to think (which is "determined" by our biochemical apparatus) is different than the process of thinking particular thoughts in a particular sequence (which is the realm where "freedom" can operate). So no, I still don't see the huge contradiction that you are so exercised about.

I don't think the fullness of spiritual life consists "solely" of a desire to transcend the limitations of material existence, but I do think this desire usually arises near the beginning of the spiritual journey. Are you suggesting that the spiritual impulse has to arise in some other way to avoid being "a futile illusion doomed to bring us misery and frustration"?

Your idea of freedom is that it consists of rearranging thoughts in a particular sequence. I hope I'm not misinterpreting you :) The question arises as to what it is that rearranges thoughts... because that must be where the responsibility lies...

A similar problem occurs with the spiritual journey. When does it begin and, more importantly, when does it end? If it ends at death it is doomed to bring us misery and frustration...

It may help you to understand my viewpoint if I point out that the present stage of the discussion is concerned with freedom and responsibility.

It is, yes, for the reason that you introduced it as a test that physicalism (of the sort that had been advocated by asking) cannot pass.


Obviously many of our thoughts, feelings, states and actions are not under our control, we do not cause them and are not responsible for them. We are responsible only for those caused by decisions we make consciously, rationally and deliberately. The explanation of eating a sandwich certainly includes a desire and a belief but the cause of eating the sandwich is the decision to do so - if mens rea exists. Self-control implies an intangible entity we call the "self". The brain is not responsible because it has no control-centre. Nor are the states and events that occur in the brain.

It isn't at all obvious to me that "self-control implies an intangible entity" of any sort. I am not an eliminativist, and I have my own issues with physicalism, but there is no good reason to suppose that what you call "self-control" requires the existence of an immaterial self or mind (it appears that by "intangible" you mean "immaterial" or "non-physical"). On the contrary, this is precisely where the sort of dualism you appear to advocate gets into trouble: The problem of interaction. If the mind or self is itself non-physical, then the dualist (you) needs to explain how an immaterial substance (the mind) can interact causally with a physical substance (the body). This is a problem as old as Cartesian dualism itself, since the objection was raised already by Arnauld (among others). If the mind causes behavior, and behavior involves the movement of the body, then you owe us some account of the means by which the mind can enter into causal commerce with the body.


Why are we responsible for what we did in the past, given that our physical states have changed? It can only be because we have a continuous identity that is not located in the body.

How about relations of psychological continuity? This doesn't imply the existence of an immaterial mind or self. Many philosophers favor the psychological continuity theory of personal identity, according to which personal identity is vouchsafed by the identity and similarity relations among different temporal stages of a given self.


In this context the mind is the director whereas the body is the servant. That is why I referred to self-determinism. (The term can be found in Google, Merriam-Webster and many other sources). The self determines itself by transcending the determinism and indeterminism of the physical world. That is why the buck rests with us. We decide what we want out of life and, within limits, shape ourselves and our destiny. A more poetic view is implied in the words of John Keats that this world is "a vale of soul-making" ( although he was unorthodox in his belief that we create our soul!)

The business about the mind as director and the body as servant is picturesque but doesn't appear to me to pay any real explanatory dividends. If the mind is, after all, the body, then there is no dualism between the two and so the metaphor collapses. I still find the notion of "self-determinism" with which you are operating to be intolerably vague. No one denies that the self is capable of self-determination (also often referred to as autonomy), but from this is does not follow that the mind is an immaterial substance. This is perfectly consistent with all the versions of physicalism with which I am aware. In fact, given the interaction problem faced by dualism, there are reasons to suppose that taking mental causation seriously strongly recommends physicalism.


It is the first time I have ever been described as an epiphenomenalist :) The original meaning of the term is that mental states and events are mere epiphenomena, i.e. side-effects or by-products of physiological states and events in the brain. The exact opposite is true. I believe the mind or self is responsible for its rational activity, not the brain, beliefs, desires or whatever else you care to name.

There's a first time for everything, I suppose. Given the causal closure of the physical world (all physical events have physical causes), it has often been pointed out (most notably by Jaegwon Kim) that the sort of dualism to which you have committed yourself does not provide for the mental to have any causal work to do, most especially in the production of behavior, linguistic or otherwise. This is, of course, a not-too-distant cousin of the interaction problem for mind-body dualism. Now you could, of course, reject the principle of causal closure. That's not an avenue many people are inclined to pursue, however. Instead, most philosophers have opted for non-reductionistic physicalism or the view that the mind and body are identical but that mental properties cannot be reduced to physical properties. This doesn't appear to be the option you have chosen for yourself. You seem to embrace a pretty full-blooded dualism, and this leaves you saddled with the problem of interaction--a problem which, unaddressed, leaves you open (given things you have said) to the charge of epiphenomenalism.


Your view of the mind seems atomistic in the sense that you seem to regard it as a sequence of states and events. I may be mistaken but you apparently dispense with the idea of the self and attribute the causes of behavior to individual events and states.

I don't, in fact, regard the mind as just a sequence of states and events. I find that view indefensible, although it isn't obviously false and so you would need to provide some argument to show that your charges of atomism are anything more than reflections of your own philosophical tastes. And I very definitely am not a reductionist or eliminativist about the self. Nevertheless, we do act on particular desires and under particular beliefs.


Yet how can individual events and states of the mind be responsible for their activity? And if they are not responsible what is?

Given the dualism you favor, how can anything mental be responsible for anything at all? At this point, the sort of emergence view offered by asking earlier in the thread seems far more plausible.

Your idea of freedom is that it consists of rearranging thoughts in a particular sequence. I hope I'm not misinterpreting you :)
Well, I think you are misinterpreting me, but frankly, I don't have the patience that Akoue has to try to straighten you out. I find your logic contorted, your terminology sloppy and your objections unconvincing.

Well, I think you are misinterpreting me, but frankly, I don't have the patience that Akoue has to try to straighten you out. I find your logic contorted, your terminology sloppy and your objections unconvincing.

Since you have failed miserably to answer my questions and refute the points I have made it would be equally facile and evasive to describe your logic contorted, your terminology sloppy and your objections unconvincing...

Since you have failed miserably...

Failure, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Failure, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
Not at all. One has either answered questions or failed to answer them...

If the mind or self is itself non-physical, then the dualist (you) needs to explain how an immaterial substance (the mind) can interact causally with a physical substance (the body). This is a problem as old as Cartesian dualism itself, since the objection was raised already by Arnauld (among others). If the mind causes behavior, and behavior involves the movement of the body, then you owe us some account of the means by which the mind can enter into causal commerce with the body.



I am not a dualist in the original sense of the term - that ultimate reality is composed of mind and matter. I am a monist, believing that both our minds and bodies owe their existence to a Supreme Mind. So they are intimately related by virtue of their origin and not so disparate as physicalists contend. I don't claim to understand all the ways in which the mind functions but who does? Kim admits physicalism is defective in at least one respect, i.e. qualia. Bertrand Russell was no fool and he sought refuge in neutral monism precisely because of the formidable difficulties in physicalism, emergent or otherwise.

How were conscious, rational, purposeful and autonomous persons produced by random combinations of atomic particles? This is a problem as old as the monism of Leucippus and Democritus. If the mind has emerged from the activity of the brain you owe us some account of the means by which the brain is aware of itself and controls itself.

If you find the notion of self-determinism intolerably vague I find your notion of the self intolerably nebulous :) What is it exactly? If it has a physical basis where is it located?
In daily life we do not regard other people as biological robots.As I pointed out to Asking, emergent physicalism does not correspond to the belief that persons have the right to life, liberty and happiness. A mechanistic interpretation of reality does not account for the existence of purpose and values. When a theory conflicts with the fundamental tenets of civilised human beings one is entitled to be sceptical.

Since our thoughts, emotions and decisions are intangible they are explained more readily in terms of an intangible entity than a physical brain. Since truth, goodness, freedom, equality and justice are intangible they too correspond more closely to an intangible self than to an observable organ. The relation of the mind to the body is mysterious but the mind directs the body in the literal sense of the term - it introduces direction and purpose into what would otherwise be a purposeless process. Inanimate matter has no goal or end.

We have direct, personal experience of the power of our mind.It is putting the cart before the horse to explain mind in terms of matter. Without a mind we wouldn't even know matter exists. Our starting point is our stream of consciousness with its thoughts, sensations, feelings and decisions. We have direct knowledge of ourselves whereas our knowledge of physical reality is inferred from the evidence of our senses. Epistemological precedence does not necessarily entail ontological precedence but it indicates that the presumption that matter has emerged from mind is more likely than mind from matter.

The basic flaw in materialism is that it equates temporal priority with ontological priority. To all appearances only matter existed at the Big Bang but since mind cannot be observed there is no evidence that it did not exist. On the contrary, the origin and evolution of life are not adequately explained by a series of fortuitous events. The effect would not be proportionate to the cause.

The increase of complexity and the emergence of organization are characteristic of rational activity.The significance of a process should not be assessed solely by its apparent origin but by its development and outcome. To regard conscious, rational and purposeful persons as the product of purposeless particles is to seek refuge in absurdity and devalue everything we consider precious...

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I am not a dualist in the original sense of the term - that ultimate reality is composed of mind and matter. I am a monist, believing that both our minds and bodies owe their existence to a Supreme Mind.

Believing in a Supreme Mind doesn't save you from dualism unless you deny the existence of either mind or matter. Now you appear to affirm the existence of bodies. If you hold that bodies are physical and that the mind is non-physical, then you are a dualist despite your belief that they have the origin of their existence in a Supreme Mind. Most Christians, for instance, believe as you do and are dualists. Descartes comes to mind. Or do you mean to avoid dualism by mentalizing the material a la Berkeley?


So they are intimately related by virtue of their origin and not so disparate as physicalists contend.

How does their common source in a Supreme Mind solve the problem of interaction? You still don't apear to have any way to account for mental causation.


I don't claim to understand all the ways in which the mind functions but who does? Kim admits physicalism is defective in at least one respect, i.e. qualia. Bertrand Russell was no fool and he sought refuge in neutral monism precisely because of the formidable difficulties in physicalism, emergent or otherwise.

Kim thinks that consciousness presents the most pressing challenge for physicalism, but he certainly hasn't abandoned physicalism. Far from it. Notice that I have nowhere said that physicalism is unproblematic. (I am not a shill for physicalism as I do not regard myself as a physicalist. Nevertheless, one must respond to it in a way that is intellectually honest.) What I have done is to point out that the sort of dualism you have been advocating appears to have insuperable difficulties. Dualism does considerably worse as a response to the action-theoretic objections you have raised to physicalism than does physicalism itself. That really ought to give you some pause.


How were conscious, rational, purposeful and autonomous persons produced by random combinations of atomic particles? This is a problem as old as the monism of Leucippus and Democritus. If the mind has emerged from the activity of the brain you owe us some account of the means by which the brain is aware of itself and controls itself.

Why do you suppose that the brain has to be reflectively aware of itself? Why, moreover, do you suppose that physicalism requires an account of the origin of consciousness, et al. After all, the laws of planetary motion don't require an account of the origin of the universe in order to be true.


If you find the notion of self-determinism intolerably vague I find your notion of the self intolerably nebulous :) What is it exactly? If it has a physical basis where is it located?
In daily life we do not regard other people as biological robots.As I pointed out to Asking, emergent physicalism does not correspond to the belief that persons have the right to life, liberty and happiness. A mechanistic interpretation of reality does not account for the existence of purpose and values. When a theory conflicts with the fundamental tenets of civilised human beings one is entitled to be sceptical.

I haven't offered any notion of the self. I have so far merely been responding to your claims.

I don't see that asking committed herself to the view that we are biological robots. But even if she had, how would that commit her to a mechanistic view of reality? Science hasn't been mechanistic for quite some time. You need to get your picture of science out of the seventeenth century. On the whole, your objections to physicalism have had a strawman quality about them.


Since our thoughts, emotions and decisions are intangible they are explained more readily in terms of an intangible entity than a physical brain.

You can continue to insist upon this all you like, though you are, of course, begging the question. And if by "intangible entity" you mean "immaterial entity" that's exactly what you're doing.


Since truth, goodness, freedom, equality and justice are intangible they too correspond more closely to an intangible self than to an observable organ. The relation of the mind to the body is mysterious but the mind directs the body in the literal sense of the term - it introduces direction and purpose into what would otherwise be a purposeless process. Inanimate matter has no goal or end.

We have direct, personal experience of the power of our mind.It is putting the cart before the horse to explain mind in terms of matter.

The things you mention are non-physical. I don't agree that this renders them intangible.
Now when you say that the relation of mind and body is mysterious, is this your conceding that you have absolutely no idea how to deal with the problem of interaction? 'Cause that's how it looks.

We have direct introspective awareness of certain mental properties or states or events (call them what you will). It doesn't at all follow that this is awareness of an immaterial thing or entity. Most physicalists regard mental properties or states or events to be higher-order functional properties of lower-order physical properties (this is what asking argued for earlier in the thread).


Without a mind we wouldn't even know matter exists.

Okay. So long as you realize that it doesn't follow from this that the mind is itself immaterial. It would be a mistake to attempt to read off from the surface contours of our mental life the deep metaphysical structure of the world. There is no facile inferential path leading from the introspectible features of our mental life to the ontological nature of those states themselves. Now Descartes and others--and perhaps you--were more than happy to take it for granted that the mind is panoptical with regard to itself, that the mind knows not only what it is thinking but what kind of thing that it is. But, of course, the panopticism of the mind has been just absolutely vitiated. I can see no good reason to suppose that from the fact that I do not experience my mental states as physical states of my body I can therefore take it for granted that they are not physical states of my body.


it indicates that the presumption that matter has emerged from mind is more likely than mind from matter.

How on earth to you get that? This doesn't even have a toe-hold on the canons of logical reasoning.


The basic flaw in materialism is that it equates temporal priority with ontological priority. To all appearances only matter existed at the Big Bang but since mind cannot be observed there is no evidence that it did not exist. On the contrary, the origin and evolution of life are not adequately explained by a series of fortuitous events. The effect would not be proportionate to the cause.

The increase of complexity and the emergence of organization are characteristic of rational activity.The significance of a process should not be assessed solely by its apparent origin but by its development and outcome.

What you say here gives the impression that you haven't the vaguest notion what materialism's commitments are. Again, a strawman. In particular, materialism isn't committed to the equation of temporal with ontological priority. You have conjured this out of thin air.


To regard conscious, rational and purposeful persons as the product of purposeless particles is to seek refuge in absurdity and devalue everything we consider precious...

Your appeal to sentiment is, of course, an informal fallacy. Moreover, you have insisted emphatically that physicalism poses a threat to these things, but you have provided no rationally compelling argument. Yet again, you give evidence of having only a very remote and casual acquaintance with physicalism. This might--might--be a problem for reductionists. But most physicalists are not reductionists (as you must know since you've read Kim): they do not take the view that higher-order functional properties can be reduced to, or eliminated in favor of, their lower-order supervenience bases. This is as much as to point out, once again, that you have elected to take aim at a strawman.

But, leaving that aside for a moment, why suppose that our prephilosophical commonsense commitments are unrevisable? Our regarding certain things as precious does not guarantee that they aren't fictive.

Believing in a Supreme Mind doesn't save you from dualism unless you deny the existence of either mind or matter.


You do not seem to understand that belief in a Supreme Being is monistic. If mind and matter are both created they must have something in common - their origin and their contingency. They are both subsidiary aspects of reality. To regard them as entirely disparate and incapable of interaction is to restrict reality to human categories - an absurd view. It amounts to imposing limits on the power of the Creator.

You suggest I have absolutely no idea how to deal with the problem of interaction, apparently forgetting or dismissing my statement that the mind directs the body by introducing direction and purpose into what would otherwise be a purposeless process.

"Why do you suppose that the brain has to be reflectively aware of itself?"

I don't but if the brain is not aware of itself what is self-awareness? It must be either an illusion or an attribute of an entity which does not enter into your scheme of things. If you cannot specify what the self is, or are unwilling to do so, your objections to dualism lack foundation. Many explanations are incomplete or entail difficulties but they are better than no explanation at all.

You ask why I suppose physicalism requires an account of the origin of consciousness, rationality, truth, goodness, justice, freedom and purpose. If it explains none of the most important aspects of reality it is vacuous. The laws of planetary motion don't require an account of the origin of the universe because they are concerned with only one aspect of reality. This discussion is concerned with the nature of reality itself.

Your view of science seems outdated. There are many examples of mechanistic thinking in current science. Proponents of AI, for example, have argued that the human mind is a machine and subject to the same laws of physics as any other machine.

The view that mental properties or states or events as higher-order functional properties of lower-order physical properties throws no light on their relationship. There is no direct inference from introspection to the nature of reality but the fact remains that our primary data are our thoughts, feelings and decisions. There is no guarantee that the physical world even exists whereas we cannot deny our thoughts exist without contradicting ourselves. That should give you pause for thought...

If materialism isn't committed to the equation of temporal with ontological priority why does it focus on the origin of the universe rather than consider the entire process? Why does it have a one-way view of causality, explaining the present in terms of the past and rejecting explanation in terms of final causes, i.e. teleology?

" I can see no good reason to suppose that from the fact that I do not experience my mental states as physical states of my body I can therefore take it for granted that they are not physical states of my body."

If we do not experience mental states as physical states of the body even though they are physical states of the body the whole of humanity has been labouring under a colossal delusion for thousands of years. You may not take it for granted but the onus is on you to explain how they are physical states. Most physicalists are not reductionists but they have not explained how higher-order functional properties are derived from their lower-order supervenience bases. "Supervenience" is a description not an explanation.

You are quite mistaken in dismissing as an appeal to sentiment my statement that regarding persons as the product of particles is to devalue everything. In fact you have confirmed it by asking why we should suppose our prephilosophical commonsense commitments are unrevisable. Your question implies you have no sound basis for believing in human rights. If you regard human rights as fictive you're not alone - so did Hitler, Stalin and a multitude of others. If you don't, how do you explain them?

Is the mind anything distinct from the body?

Here's another, perhaps more precise, way of asking the question:

Are mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires, sensations, fears) states of the brain or are mental states distinct from brain states?

Please provide support for your claims. I would like to hear from people who hold different views about this, so kindly support your view or any claims you make with reasons so that those who don't hold your view can see where you are coming from and why you think what you think.

Thank you in advance.

Hi AKoue,

What an interesting question.. unfortunately I don't have enough knowledge to add to this discussion, only to say I believe..

The brain is responsible for all our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, desires and so on,

Purely because you can train parts of the brain that are not used.. shall we say for e.g.. After suffering a stroke.. or if you are a O C D sufferer with C B T.

I think mental states can be controlled by the brain in what ever way it is trained.

The brain is the engine of the body, the controller of all the states of mind.

The states of mind cannot be separate from the brain states, the are one in the same.

I have no answer as to why, having had an outer body experience, how all of this works, only to say that maybe, because I had not died and my brain was still functioning, the outer body was some how supported.

This happened many years ago, it was the strangest thing I have ever experienced.

I think there are things that we are not meant to know, no matter how hard we try to scientifically back them up... it's just how it's meant to be.

The brain is responsible for all our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, desires and so on,

Purely because you can train parts of the brain that are not used..shall we say for eg. after suffering a stroke..or if you are a O C D sufferer with C B T.

I think mental states can be controlled by the brain in what ever way it is trained.

The brain is the engine of the body, the controller of all the states of mind.

The states of mind cannot be separate from the brain states, the are one in the same.

I have no answer as to why, having had an outer body experience, how all of this works, only to say that maybe, because i had not died and my brain was still functioning, the outer body was some how supported.

This happened many years ago, it was the strangest thing i have ever experienced.

I think there are things that we are not meant to know, no matter how hard we try to scientifically back them up...it's just how it's meant to be.

I'm intrigued by your last statement: "meant" usually means "intended". Should we interpret that literally? If so, there is at least one state of mind that is not controlled by the brain :)

Hi AKoue,

What an interesting question..unfortunately i don't have enough knowledge to add to this discussion, only to say i believe..

The brain is responsible for all our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, desires and so on,

Purely because you can train parts of the brain that are not used..shall we say for eg. after suffering a stroke..or if you are a O C D sufferer with C B T.

I think mental states can be controlled by the brain in what ever way it is trained.

The brain is the engine of the body, the controller of all the states of mind.

The states of mind cannot be separate from the brain states, the are one in the same.

I have no answer as to why, having had an outer body experience, how all of this works, only to say that maybe, because i had not died and my brain was still functioning, the outer body was some how supported.

This happened many years ago, it was the strangest thing i have ever experienced.

I think there are things that we are not meant to know, no matter how hard we try to scientifically back them up...it's just how it's meant to be.

To say that mental states can be controlled by the brain in what ever way it is trained implies that there is a trainer :)

Have you ever hear of something called "The ghost in the machine"? It's a problem that has been around for a while, we're the ghost and our bodies are the machine. I think our bodies are a necessity of evolution. We need them to fulfill our aspirations. Also I think our minds and the knowledge we have are different. Meaning the mind and that brain are not the same.

Have you ever hear of something called "The ghost in the machine"? It's a problem that has been around for a while, we're the ghost and our bodies are the machine. I think our bodies are a necessity of evolution. We need them to fulfill our aspirations. Also I think our minds and the knowledge we have are different. Meaning the mind and that brain are not the same.

The Ghost in the Machine is a famous book by Gilbert Ryle in which he attempted to dispose of belief in the mind as an independent entity. Yet if the mind is produced by the brain its activity must depend on neurological mechanisms and it cannot be responsible for its activity. All our thoughts, feelings, values and decisions must be determined and beyond "my" or "your" control for the simple reason that there is no self to do the controlling!

Your idea that we need our bodies to fulfil our aspirations implies that we are distinct from our bodies. :)

I agree. Our bodies certainly make our lives richer but the most precious aspects of our existence are intangible. How can truth, goodness, justice, freedom, beauty, friendship and love be explained mechanistically?

To say that mental states can be controlled by the brain in what ever way it is trained implies that there is a trainer :)

I take your point !

We are the trainer... who's to say that there isn't a part of the brain that performs this function, after all there are 2/3 rds of the brain ( I'm told) that we do not use.

i.e when a person suffers a stroke, they are left with scar tissue, the very tissue that may be responsible for transmitting signals to their limbs or what ever part of their body has been affected by the stroke, making it impossible for the limbs etc. to respond, with physio therapy and continual thought to that part of the body whilst various exercises are carried out, very slight movement can be achieved. Over a period of sometimes many months, depending on the severity of the stroke, the person can gain a good percentage of use in a limb that might have been otherwise paralyzed.

Every day knowledge is soaked into our brain via... radio,TV,PC,people, things, visuals, which I believe we store and sometimes forget about... it only takes the relevant key to unlock the memory and everything comes back to us.

People who have hypnotherapy remember things from when they were a few years old, things they never thought they new, it only took the correct way to get into their mind to bring these things to the fore, in their conscious mind they were totally unaware of these memories... like I've said I think from the time that we are born, memories are stored, just like our own personal p.c.

It's very difficult to explain exactly, I do think the brain is the engine of the body.