UKC

Just musing on the way to work this morning of what makes a person, and does a person ever stop being a person (unless they die)

A few hypothetical scenarios first -

If you transferred a persons mind (thought processes and memories) to a computer, does that then become that person?

If you cloned a persons body but they had no mind, is that still that person?


Some realistic scenarios now to build on those -

If they have an accident and suffer damage (i.e. 1st degree burns) to most of their body so that they are no longer recognisable, are they still the same person?

If they loose their memory (head trauma etc) are they still the same person?

If they have advanced dementia so that they can no longer think or remember in the same way, are they still the same person?


Feel free to add any other scenarios that come to mind and any comments please.

In reply to ow arm:

I am watching a close relative move into what I suppose we shall soon have to call dementia; one of the reasons why it's hard to see what is happening is that she is changing, but actually getting more like herself. By that I mean that certain personality traits (not the comfortable ones!) are being magnified as she gets more confused and more stressed. So yes, she is (for now) very much the same person. It's an interesting process.

I expect it isn't always like that. My father, in his last couple of months, likewise became much more like himself, but in his case the nice side of him was magnified. So it was a bit like watching someone moving into heaven. Equally interesting!

Both those examples are very different from a trauma that wipes out memory or changes personality.

L

In reply to ow arm:

I would argue it’s definitely the mind or the information contained within the brain (same thing really) over the body and that it does not have to be a mind in a body to make a person.

If you ask what am “I”? As in, what is that voice inside my head, what thinks, what feels, what decides? Then it’s ultimately just a mass of electrical signals in the brain firing across coded structures of interconnected neurons which are constantly rewiring themselves as we learn and experience things via our senses.
Which is why I wonder why in the medical world they seem so instant on keeping bodies alive when the mind has clearly been destroyed or damaged beyond use. When the brain has been so badly damaged whether by illness or injury that the ‘person’ has gone or what remains is so broken and distorted is can hardly still be considered a ‘person’ or maybe an intelligence might be a better term. In such a case I see no reason to keep the arms, legs and chest alive, that’s just the packaging really.

I’ve always said to my friends and family that if I’m involved in a major accident and I’m left with significant brain damage to the point where I can’t really think properly anymore (when as an entity I can no longer be considered an intelligence), they should find a way to kill me and make it look like an accident (wheel chair rolling out in front of a truck / train / off a cliff would do.) If on the other hand, I was badly injured and say left paralysed from the neck down but with my brain intact then I should be left to decide for myself if I want to go on living because the ‘me’ inside is still intact and it’s simply a matter of quality of life and what I’m willing to accept / able to adapt to, but if ’I’m’ damaged beyond a point then all is lost as far as I’m concerned.

In reply to Lord_ash2000:

Amen to that, one day perhaps the medical community will realise this too

In reply to ow arm:


I think the medical community know it now. It's finding 300 MPs willing to risk their seats by saying that killing people is OK under certain circumstances that's the tricky bit.

In reply to ow arm:
Only fools and horses covered the same thing with Triggers Broom, his broom has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles in 20 years. Is it still the same broom despite it being replaced 14 times?

youtube.com/watch?v=BUl6PooveJE&

In reply to Wiley Coyote:

I'm not too sure the Popes that keen on the idea either, and he seems to have some influence with quite a few people around the place.

In reply to JoshOvki:

this thread was worth starting just for that memory, thanks!

In reply to cander:


But the Pope's (or anybody else's) influence only matters when it's converted into votes at the ballot box. MPs know there are too many people strongly against it to risk their seats by voting for it. Even if a majority of people are in favour of assisted dying (and I've no idea what the split is) the people who are against it are more likely to feel more strongly and therefore more likely to see it as an issue which would sway where they put their cross come an election. For most of the pros it's not a vote-changing issue. As a result MPs, quite understandably, give the antis' views extra weight and dismiss a lot of the pros when it comes deciding which side to support on assisted dying in Parliament.

In reply to ow arm:

this leads to some interesting philosophical questions like, for example:

1. damage to certain areas of the frontal lobes change a person's personality - still a living, functioning human being but , for example, more impulsive and less responsible. Are they still the same person?

2. it is becoming increasingly clear that conscious experience is very much the minority of mental activity. Decisions are effectively already made by the time our conscious selves become aware of them. Imagine an accident which depleted only the conscious experience but left the unconscious person intact (realistically a difficult accident since consciousness isn't actually located anywhere in the brain but as a thought experiment...)
Would what remains be the same person?

In reply to Bob Hughes:


It also leads to questions of what is it that makes it a person?

Is it the level of intelligence? What about chimpanzees and crows then ... They are pretty smart and have been shown to be able to problem solve using tools. Does that mean that the mentally handicapped or those of low IQ shouldn't be considered people?

Is it a level of self awareness then? Well what about the thought experiment posited above then?

Is it a genetic thing? Well would a 30 chromosomed individual who was born via spontaneous mutations be considered a person? No?

The consideration of what a person actually is is probably something which everyone thinks is pretty clear but probably has all sorts offed be conditions where it gets fuzzy.

There's currently a case being heard In New York State as to whether a chimpanzee can be considered a person.

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/chimpanzee-personhood-hearing/

In reply to zebidee:
Various films have addressed similar issues of what it is to be human, I robot is one that springs to mind, but there are very many I cant remember right now.

Giving human values / rights to a non human is going to be such a massive task as it not only implies they should be treated differently but it calls in to question what many people believe, and undermines many religious bases, especially in christianity where god created man seperate to the animals and that we are special

Im definately special, but I dont think of animals as people, but do give them their own respect and dont take a life meaninglessly regardless of the organisms complexity.
I often respect a bacterium more than I do a sheep when im ill or have an infection.

In reply to Wiley Coyote:

The medical community have always known it. Keeping people alive at all costs, no matter how miserable their existence, is a relatively recent phenomena. Mrs Ridge has purely anecdotal evidence of a time when (hypothetically) a quick nod between patient, family and medics resulted in a whacking great shot of morphine when it all got too much to bear.

In reply to ow arm:


It seemed to be one of Asimov's pet topics. Done particularly well in The Positronic Man (the book not the film).

The lead character - a robot - is found by its (his) owners to show creativity and individualistic traits. By the end the book prompts the question as to what actually makes a human a person?

Good book.

In reply to Ridge:


I guess the problem is that there needs to be traceability for those instances where someone just had a bit of a twitch which was mis-construed. Unfortunately the result of preventing these "knowing" situations from occurring also results in people being kept alive beyond their days.

On a similar but unrelated topic I was chatting with my dad at the weekend - he was telling me about when he was a traffic cop in the 70's they got called to a hit and run - found the car involved parked outside the owners house where he was in bed still blitzed out his skull. So the bloke got done for drink driving, leaving the scene of an accident, etc. etc.

Nowadays they wouldn't be able to charge the bloke because they wouldn't have sufficient proof that he was actually the driver involved unless there had been witnesses, to him getting in and/or out of the car and all that stuff.

It isn't always progress I guess.

In reply to ow arm:

Je pense, donc je suis
Descartes 1637

All of modern philosophy starts with these words.

In reply to zebidee:



I think once you get to this level then the word "person" is no longer useful, person already constrains you to the realms of human being. A better word might be an 'intelligence', as i't's that higher level of consciousness and understanding which sets us apart from other animals.

So a 30 chromosomed individual who was born through mutation or even grown in a lab might not be technically human but assuming they were still fully functional and at least on par with humans then thy would certainly be considered a consciousness, intelligent being as humans consider fellow humans to be in general. The same could be said of advanced alien life if they came and settled here peacefully. You could have many different species while regarding them all as 'people', think star trek etc.

Which now leaves intelligence. In short, yes I think it is intelligence which defines us as a 'person'. A person in this context is any being operating on a level where a human can interact with on an intellectual / emotional level through in depth communication. So this would include any set of genetics which leads to an intelligent being human born or otherwise, it would include advanced life from other worlds and could even include advanced machine intelligence's (AI) which may well pop up in the next 100 years or less.

It wouldn't include animals such as chimps, crows or dolphins, not to say they are not intelligent (by the standards of other animals) but lets face it, they are light years behind humans. But none the less, we can see and understand that they have a level of intelligence, with chimps in particular (probably due to there physical likeness) we can relate on a certain level and as such tend to give these creatures more value than others. To highlight this, typically someone is going to be much more bothered if they ran over a chimpanzee than if they stepped on a snail.

The last point and no doubt most controversial is the mentally handicapped issue. We've said above that it's the mind that turns a human shaped lump of meat into a person, the vessel is not important, it's what contained within. So if you take a severally mentally handicapped human being and ask are they a 'person' in the sense that has been discussed then the unfortunate answer is no. They are technically human by birth but they can not be considered to have the awareness, mental abilities or even possibly consciousness of a genuine intelligent entity operating on the level of a typical human. Now of course it's not black and white, it's a gradient and it's difficult to know where to draw the line on what is and isn't a sentient intelligence. A partially smart chimp might be mentally more capable that severally mentally disabled human so it if we're going to draw a conservative line and have already concluded chimps are under it then it follows some humans must be too.

In reply to ow arm:
This guy has a very good answer: a person is their 'connectome'.

youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0&

In his book, he talks a lot about ways to preserve a person after death, concluding that cryonics is useless because the process destroys the connectome; whereas plastinating process that preserves the connectome could be used to store it and then to recreate it computationally (as in a Rimmer hologram or something).

In reply to Jon Stewart:

What a superb talk. Thanks for sharing. (And what soggy, dim, dull, unresponsive audience he had!) I love the way he gently puts the reductionists in their place, in genes not being the whole story, and emphasises the mysterious role of neural activity. As an identical twin I also endorse his comments in that respect, i.e. re. how twins become different.

In reply to ow arm:

It also raises some interesting questions should we ever be visited by an advanced civilisation, would,they recognise humanity as an intelligent race or more like a group of ants. If they regarded us and ants we could be in line for some pest control simply because they were so advanced. Any civilisation (assuming one sufficiently advanced exists) sufficiently advanced to have developed interstellar travel would probably be so advanced they might struggle to regard us as anything other than bright hairless monkeys.

In reply to kipper12:

whos to say they havent and decided it wasnt worth making contact, picked up a few specimens and buggered off?

In reply to ow arm:

As a,result of picking up hillbillys from the Midwest of the USA perhaps!

In reply to ow arm:

Interesting topic - the philosophers call it 'personal identity'. Your initial musings seem to concern the issue of the criteria by which we judge x to be a person - e.g. perhaps x is a person if x has a mind. But your various scenarios concern the criteria by which we judge whether a person, A, remains A having undergone a process of change, or thereby becomes a different person, B.

The first issue is just a question of what we generally agree the word 'person' means. So we could, for example, agree to call species such as apes, dolphins, elephants and dogs 'people', along with human beings. Where we draw the boundaries is quite arbitrary.

The second issue is more interesting. Samuel Beckett believed that each person does not remain the same person through a lifetime, but is a rather a succession of different people. The philosopher Derek Parfitt famously held (and as far as I know still does) that what matters is not personal identity, but personal survival. Parfitt thinks that whether A remains A or becomes B is of little importance. Instead, what matters is that the elements of A's mental life, crucially memory, form a continuous chain from one state of being to another, so that even if A becomes B, A can be said to have survived.

But of course there are many, especially those of a religious bent, who disagree with Parfitt's emphasis on survival over identity. I don't suppose there will ever be universal agreement on the subject!

In reply to kipper12:


What do you mean, "should we ever be"?!?! Don't you know aliens are among us now, disguised as TRAFFIC WARDENS and CINEMA USHERS????? If you don't believe me, go and ask about it right now at your local police station (they know, and by law they have to tell you).

Joking aside, great thread.

In reply to ow arm:


If we thought that was possible, even in theory, then maybe. My money, however, is on the brain doing something fundamentally different to computing, so this would be entirely impossible in principle as well as in practice.


How do they end up with a body (including a brain) but no mind? And if by 'cloned' you mean 'grow a new one from the same genes' then you end up with an identical twin, who would be a different person of course. The 'connectome' view explains the difference between twins as Gordon says


Here's a good one. This lad rolled head-first down a hill, had a stroke as a result and went from being a beery straight rugby lad to a camp gay hairdresser. Same person?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17703018

Sounds to me like a big change of connectome after the death of a load of neurones. So same brain but a different enough connectome to be described as different person perhaps?

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Thanks - after checking up on the definition of mind I realise I chose the wrong word, perhaps no memories would be more appropriate. You get what I mean though.

The progression through different personalities throughout an individuals lifetime is interesting and does seem to correlate with my own fairly short experience so far, there is a certain aspect that remains constant though and I suspect that is the part that was initially formed through childhood experiences

In reply to ow arm:

In William Gibson's "Neuromancer" there's an AI which has "limited Swiss citizenship". The idea knocked my socks off when I first read it. It sort of still does.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I think the hardware of a computer is fundamentally different to the brain (I don't really know much about brains), but I would imagine you can model pretty much anything in software given enough resources.

In reply to Tony Naylor:

I wasnt that surprised by that book, a bit of a dull read I thought but its a well acclaimed book. different tastes I suppose. Iain M Banks books are quite interesting in the AI field too.

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

I agree that with enough resources you could create software that does certain specific things that a brain does - such that an appropriate behavioural response might be elicited. Driving would be a good example, and possibly making small-talk. But I think there are some tasks that can't be achieved by computation because they hinge to crucially on consciousness. For example, any tasks that involve understanding what another person is thinking and feeling where they don't explicitly express it - especially where deception of some degree is involved. An example might be recruitment: I don't think it's possible to computationally analyse even written job applications, to sift those that are clearly made-up to fulfil the job advert from those that are compellingly real, full of genuine relevant experience, personality, and have precisely the right 'feel' for the kind of person an employer is looking for.

How would you begin writing software to do this job? Can you imagine how you'd approach it?

What's needed for that task is conscious imagination: to build a mental picture of the person from the way they use language as well as the information given. Only a conscious thing that uses language itself to express its own conscious world is able to perform this kind of task: it is inherently conscious as opposed to computational.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I'm not saying this is possible now, or in any foreseeable future, or ever really. I just don't see it as impossible, in theory at least. Perhaps anything in the physical world can be modelled. If conciousness is rooted in the physical world, then perhaps it can be modelled in software. Lots of ifs!

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:


I kind of agree: once we've worked out how the brain generates consciousness (and how it applies it to problems such as predicting someone's behaviour from their body language or facial expression) - which I fully expect to be the execution of a physical process - what else could it be? - then we could model it. But that understanding of how the brain works is crucial and absent, and as such, conscious mental processes can't be modelled.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I don't really know much of anything about the brain, but I seriously doubt it's well understood to a level to build a model of it. But if you model the physical brain accurately, you would think conciousness would come out of that model.

Unless you believe conciousness is something extra. I'm guessing you don't!

In reply to 1poundSOCKS:

Yes I agree (damn it! I was hoping for more of a debate...). Thing is, while we understand quite well how individual neurones work, and we're beginning to understand how certain regions' activity correlates with conscious experience, we have no idea how the neural activity actually generates consciousness. Knowing that a load of neurones in regions x and y and z firing correlates with experiencing the smell of coffee isn't much use when it comes to modelling the smelling of coffee.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

You're far too reasonable and lacking in ego.

Thinking about conciousness is hard. I can happily sit around pondering lots of things, but thinking about conciousness seems to be like hitting a brick wall.

In reply to ow arm: 'Manners maketh a man'

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I used to think that but not long ago driving a car through traffic was one of the examples of "things a computer will never be able to do" and yet google is now merrily sending cars round northern california. The only crashes they've had are being rear-ended by another (human-driven) car. So was chess and yet here we are getting beaten by super computers.

I'm also not sure necessarily that consciousness is as important as we think it is. Are humans better at detecting deceit than computers because we are conscious? Or is much of what we are doing performed sub-consciously ? (see your recent thread on free will for examples). A lot of the time we just "feel" that someone is lying; not necessarily a conscious process .

Maybe what you mean is more self-awareness than consciousness. But even here I don't really see why you couldn't build a computer that at least replicates the functions of self-awareness if not, necessarily, being self-aware themselves.

Which raises the prospect of a computer which lies to you....

In reply to ow arm:
and at last the question of 'what is consciousness' surfaces from the murky waters of introspective philosophising. Does consciousness exist, or is it just a different level of sensory integration?

Bob Hughes - A computer that lies to you already exists, its any version of Windows - time remaining 10 seconds (30 seconds later) time remaining 5 seconds....

In reply to ow arm:
http://www.discworldemporium.com/index.php?route=product/product&produc...

In reply to marsbar:
I liked the Wintersmith but not sure what the ring has to do with this thread?

In reply to Bob Hughes:


But that can only ever have been a resource consideration. Driving is explicitly computational - it's a matter of processing specific data inputs to produce specific motor outputs.


I don't buy that. Chess is the most obvious task to accomplish computationally - although that might be a different technique to a more intuitive non-computational? approach taken by the human player.


Interesting point: even if much of the brain processes that lead us to think that someone's lying aren't conscious then I still believe they're non-computational. And I'm saying that the understanding of how another conscious mind works - only possibly if you've got one - is crucial. So the consciousness of both the liar and the listener are critical but not the whole story.


I mean consciousness. I think it's something distinct that arises from (only a subset of) processes in the brain that are not computation. Some things the brain does are computational in nature (controlling bodily functions), some are subconscious mental functions which are hard to access (which may or may not be computational), and others arrive into consciousness (and we have no idea what makes some brain activity part of the consciousness subset). Quite how tied-together the non-computational processes are with the conscious ones I have absolutely no idea about, but I don't think that it's a coincidence that non-computational information processing and consciousness are both things we can't explain.

As such, I'm not sure we'll get that far creating a computer that's any good at mimicking human behaviour, of the 'zombie' type. If we don't understand how the thing we're trying to model works, then there's no chance of modelling it. The state of the art conversations with computer programmes are really really lame.

http://www.worldsbestchatbot.com/Competition_Transcripts


Looking at the above there are some pretty fundamental problems to solve, better and faster computation ain't going to be enough.

In reply to ow arm:


Of course it exists! Have you ever noticed the difference between being awake and dreamless sleep?

In reply to Jon Stewart:


Hmmm. Maybe, although how is your experience of dreamless sleep different from any period of amnesia (during which you might well have been apparently conscious)?

In reply to Dave Garnett:

Well it isn't, but while some people like to do down consciousness and pretend it's not really a distinct thing, it's rather an unusual twist to suggest that there's more of it out there than we realise. If something doesn't appear to be there, then it's either because it's not there or it's hidden. Occam's razor would tell us to assume the former rather than the latter.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I wasn't suggesting that, more that what seems intrinsically and subjectively obvious might not be very helpful here.

In reply to Dave Garnett:


They are very different. Dreamless sleep is something you dont experience. A period of amnesia is somethin you experience but then forget - or never remember in the first place but you have still experienced it. I once banged my head snowboarding and was unable to record new memories for about half an hour. I was remembering nothing but still experiencing what was going on.

In reply to Bob Hughes:


How do you know?

In reply to Dave Garnett:


I don't see what is helpful about ignoring or deny the intrinsically and subjectively obvious. What is there to suggest that the intrinsically and subjectively obvious isn't the case?

In reply to Jon Stewart:

It might be reasonable to describe someone in a severe coma where there is little mental activity and certainly no conscious mental activity, as having a body (including a brain) but no mind. Cloning could in principle induce such a coma. But clearly the clone would in any case be a different person from the person cloned, even with a fully active mind.

I'd say there's no definitive answer to this question. However, it seems to me that an intrinsic part of being a person is the fact that we change physically and mentally over time. So, a person does not become a different person just because he or she changes, even if the change is quite radical. In this case you might say that the same person has acquired a different personality.

How about people with multiple personalities? Are they a collection of different people inhabiting the same body?

In reply to Dave Garnett:
Because i managed to ski down to the bottom and talk to friends so i assume i was experiening something

In reply to Ratfeeder:

I think in answer to the OP, a person is the bag of bones and brains and stuff, so long as it's operating well enough to be intermittently conscious. So one person per body, which changes over time (usually gradually but occasionally dramatically).

I think if you're in a coma, just being passively kept alive and having no consciousness then you've lost the most important bit and aren't really a person any more. You could replace the heart with a mechanical pump and it would still be a person and indeed the same one, but you couldn't replace the brain in the same way. We'd keep someone alive in the hope that that person might return, rather than because there's any person still left once consciousness has gone.

In reply to Jon Stewart:



Yeah I'd agree with all that, from a common sense point of view!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

You're making a distinction between computational and non-computational (human, intuitive) which I don't think is all that clear cut. We don't know why or how we detect deceit in others but it is at least possible that it is a "computational" process of collecting data about the minutiae of how someone is behaving and setting that into a context of "does what he is saying make sense and / or suit him to say that" - all that could be a "computational" process that feels like something different because our experience of consciousness just doesn't feel very computational. Playing chess is a good example - there is a theory (i've been trying to find the reference but can't) that human chess players short-cut the computational horse power used by super computers by relying on memory of millions of moves in thousand of games over their lifetimes. The experience is of an intuitive "feeling" that a certain move isn't right but the process is actually querying a databae (memory).

It is easy to say now that driving a car and playing chess are explicitly computational tasks but only 10 years ago the mainstream view was that driving a car was too complex a task for a computer ever to complete and there were some very fundamental computing problems that didn't look like the kind of thing that simply chucking more processors and more data at the problem were going to solve. One of those is image recognition, which computers are still bad at. It is very difficult to get a computer to recognise a chair, for example. You can programe it to remember what a specific chair looks like but show it a similar but subtley different shape and it won't recognise it as a chair. this sounds like a "computational" problem but it still has computers stumped despite moore's law and its equivalent for memory storage.

Some of the things which computers can do are starting to seem very "human-like" - there is software which can accurately tell whether a song will be a hit or not (which is used by the music industry to identify hit songs). It seems there are certain elements in music which make a song a sure-fire hit and it works equally well for modern popular music as it does for 18th century classical music which were the hit songs of their day. Again, i can't remember the reference but will look it up.

In reply to ow arm:
Sorry didn't explain properly.
It was the only website I could find with the relevant part of the book. Scroll down and its got the words, iron enough to make a nail etc.

In reply to Bob Hughes:


Certainly isn't, it's a fascinating open-ended question for science with no hint of an answer at the moment.


Yes, absolutely. But given that we don't know how the thing in question - consciousness - works, there isn't much to recommend the theory that it's computation. It seems more like grabbing the nearest metaphor for want of anything better, as Susan Greenfield says here:

youtube.com/watch?v=G8VwDOK3Lio&


Could be - but while that argument works OK for chess moves, I think it runs out of steam when one thinks about tasks involving theory of mind. I think it's fair that with conscious minds, it takes one to know one and until we create a conscious mind through computation - how? - we're not going to get computers to do tasks that need a theory of mind, like detecting the fake job application.


I'm not sure it's such a modern view. After all, the Turing machine is quite an old invention!


I'm not sure it does really. It sounds like something virtually impossible to do with computation, but easy to do by human abstraction: understanding the function of a chair and running through the possibility of sitting on whatever object is presented and how that would feel - along with ideas about design and how people respond to different forms - makes the task easy. But where would you start taking a computational approach?


Interesting! What a horrible thought, that people are so predictable...although I bet it didn't predict Mad World by Gary Jules as xmas no.1 2003!

In reply to Jon Stewart:


What they call the 'qualia' of experience clearly creates problems for any mind-brain identity theory. What physically goes on in the brain - neural activity, c-fibres firing etc. - forms a causal nexus describable in bio-chemical terms and is the observable basis for testing theories about how the brain works. But the relationship between that physical level of description and the conceptual level at which we describe our own 'mental events' as we actually experience them cannot be established in the same way. Types of experience, such as the smell of coffee, cannot be identified with certain types of neural activity. A highly plausible materialist theory is Donald Davidson's 'anomalous monism', which rejects type-type identity theories in favour of a token-token theory. That's to say, Davidson holds that each and every 'mental event' is identical with some physical event in the brain, such that in principle it has a physical (brain) description as well as an ordinary psychological description; but mental events cannot be predicted from physical brain events, since they are 'anomalous'.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

Fascinating post, thanks, but will take me some time and googling to digest. Cheers.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

If I've understood correctly, then I agree (from intuition mostly) that while brain states are correlated with mental states, to identify them with mental states is just to ignore the existence of the mental states. Which would seem pretty daft to me: we can see brain activity that results in no mental state at all, that which is going on to control our unconscious functions while we are asleep; and we can see with fMRI brain activity which is correlated with mental states. Since we subjectively know the difference, we have to conclude that some brain activity is just brain activity, while other brain activity gives rise to particular mental states.

I would go as far as to say I find the denial of the existence of qualia rather annoying. OK, it's an intellectually tenable position, but it's also one that's instantly disproved by a second's experience of being conscious. So with that in mind and a bit of fMRI evidence, we know that mental states exists and are correlated with brain states, but we don't understand what makes certain brain activity give rise to mental states but other activity not. It's a mechanism that's missing, rather than the answer to a particularly puzzling philosophical question.


From what I've understood about this, I'm not certain all the ingredients are necessary - it all seems to over-complicate matters without adding evidence for a particular view (but I say that as someone with a scientific background who can't really see how philosophy can ever solve a problem or propose a meaningful theory, rather it gives us ways to think about things and the broader context of science). Surely where we're at is that dualism is dead because it's obviously made-up, only a physicalist (monist?) theory makes sense and is supported by what we see happening in the brain. But we're lacking the scientific substance of how the brain brings mental states into existence. What anomolous monism brings to this party I haven't quite understood yet - it's certainly not an explanation, it sounds to me more like a fairly made-up stipulation about the unpredictability of mental states. I will carry on trying though...

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you (other things to do!). Your post is well thought out & I can see you've understood at least something of anomalous monism (AM). I think actually we share more or less the same view, except I think you are residually a dualist! If I understand you correctly I think you are saying we don't need any kind of mind-brain identity theory. I do sympathise with that view! However, if you do reject any kind of identity theory then you assume two distinct ontologies. The point of monism is that it supposes there to be only one ontology. For the idealist there is only the mental, and for the physicalist there is only the physical. For the neutral monist (Spinoza), the one ontology has both mental and physical aspects. What AM brings to the debate is a solution to the logical problem of how to be a physicalist without being a reductivist. What you and I and many others find objectionable is the tendency of physicalism to reduce the terms of mental phenomena to the terms of brain states - e.g. 'pain is nothing more than c-fibres firing'. For this amounts to and often explicitly results in the denial of qualia and even of consciousness. It is a denial of what it is actually like to be a living sentient being. Now the point is that while some physicalists didn't want to be reductivists, until AM came along there was no logically consistent way to avoid it. That's because all physicalist theories of the mind assumed, and most still do assume, type identities between the physical and the mental: a given type of mental phenomenon was thought in principle to be extensionally identical with a given type of brain state. The reason for this assumption is that type identities are required if the causal nexus of brain states is to explain and predict mental phenomena (pain = c-fibres firing, therefore whenever c-fibres fire there will be pain), but it means that a complete description in terms of physical (causal) properties is exhaustive (anything left over would be unacceptably unexplained). AM rejects this kind of reductivism by rejecting type identities. But it retains a physicalist ontology by allowing token identities. Each and every particular 'mental event' - e.g. an instance at time t of my smelling coffee - is at one and the same time both a mental phenomenon in the ordinary sense and a particular brain state of unspecified type. The type it is in one instance of my smelling coffee may not be the type it is in another. But one and the same event can be described in terms of both the mental and the physical. As a brain state it forms part of the causal nexus of physical properties. But as a mental phenomenon it does not - it is 'anomalous'. It is due to this anomalous level of description - 'the anomalism of the mental' - that mental terms are not reduced to neurological terms. They still denote what it is we actually experience as human beings. But this is clearly a trade off, since it means the causal nexus of physical properties has no explanatory or predictive power on the mental level. And perhaps that is the situation that neuro-scientists are in. For the sake of explanatory power, perhaps they have to abandon the level of ordinary mental description altogether and think only in terms of the brain itself and its causal relationship with the body? I suspect that scientists are not going to give up the quest for type identities, but perhaps the ongoing lack of success in that field suggests the project is not really viable? I don't know. I'm not sure if this make's anything any clearer. I'm still trying to understand it myself! Anyway,food for thought I guess, and thanks for your interest. Cheers.

In reply to Ratfeeder:
thanks for posting that was just within my grasp of understanding and I believe ive been thinking in line with AM theory, Id say its still a question of what it is that gives rise to conscious awareness as separated from subconscious awareness. Going with your example of c fibres and pain, that signal will reach the subconscious mind, but the degree to which it is made available to the conscious awareness is variable between individuals, perhaps based on repetition and experience. That would be the gated theory of pain whereby the subconscious effectively triages the relevant information it makes available to the conscious mind.

A more subjective and possibly impossible thing to determine is how an individual experiences a particular sensory input e.g. the smell of coffee. However it is as many have done, not unrealistic to assume that we will have very similar experiences of particular stimuli given that our physical composition is very similar. The main question is more of how aware we are of the finer details of that stimulus or sensation based on what information the subconscious passes to the conscious.

What the conscious mind is, I have no idea how to explain, but then its not something ive ever studied so im approaching this as a lay person and am intrigued by all the responses. However the other previous less technical replies to this thread are also interesting as they explore other aspects other than the scientific.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

Cheers, fascinating stuff, thanks for the more detailed explanation. Not easy this!


Kind of, there is I admit a sniff of dualism in how I see this. I'm sure there is formal/established language to describe my view, but I think it's best expressed with a metaphore: one of these LED display screens on which the message appears to move across - let's take one that says "consciousness is an emergent property of physical brain activity". You could describe this, if you were being simplistic, as a sign that said "consciousness is an emergent property..." and you'd be correct, but you'd be missing many of the important properties of the thing and giving the completely false impression that the letters were distinct physical objects. On the other hand, if you were being rigorous, scientific, yet rather dense, you could describe in great detail the electronics and the exact timings at which each LED went on and off; you could completely fail to omit the fact that it was a sign saying ""consciousness is an emergent property of physical brain activity" and yet still describe the the thing accurately and in great detail.

This latter way of describing the sign is how I view mind-brain identity, or ignoring consciousness, or denying the obvious existence of qualia. The former description states the bleeding obvious, is misleading and offers no insight. This is how I see dualism - a lazy or out-dated ignorance of what we know about the world, and a view that leads to erroneous conclusions (here, that physical letters exist on the sign). A proper description of this object needs two levels of understanding, and how they are linked together: the mechanism can be described, but you also need a completely different set of knowledge - that of language and meaning, plus how the human visual system interprets the lights as illusory movement - in order to describe the object. I suppose it's a difficult question as to whether language and concepts are part of the physical world or not, and if you take the view that they're not, then I guess that makes my view dualist. Now it all becomes rather circular when you consider that language and concepts are part of the physical world, as I would, by their existence in human minds which are an emergent property of physical brains as well as in writing or other physical forms. This is starting to make my head hurt.


Yes, exactly. Good old Spinoza, whaddaguy.


Well I'm not sure. Is my preferred description of mental states as an emergent property of the physical brain (from people like David Chalmers, Susan Greenfield, many others) not reductivist "in a good way"? It doesn't lead to the denial of qualia, it just admits openly that scientifically (reductively perhaps, if that's a word) we're missing an incredibly important part of the puzzle - the "hard problem".


And I don't see why type-type theories are problematic in principle.


This bit just sounds like over-clever and unnecessary philosophical trickery to me, used in order to retain something special and magic about minds. Why should they be special and magic and in principle unpredictable? It's not hard to imagine that with billions of neurons and trillions of synapses, human brains can never be predicted in practice, but that says nothing about some "law" preventing predictability (but of course that would involve knowing all the inputs too, totally impossible due the chaotic nature of the world).

Now I seem to be dangerously close to arguing that the brain is in fact a computer and the world is totally deterministic. I'm not: just because something obeys physical laws it doesn't mean it's doing computation, nor that it works deterministically - just probabilistically like everything else. A simple biological creature with a few neurones is quite predictable, a complex one with more neurons less so, only because it's more complex.

Does AM apply to roundworms that have a few neurons and probably not much in the way of a mind? Does it apply to cat or a money? Sounds to me like it relies on having some cut-off where the "anomolousness" begins. Something with only a few neurons is pretty much an automaton, and it's a sliding scale up to humans, with increasing levels of consciousness (this appears to me to be self-evidently true). This looks to me like a problem for any theory that puts minds up on a pedestal above the predictable laws of nature (even if they get rid of any dualism by clever philosophical trickery).


I don't think they've really got started yet. Let's review in a couple of hundred years, and I think we may well have an excellent understanding of how the brain generates consciousness

In reply to ow arm:

Thanks for starting such an interesting thread! The whole issue of consciousness - what it is, how it arises etc. - is so difficult isn't it? One could spend several lifetimes thinking about it and still be none the wiser!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Wonderful! Thank you so much. If I get a bit more time I shall give proper consideration to all your points. I certainly like the idea of consciousness as an emergent property of the brain - very Spinozan. I suppose what AM addresses with respect to that is the individuation of different states of consciousness and also propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires) and how this relates to the individuation of different brain states, rather than just the generic phenomenon of consciousness as such (though I guess that's what really interests scientists).

Davidson's philosophy of mind is in fact very influenced by Spinoza. It differs, of course, in being non-deterministic; one of the other problems AM is meant to address is that of free will. I think in that respect AM gives the nod to quantum theory - a real boon to physicalists who believe in free will!

I'm not quite with you regarding AM putting 'minds on a pedestal...' It's more a question of accepting that our ordinary psychological descriptions of mental events as we experience them are too imprecise for scientific (explanatory) purposes, though they do serve to explain our actions - Davidson holds that reasons (belief-desire pairings) can be causes. It is only on this level of description that mental events escape the 'nomological net'. In so far as mental events are physical events they do not.

Who knows what advances will be made in two centuries time! Probably our whole way of thinking about these issues will be laughed at.

I've really enjoyed thinking about all these issues again - I haven't done for an awfully long time!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Right, I have some time to spare so here goes. I don't think it would be doing justice to Davidson if I let your comments rest as they stand. I think there's quite a bit of misunderstanding there and that's probably my fault for not being clear enough. It seems the stumbling block to your appreciation of AM is the type-token distinction, which you see as mere sophistry. I can assure you that it isn't. It serves a serious purpose in relation to a genuine philosophical problem.

The first point to be clear about is that Davidson doesn't have anything against type identities as such. But what he is keen to show is that we can remain committed to the basic thesis of mind-brain identity, and hence a physicalist ontology, even if type identities don't work. And it does look pretty unlikely they they could work in certain cases (I'll explain why in a moment). A type theory, like any scientific theory, needs to be able to cope with the most difficult cases, not just the easiest ones. So the problem is that unless every type of mental event can in principle be distinguished, explained and predicted in terms of a definable set of physical properties (a physical type), the theory will be false. If the type theory is the only kind of identity theory in town, and it's false, then our commitment to a physicalist ontology becomes impossible to sustain, and that opens the door to occultism.

So, what sorts of mental events would present possibly insurmountable problems for a type theory, and why? Let's look at propositional attitudes - beliefs, desires, intentions. Ok, so I have a desire to climb Right Unconquerable, and I believe that RU is in the Plantation area of Stanage Edge. From that belief-desire pairing I may well form an intention, which in turn will affect my behaviour. At some point I shall probably make my way to the Plantation area of Stanage Edge. But if my belief were different I'd be heading somewhere else. Let's say I've been misinformed and I believe (falsely) that RU is on Froggatt Edge. The difference of propositional content between those two beliefs makes a big difference to where I actually go, and to whether or not I satisfy my desire. It has quite a big effect on my life.

But how does this look on the level of the brain-states in terms of which the respective beliefs are physically realized? A type theory is going to have to discern a reliable difference between the respective sets of neural properties. It seems pretty unlikely, to say the least, that the 'belief that RU is on Stanage Edge' is going to have a reliably distinctive physical realization that can be identified whenever it occurs in any human brain under any circumstances. Yet that is what a type theory commits itself to doing.

A token theory, by contrast, makes no such commitment. Whatever state my brain is in - whatever the total description of all its properties and the relations between them happens to be at time t, is the physical realization of my total belief set at time t. It is almost certain that my brain will be in a different state when I believe that RU is at Stanage from when I believe RU is at Froggatt, but it will be impossible to identify which precise part of that different state has anything to do with the difference between those two beliefs. It may well be that two people share the same belief, or even the same total belief set (highly unlikely), and there will be many similarities as well as differences between the states of the two people's brains. But what among the multifarious similarities accounts for the sharing of the same beliefs? Impossible to say, surely.

So, perhaps we cannot even in principle discern what type of state constitutes the 'belief that-p' as distinct from the 'belief that-q'. But that does not mean the two beliefs are not physically realized or even that we cannot describe what the respective realizations are; it's just that we cannot know what it is about those respective realizations that accounts for the difference in belief.

The token theory even allows us to answer the question 'what is consciousness'. Consciousness is whatever state a person's brain is in when that person is conscious, and in principle that state could be described. But obviously it won't be the same state every time someone is conscious, even for the same person.

Hope this helps. I really don't see why this 'puts minds up on a pedestal above the laws of nature' - that's precisely what AM is trying to prevent! And actually I don't agree that the laws of nature are always predictable! Do we really understand them yet - I mean all of them?

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Sorry, I've been busy and missed the bus on a really interesting thread. the point I was making was merely that the big problem with consciousness as that we can't even reliably describe what is (at the moment) an barely verifiable and totally subjective phenomenon.

As for an example of how the subjectively obvious ain't necessarily so, how about the way that what appears to us to be a conscious and deliberate choice is preceded by the neurological origins of the action (I'm sure you are more familiar with this than I am). What seems to us to be intention turns out to be the brain reporting out to our consciousness what it's already in the process of doing.

To be clear I'm not implying dualism, I'm firmly in the the 'inevitable emergent phenomenon from any sufficiently complex system' camp.

In reply to Bob Hughes:

Possibly, although I know someone who used to fairly regularly wander around a hall of residence in her sleep, including sometimes responding to questions, with absolutely no memory of it at all.

I was making more of a philosophical point that memory is an essential component of consciousness. Without memory consciousness is untestable and has no meaning. Responsiveness is not consciousness.

In reply to Ratfeeder:
Thanks again. Lots to chew on here, but it's very difficult without getting a proper understanding of these difficult philosophical theories - and thanks for the help with that! At a fundamental level, I find it hard to understand arguments about a theory that doesn't even exist (a theory of how consciousness is generated), when I know that what will answer the question is evidence, rather than abstracting the properties of different theories that might possibly exist one day.

I think that everything we know about the brain so far points towards a type-identity theory (notwithstanding the fact that we can currently only correlate rather than identify brain processes with mental states because of the 'hard problem'). When we look at how the visual system works, we see certain types of neurones firing in certain regions when we are presented with say a light-dark boundary 5 degrees straight up from fixation; and we see a certain type of neurones firing in a certain region when that light-dark boundary move rightwards, compared to the neurones that fire when it moves leftwards. With fMRI we're constantly seeing types of neural activity correlating with types of conscious experience.


I don't agree. We're not presenting a fundamental theory of physics here we're doing biology. Biology describes structures and processes in living organisms, it doesn't have laws which hold in every case. The duck-billed platypus does not break the laws of biology and render them false! Biology is mainly carving things up into best-fit, but ultimately arbitrary categories, and this is how a type-type theory would work. Some mental experiences lend themselves well to being categorised, simple stuff like seeing a white patch of light on a black background. The mental experience of say elements of a novel you're reading resonating with certain things about you and your life that you can't quite put your finger on is less easily categorised. At this level of hard-to-categorise mental experience, we would essentially be in token rather than type identity territory, because the mental experience in question is made up of so many complex elements from different types. But that hasn't harmed our type theory, our biologists best-fit categorisation of mental events and the brain processes that bring them into being.



No it doesn't! Only a false abstraction of a type theory in a philosopher's mind has this problem. A real theory would tell you how information such as which routes are at which crags is stored and recalled, how desires and beliefs are conjured from the information laid down in memory and the past experience of action and feedback. Once this is understood generically, it matters not what information goes into those processes. For each individual, the content is unique (your understanding of Stanage is different to mine, although they have lots in common). It seems, looking from the 'connectome' perspective that we appropriate different bits of our brains to make structures of synapses to suit our needs. All our needs are different, all our connectomes are different, and so when you get down to beliefs and desires, which are highly individual, type-identity may become useless; whereas it's useful when thinking about generic experiences such as pain or vision. Science is not just about finding laws that hold in all cases as in physics, it's about forming useful descriptions of how things work.


Is it really worth asking what is possible in principle before we have a theory of how the brain works? This is where I get stuck, talking about the properties of things that aren't there!


I would say that that the statement is true but entirely unenlightening. Another true answer to that question is "consciousness is the experience of being conscious" but how these two statements of the bleedin' obvious relate to one another is the interesting bit - we're back at the hard problem again, and in my view it just can't be brushed under the carpet (I'm looking at you, Dennett).


Yes I think I see that now. But as you said in the previous post, AM is a way of shoehorning free-will into a physicalist theory of mind, and as someone who thinks free will is a silly made-up concept and doesn't have any useful meaning, that makes me suspicious.


Well...

No we don't know all the laws of nature by any stretch of the imagination, but the laws (of physics not biology of course) we do have make predictions, even if some of them are probabilistic.

Cheers!

In reply to Dave Garnett:


Funny thing is, to me that's quite intuitive really. Maybe this is a bit odd, but I don't feel that 'I' am the one in control. I'm just a biological entity that has evolved to have a mind, and it's biology that's calling the shots, not me.


That's a different camp to me. I don't think consciousness is inevitable at all, I think it has specifically evolved because it's useful. Until evidence suggests otherwise, I'll continue to believe that only a complex mush of neurons, doing something particular, can generate it.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I'm just a biological entity that has evolved to have a mind, and it's biology that's calling the shots, not me.

Maybe, but the fact that mind arose in this way doesn't prevent it from being able to generate free will as a useful by-product. And in the case of something as slippery as free will I guess the subjective experience is all that matters. I'm not sure many people see themselves as passengers in their own heads rather than drivers, but I agree it's not as obvious as it seems.

Obviously, in biological systems, something as costly and complicated as a brain in which consciousness arises (and it really is very complicated) is only going to evolve if its useful. That doesn't mean that complicated brains just short of consciousness aren't useful, and of course, unless you've suddenly gone over to directed evolution, the complexity didn't arise with the 'aim' of consciousness. Whether 'post conscious' evolution has selected for higher levels of consciousness is an interesting question. I certainly see consciousness as a spectrum rather than a sharp step-change but it's not clear to me that it's consciousness per se that's being selected for.

You being a bit biologist though. In principle, I don't see why consciousness shouldn't be possible in non-biological substrates of sufficient complexity, although I agree that it's hard to see how it would arise naturally. Then again, it's a big universe.

In reply to Jon Stewart:
What a fascinating thread!


I think you're really onto something here - I always thought that the type/token debate is red herring. All it really points to is the question of how fine-grained our mechanical/physical understanding of the processes has become. Clearly, where the apparent mental phenomenon is a complex mesh of inter-related 'stuff', then our matching physical state will need to be equally complex, and, as you rightly point out, probably unique to individuals and circumstances. This, actually, could be part of what makes a person; a contingent mess of jury-rigged systems and half-formed connections that get updated, revised, used, forgotten, stuck on repeat, hated, loved, resisted, embraced, talked about, hidden, muddled up and otherwise messed about with over the course of a lifetime.

Something to throw into the debate here is that I tend toward a functionalist theory. I don't really think the 'mental event'/'physical event' distinction is relevant - it's just an extension of the limitations of our understanding as alluded to above. The problem of consciousness is often framed by the apparent weirdness that brains/people don't only have a functional state, but that there is also something that it is LIKE to be in that state. To my mind that isn't a problem, it's a solution. The apparent mental state just is what it is like to be in the functional state - it's nothing different or special. Presumably there is something that it is 'like' to be a car on the M1 north of Chesterfield. The fact that it's not 'like' anything that it is 'like' to be a 33 year old man buying a toaster tends to make us dismiss it as either a fiction or as irrelevant. The problem of consciousness might just be a kind of observational bias. Is this right? Who knows, but it at least highlights that what seems intuitively and subjectively obvious doesn't always help - to me the issue of 'likeness' just collapses the consciousness debate to nothing, whereas others feel the opposite.

A final point that this thread raised for me is the importance of the fact that brains exist in bodies. My reaction to reading this thread would be different if you made me do it with a hand in a kettle full of boiling water. I might be less patient and attentive. The hormonal bath that we exist in, and the way that our physical presence structures our sensory inputs and reflexive responses has a complex and reflexive relationship with our decisions, behaviours and thoughts. This is one of the reasons why the notion of a person as being somewhere in the connection between a particular mind and a particular body is sort of a tautology - the body, from head to toe, is part of the mind. Maybe...

Thanks for so many great posts everyone - really good reading.

In reply to hamsforlegs:
So conciousness as a sort of epiphenoma of complex neural processes seeking more ever conciousness? Is this the link between religion and human biology?

I'm firmly of the the view that we are not only our CNS, that's just part of our body/mind though obviously an important one, loose a limb, undergo deprivation or illness and our experience of ourselves changes acutely sometimes irrecoverably - even if no physical damage occurs to the CNS.

Sorry if I'm preaching to the converted but there lots of good fMRI and PET studies of a whole spectrum consciousness. Brain states or feelings correspond very reliably with localised activity.

D

In reply to Dauphin:

A musical instrument,attached at the fingers,often makes a person.....

In reply to ow arm:

heard a story that a man blind since birth had a major hospital op,and afterwards defined the positions and numbersof the surgical staff and in minute detail defined the gear in the operating theatre,plus the pathways the staff had taken around the room.....

In reply to Jon Stewart:
I like your thinking a lot - certainly keeps me on my toes! You obviously have a scientific background and I respect that.

Of course you are absolutely right about the crucial importance of evidence - I wouldn't dispute that for one second. But the role of evidence in science is as a test for theories. You need a theory first, otherwise you don't know what the 'evidence' is evidence for, or what counts as evidence for it. If no theories exist concerning a given problem, we can at least speculate about what sort of theories might be devised and what properties they would require to be successful. Some of the most important theories in science have resulted from very bold conjectures based on intuition or inspired guesswork (one thinks of Einstein's relativity and Crick & Watson's work on the structure of DNA). Once the observable consequences of the theory have been logically derived from its premisses, the theory can be tested against the observable facts (usually in the form of a controlled experiment). However, what I think you are getting at is this. Before we can expect any worthwhile theories to emerge from a given field of study, we need a groundwork of sufficient empirical data. After all, it seems pretty unlikely that quantum theory could have been anticipated before the bizarre 'behaviour' of sub-atomic particles was (indirectly) observed. In the case of the human brain, gathering empirical data is work in progress (you'll know much more about that progress than I do). So yes, good point.


Yes, but since it's the type-identity theory that's reductive and not the token one, don't you think the 'hard problem' is more a problem for the type-theory than for the token-theory? In Davidson's own words, AM is 'the view that the mental and the physical are two irreducibly different ways of describing and explaining the same objects and events...It holds that mental concepts, though supervenient on physical concepts, cannot be fully analyzed or defined in physical terms, and claims there are no strict psycho-physical laws.'

Well yes, but don't you think biology is subject to the laws of physics?

>The duck-billed platypus does not break the laws of biology and render them false!

Neither does it break the laws of physics. But if there was ever a theory in biology which held that all mammals bear live young, then the existence of the monotremes is sufficient to falsify it. Of course it doesn't tear down the whole edifice of biology, but it does blow that particular little theory out of the water. And that's precisely how science works. Theories are proposed, put to the test, usually falsified, then replaced by better theories.

>...At this level of hard-to-categorise mental experience, we would essentially be in token rather than type identity territory, because the mental experience in question is made up of so many complex elements from different types. But that hasn't harmed our type theory, our biologists best-fit categorisation of mental events and the brain processes that bring them into being.

Well it may not have harmed the cases that seem to work, but what it fatally harms is a type-identity theory of the mind, such as that proposed, for example, by D.M. Armstrong in A Materialist Theory of the Mind (1968). What this theory claims is that all mental properties, or kinds, are reducible to, or reductively identified with, physical properties and kinds. Admittedly this is a philosophical theory. But it is exactly this sort of philosophical theory to which Davidson offered an alternative philosophical theory - AM.

Like the one that was in D.M Armstrong's mind! AM provides an alternative to it.

>... All our needs are different, all our connectomes are different, and so when you get down to beliefs and desires, which are highly individual, type-identity may become useless; whereas it's useful when thinking about generic experiences such as pain or vision. Science is not just about finding laws that hold in all cases as in physics, it's about forming useful descriptions of how things work.

So how does that go against AM?

Of course it is!

>This is where I get stuck, talking about the properties of things that aren't there!

Anyone who is going to come up with a theory of the mind will need to think about the properties that his or her theory must have in order to stand any chance of being successful.

My statement 'consciousness is whatever state the brain is in when someone is conscious' was a bit tongue in cheek! Yes, of course it's (almost) completely uninformative - unless, that is, the state in question is given a complete description. It's 'bleedin obvious' to a physicalist, but not to a dualist or an idealist, both of whom would strenuously deny it!

But isn't the concept of free will an integral part of how we describe our mental life on the psychological level? Without it we can't make sense of our notions of moral responsibility and culpability. And doesn't that reinforce Davidson's thesis that 'the mental and the physical are two irreducibly different ways of describing and explaining the same events'? What exactly are you suspicious of?

Thanks again. (Sorry about some of the quotes from your post not being italicized. I'm a bit new to all this).

In reply to Ratfeeder:


This is an interesting discussion in itself. I recently trained as an optometrist and did some psycophysics research as part of the degree. At the start of the project I (having studied physics before) asked my supervisor "OK, I get the experiment, but what is the research question? What hypothesis are we trying to falsify?". He didn't give me an answer, in fact he kind of rolled his eyes. I have a chemist friend who researches stuff somewhere in the middle of physics, chemistry and biology. She has exactly the same problem with students from a physics background, they always want to know what the theory is, because they think that you only do an experiment in order to falsify a theory.

Thing is, I now know that this isn't how the rest of science works: you have some 'thing' which could be a material or it could be the human perceptual system or whatever, that you want to know more about it. So you design an experiment in which you set up a bunch of conditions, and you see how the thing behaves under those conditions. Then you change only one condition (e.g. temperature, or the discrepancy in duration of two consecutive visual stimuli, or whatever) and you see how the behaviour of the thing changes. You don't know if it's going to change or how it's going to change, you're just holding everything constant and changing one thing. Then whatever results you get, you try to explain them using whatever relevant research has been done before. As a physicist (I've never actually been one but I did do an undergrad degree in it) I'd have shaken my head this and just said, "for goodness sake, you're doing an experiment without any falsifiable hypothesis?" but now I get it. Science isn't all physics with binary true or false fundamental theories: it's also exploring how the world behaves and attempting to describe and explain it.


Exactly, you're already on board!


No, exactly the same problem. In David Chalmer's words, "how is the water of the brain turned into the wine of consciousness?". The hard problem is the process, and AM offers nothing on front, because what we need is a scientific explanation of how it works,


But no one claims there are strict psychophysical laws. Although we have Weber's Law, and Ricco's Law and Bloch's Law, they're not 'real' laws like the laws of motion or thermodynamics. These are quantitative relationships that hold pretty roughly over certain ranges that point towards physical processes in the brain that create our perceptual experience. These laws, while not being strict are useful insights into generic (type of) physical processes in the brain that provide us with our perceptual conscious experience. Given that these laws hold in experimental conditions (statistically, over certain ranges) we seem to be doing fairly well in analysing mental concepts in physical terms, although we haven't achieved a full or complete analysis (thanks to both the hard problem, and the vast complexity involved).

I haven't yet grasped why - unless one was determined to it on a pedestal, and very special one which allowed it free will that other things don't have - the mind can't be in principle be fully analysable in physical terms. This seems a very important part of AM, and I can't yet see that it isn't entirely plucked out of wishful thinking.


Yes, biology is subject to the laws of physics but that doesn't mean you can describe it using the same language. The behaviour of particles is described best by mathematical laws that hold in all cases. Same goes for planets. Biological things however, due to their complexity are better described by words, diagrams and broad-brush stats. While they are subject to the laws of physics, biological entities cannot be described by them in reality - however I suppose in principle they can be.



And the point is that no such laws exist in biology, because they don't describe biological entities effectiely.


As above, that's how physics works, not how science works. Philosophers like to abstract the pure form of things, and in doing so seem to have said "physics is the most abstract, rule-governed form of science, and we like that, so we'll just assume that the rest of science works exactly like that too". It doesn't.


Quite possibly - without having read it, I can't comment on Armstrong's theory and whether I think it needs a rebuttal!


Maybe. I'd say they need to look at a lot of evidence and search for the best explanation. I'm of the view that when it comes to solving scientific problems, it is looking out at nature that provides the answers, not introspection.


I think our notions of moral responsibility are false, and we should look at the work practically. For example, we shouldn't lock up murderers because they've done something bad that they're culpable for, we should lock them up to stop them murdering anyone else. I'm with Sam Harris on this.


I am suspicious that Davidson objects to the idea of the mind as just a bunch of neurons creating consciousness for the purpose of getting biological organisms around the place, so that they can eat, shag, bring up kids, and effectively gather resources to go round the cycle again and again. He seems to want something more special, more space for free will; something that is still physicalist but doesn't kill off old-fashioned, romantic notions about human minds being something above and beyond bits of evolved machinery (or an emergent property thereof) that are only there to carry out the functions that biology dictates for them.

This discussion really does go to the core of things, doesn't it! Goodnight.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Hi. Sorry to come in half way into a fascinating discussion about 'what makes a person'. I’ve only this minute got connected to the internet again on my word processer. Up until now I’ve followed the discussion with immense frustration on my mobile phone. Ever tried to type something of depth on one of those?! Anyway, my opening definition of what makes a person would be,

That a person is some thing which can act upon, as well as be acted on by, natural laws. And the nearest object to such a thing is a human being

I know that this will arouse your suspicions, for as you say


It's a bit of mudslinging (in a friendly way I'm sure) to use words like 'old fashioned' and 'romantic notions' to describe the other person's view, but I suppose it could be that the biological machinery which drives your thinking is simply forcing you to say such things. You can't help it.

Now if you’ve already answered and got way past where I’m picking up I do apologise. Throw me a thread from where you now are so that I can cotton on. Thanks.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

You don't know if it's going to change or how it's going to change, you're just holding everything constant and changing one thing....As a physicist (I've never actually been one but I did do an undergrad degree in it) I'd have shaken my head this and just said, "for goodness sake, you're doing an experiment without any falsifiable hypothesis?"


Surely your hypothesis is "this one thing affects something I am measuring"? If you really had no hypothesis, you wouldn't know what to measure or what to change.

In reply to Jon Stewart:



I think these two issues are linked - just as describing liver function or breeding patterns in terms of physics would be unhelpfully combersome, I'm pretty sure that a full psycho-physical theory would be pretty useless in predicting whether Mike is hoping to cop off with Rita at the party this weekend. We'll normally prefer to use some sort of shorthand based on phenomena at a level of abstraction closer to the issues we're trying to predict or explain.


Yes; I think Davidson is hand-waving here, but to the extent that he is making a point I think he's wrong. Surely free will depends on things being really quite predictably determinate? If we can't reliably observe and predict what goes on around us, we're reduced to a 'sh*t happens' approach to the world. It's the fact that things (including people) tend to work to pretty reliable and determinate patterns that allows us to imagine the future, make plans and stage interventions in the world. And if Mike is pre-determined to cop off with Rita, will the inevitability will stop him enjoying it? I just can't see why that should be the case even theoretically?

In reply to Dauphin:


I've come across little summaries of these studies in philosophy reading, but have never got into the literature. I would probably struggle to understand it. In my case you are largely preaching to the converted, but my own opinion is based on intuition, so is basically made up...

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Very interesting post. Thanks for the time and effort you've taken to reply to my annoying posts! Sorry if I've been a pain in the bum.


Well D.M. Armstrong and other philosophers of the same 'school' did. If no one in biology does then that puts Davidson on their side. I think there's a certain irony here. If you say biology makes no claim to strict psycho-physical laws, and Davidson says there are no strict psycho-physical laws, then it seems you pretty much agree with Davidson (as opposed to Armstrong). I might add that Davidson, as well as being influenced by Spinoza, is significantly influenced by the later Wittgenstein (see below). It seems to me that your thinking, that's to say the philosophical position your thinking suggests, is closer to Davidson than you think!


If the mind were to be fully analysed in physical terms then you would need strict psycho-physical (i.e. psycho-bio-physical) laws to do it. Otherwise you're only going to get the correlations and best-fit descriptions which you say characterize biology.


I think you have a valid point here. I can see I have tended to generalize about the methods and language of science based on the model of physics! It's actually quite a Wittgensteinian observation, this. You could see the different branches of science as different 'forms of life' or 'language games' each with its own set of rules; applying the rules of one to another is a primary source of confusion. It's funny, I always took myself to be a Wittgensteinian (I did my post-grad thesis on his later work), but lately I've been somewhat influenced by Karl Popper (he is very dismissive of the later Wittgenstein!).


It's the influence of Plato. Disastrous! As above re. Wittgenstein.


Going by what you've said above, then yes, you would definitely think it needs a rebuttal. So did Davidson.


I agree. But you also need to think about what it is you're looking at.


I agree that a lot of them are false - especially when they are based on any sort of fundamental principle. I also agree that the law should not be punitive. You do realize you are expressing a moral view here?


If I thought AM was some kind of ploy to let the 'dear angels' in on a physicalist account of the mind, I'd consign it to the flames right now! But I see no evidence to suggest anything of the sort. My personal take on free will is a rather existentialist one. We're stuck with it, like it or not. Many people try to escape it, e.g. by joining the army, or a church. Why can't it have an evolutionary explanation, like other facts of life? And why should it be confined to humans? I would guess there's a spectrum of degrees of free will - the more complex the brain the greater the degree of free will (which really only means a greater capacity to choose between a greater number of options). I'm pretty sure that would have been Davidson's take on it too. I have always despised the efforts of so many people to distinguish humans as somehow unique and categorically distinct from all other species. We are all products of evolution and each species has its own characteristics. Humans just happen to have rather large brains in relation to their body size, as do dolphins. Just to be clear! Cheers.

In reply to Ratfeeder:
Not sure how you go about comensurating notions of free will with bigger complex brains - can you measure it? As you indicate we are pretty simple creatures, animals really. Eating, sleeping, f*cking. We manage to write poetry about it. But it seems to me that free will is the greatest experiental epiphenoma of the complex brain, related to problem solving and memory

I did some epistemology classes after a degree in physiology provoked an interest in philosophy of science. Found the logic fascinating but ultimately sophistry since not much of it us rooted in anything we can measure, my reductive training precluded any deep explorations. Liked Wittgenstein, Feyerabend and some of the Vienna boys the most, er Mach?

I did think however that both scientists and philosphers would benefit from some essential training in each discipline. Perhaps at the more illustrious institutions this happens nowadays?

D

In reply to Dauphin:

Thanks for the post. I think you're right that philosophers would benefit from a scientific training and vice versa. Some philosophers do come from a scientific background and that's usually when they become interested in philosophical problems that their scientific research raises. The mind-body problem has been around since the ancient Greeks and is a traditional area of philosophy - the philosophy of mind. I think it's difficult to avoid the philosophical issues if you're a scientist studying the functioning of the brain in relation to experience, thought and consciousness. There are lots of different positions you could take.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

"If I thought AM was some kind of ploy to let the 'dear angels' in on a physicalist account of the mind, I'd consign it to the flames right now! But I see no evidence to suggest anything of the sort. My personal take on free will is a rather existentialist one. We're stuck with it, like it or not. Many people try to escape it, e.g. by joining the army, or a church. Why can't it have an evolutionary explanation, like other facts of life? And why should it be confined to humans? I would guess there's a spectrum of degrees of free will - the more complex the brain the greater the degree of free will (which really only means a greater capacity to choose between a greater number of options). I'm pretty sure that would have been Davidson's take on it too. I have always despised the efforts of so many people to distinguish humans as somehow unique and categorically distinct from all other species. We are all products of evolution and each species has its own characteristics. Humans just happen to have rather large brains in relation to their body size, as do dolphins. Just to be clear! Cheers."

Hmm. Lots of emotive stuff here. It’s disapointing to see that mudslinging is alive and well even in so called philosophical debates.

As you say, free will, we’re stuck with it, or to put it another way, we’re blessed with it. And because we have free will some folk exercise it by sharing it with others rather than keeping it in a little bottle for themselves. They join the army, or a church, they get married and they have cats and dogs. Doing such things is not an escape from free will but an exercise of it. They make a choice not to be a law unto themselves. And by freely choosing to share their free will with others they are doing something which will not square with the evolutionary theory of self survival. ‘Sacrifice’ is an important ingredient in the story of what it means to be a person and a free person at that.

And one last point,

"I would guess there's a spectrum of degrees of free will - the more complex the brain the greater the degree of free will (which really only means a greater capacity to choose between a greater number of options)."

The important word here is "choose". No matter how many or how few options we have, a choice is still required. But if a choice has the same genesis as an option, as in a Naturalist’s view, then what we’re doing when we choose is something equivelant to itching. The choosing is not an act of creation, bringing about something which wasn’t there before, but simply pointing out how things are. The status quo remains. Thankfully though, history shows that choosing (not always correctly) does bring about a change (not always a good one) and introduces something not there before. I think it’s this which distinguishes humans from animals. As far as we can tell, dolphins have always been dolphins and always will be; when the US Navy tie an explosive to a dolphine and train it to carry the bomb to beneath an enemy ship and to detonate it, I doubt if the dolphine can make a moral choice between a battle ship and a passenger liner. Humans can. Size (of brain in this case) is only half the story.

In reply to demdyke:

Well it makes a change to hear a completely different point of view on this rather materialistically orientated thread. I did prefer your previous post though!

1. Species other than humans make choices and, as a consequence, introduce things not there before. So that in itself does not distinguish humans from all other species.

2. Humans are animals, but a different species of animal from dolphins.

3. Dolphins have been known to organize coordinated plans of action in order to save groups of humans from shark attacks. One can hardly blame dolphins for carrying out atrocities against humans which other humans have forced them to. How would the dolphin know the difference between a battleship and a passenger liner, or that it's carrying a bomb? Is the US Navy going to tell it? Suicide bombers are trained (by humans) to carry out atrocities against other humans, and they know exactly what they're doing. The evidence tends to suggest that dolphins exercise greater compassion and altruism in their moral choices than humans do.

You can't beat a good mudsling!

In reply to Dauphin:


You would measure it in behavioural terms. For example, dolphins have sometimes committed suicide in captive situations. The behaviour of large brained animals, including humans, displays a propensity for considered choice over a relatively large number of options. By the way, I didn't say we are pretty simple creatures. We are animals, certainly, but as animals go we are very sophisticated, with large and complex brains, as are dolphins. I refrain from making any categorical distinction between humans and all other species.


Philosophical logic is extremely abstract, but an essential tool for assessing the validity of arguments. The validity of an argument is independent of the truth or falsity of its premisses or its conclusion, but where the premisses are true, a valid argument always gives a true conclusion. It's not sophistry. Yes I remember Feyerabend - interesting and radical figure. Very sceptical about the rationality of scientific method; scientific beliefs are no better than voodoo according to him. I did quite a bit about the Vienna logical positivists as an undergrad. Their verificationism was soon superseded by Popper's falsificationism, though many argue that Popper's rejection of induction as a scientific method is untenable. I tend to agree with Popper.

In reply to hamsforlegs:

Sorry for taking ages, busy times with work and climbing.


Yes - I think the idea of a "full psycho-physical theory" theory is pretty made-up anyway. We understand the weather pretty well, yet we don't have a "full climato-physical theory" of it. We just understand what it's made of, what makes it change, what systems it has, and it's pretty good description. But because it's a complex system our understanding doesn't give us full predictive power, and there's always more to learn about its behaviour. This is where we want to get to with the brain, and such a theory, while not being "full" in some philosophical sense, will provide us with a good understanding of how it works, including of course, how it creates the mind. Such a theory might have a bit of predictive power (similar to weather forecasts) but isn't going to be able to predict individual events (e.g. Mike copping off with Rita) a long way in advance.


I don't think the fact that we predict what will happen and do things to change stuff gives us free will, or indicates that such a thing exists. We do stuff, and some of that stuff is decided consciously or even deliberated over internally, but it's all driven by our biology rather than by "I" in our heads. It's a matter of hierarchy really: the conscious "I" is subservient to the biological processes dictated by the interaction of our genes and our environment. I didn't choose to become who I am and to think the way I do, that's just what happened. I make decisions, but they're not free, they're consequences of a load of stuff out of my control.


I don't believe in free will, but I don't think the world is deterministic either. I'm sure Mike will have a ball - he's "programmed" to!

In reply to demdyke:

Hi. Great to have a different view on things!


I'd go for: a person is a monkey in shoes.


Not really - lots of people like things that are old fashioned and romantic! Thing is, us rationalists don't think all views are of equal value. We think that if a view is anchored in the external objective reality, formed by taking in information from that reality and collectively analysing it to form a consensus that can be tested against nature, then it's right. And by "right" I just mean an accurate description of reality. On the other hand, if a view has been conjured from within the neural firing of people's brains without that firing being used for checking internal consistency, falsifiability and most of all evidence, then it's not good. So, you might see it as mudslinging, but what I'm saying is that I'm suspicious that certain views might be creeping more into the made-up variety.


Exactly! Banged to rights there.

I'm sure there were some other things in different posts (about morals?) I wanted to respond to as well - must have been someone else. Damn it!

In reply to Ratfeeder:


Likewise, you've been very patient; on AM I am arguing about something with knowledge extending no further than the Wikipedia entry!


Yes, quite possibly. I just think it's entirely obvious that brain activity is far more like the weather than the solar system, and so can't be predicted with exceptionless laws, because the brain, like the atmosphere is complex. Both are made up of incredibly numbers of interacting bits. The brain, being an evolved thing has much more "apparent purpose" than the weather of course, but it terms of the types of theory we might use to describe them, some properties will be shared: we'll understand processes, but we won't be laying down laws that make accurate predictions every time.


This just depends on what you mean by "fully analysed". I'm afraid as a pragmatist I don't consider the philosopher's definition very useful!


Kind of. One that follows from pragmatic principles about not doing stuff for no reason. It's pretty watered-down morality!


We're stuck with the illusion of it. Which is fine!


I would say the greater the amount of stuff that they do is processed through conscious thought. But those thoughts are not the start of the chain of causality, they are delivered to the mind, by the brain, for reasons out of the control of the conscious "I" who is thinking them. Sam Harris put it much better than I can:

youtube.com/watch?v=cf9eGUWGtyo&


Absolutely. We are very close in our views, with just enough difference to generate a good discussion!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Thanks for your kind reply. You're a gentleman.

The Sam Harris link is fascinating and very thought provoking. I'll have to listen to it a few times to digest it properly. In fact I'd like to get hold of one of his books. Is there one you'd recommend?

So, not only is free will an illusion, but 'the illusion of free will is itself an illusion'! It's the processes of the brain that determine our beliefs, desires and intentions, upon which we act. The 'self' is not the primary cause of them. There is no 'agency' as traditionally conceived. Well, if the illusion of the illusion of free will is the source of some people's desire for retributive justice, then I agree with Harris in rejecting it, because I have never believed in retributive justice. I've always believed that morality should be understood in terms of compassion, sensitivity to the needs of sentient beings, and a full understanding of the circumstances that affect them. Perhaps it depends on one's understanding, or misunderstanding, of what 'free will' means. As conceived by Sam Harris, I definitely agree with him in rejecting it. Perhaps I have only 'understood' the concept of free will in the very simple sense of having the ability to make conscious choices based on perception and rational thought. I suppose Harris's view, based on modern neuroscience, would be that rational thought itself, like our choices of words, is determined for us by our pre-conscious neural activity, so we don't really have 'control' over our thinking - our biology determines it for us. We are not 'rational beings' in Kant's sense. In fact Harris's view is very similar to Schopenhauer's. I've always rated Schopenhauer. It's certainly a very persuasive view. The only little niggle I have is that most of us have to deal with making conscious choices without any knowledge of what's going on in our brains, so it doesn't really occur to us to think 'but I'm not really making that choice at all, my brain is making it for me; I'm not really doing the thinking, my brain is doing it. But then if I think 'I am my brain' perhaps there is no longer a separate 'I' that is not in control? It raises a lot of issues of a philosophical nature. I'll have to look into what's going on in the field of 'neurophilosophy'. I need to get up to date!

Leaving free will aside, interesting as it is, I just have one last thing to say about AM, which also concerns philosophy in general.

You say that 'AM offers nothing on front' as regards a scientific explanation of the neurological processes that generate consciousness. You're quite right, it doesn't. If we want to know what these processes are, only a scientific explanation is going to provide that knowledge, and AM doesn't provide it, because it isn't a scientific explanation. But Davidson, as a philosopher, is not in the business of seeking scientific explanations. That's the business of neuroscientists. Davidson offers a philosophical position - a conceptual framework - which addresses the traditional mind-body problem as a philosophical (conceptual) problem. It takes into account the nature of scientific explanation in relation to the nature of what is to be explained, in a way that no previous philosophical position did. Physicalism as a form of monism requires the identification of the mind with the brain. So, it would perhaps (and perhaps naively) be natural to assume that for every sort of mental state as we would normally describe it, such as 'belief', 'pain', 'thought', 'desire', there'll be a corresponding sort of neural state with which it can be identified (in the sense that the mental state as described in mental terms is the physical state as described in neurological terms - the terms of the one description 'reduce' to the terms of the other). So the sort of identities it is assumed neuroscientists are looking for are like the formula 'water = H2O'. The presence of H2O is a necessary and sufficient condition for the presence of water. The description 'water' is fully analysed and defined by the chemical formula 'H2O'. Hence, if every mental state could be analysed and defined in this way (the task of which would be down to neuroscientists), we would have a complete account of the mind which satisfied a physicalist ontology. But this raises the question of whether the nature of neural states and processes in relation to our ordinary mental descriptions lend themselves to such analysis and definition. For neuroscientists would not only have the extraordinary complexity and fluidity of neural processes to contend with, but also what Davidson calls 'the holism of the mental'. The latter means that when we consider, say, a 'belief' that someone has, that belief cannot really be isolated from other beliefs with which it is associated, until we get to the point of being forced to consider an entire belief set, which in turn cannot be isolated from desires which are associated with them, and so on. So maybe the nature of the mental as we normally describe it (in psychological terms) does not in principle lend itself to identity definitions like 'water = H2O'. Perhaps we cannot give necessary and sufficient conditions in neurological terms for what we normally describe as 'beliefs' and 'desires' etc. But if that were the case, where would it leave physicalism as a philosophical position? Would we have to abandon it? No, says Davidson. We can still keep our physicalist ontology. The mental and the physical may be two irreducibly different ways of describing something, but they still describe the same thing. Every particular mental event is a particular neurological event, even if we can't fully analyse or define in neurological terms what we describe in psychological terms. That position gives us AM.

I hope you can see that this conceptual issue, as Davidson handles it, does not deny the science of neurology. AM is entirely compatible with it. Neuroscientists like yourself are trying to answer incredibly challenging questions of how the brain works on the molecular, cellular, systems, behavioural and cognitive levels, but on all levels it is causal explanations that are being sought, rather than identity definitions. Davidson is only saying that it doesn't matter as far as a physicalist ontology is concerned if identity definitions are not achievable.

I'm flattered that you've seen this as a good discussion and I shall certainly be taking a keen interest in neuroscience and neurophilosophy as a result. I think I've been a bit behind the times!

In reply to Jon Stewart:


Think I'm with you on all of this - you have a better grasp of the scientific aspects I think (since I have none).

>I make decisions, but they're not free, they're consequences of a load of stuff out of my control.

This is more or less what I was getting at. I suspect that 'free will' is just a short hand for being the person doing the doing, or being an 'agent' in the abstracted, squishy, way that we normally use the word. If the universe wasn't pretty regular and predictable in some ways it would be difficult for us to ever attribute agency to a person, which we can do, albeit we might harbour some concerns about what it adds up to in the end.


Apparently Rita has a dental hygiene problem, and did something weird that he doesn't want to get into.

In reply to MG:

(In reply to Jon Stewart)

Yes. We're kidding ourselves if we think our approach to observation is not already theory-laden - and that is especially the case when we set up an experiment.

In reply to hamsforlegs:

(In reply to Jon Stewart)

Hope you don't mind if I pick up on this. It's interesting you should mention functionalism - that was D.M Armstrong's position! Along with David Lewis, Armstrong was one of it's most important advocates. It's a philosophical theory, not a scientific one, since it concerns the meaning of mental-state terms ('pain', 'belief', 'intention' etc.). Pain 'means' the causal role between stimulus and pain-behaviour - e.g. 'ouch'. Though provisionally the causal role is ontologically neutral, it's assumed that the only plausible ontology for it will be it's 'realization' in strictly defined neurological terms - 'pain' will then 'mean' whatever that definition is. Davidson disagrees with the 'strict definition' (necessary and sufficient conditions) bit. Anomalous monism is way more sophisticated than functionlism and is generally regarded as being more plausible.

So, functionalism is the very theory that you and J.S. reckon is just 'made up'! Well yes, of course it's made up, but then so is every other theory, including all the theories of science.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

Don't mind at all - fair and interesting point.

I haven't read into this deeply for years, but my sense on this was always that the functionalism/anomalous-monism distinction is not as clear as the discussions imply. If I remember correctly A-M specifically holds that you can't develop a fully determinate set of laws governing mental events; ie there are no type identities?

I probably didn't communicate very clearly and may have misread JS's thoughts. I've always tended to consider that the difficulty with mental 'laws' that would support type identities is more one of practical feasibility rather than theoretical possibility. I tend to think that a-m is sort of right, but that as computational power and complexity of understanding advances, the difference between this and a functionalist type-identity begins to collapse.

Given that, for practical purposes, there is a distinction, I am quite happy to be considered an anomalous monist, or to be a waverer! In any case, what I was really gesturing at is the insight (shared across the two conceptual frameworks, in large part) that the questions 'how do the qualia get here' simply disappears under proper scrutiny. I thought this was worth highlighting, since dualist thinking often creeps back into this discussion when appeals are made to intuition. Not so much here - some good thinking all round.

Thanks for the post though - has reminded me that I should revisit some of this over Christmas and wake up some dormant bits of my brain!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

"We think that if a view is anchored in the external objective reality ......."

Where or what is the external objective reality? External to what?

"On the other hand, if a view has been conjured from within the neural firing of people's brains without that firing being used for checking internal consistency, falsifiability and most of all evidence, then it's not good."

But a Naturalist is just such a person ie, all his ideas and proofs and evidences are taken from Nature. All his views are the result of neural firings which are part of Nature. Your findings are nothing more than what must be the case because Nature follows Laws of its own. You would contradict your own argument if you were not sat here reading this reply right now. It had to be. The only evidence you are prepared to admit is what you decide is evidence, namely information taken from Nature only. Strikes me that your case is fixed before it comes to court and you want to be judge and jury, prosecution and defence.

In reply to demdyke:


external to my consciousness. The things i perceive when I'm dreaming aren't part of it, and nor are the things i describe when I'm making things up. But things that anyone can perceive (directly or by perceiving the evidence of them) and whose properties we can describe form external objective reality.


I'm not completely sure what you're getting at. I don't believe the world is strictly deterministic, as that's just not how nature works at the basic level (quantum mechanics). And we mustn't let this great thread descend into god or not. When i say evidence, that's what i mean: it must be part of the external objective reality. If it isn't, i.e. If it's first person experience, then it simply isn't evidence.

In reply to hamsforlegs:

Thanks for the reply!
Some really interesting thoughts there. I'm in the same position as you really - trying to remember a lot of stuff from years ago! I think it's good to treat any theory, philosophical or scientific, with a critically open mind. AM is not without its critics, but of all the philosophical positions so far expounded it's probably the least implausible. Regarding qualia, Davidson's point of course is that what we describe when we use the word 'pain' (for example) is the qualia - how it feels - which is what we express, and this way of describing such a mental event is not 'reducible' to the physical terms (however sophisticated and accurate) which would describe it as a physical event, which it also is! It's maybe difficult to get one's head round this, but if one makes the effort I reckon it makes a lot of sense!

Thanks again.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Intuition. Deduction. Working Hypothesis. None of these are dreams but are all part of consciousness and are perceived after looking at the evidence.

As for first person experience not being part of evidence; isn't everything initially, first person experience? I then consult others as to whether they perceived the same thing as myself. If you wish to enter into the view that the majority are always right over the individual then God certainly wins hands down. The majority of people in the world agree that their initial experience of certain events in the world lead them to perceive that God is alive and well.

You say that you don't believe the world is strictly deterministic, as that's just not how nature works at the basic level (quantum mechanics). What do you mean by the world not being "strictly" deterministic? It either is or it isn't. And if it isn't, you've let in the Angels. And what do you mean by the "basic" level of nature? Are there hierarchical levels within nature? Who decides what is higher or lower, bigger or smaller, greater or lesser. Oh dear, we're getting into personal experience/opinion here and in your view, is not to be allowed.

In reality,Quantum Mechanics is just the result of the random firing of neurons. Its conclusions are the same as an itch. A Quantum Mechanic can no more stand outside of what has produced him (Nature) than can a flea. Why then trust what he says?

In reply to demdyke:


That's right, and we check with each other that we're all talking about the same external thing.


Not really, since everyone's just talking about a unique first person experience, and not checking with each other that they're all talking about the same thing.


What happens to me in my life is determined by the interaction of my genes with my environment. So it's just a matter of things taking their course, but it's all unpredictable due to the probabilistic rather than deterministic way in which physical matter works.


Atoms make up molecules make up cells make up organisms. We know this to be true because we've been checking out first person experiences with each other and checking that they relate to the same external objects. The hierarchy is there, like it or not.


Because unlike a flea he makes predictions which are correct every time. What better reason might there be to trust someone?

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I think you ignore lots of first person experiences which are part of external objective reality, regardless of whether I consult anyone else to see if they agree. I'm thinking of 'eureka moments'. Archimedes and his overflowing bath. The nameless African who invented the Lateen sail. Harrison and his balance wheel escapement. Watt and his external condenser. Stephenson and his fire tubes running through, not under, the Rocket. etc. (Incidentally, it was said by Stephenson himself that he saw the fire tubes during a dream.) Also, when we consider personal experiences of authors and composers by looking at the world of literature and music other matters concerning reality come into play. It might be pure fiction that Mr Scrooge existed and so never had any visions. Dickens made it all up. But look at the results in our social interaction with each other. Again, does it really matter if the Good Samaritan never existed? And Beethoven's 9th Symphony isn't dependent on him asking questions of others. It is still something which exists in reality, like a cathedral or a painting by Turner.

When I talk with fellow Christians I am talking about common experiences with them. So it is not an experience unique to me although I initially experience it alone. We agree that we are talking about the same thing.

You say, "What happens to me in my life is determined by the interaction of my genes with my environment. So it's just a matter of things taking their course, but it's all unpredictable due to the probabilistic rather than deterministic way in which physical matter works." I ask; was it unpredictable that you should make such a claim? And is it determined that you should stick to it?

You say that a Quantum Mechanic makes predictions which are correct every time. But is this just a fluke, a lucky guess, or must it have been correct regardless of the Mechanic? Is all he's done is state the inevitable? If so it looks like the world is a deterministic place so you haven't answered my question about what you mean when you say it isn't "strictly" deterministic.

I can hear the Angels crowding in.

In reply to demdyke:

Let's start a new thread on this - we're no longer discussing what it means to be a person, we're talking about what exists and what doesn't.

http://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?t=604598&new=7944618#x7944618

In reply to ow arm:

The other thing to consider is that even if we do not suffer an accident or disease that affects our brain are we still the same person we were an hour ago, a day ago, a month ago, a year ago, ten years ago etc. I am quite sure that if I were to travel back in time and met teenage me then anyone observing us would say that we were different people (rather than the same person at different ages). Even 12 years ago my thought processes were different to what they are now.
As another thought experiment:
Teleportation exists and a man (or woman) teleports themself from point A to point B. But there is an accident and instead of one person arriving at point B two people arrive. They are both identical in everyway and thus could be said to be the same person (albeit doubled) but as they move on with their life/lives they encounter different experiences and events which subtly change their character at what point would they no longer be the same person?
Perhaps what makes a person a person is their memory? That no matter how they change in outlook they can still refer back to a specific event(s) for instance someone might no longer be an abusive alchoholic but would still be able to recall the experience of falling down drunk in the street, even if they viewed it differently. But then memory is fickle, there are more thinks I have forgotten than I remember and if I look back at my old diaries I realise that even the things I do remember I don't always remember correctly.
Perhaps what makes a person a person is that combination of memory and attitude held in a given moment where future and past intercede?

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Hello again.

Ted Honderich's the fella isn't he (A Theory of Determinism 1988)? Not so interested in psycho-physical identities as in 'psychoneural nomic correlation' (law-like type-correllations between mental and physical events) which are capable in principle of being confirmed or refuted scientifically. Great stuff this.

'Psychoneural pairs' (pairings of mental events and neural events occurring simultaneously and bearing law-like correlations) are single causes (not two separate causes) of action, but, crucially, are also the effects of preceding neural events which are not paired with any states of consciousness. In other words the conscious intentions which cause us to act are determined by a chain of neural events that precede consciousness of them. As you say, our conscious intentions are not the originators of the causal chains leading to action. For convenience, let's call this the 'causally determined intention clause' ('cdic'). I'm going to treat this as an indisputable fact established by neuroscience.

From the 'cdic' Honderich argues that it's not the conscious 'self' that has control over our actions, but our unconscious neural activity. If this is right then traditional ideas of 'free will' are mistaken. I also take this particular conditional - 'If the conscious self has no control over its actions then traditional ideas of free will are mistaken' - to be necessarily true. And I take it as necessarily true that if the concept of 'free will' is mistaken, then so are our ideas about moral responsibility and value. And this has political implications too, which are very important to Honderich. Political conservatism, which is predicated on the notion that we are the authors of our own fortunes or misfortunes, makes no sense at all, has no justification, if we really can't help what what we do and who we are.

What really appeals to me about this theory is the thought that a scientific fact could make a nonsense of political conservatism. How I wish that were true! Sadly I think the argument's concomitant elimination of moral reasoning leaves the case against conservatism (which is otherwise very strong indeed) rather vulnerable. All our eggs are in one basket, so to speak. I'm pretty sure the conservative could turn not only the 'cdic' itself but Honderich's entire argument to his own advantage. For if there are no moral reasons then there is no moral reason why the rich should not exploit the poor, or why the economically weak should not be entirely at the mercy of the economically strong (social Darwinism). There are no non-moral implications of the 'cdic' which make a nonsense of social Darwinism! In any case, does a political conservative really need morals? I'd say he's better off without them, since he can't gain moral justification from either Kantian or utilitarian ethics. There is no respectable system of ethics which supports him. So it seems to me that Honderich shoots himself in the foot with respect to his political agenda. To say that conservatism can't be justified, given that we really can't help what we do and who we are, is itself a moral judgement (about conservatism).

However, the nonsense-making of morals is inescapable if Honderich's argument is right. But is it? Well it's deductively valid (as you'd expect from a professional philosopher). And we can take it that the 'cdic' is true (it's a fact established by neuroscience). So how can the conclusion (that the concept of 'free will' is mistaken) be false? Well, the 'cdic' is not the only premiss of the argument (if it were, the argument would not be valid). The conclusion of a deductively valid argument is necessarily true if, and only if, all the premisses are true. The achilles heel of Honderich's argument is the following premiss: 'If the conscious self is not the originator of the causal chain which leads to action, then the conscious self is not in control of its actions.' This is not only not necessarily true, but it is quite easy to argue that it is false. It would be true if (and only if) if the conscious self could not cause any alterations in the causal chain prior to action. But clearly it can. What is delivered to consciousness in the form of beliefs and desires, resulting in conscious intentions, can and are reviewed in consciousness and altered by it, thereby resulting in new intentions which would not have formed without the intervention of conscious deliberation. Consciousness is a cause backwards in the causal chain as well as forwards. It's like the captain of a ship. The captain relies on information and advice supplied to him by his subordinates, but he selects from this input what will be his output. He makes the decision. Hence, consciousness is not a mere epiphenomenon free-riding over unconscious determination, but an essential part of the decision making process. The conscious self is not entirely not in control of its intentions.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

Not heard of him 'til now but from what I've learned so far yes, but... I can't get to grips with some of his views. I'm not sure I'm with him on the existence of "subjective physical reality" which is not a representation of objective physical reality. I think perceptual consciousness is a representation, and while it seems to exist in time, I can't quite see that it exists in space. As such, I'm not sure it's as physical as all that, and I find myself more drawn towards Chalmer's brand of dualism (but not his hippy-dippy panpsychism).



Yes, this is exactly where I stand after reading Sam Harris' little book.


Exactly. But you have to be a right (pun intended) idiot to think that every person is responsible for their lot in life, that we live in a meritocracy in which intrinsically good, hard-working people succeed by gaining material wealth and those that fail do so because, while they have every opportunity, they just can't be bothered to put the effort in and be successful. This position of course doesn't make sense in theory - it isn't consistent and provides no explanation for variation in outcomes - and of course it ignores all the obvious facts about the world. In short, it's moronic. We shouldn't need to call on high falutin philosophy to refute this absurd view, we should merely ask those who come out with this stuff to reflect for a moment and then immediately stop talking utter crap.


Full stop! The closest I think we have is utilitarianism, which fails to account for (returning to the OP) what we are as people: we are evolved creatures that have both

- instincts which provide emotional sensations that influence our behaviour;
- powers of reasoning.

These two facets of humanity (probably lacking in other less sophisticated species) pull us in opposite directions, for example in the "trolly problem" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem . I think we need to be honest with ourselves and admit that our morality is a mess of contradictions, resulting from what it is to be a person: a monkey in shoes, but one with powers of reasoning that we turn on and off as it suits us. The attempts we make to come up with "respectable" or consistent moral systems are total jokes, religion of course being the funniest (if you appreciate black humour that it).


I think you might be falling into something of a dualist trap here in order to attempt to save some of your beloved free will. The purpose of consciousness is no more than a tool to generate useful biological behaviour - it evolved like every other aspect of life. Sure the conscious self makes decisions and causes actions - as the marvellous John Searle says here, when he consciously decides to raise his arm "the damn thing goes up!" youtube.com/watch?v=j_OPQgPIdKg& - but it doesn't follow from that that this conscious self is a separate entity, reviewing a bunch of options and advice sent up from subordinates. This is really interesting and difficult to dissect, but it seems to me that the conscious self is more like a Minister in a government department than the captain of a ship. Depending on the importance of the matter, the conscious self might be let off the reign a little and given some autonomy to make free decisions: if it wants to raise an arm for a second or two, or choose the cheeseboard over the lemon sorbet, then fine, so be it, it does not harm and maintains the illusion of power. But it when it comes to the real stuff, whether to attempt to a find a partner to marry, whether to strive hard to succeed at work, whether to socialise habitually or to sit at home alone, whether to stay in bed and starve or get up and make breakfast, the conscious self is dictated to from the unconscious "Department" of biology. It might seem like helpful and fulsome advice, allowing the conscious self to make the right decision based on all the facts, but I rather think it has been manipulated to allow only a specified outcome. The free will we experience when we decide on the cheeseboard is just the right amount to keep us behaving the way we should to achieve the aims we're not fully cognisant of.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I'm not sure what Honderich would mean by that either - I haven't looked in much detail at the finer points of his theory (it's a very large work). Descartes would have agreed that consciousness exists in time but not in space - that was exactly his view of the mind. I think you are a (substantive) dualist and I think Honderich is too - or at least I think his position collapses into dualism (which in turn collapses into idealism, as Berkeley demonstrated).


Yes it is an absurd view and we shouldn't need to refute it at all - it simply shouldn't exist! But unfortunately it does for reasons which have nothing to do with morality or reason and everything to do with insatiable greed and pathological selfishness. I think Honderich's attempt to refute it by denying ethics is misguided and ultimately self-defeating (he throws the baby out with the bathwater) - though I very much admire his intentions.


Yes I do see you as a utilitarian (or perhaps a sophisticated consequentialist). But I don't agree that there are no respectable systems of ethics (by 'respectable' I mean 'intellectually respectable' rather than 'conventionally respectable') - and neither does Richard Dawkins, who identifies himself as a consequentialist. You are absolutely right in saying that utilitarianism fails to account for what we are as people. In fact it fails to give an adequate account of action (it misses out the intentionality bit), which is a failing of consequentialism in general due to its externalism. My postion, like Jonathan Dancy's (he was one of my tutors when I was an undergrad.) is that of internalist partcularism, which is a bit like Kantianism but without the generalism and more empiricist than rationalist (there are perceivable moral properties of empirical reality which in the relevant circumstances are capable of defeating any given moral principle (generalization)).


Oh yes - the old 'trolley problem'! There are a lot of variations on that one. As you say there's a tension here due to our basic humanity. If you're a consequentialist then in theory you'll have no hesitation in pulling the lever - you are morally required to bring about the 'best' outcome (it's better to save five people than only one) and you are 'negatively responsible' if you don't. In non-consequentialism the tension is greater but need not just be emotive. It's a cognitive issue in the sense that by pulling the lever you are actively causing the death of someone, whereas if you don't you haven't actively caused anyone to be killed (even though you know they will be). But I think both camps would agree that the right thing to do is to pull the lever. Imagine, though, that the five people are George Osbourne, Michael Gove, Ian Duncan-Smith, Teresa May and David Cameron, while the one person on the other track is John Searle. I reckon I'd suddenly find that I can't raise my arm up to the lever! 'Our morality' is certainly a mess of contradictions and one of the main reasons for that is its long history of being hijacked and monopolized by religion. We must make the effort to prize ethics away from religion, and one way of doing that is by going back to Aristotelian virtue ethics - that's just what Philippa Foot did!


I'm working with the conceptual framework given by Honderich. He's the one who talks about the 'conscious self' as if it's a distinct entity and I agree that this is really dualism. I don't think Honderich establishes the falsehood of free will even within this framework. I don't actually go for this 'homunculus' view of the self (my 'captain' metaphor was only meant to apply in that context). I think of the self as the whole person (including what goes on unconsciously) rather than as just 'consciousness' ('consciousness' is an unhelpful generalization of particular mental states - there are many different states of consciousness) - and that position makes Honderich's argument even weaker.

Thanks for the John Searle link. It's a great talk & he's a great guy - one of the most important philosophers of his generation I'd say. He's a compatibilist by the way (he thinks the concept of free will is compatible with physicalist determinism, as does Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett. While you agree with Honderich and Harris that free will is an illusion in the light of scientifically established determinism, I agree with Searle, Dennett and Davidson that the contradiction between free will and determinism is only an apparent one (the two can be reconciled). I notice that you mention the 'purpose' of consciousness. I'd say there's no purpose to it whatsoever. I'd prefer to say it happened to be an evolutionary advantage for those species which found themselves with it - it helped them to survive and pass on their genes. But in the very 'highest' species, such as humans, it has reached the point where it might even be an evolutionary disadvantage - we can consciously decide not to pass on our genes. David Bellamy made that decision and so have I. I think one should be wary of speaking about biological functions being 'useful' - useful to whom? It tends to imply that evolution serves the purpose of some external agent.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

In reply to Ratfeeder:

Hi. Firstly, sorry I forgot to say in reply to your previous post that I agree that our conscious thoughts affect neural activity later on - the causality in the other direction you described. I'd go (slightly, and not fundamentally) further and suggest that our conscious thoughts affect the physical structure of our brains - our connectomes - and so have a permanent and inescapable affect on our neural activity; presumably on both unconscious activity and that which generates conscious thoughts and experience. However, I don't see this tightly bound two-way causality providing us with free will. When I say I don't believe in free will what I mean is that the notion of free will is a poor and misleading way of describing how a conscious being operates, and it originates from pre-scientific thinking that places humans apart from the natural world. Just because there is an internal experience going on, and that some behaviour is generated by decisions happening in this internal experience, that doesn't elevate the conscious being into a new realm of causality that doesn't apply to the rest of the physical world. A human being is still behaving according to the "laws" of biology as it sets about feeding, mating, sleeping and engaging in more subtle and complex social behaviour. It isn't any "freeer" than any other life form, it just has more going on in its internal conscious experience, and its varied behaviour is more dependent upon that internal world. Examples of where we don't even feel free, such as the compulsion of OCD or drug addiction - because the mental and physical behaviour is so clearly out of line with other sets of beliefs and desires - make clear that describing our choices as "free" has no consistency or sensible definition. We want to do more than one thing, but some desires win out over others, depending on the case in question. The conscious "I" is not arbitrating over subordinates and coming to a decision based on what the conscious "I" thinks is best, or desires most: it's all neural activity, and it's beautifully integrated into a coherent internal narrative. We don't choose to be hungry, we don't choose who we fancy, we don't choose to feel grief or any other emotion (they simply wouldn't be emotions if we chose them), and we don't choose our circumstances. So how it's useful or sensible to impose the notion of freedom - just because we can raise our right arm when we want to - on this situation doesn't reflect the reality of being alive and conscious well at all.

In general, I find the argument of free will vs. determinism as old fashioned and unconstructive as arguments about nature vs. nurture. The science tells you that both and/or neither are true - the apparent dichotomy is just a result of a bad way of describing the world. (I know that this is a similar argument as is used against dualism and the hard problem, I think the two situations are very different as I'm not denying anything that we all know to be true here).


Yes I think you're right: without following Dennett et el down the denial of qualia path, one is left with a bit of dualism, and I think I can see that that's the problem Davidson was attempting to overcome with AM. Although I'm not sure it really is a problem. Why can't mental events be non-physical, while being caused by the physical world? I always thought Popper's Three Worlds to be compelling and common-sense. The type of dualism I think is silly and outdated is just the pre-scientific Cartesian type...I realise now that earlier in this discussion I had been taken in by the likes of Dennett and persuaded that this is what dualism always amounts to - it isn't. I'll now proudly admit to being dualist, following the common-sense position of Popper that both the mental and the physical exist; and their interaction is Chalmer's hard problem. Whether or not there is a third world which is distinct from the other two isn't so obvious to me, but I do find something like the number pi hard to place in either world one or two...

...(which in turn collapses into idealism, as Berkeley demonstrated).

Surely Berkeley didn't actually demonstrate that. No one can disprove idealism, but it's such a useless position with zero explanatory power that while we should all acknowledge its logical possibility over the course of one second, once, we can then forget about it. For me, there's nothing interesting about a logically possible proposal that has nothing to recommend it other than its un-disprovability. We live in a world full of evidence and explanation, why throw all that away and be satisfied instead by logical possibility?

In reply to Ratfeeder:


Without knowing more about what this entails, I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I think that internalism in general is on a hiding to nothing trying to find any kind of consistency (even in particularism). It's not only that the social world is far too complex to succumb to stupid, blunt, rule-based moral systems (that's you, religion), but also that people are internally chaotic due to what they're made of. If I'm confronted with a finely balanced moral decision that could go either way, then the outcome will be different depending on how much sleep I've had, on what happened yesterday and potentially by what drugs I've taken. Give one person a drug that enhances empathy (e.g. MDMA) and another one that enhances self-absorption (e.g. cocaine) and they'll make different moral choices. Again it seems to me that internalism and externalism are equally bad ways of describing the what's happening with morality, and looking at human beings as evolved life forms with a job to do and a social environment to live in is where the explanatory power lies.


I don't think a consequentialist would have much trouble with that decision!


Another way that appeals far more to me is to face the facts of people as animals who've evolved a whole load of abilities and reflexes such as empathy, rational self-interest, guilt (and conversely the reward of feeling good when you do something nice - is there a neat word for that equivalent to guilt?). These are competing drives, all are useful in the statistical long-game of genetic replication, and the key to success is the right drive getting its outcome at the right time.



I'm not having the greatest success in trying to understand the subtly different positions - only with Dennett's trick of redefining the free 'agent' as not the just the conscious self but as the whole organism (i.e. ignoring consciousness) can the problem characterised by the Libet experiment - that conscious thoughts come from preceding neural activity - be dealt with (and for me it just ignores the question). As I said above, I just don't think it's useful to give the fact that some behaviour arises through conscious decision making the grandiose title of "free will" when there isn't anything free about it. To say that "I could have done otherwise" doesn't mean much to me. In what sense could you? Lots of events can pan out different ways, a low pressure system might deepen and become a hurricane, or it might dissipate uneventfully. It could also have "done otherwise"!


Evolution provides its own purpose, a direction in which things change: towards that which improves chances of the genes being replicated. That's all I mean by purpose: a specific direction of change rather than random wandering through the space of possibilities. Consciousness didn't just spring accidentally into existence and happened to be useful; tiny changes towards increasing consciousness happened because they were each useful in replicating genes.


To the genes. Just because you or I don't happen to reproduce doesn't mean that our behaviour isn't part of a statistical long-game of gene reproduction. Once you see the individual genes rather than the organism or the the whole genome as the replicating unit, then things click into place. Lots of my genes are being replicated by my brother having kids. The genes don't care whether their new copy is in a genome mixed with his partner's genes or with someone I mate with. We do all kinds of things that aren't great of the replication of ourselves (if that's what we were really bothered by, we'd all have the urge to clone thousands of copies of ourselves now we have the technology), but the driving force is the replication of genes, and they're spread among a lot of different bodies. Genes obviously don't have the intentions of an external agent, but they do manipulate the entire of the biological world into making copies upon copies upon copies of themselves.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

What makes/completes a person is being kind to another person,including animals of other species.Gautama made out that the whole person/persona thing was heavily subject to change.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


Thanks for your last 2 posts (very interesting too). I'll confine this post, which is going to be long enough anyway, to the one issue. I'll respond to the rest of what you've said tomorrow (hopefully!). So, concerning the internalist/externalist distinction as used in theoretical ethics, your suspicion that you've misconstrued it is correct - but that's understandable since it clearly needs to be explained (I didn't do that because it would have made the post too long). I'll explain it now because it's important. It's also difficult, but once you've got it you'll be well equipped to understand ethical theory in great depth.

The internalist/externalist distinction concerns the relationship between an action's moral value and how it's motivated. Consequentialism is an externalist theory because the reasons which, according to the theory, make actions right or wrong (i.e. the values of outcomes), are not necessarily the reasons which motivate them. The moral reasons are 'external' to the motivating reasons; an action could be morally right even if it's motivated by a reason other than the one that makes it right. By contrast, deontological theories, such as Kant's, are internalist because, according to them, the reasons which make actions right or wrong are necessarily the same reasons which motivate them - you couldn't do the right thing or the wrong thing by accident, since what makes the action right or wrong is the reason that motivates it; the intention which describes what the action is the act of doing is also what gives it its moral value.

Particularism can be either internalist or externalist, but it rejects the generalism of both consequentialism and Kantianism. For an internalist particularist, if circumstances require a person to act in a certain way, then that requirement is unconditional - there are no ifs or buts. (The particularist aspect means that different circumstances may alter or even reverse the requirement - what is a requirement in one case may be a restriction in another). Such an unconditional requirement (in the particular case) is expressed as a categorical imperative - e.g. 'Under the circumstances you ought to apologize to Katie.' (There's an indefinite number of possible categorical imperatives generated by particular circumstances, in contrast to Kant's singular Categorical Imperative.) For an externalist particularist, on the other hand, a moral requirement, where it occurs, is conditional upon an extrinsic motive (a desire), and is expressed as a conditional or hypothetical imperative - e.g. 'Under the circumstances, if you want to stay friends with Katie, then you ought to apologize to her.'

In the seminal paper 'Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?', Philippa Foot argues for the externalist version (she answers 'yes' to the question), while John McDowell argues for the internalist version (he answers 'no'). I prefer McDowell's answer, because I agree with Kant that what distinguishes a moral act from an act of mere self-interest is its not having an ulterior motive.

In reply to Ratfeeder and all:

What an awesome thread. Hugely interesting subject, no-one getting angry, people taking time to explain. Thank you all!

In reply to Ratfeeder:

Thanks for this explanation. Much clearer than the stuff I was trying to read the other night. But I'm afraid you'll have to go a step more basic for me:

What is the point of moral philosophy? Is it to come up with a system of morality we can use like an algorithm to tell us what is right and what is wrong? Or is it to describe how we do (as opposed to how we should) make moral choices? Or something else entirely?

As I understand it, Kantian ethics are supposed to provide a system. If deontology relies on objective moral duties, then the only place you can get these kind of things from is god or somewhere out in the cosmos that somehow cares about human behaviour. And we all know that just means the idea has run aground. Particularism doesn't appear to help much, it avoids some of the pitfalls of daft rules, but still seems to rely on something external to provide us with standards of good and bad motivations.

I suppose you could have some kind of hybrid where you qualify consequentialism with a bit of internalism by saying that the agent has to understand the consequences rather than fall upon the right action by chance, and it's still fine if the calculations of the greater good are wrong but made in good faith. But this still fails to be a workable system and it fails to provide description and explanation. If I could just turn on my rational brain and turn off all my emotional "circuits", then that would be great: I'd operate according to consequentialism (or at least try to satisfying this "internalist consequentialism") and the greater good would be achieved (or if it goes wrong, at least that's what I'd be aiming for). Everyone's a winner - I don't care about having to kill my Mum to save 50, or even just a couple of strangers, because my emotional circuits have been removed. All great in theory, but no use in practice, where we have evolved emotional instincts and hard-wired self interest that make consequentialism/externalism/utilitarianism (I have to say these all mean the same thing to me at the moment) impossible to live by.


I don't understand what is meant by an ulterior motive. I help an old lady across the road because if I didn't she'd struggle and be in danger, and it'll only take a minute. My motives are "good" (by standards I consider to have absolutely no foundation outside consequentialism), because I won't gain anything myself, I genuinely want to help her. Great, but why do I want to help her, if I don't allow myself the cop-out of appealing to cosmic moral standards that are blatantly made up? Because I've evolved emotional circuitry that makes this act feel good. I get a reward, one that we can probably pinpoint to release of neurotransmitters and the firing of certain neurones. I evolved this "reward for altruism" circuitry because it helps humans socialise, it makes us co-operate better to gather resources, and so we survive, and our genes are replicated. Is that an ulterior motive? It's not a conscious one, but biology is up to its old tricks: I (the conscious "I") find myself yet again not to be a free agent making unbiased choices based on information and rationality (and moral standards plucked from the cosmos), but instead a puppet on the strings of the neural firing in my brain. Why did I help the old lady across the road? Because I evolved to do that kind of thing, because doing that kind of thing makes it more likely that my genes will continue replicating themselves.

So consequentialism/externalism fails as a workable system and it fails to describe our moral behaviour because it doesn't recognise our irrational - but useful - evolved emotional circuitry. Internalism - as I understand so far - fails to achieve anything because it has to appeal to either god (or give up and submit to consequentialism) to provide standards for what constitutes a good or bad motive.

I'm standing by my position above that the whole endeavour of moral philosophy is in principle a waste of time, because evolutionary biology is the only way to describe and explain human behaviour including moral choices. And* if you're looking for rules or algorithms to tell you right from wrong, you're on a hiding to nothing, that's not how the world works. If this is what you want, then your choice is either

- to make it up based on what you feel (i.e. follow your evolved, irrational emotional instincts) - and this way you end up with religion or something equally nonsensical because the evolved instincts are there for practical purposes of replicating genes and don't give a hoot about internal consistency; or

- to go with consequentialism, but bear in mind that you'll never be able to live by it, as it'll mean killing your mum to save strangers, and that ain't what you've evolved to do.

As such we'd better give up on this hunt for a system and be content with just description and explanation.

Sorry for bombarding you with a lot of words, from a perspective which is utterly naive of any actual knowledge of moral philosophy. But I do find it really interesting and can't help myself.


*I really am sorry for the sentence beginning with "And". I blame this on once being a civil servant under New Labour.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


Sure, but what interests moral philosophers is the question of what, if anything, makes an action objectively right or wrong - or is it just a question of 'taste' and subjective preference (Hume and the emotivists).


*Chuckle* Dead right - no trouble at all!


The word you're looking for is 'pride' perhaps? All that's very well and good, but thinking about the statistical long-game of genetic replication doesn't help me decide what I ought to do when faced with a dilemma.


I totally agree that any theory of the mind which denies consciousness and qualia has to be an inadequate theory - it's a cop out. So that's a big, big failing for Dennett. Searle and Davidson are vastly superior. A good way to understand their versions of physicalist monism (which embraces consciouness and qualia), is to think in terms of looking at the same thing from different points of view. If you look at a dinner plate side-on it appears long and thin, sort of cigar shaped; but if you look at it face-on it appears perfectly circular. The descriptions 'long and thin' and 'circular' have completely different meanings; the one cannot be 'reduced' to the other. Yet they both describe one and the same thing. Similarly with the mental. Viewed from a third-personal point of view, the neuroscientist looks at the brain and its neural activity. But from one's own point of view, one experiences what it's like to have those neural states. When we describe (or rather express) this first-personal experience, the terms we use have completely different meanings from the terms a neuroscientist uses to describe what's going on in the brain. The one set of terms cannot be 'reduced' to the other, yet both sets of terms describe one and the same thing.

As for 'free will', I don't really see it as a 'grandiose' term, but I'd be happy to call it something else so long as it captures the thought that I have some choice in what I do and that it's me that's doing the choosing. It's a matter of distinguishing doing something that someone else has compelled me to do by brainwashing, for example, from doing something that I've used my own judgement in deciding to do. Indeed it is the thought that if I make a decision and act upon it, I could have made a different decision and acted upon that instead. The fact of preceding neural activity by itself does nothing to threaten that thought; that's how Searle and Davidson see the matter and it's how I see it. I think the reason it might seem wrong headed to think that I could have acted differently is simply that once I've acted I can't undo the act, so what's the point of saying I might have acted otherwise? But having acted, it doesn't mean I was not in a position to have carried out an alternative action before I did what I actually did. When we are in a position of having to make a choice, it doesn't help in trying to decide which option to take, to think that 'really' I have no choice at all and will do what my biology determines me to do.


Yes I agree that the emergence of consciousness will have been an incremental process. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But I think you are implying an intentionality behind the direction towards increasing consciousness that doesn't exist. Like many Darwinists, I don't think you are Darwinian enough!


Now this is where I really have difficulties. Consciousness is useful to our genes, and there is a statistical long-game of gene reproduction. Genes don't care whether their new copy is in a genome mixed with your brother's partner's genes...etc. Well I don't suppose genes 'care' about anything much. It would take a complex organism, like a human being or a dolphin, to do any caring. Genes just do what they do, and if they didn't we would be here. There's no purpose behind it, no 'statistical long game'. It just looks that way to us, because we are beings driven by a sense of purpose. Biology relies heavily on teleological explanation, and tends to extend that into regions where it doesn't belong. Darwin himself made exactly the same mistake with his conception of natural selection (i.e. 'selection for...'). I started reading a book some time back called 'What Darwin Got Wrong' (2010) by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. It's not what you might think. Far from arguing against the theory of evolution, the book argues that Darwin was not Darwinian enough! By the way, I don't have a brother or a sister.

In reply to Jon Stewart:
Just seen your latest post - looks good. I started replying to your previous post before you posted the one above. Haven't got time to reply properly just now but will do so. I'm at work tomorrow & I need some sleep! For someone who's 'utterly naive of any knowledge of moral philosophy' you're doing pretty well.

What is the point of moral philosophy? Well, unlike the ten commandments, it doesn't seek to tell people what to do. What it does is to suggest different ways in which, and different criteria by which, we might go about deciding how we should or should not act. It makes use of a lot of thought experiments, imagining different scenarios. Modern moral philosophy is part of the analytic tradition. Religion doesn't come in to it. Read what Richard Dawkins has to say about it in 'The God Delusion'. And you are very much mistaken if you think internalism has to appeal to 'God'. That's just rubbish. But the point is it's up to you to decide which position you think is the right one. You're maybe finding difficulties with the whole field because you think as a biologist. Remember Wittgenstein and his 'language games' - don't apply the rules of one game to a different game!

Ps there's nothing wrong with beginning a sentence with 'And' or 'But', at least not in my book.

In reply to BusyLizzie:

What a nice thing to say! On behalf of all contributors, thanks for the positive feedback BusyLizzie!

In reply to Jon Stewart:


Fine. Whatever you say.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I would like to say that the entire post of yours to which I am belatedly responding here is superb. I think it really sums up everything we've been discussing and reaches an understanding that we can both find entirely acceptable. I think I'm going to concede that the free-will / determinism debate is, as you say, a false dichotomy in which neither and/or both are true. That's a great way of putting it and deep down I completely agree.

I was aware that Popper was quite happy to call himself a dualist - 'I think I was always a Cartesian dualist', he says in chapter 39 of Unended Quest '(though I never thought we should talk about substances)'. I do envy him his penetrating common sense. I like his idea of the three worlds too. World 2 (the mental) is an intermediary between world 1 (the physical) and world 3 (products of the mental). Hmm...this does leave the old problem of the interaction between mind an body a bit untouched though, doesn't it? Popper is basically saying that the physical can only interact with products of the mental through the mental. Seems a bit obvious maybe & not much of an explanation - but then of course what's important is that the biological and evolutionary function of the brain is to produce world 3 objects. I do love Popper. He's one of may favourite thinkers and can really bring one down to earth.


Good heavens I should hope no one takes idealism seriously any more - as you say, what a useless position. What difference would it make to anything even if it were true? But Berkeley's argument is notoriously difficult to fault, given the starting point of Cartesian dualism, which is essentially subjective - how do you get from the subjective certainties of one's own mind to an objectively existing material world? That's the classic problem and Berkeley is very convincing in his argument that it can't be done. But of course we don't start from the subjective certainties of our own minds. There's no knowledge to be found there. Where there is immunity from error, there is also immunity from truth - that's a Wittgensteinian insight. I think Popper does himself a disservice in calling himself a Cartesian dualist. He's an objective dualist, and I'm guessing that's your kind of dualism too, and I have great respect for it.

I regret that I went on about moral philosophy before getting round to responding to this post of yours, which is beautifully written and brilliant. Please forgive me. I am prepared to accept the possibility that moral philosophy is a compete waste of time. Maybe I've been overly influenced by Jonathan Dancy, who was my teacher. Sometimes influences can be harmful. And please ignore the stuff I mentioned in a previous post about Fodor's and Piatelli-Palmarini's 'What Darwin Got Wrong'. It's a load of rubbish I think.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

Hi and thanks for the kind words. I've really enjoyed this discussion and have learnt a lot, with lots of help from you in particular; I really appreciate you taking the time to explain things that I'm never realistically going to read in their original source. I think we agree pretty much about free will, your definition is just a bit more low-key than mine - you're more concerned with "regular free will" as Afred Mele calls it here (as with most of this stuff, I haven't read any books, pretty much just wikipedia and youtube clips: god bless the internet). youtube.com/watch?v=wI3cXbIlA0g&

The always-right Steven Pinker clarifies my view in just 2 minutes here.

youtube.com/watch?v=VQxJi0COTBo& Unbelievably eloquent, although he's rather shy about mentioning consciousness here, talking instead about information processing and modelling in the frontal lobes. I hope he is just being shy, not being a consciousness denier!

There are few things left unresolved for me, so if you do have time over Christmas I'd be really interested to hear your views.

Firstly, I apologise for saying that moral philosophy is a waste of time, that's a poor expression of what I meant. No need to apologise for taking the discussion in that direction, it's fascinating. I am just convinced that human beings are fundamentally hypocrites, and that there is no possibility of analysing moral issues and coming up with a system that will explain this hypocrisy away. If you look upon human beings as merely animals, vessels for their genes, then you have a compelling explanation for our hypocrisy. At every level, I see people turning on and off their rational or critical faculties as and when it suits them and makes their lives easier. This is why we are intrinsically hypocritical. Sometimes we like to trust our hearts, other times we trust our heads. And the 'heart' (which I would characterise as our evolved emotional instincts) is just a bunch of tricks in the nervous system (to use a Dennett expression, but without stretching it to breaking point and beyond) we've evolved to direct our behaviour in ways that will satisfy the requirements of our genes (I'll attempt to clarify this expression later).

So while moral philosophy is interesting, I completely reject the idea that one can come up with a consistent ethical system to wheel out when we're faced with a dilemma. You rightly said that thinking about the statistical long game of genetic replication is no use when faced with a dilemma, so my suggestion is this: think about the choice rationally, i.e. employ consequentialism; then decide if this conflicts with your emotions. If it does, think about what's causing the conflict and accept that you might have to adapt your consequentialist response to manage the emotional impact of your actions and take account of your natural self-interest. No need to appeal to objective standards of right and wrong, other than those which fall naturally out of consequentialism and which can be accepted from the outset as incompatible with our self-interest and emotions.

You rejected that idea that for an internalist position, you needed to look out into the cosmos for your standards of good and bad motivation. I can't see any ways of creating standards for motivations (other than consequentialism) that don't involve just making things up - perhaps you could expand a bit on this?


Thanks for this, it makes things much clearer. However (as you might expect from a born-again dualist obsessed with the hard problem), I detect a cop-out.

With the dinner plate, we have a compelling explanation of how it is both circular and long and thing: these are two different projections of an object that extends in three dimensions of space. We understand it so well that I can mentally rotate a dinner plate in my mind and watch it transform from circular to long and thing, including all the different elliptical projections in between. What I want with the neural processes and consciousness is this kind of understanding. This is my problem with AM, as much as I've understood it: I see a wonderful scientific problem to be solved, which we're nowhere near the moment, and many philosophical theories are proposing that it's just not soluble, it's above our pay-grade, and we should leave it to philosophers eliminate the question through introspection, rather than cracking on with some research that might actually help. John Searle, as ever, has it nailed: how consciousness arises is not a difficult philosophical problem, but it is a very difficult neurobiological problem. As such I'm with Searle rather than Chalmers, who seems to think that the hard problem is so hard that we have to look completely outside the realm of current science - hence he ends up sounding like he's having an acid flashback (let's face it, there has to be some explanation for that haircut) while babbling on about the fundamental nature of consciousness.


We don't really have this problem in the version of dualism I've come around to through this discussion. The subjective world of consciousness, while non-physical, comes about as an emergent property of physical brain processes ("it's a state that the brain is in" - Searle). No objective physical world means no subjective world, the latter is secondary to or dependent upon the former. Justification? The usual: inference to the best explanation.

In reply to Ratfeeder:
And one last thing...


Well, that's another absolutely fascinating field of discussion. Just as I see the mechanics of consciousness as a huge and fundamental question that science has no answer for, here's another. Why do the laws of nature result in the creation of self-replicating collections of atoms (genes) whose existence essentially circumvents the second law of thermodynamics, constructing exquisitely ordered things, like flowers, and flocks of starlings? And most of all, conscious beings that understand the atoms from which they're made. We have to talk about genes as "manipulating" or "caring about" because they're the best metaphors we have. The fact that we end up talking in metaphors tells us that we are dealing with something that isn't obvious or self-evident. Like consciousness, the existence of life is a profound scientific mystery.

As an aside, many people think that science explains away the mystery of the universe. This is categorically untrue. Science elucidates just how unfathomable and mysterious it is. In this conversation alone, from a completely scientific perspective we've stumbled upon the complete mystery of how the brain generates consciousness, and now how molecules of DNA arrive and drive the development of the entire biological world including us and our conscious brains. It's going to be a while before science has explained it all away!

In reply to Jon Stewart:


On this point I think we do have the answer. Living things don't circumvents the second law of thermodynamics, they create more order locally but create more disorder elsewhere.

There are interesting theories that actually self replicating things are not an accident but a likely consequence of the second law under certain conditions : https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/

In reply to RomTheBear:


Sorry I wasn't very clear there, when I said "circumvent" I meant "get around" rather than contravene. What I'm saying is the second law discourages the formation of life, rather than forbids it.


Yes, I've heard of this thanks to another UKCer - sounds like just the kind of theory we need. Let's wait to see if it has legs.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I don't think it discourages it,life forms are often more efficient at dissipating heat from the environment.
If you had just a clump of carbon atoms with no life it would take a very long time before the energy contained in the atoms is released in the form of heat. Plants or animal speed up that process tremendously, in the process to do so they create a bit of order for themselves, in order to exist and replicate, but create more disorder overall.

In reply to RomTheBear:

On its own, the second law leads to smooth, generalised disorder (as in the heat death of the universe), rather than patches of exquisite order offset by an increase in overall disorder. Without some new understanding like the theory you gave the link to, the second law is very much an obstacle to the formation of life.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I don't think so, all the second law says is that in a thermodynamic process, the overall entropy of the participating systems increases, nothing more. It provides no obstacle for some parts of the systems to arrange into exquisite order, as long as doing so does not decrease the overall entropy.

In reply to RomTheBear:

We're way off topic now, but the second law is statistical. It tells you that smooth disordered states are billions of times more likely that states with patches of exquisite order made up for by increased disorder elsewhere. Thus the second law makes life incredibly unlikely just to spring into existence and we need a special explanation for it, as the chap at MIT is trying. If the second law doesn't make life vanishingly unlikely, then why has that chap made the papers? What's the point of his work?

In reply to Jon Stewart:

It's not what the second law tells you.


The point of his work is to try to explain why the second law of thermodynamics might actually explain why life appears under certain conditions.

In reply to RomTheBear:


We need someone to arbitrate then, because when I studied thermodynamics as an undergrad, that's exactly what it told me!

In reply to Jon Stewart:


The most common formulation is :

"The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium"

There is no requirement for this process of increasing entropy to not produce any localised order along the way, as long as the overall entropy increase.

In reply to RomTheBear:


I know and that's what makes life possible. However, something being allowed is not a sufficient explanation for something happening. We need an explanation for why, when the gradual spreading out and decay of order is the most likely behaviour under the second law, we instead on Earth at least see the least likely: little patches of exquisite order appearing by themselves. This appearance of self-organisation in the face of vast statistical improbability is as deep a mystery as the emergence of consciousness from the mush of neurons in the skull. We know that both things happened, but we have no idea how.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I think where you are confused is that the second law doesn't make self organisation less likely to occur, in a system that had not reached equilibrium.

For example take a transparent box and consider it an isolated /insulatedsystem for the sake of the experiment, then put a lit cigarette in it, close the lid, and observe the smoke rise.
You'll see exquisite spirals of smoke forming by the hot air rising, a new form of order has been created locally, even though in terms of thermodynamics, the temperature is starting to even out in all points.


There is also confusion as to what we perceive as ordered, and low entropy, it's not really the same concept.

For example oil mixed with water in a glass, seems more disordered to us than if not mixed, however, on a thermodynamics point of view, the entropy of the glass is higher if the oil floats on top of the water than if mixed.

Similarly, the life forms on earth seem to be ordered, but in terms of entropy of the earth, it would be lower if they didn't exist.

And merry Christmas BTW

In reply to RomTheBear:




Sorry, not convinced. The first two examples look like self organisation - because of what we perceive to reflect high and low-entropy states as you point out - but are just natural consequences of the laws of physics (including the second law) and don't require any further explanation. Life on the other hand isn't just a natural consequence of the laws of physics as we currently understand them (although that guy at MIT could be onto something really significant). if the self-organisation we see in life was just what particles did in general - as statistically likely as any other arrangement - then universe would be a very different place. Surely it would be a doddle to produce self-replicating molecules in the lab by just setting up the right conditions and watching nature do its thing. Doesn't seem to work like that, though does it?

In reply to Jon Stewart:

It does, there is a very famous experiment. If you lock carbon, different minerals, and water, and a few gases with a source of heat in a bowl, amino acids start to form, the very basic building blocks of life.

It's the Muller Urey experiment, check it out if you have time.

Beyond that, the anthropological principle may be a possible answer to most of your questions.

In reply to RomTheBear:

Err, yes, but amino acids aren't self-replicating molecules. They're just molecules. They don't self-organise, in fact they don't really do anything without the self-replicating DNA or RNA (or any other arrangement of atoms that can store information and self-replicate) to construct them into bigger units. And it's these bigger units (cells made of proteins) that constitute the statistically improbably islands of exquisite order that pump out heat to make up for the localised decrease in entropy. The Muller Urey experiment lends no evidence towards how the first self-replicating molecule came into existence.


Oh yes, the anthropic principle. The least useful statement of the bleeding obvious ever to have been given a fancy name. Science provides us with insight and explanation; and where there are significant gaps, that's great, it means there are still big, important questions to work on.

Merry Christmas. Ho ho ho.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

No, it's a start, but I don't pretend we know exactly how life started. What we know though is that the second law is in no way an obstacle to the creation of complex structures or makes them less likely in a system that has not yet reached equilibrium. It's an argument used by creationist to say that life can't have evolved the way it did but it has no scientific basis.

In reply to RomTheBear:


It's debatable whether this is 'order' at all, and it's certainly nothing like the kind of order that we are faced with when it comes to explaining the riddle of life. Even 'self-organisation' is an inadequate term for the scientific puzzle that needs to be addressed - it's the very special type of self-organisation that lies at the core of the puzzle. Rather a lot of hot air was wasted about 10-15 years ago on the subject of self-organisation, imho. Moderately interesting but missing the main troubling point.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

There is complex self organisation everywhere not only life. Snowflakes are a good example.

But yeah of course we don't know yet exactly how life came to appear although we have a few promising ideas.

In reply to RomTheBear:


Snowflakes are a bad example: there is nothing analogous to the complexity found in life about a snowflake. which is merely the result of the behaviour of polarised water molecules and their hydrogen bonds and as such is incredibly simple. Trivial in comparison to life.


Seems like because you've heard creationists misuse arguments about the mystery of the start of life, for that political reason you are determined to believe for that it can easily be explained by what we already know. It can't.

In reply to Jon Stewart:



No no, I am just questioning whether the second law makes the apparition and evolution of life implausible or unexplainable , it doesn't seem to be the case as far as I know.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

Radio 4 has just finished broadcasting a programme 'The Forum' on the subject of natural navigation. In the closing stages of it, they discussed the link between memory and spatial integration. I thought it might help inform this discussion. I've started a new post for it in Off Belay because, although my professional interest in stroke rehab' draws me to Ow Arm's question, my personal interest lies more in the obvious navigation element.

In reply to RomTheBear:


The Second Law is just fine, and it doesn't make life either implausible or inexplicable. But it goes nowhere whatever towards explaining it. Nor does 'self-organisation' (and the example of a snowflake simply emphasises my point.) So we're right back to square one at the moment. That's not to say that one day we might not be able to explain life scientifically,

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


Well yes


We can explain self organisation in a theoretical framework where the second law exists.


We can explain much of what we know about life scientifically, but of course there are things we don't know, it really depends what you mean by "explain life".

In reply to RomTheBear:


There are in my view three enormous, profound mysteries in our scientific understanding when we ask the question "what am I" or "how did I get here" or "what is reality" or however you want to phrase it.

1. The creation of the universe: why are the laws set up the way they are to enable atoms, stars, planets, life? There are lots of other important physics questions, for example, whether this (observable) universe is the job lot or whether it is one of many that exist, whether it's finite in space-time, and more practical (relatively speaking, no pun intended) stuff about dark energy and dark matter. This stuff may well be answered by a successful fundamental theory unifying the forces of nature and providing an explanation for the Standard Model.

2. The creation of the the first self-replicating molecules from which all life evolved. Once you have such molecules in existence, we have a good understanding of the mechanism by which they gradually drive the creation of all living things, and how those things come to be so apparently designed. The fact that this process has to occur within the requirements of the second law of thermodynamics is only one of many wonderful and fascinating aspects of it - as Gordon says, it doesn't make it implausible nor inexplicable; but that doesn't mean we have an answer to the crucial mystery of how atoms came together to form information storing and transferring machines from which all life developed.

3. The creation of consciousness from collections of cells in living things. How the firing of neurons brings into existence the subjective world of experience is currently completely unexplained. As far as current neuroscience can tell us, it happens by magic.

This is great, isn't it? We've got a wonderful rich understanding of the universe, that goes a long way to answering those fundamental questions: but we still live in universe that is profoundly mysterious and doesn't give up its secrets easily. There is much work to be done.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Hi, hope you had a good xmas. Sorry to have been out of it for a bit (family commitments etc.). I see things have moved on a pace in a very cosmological way - fascinating stuff. You guys are a lot more clued up on 2nd law of thermodynamics than I am. I've some catching up to do! Anyway, many thanks for your last 2 posts to me - much appreciated. The Mele and Pinker links are great. Pinker is basically arguing against Cartesian dualism - 'the ghost in the machine', as Gilbert Ryle called it.

I was quite surprised (in a good way) that you're more with Searle than Chalmers, since Searle is closer to Davidsonian monism than to dualism (though I'll have to read more about Searle to see if there are any significant differences - it may be that Searle is developing Davidson's position in greater detail, I'm not sure yet). I totally agree that the question of how consciousness actually arises is going to be answered, if it ever can be, only by neuroscience; by its very nature it is a scientific question and I think everyone would agree that the devil is in the detail. But if consciousness isn't itself a subjective aspect of physical brain states - if it isn't 'physical' even from a third-personal viewpoint - then we're stuck with the old problem of how it has any causal connection with physical properties. I've been looking a bit at Chalmers and he deserves to be taken seriously, but it seems to me his dualism still needs to address the problem of how non-physical properties can causally interact with physical properties. Yes, if there's no physical world then there's no subjectivity, but the problem of causal interaction remains as it did for Descartes. I take the Wittgensteinian view that subjectivity does not constitute a world unto itself - there is only one world. But this is not the same as denying the existence of subjective experience.



Particularism is precisely against any kind of 'ethical system'. It's all about weighing up the relevant considerations in any particular case. What one decides is the right course of action in one case, one may well decide is the wrong course of action in another. But the absence of general principles does not mean that one's moral decisions are not 'objective'. And if one has no ulterior motives for making them, that does not mean one is appealing to some 'cosmological standard'. Quite the opposite in fact. Any appeal to a divine authority would entail an ulterior motive (e.g. fear of punishment or hope of reward). So internalism actually rules out any such appeal (whereas externalism does not). I don't quite agree with the Hobbesian view that we are all essentially selfish and hypocritical. Anyone who is completely like that is a psychopath. Most of us can be a bit that way; anyone can make a mistake and no one is perfect, but some people do strive for integrity and a good life and that seems to me a pretty good aim in life (and there's no reason why that shouldn't be part of our biology). As Socrates said, virtue is its own reward. That really sums up internalism. It's like climbing; we do it for its own sake, not for the hope of some 'external' reward.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

The main problem with thermodynamics is that so many interesting systems on Earth and elsewhere are not in thermodynamic equilibrium, or are only in equilibrium locally.

In reply to Jon Stewart:



Following on from some comments I made in my previous post re. the distinction, if any, between Searle's position and Davidson's, here's what I've so far gleaned. Both are non-reductive physicalists. Most non-reductive physicalists subscribe to AM, which is sometimes described, unhelpfully imo, as 'property dualism' (as opposed to substantive dualism) but is, as it says on the tin, a form of monism rather than of dualism. Searle distinguishes his position from this as 'Biological Naturalism', which he admits looks very much like property dualism but differs in the respect that it allows the possibility, or even probability, that the mental will ultimately be explained by neuroscience. So, if anything, Searle is less dualistic than Davidson (though it's misleading to call either of them 'dualists' - they are physicalist monists). I find myself wavering between the two positions, since while I'm very sympathetic to the view that the mental is in principle neuroscientifically explicable, I also recognize that there's a logical asymmetry between looking at brain states from the outside and actually being in those states (which latter gives rise to what we mean by 'the mental'). Perhaps the ultimate explanation will take account of this asymmetry? Anyway, our views virtually coincide in Searle. Whaddaguy!

In reply to Ratfeeder:
Hi. Cheers, xmas included a bit of bouldering and soloing in great conditions in the morning and also a curry. Very traditional!


I'm not sure the extent of Searle's work, but everything I hear seems to be resounding common sense. On the other hand I think that AM says too much and puts forward principles that there is no evidence for and which aren't necessary to give a picture of how the brain and mind relate. So as far as I understand them, Searle's Biological Naturalism is if anything scaled back from AM.

At the start of this discussion I denounced dualism completely, then a few posts ago I declared myself a proud dualist. I literally cannot make up my mind. This shouldn't be surprising, since I don't actually have any workable definition of what it means for something to be physical. As such I'm now going to give up trying to decide whether my own position - or Searle's in other words - is monist or dualist.

While I believe that consciousness is caused entirely by the physical processes of the brain, I don't believe that the description we currently have of the physical processes in the brain are sufficient to explain consciousness. It seems to me that Dennett's brand of physicalism, along with the computational theory of mind (amazingly) require a strong rebuttal because rather than being seen as obviously ridiculous since it's completely at odds with our first-person experience, it's being taken seriously by people with a scientific background. This is where I applaud David Chalmers for making the problem with this view so apparent, even undeniable I would say. That said, I don't find his ideas about where we might look for an answer to the hard problem compelling. In particular, while I agree with him that consciousness is an emergent property of brain processes, I don't think his ideas of "strong emergence" are justified.

youtube.com/watch?v=FN9lT8Vc8kk&

In contrast, this chap develops the idea of emergence very well, in this great talk about consciousness from a physicist's perspective:

youtube.com/watch?v=GzCvlFRISIM&

I think he's absolutely right about the distinction between computation and consciousness, and I find the idea of consciousness being "substrate independent" compelling. I agree with his physicalist approach, that there isn't a mysterious additional thing that's needed to "turn the water of the brain into the wine of consciousness" but what we need to look for instead is the pattern that the physical particles are forming. I don't however think he's being very helpful by saying that consciousness is "what information feels like when it's being processed in certain ways" - in fact, I can't really make any sense out of that at all!


Yes, it is a perfectly compelling argument against dualism in general, and why I'm now not happy with saying that anything is "non-physical". That said, I don't feel 100% comfortable saying that consciousness is an emergent physical property. This tension is perhaps what brought Honderich to declare that there is such a thing as subjective physical reality.


I've so far not been able to find anything on Wittgensteinian philosophy of mind in a sufficiently digestible format to enable me to comment!


But I don't know how to categorise motives into "genuine" and "ulterior". In my example of me helping an old lady across the road because I evolved emotional responses to encourage me to do such things, my motivations are both "genuine" and "ulterior". Underneath every "genuine" motive you find a biologically "ulterior" one. And it's a sliding scale of how much of the ulterior aspect of the motivation we might be aware of in any given situation.


I go climbing for psychological reward, and this thread would suggest that we all do.

http://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?t=604030

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Sounds like you've been a lot more active than me over xmas! Thanks for your thoughts here. Haven't had time to view the links yet (except the last one) but shall do.


The problem with AM for many - and probably for scientists in particular - is that Davidson begins with the anomalism of the mental as an a priori position, whereas one might feel this is something that needs to be argued for (though he does provide a supporting argument afterwards). In fact he begins from three a priori principles: 1.The principle of causal interaction (at least some mental events interact causally with physical events). 2.The principle of the nomological (law-like) character of causality. 3.The anomalism of the mental. From these apparently contradictory assumptions he seeks to explain away the appearance of contradiction and to show how they can be reconciled in a version of the mind-brain identity theory which lays to rest the assumption of the necessity of psychophysical laws for an identity theory. He admits from the outset that his argument for the identity theory is at best conditional and that the supporting argument for the anomalism of the mental is not conclusive.


If you go with Searle then you're monist. If you go with Chalmers then you're dualist.


And there will no doubt be disputes over what would count as a 'sufficient explanation'.


Sounds a bit functionalist from how you describe it, though I haven't seen the video yet. Can't imagine information feeling like anything, but I can imagine physical brain states having a phenomenological character to the person who has them and maybe that's the processing bit. I totally agree that computation modelling is no help at all - I've never found that remotely plausible.


Maybe a lot of the difficulty here has to do with what we mean by 'the physical' or what we imagine that to be. Our understanding of physical reality is probably woefully inadequate for the task in hand - too limited by fixed concepts like 'particles' and 'waves' which are derived from our experience of the world at the medium-sized level.


The key thought here is that there is no 'inner world'. Our experience is directed to the world. We do not possess knowledge of our our own mental states as they occur; they provide us with knowledge of that to which they are directed. Searle was greatly influence by Wittgenstein.


I'll reply to the above in my next post.


But are all these things we reckon we get out of climbing the reasons we do it? And if we didn't get them would we give it up? I don't think we need anything that we can separate from, or that's intelligible independently of, climbing itself to motivate us. I'm not sure what this 'psychological reward' is, when it comes down to it.

In reply to ow arm:

With these questions being so multifaceted there really is no right answer, and each perspective will no doubt differ due to each 'persons' individuality, which coincidentally applies to the whole concept of your post. A person will be perceived in various forms depending on the relationship that person has with other people, in the sense that if they are someone's Mother/Wife/Sister etc, so if personality was what made a person then each perspective would be slightly different depending on that relationship?

Also for us to value a person and what they mean to us then physical appearance alone can seem enough to warrant an acknowledgment of the person still being 'themselves' in the event of for example a catastrophic brain injury, this could be the initial response and has happened when people are gravely ill and the relatives think being 'there' is preferable to dying no matter what, until the reality of their situation became apparent then quality of life is questioned and they are not seen as the same person anymore.

People are defined by their 'personalities' there warmth, compassion, empathy, kindness etc and as yet being a person is only attributed to the humans amongst us, even though such evil exists that makes us question how can those individuals be valued higher than other species when it comes to saving their lives or punishment?

If a terminally ill relative or friend could have their entire consciousness transferred to a computer and retain all of their humour, wit and compassion, in essence, what makes them who they are then that would be enough for me to view them as the same person because our relationship could still exist.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


Ok, here's how to categorize motives into 'genuine' (i.e. moral) and 'ulterior' (i.e. self interested). We use Kant's distinction between a 'categorical imperative' and a 'hypothetical imperative'. The former has an unconditional structure, the latter a conditional structure. A hypothetical imperative, such as 'If you want to win your Scout badge then you ought to help this old lady across the road' contains an ulterior motive (in this case the desire to win your Scout badge). Kant's view is that a hypothetical imperative does not express a moral requirement, since a moral requirement, properly so called, is unconditionally binding - it is not conditional on the agent's personal desires. If an act is morally required of you then you are required to do it whether you want to or not. I think this captures something that seems intuitively right bout the nature of morality, since it captures the thought that morality entails the possibility of being motivated to do something one doesn't necessarily want to do. In the case of the old lady, my motivation to help her would come more from my cognitive awareness of the situation than from any desire I might (or might not) have to help old ladies in general or this old lady in particular. I would not be motivated to help her, for example, if she was with a companion (in that case I would see it as being up to the companion to help her). Nor would I be motivated to help her if I believed she was perfectly capable of managing on her own. In either case, I would see no moral requirement impinging on me. But if I could see that she really needs help and no one else is at hand to provide that help, then I would consider myself morally required to help her. Moreover, that understanding of the situation would be sufficient to motivate me to act, even if there were other things I would much rather do and even if I would be considerably inconvenienced. If my motivation under these circumstances involves any sort of desire, then it's a desire that's motivated by my beliefs about the situation. As McDowell would say, it's a desire that's not independently intelligible from my beliefs (so it's a cognitive state, not an emotive one, that does the motivating - and it's the cognitive state that constitutes my sense of being bound by a particular moral requirement, so I am motivated by the moral requirement itself).

But let's look at a different sort of case in which all this becomes much more serious. The Iraq war. It didn't take long before people began to realize that the real reasons Bush and Blair decided to invade Iraq were not the reasons that might have justified it and which were being given. Bush was giving 9/11 as the pretext while Blair was trying to convince us about weapons of mass destruction. But it turns out they had an ulterior motive - namely securing oil supplies for Britain and America. In everyone's eyes, that made the invasion an immoral act, even if Bush and Blair had been right about their phony pretexts. As it happens, not only were they wrong but they were lying. So by just about every moral standard you can think of they were behaving immorally. But the point is it was the ulterior motive, which was concealed beneath a bluster of lies about threats to the West from Iraq, intended to deceive us into believing the invasion was morally justified, that lies at the heart of our moral outrage over the whole fiasco.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

But I still can't see where the categorical imperative comes from. I don't believe that the First Formulation works, because it's not meaningful to create a maxim. There isn't a single maxim that expresses the moral action, one can pick and choose what to include in the maxim to end up with the outcome you want when you universalise it.


And what happens if you're on your way to rescue a baby from a burning building? Do you still have the moral duty to help the old lady, or do you now have a moral duty that comes from instead from consequentialism? And actually wasn't your original moral duty just a decision to do the right thing according to consequentialism - and one which luckily doesn't cause any dissonance with your emotional instincts?

I.e. what's rationally the right thing to do (consquentialism) + there's no emotional dissonance = feels like a duty.

What does Kant tell us to do when there *is* emotional dissonance or a moral dilemma? The obvious question, which I've just read two opposing answers to, is what would Kant do faced with the Trolley Problem?


Much better to look from a consequentialist perspective IMO. The crucial matter is the lives that were lost and ruined. Was it worth it? And I can imagine lots of cases where it would be acceptable to me for a politician to deceive the public and act with an ulterior (but constructive) motive. It would be preferable to convince people of the argument, but that's not always possible.

I'm not at all satisfied that moral duties exist - if they did, where would they come from? If Kant's - or any other - formulation works, then why do we sometimes act out of duty, but not other times? Because we have free will and we're just like that?

In reply to Jon Stewart:

There are some good responses here - you've obviously been looking into Kant's categorical imperative. The first thing I'm going to say, before addressing your points in more detail, is that we need to wrest the internalism of Kantian ethics (which is valuable IMO), from the generalism, which is not (in the opinion of all particularists). A lot of the objections you (and many others) make to Kantian ethics concern its generalism rather than its interalism. QED, my criticisms of consequentialism concern both its externalism and its generalism. However, at least you're seeing the value of consequentialism as a decision-making principle, and that's great. You're with Dawkins on that. Dawkins doesn't like Kant's 'absolutism', but again, this is more an objection to his generalism than to his internalism (Dawkins isn't quite sophisticated enough in his ethics to make this distinction).


The categorical imperative comes from the sense that moral judgements should be both autonomous and consistent. It matters that the judgement comes from your own will and is not imposed upon you by the will of another. And it matters that your judgement is completely egalitarian throughout the category of 'rational beings' (which we can easily reformulate as 'sentient beings'). So, double standards are not allowed! What's right or wrong for one is right or wrong for all. Hence 'Act only upon that maxim which you can will to become a universal law of nature'. At best it's a necessary condition for the rightness of action. Now I do agree with you that what's wrong here is the idea of universalizing maxims. In fact the novelist George Eliot expressed the same objection. I wouldn't say creating maxims is not meaningful, but I would say that any maxim you can think of is going to be defeated by counterexamples involving certain circumstances (this is where thought experiments are so valuable to particularists). So, what's wrong here is the generalism of creating a maxim. But what's right IMO is that the agent's intentions ('will') are intrinsic to the moral value of his or her actions.


The only duty (requirement) that comes from consequentialism is to bring about the best accessible outcome. Different versions of consequentialism will stipulate what sort of outcome will count as 'best'. In the example you give here, both (sane) consequentialists and particularists would find it very easy to decide to save the baby (on purely cognitive grounds). But particularists would have many reasons for doing so, while consequentialists would have only one reason. Particularists would also say that it's not always right to bring about the best outcome - you need to weigh all the reasons you have to act against each other to see which reasons get the upper hand. It's a matter of moral reasoning, not of (blind) emotional responses.


Consequentialism can be either cognitivist or non-cognitivist. J.J.C. Smart, for example, is a non-cognitivist utilitarian. Kantianism, on the other hand, is necessarily cognitivist. Particularism is all about moral reasoning so it only makes sense if it's cognitivist. For the cognitivist, a moral dilemma involves a cognitive dissonance. If a decision is arrived at through moral reasoning, and that decision creates a dissonance with one's emotions, then one is required to ignore the emotions.


Kant would definitely tell us that a moral dilemma, if it really is a moral dilemma, is a cognitive dissonance and not an emotional one. The emotions should not influence our decision. With respect to the trolley problem, there is a genuine cognitive dissonance for the Kantian which does not exist for the consequentialist, and this is due to internalism. It has to do with the intentionality of action and what the agent can and cannot be held morally responsible for. I want to go into a lot more detail about this but the post will be too long if I do.


I respect consequentialism and I can fully understand why anyone would take that view. I would rather be, say, a negative utilitarian than a full blown Kantian. But I think particularism is better, because it sets no limits to the sorts of reasons that can be taken into account. So I don't want to throw the baby (internalism) out with the bathwater (generalism). In the case of the Iraq war, there wouldn't have been a war if there hadn't been an ulterior motive, so that was crucial. I think it is absolutely vital that the reasons politicians give for their actions are the reasons that motivate them. If they lie about this during election campaigns then the whole democratic process might as well be consigned to the dustbin. But as a particularist I do agree that there might be circumstances in which it is right for a politician (or anyone else) to lie.


Moral duties (requirements) come from our own rational assessment of the circumstances that affect us and others. They come from ourselves as moral beings (and that will be 'explained' by our biology and our social reality). We sometimes act out of duty because we are capable of being motivated by our moral beliefs rather than only by our self-interested desires. But we often fail to do so because our self-interested desires get the better of us. But we can cultivate our moral sensibilities.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

Happy New Year! Thought I'd respond to this while waiting for dark, at which point I will be opening a bottle of decent wine and putting Withnail on the telly, a tradition of mine.


I like this, seems very sensible to me.



I haven't quite got this, I'm afraid. It still looks to me like you're renaming consequentialism (with the "internalist proviso" that you have to know what you're doing rather than be stumbling on decisions which lead to the best outcome by accident).

So what are these other reasons that the internalist particularist has for running off to save the baby?

And can you give an example of a decision that the particularist would make - and how they'd justify it - that doesn't correspond with a consequentialist's?


Might take me some time to understand how such a (non-cognitivist) view could work...sounds frankly demented to me!


OK, so another thought experiment for the particularist. There's the random old lady who needs help crossing the road, the baby about to burn to death who you're on your way to rescue, but now your slightly crazy 98 year old mum looks like she's going to wander into the road seemingly unaware of the oncoming traffic. I'm sure we'd all agree to screw the random old lady (as in...you know what I mean), but what about mum versus baby (who we don't know)?

My view here is that consequentialism fails, and while we "should" rationally save the baby for utilitarian reasons, it's perfectly fine to submit to your emotions and save your mum. Not fine in any strictly rational sense, just fine in order to keep your own sanity. Selfish yes, but hey, what are you going to do about being born human rather than robot?


I'm afraid I see the whole of democracy as at least 90% sham. Certainly a least-worst, but I don't take it very seriously.


What I haven't yet got is how else - other than consequentialism (with the "internalist proviso" - for which someone has probably coined a formal term, but mine will do for now!) - we can make this rational assessment. If it ain't consequentialism and it ain't some form of Kantian generalism, what is it it?! "It's different in any given situation" doesn't cut it for me, that can't possibly be rational!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Happy new year to you too! Yep, watching telly seems a good idea in this weather. I had hoped at least to get out for a walk but it's just been too depressing out there!


Well, perhaps you are overlooking the fact that consequentialism is a generalist theory. It states a single principle - that the right course of action is the one that, under the circumstances, brings about the 'best' accessible outcome. Different versions of consequentialism have different ideas about what the best accessible outcome would be. Would it be the maximization of aggregate happiness (classical utilitarianism)? Or would it be the minimization of suffering (negative utilitarianism)? Or would it be something else altogether? There are even (mad) versions of consequentialism in which the 'best' outcome is construed as that which is most beneficial to the agent. But whatever the version, if your action fails to bring about the best outcome (however construed) then it's wrong, and you are morally responsible for the worse outcome. That makes consequentialism extremely demanding - too demanding to be a practical system in the view of many. It means, too, that there is only ever one reason for acting, and that just doesn't sit with the variety of reasons we in fact have. So particularism is far from being a 'renaming' of consequentialism. It seeks to do justice, to be sensitive to, all the different sorts of reasons we have for acting (or refraining from action), and allows the possibility that some of these non-consequentialist reasons will, in some cases (precise circumstances are all important) defeat the single consequentialist reason.


Reasons that have nothing to do with bringing about the 'best' outcome (however construed). It would, for example, be intrinsically right to save the baby, if all the morally relevant features of the situation favour it. My integrity as a moral agent would be compromised if I didn't.


Yes. Take the example of fox hunting. A hedonistic utilitarian would argue that fox hunting gives a lot of pleasure to a lot of people and doesn't harm any other people. So to deny that pleasure to all those people would be wrong. But a particularist would point out that while pleasure is very often a reason in favour of something, sometimes it can be a reason against. For surely what is wrong with fox hunting is the very fact that its practitioners take pleasure in causing and witnessing intense suffering. The pleasure is sadistic. For this reason, fox hunting is intrinsically wrong. But according to consequentialism (of any kind), actions can only ever be extrinsically right or wrong - right or wrong according to the outcomes they bring about. So particularism here appeals to an internalist reason that consequentialism cannot, and this reason defeats the utilitarian principle.


J.J.C. Smart considers himself a non-cognitivist utilitarian because he admits that utilitarianism can lead to monstrous results (e.g. the problem of justice) and his preference for it as a moral system over an internalist theory such as Kant's is emotive rather than rational. The problem with any generalist theory is the a priori status of its central principle. It serves to test our moral intuitions, rather than the other way around. Particularists would say that our moral intuitions should serve like observation statements as critical tests for principles (as in science). It's at least better that way around.


Yes, looks like the random old lady is going to lose out. But it does depend on the exact circumstances; on taking all the morally relevant features of the case into account. Maybe the baby would stand a better chance if I phone the fire service. As an internalist I would say I owe a greater duty to protect my own mother than I do to protect a complete stranger. But if my 98 year old mum is suffering dementia and her prospects aren't good, while the other old lady is fit and healthy and mentally sound, I may consider that I ought to save the other old lady. Also, If my demented old mum had been abusive and negligent and generally hates the sight of me, I wouldn't consider myself under any extra obligation just because she's my mother.


Yes I agree. The particularist acknowledges that we cannot avoid tensions in such situations for there will always be competing reasons. We just have to live with that.


But that's just it. Democracy is being seriously undermined. You should take it very seriously. What other power does the ordinary person have, short of violent revolution? We can't afford to let democracy get buried under the corruption and self-interest of the multinationals.


You can't really have consequentialism with an 'internalist proviso'. Consequentialism is by definition an externalist theory. There are hybrid theories, such as Scheffler's and Nozick's, but they are unstable for the simple reason that the 'agent-centred prerogatives' and 'side constraints' conflict with consequentialism. If a theory of ethics is going to be based on a single stipulation then it can't just help itself to values that conflict with that stipulation. Which would you rather do, accept a single a priori stipulation that serves to test all your moral intuitions in particular cases, or trust your moral intuitions in particular cases to serve as tests for any single a priori principle?

In reply to Ratfeeder:
Interesting stuff this!


Sorry I wasn't clear. What I like is the dissection of Kantian ethics into internalist and generalist elements because it's neat and clear - but I don't agree that this gets us anywhere! I think consequentialism is much the best way to rationally decide what is "right", because I think you *have* to have some kind of generalist system if you're going to decree that certain decisions are "right" or "wrong"; the alternative seems to me to be to submit to arbitrary personal intuition. I know that consequentialism can be utterly discordant with our evolved emotional drives (or you might say moral intuition), and so I don't think it works. I defend consequentialism as an ideal, not as a sensible moral system that works - it blatantly doesn't. But as far as moral systems go, at least it's consistent and sensible.


Given that it's never going to work, I think that it's fruitless work to attempt to develop the idea in this way, but I know people have put their hearts and souls into it. Bless'em!


I can see why this is appealing, but I'm still struggling to see it as clearly defined. I don't see how the reasons can be sorted into acceptable or not. If my moral intuition leads me to totally outrageous acts from a consequentialist perspective, because I've got some, say, irrational but strongly held racist beliefs, is that OK? Or on the other hand, I might overdo the egalitarianism and believe that all life forms have equal value, and make similarly outrageous decisions for that reason. Either way, it's just another reason, and whatever reasons I want to bring to the table are fair game, right? No generalist theory, it's essentially a free-for-all. So, what is it that particularism is contributing - if it's not using consequentialist principles of distinguishing right from wrong, how is not "follow your instincts, anything goes (so long as you can justify it by whatever means suit you)"?


I guess so, but that hedonistic approach is pretty ridiculous since pleasure is a long way from utility.


No, I'm afraid that's a completely unconcvincing argument, based on false premises. I assume that foxhunters get pleasure from the sense of occasion, the social aspects and sense of belonging, the fun of riding, the focus provided by the activity, indeed many aspects of the pleasure most probably overlap significantly with what we get from climbing. The suffering of the fox, I would think, is ignored rather than relished. I don't think that foxhunting is motivated by sadism, if it was then those people would spend all day breeding kittens especially for stomping and so forth, and they don't. They might be plonkers, but I'm not going to make moral judgements over them, while I tuck into my beef stew and use all kinds of products whose existence is dependent on suffering of people as well as animals.

We all inhabit our own cut-and-paste reality in which we concentrate on the things we want to see and ignore the things we don't. I might buy fair trade coffee one minute and then hop over to the £1 undies isle and grab myself a pair. I'm inconsistent, because that's the environment we live in. I don't have a sound moral basis for my decisions, I just do stuff which sometimes means thinking about "my values" as I like to construct them, and other times ignoring them and getting on with life as it suits me. People who think they faithfully obey some kind of moral code are without exception sanctimonious hypocrites. This is why the "religious whitewash effect" is so effective: you can reliably deny your own intrinsic human hypocrisy if you have an easy formula of attending a particular building on a particular day and saying particular words from a particular book...


Is it a problem if the central principle is self-evident, e.g. one should act to achieve the best outcome? What else might "should" mean?


What I was getting at was the utilitarian reasons for saving a baby with a full life ahead versus the intuitive and emotional reasons for saving your mother (who for the sake of this dilemma is really lovely and you love her very much as she devoted her life to your wellbeing, but now has very little time left and is losing the plot a bit). Is there a principle of "trade" creeping in, where we "owe" some people moral actions but not others?

My own view on this dilemma is that I think it's rationally the right thing to do to save the baby while my mum gets crushed under the wheels of a truck, but that's no good as I will find myself emotionally compelled to save my mum while the baby burns to death. It's not right, but that's what I'll do: I'm programmed with irrational emotional behavioural control circuits that will in these circs override my ability to reason. For me, there is no reconciliation of the two - they are at odds and one will win.


Already has, I thought. But that's a very different debate.


Other than the fact that it's not going to work because it's discordant with our evolved instincts, I see no logical problem with this consequentialism with an 'internalist proviso'. A decision is right if it was made using consequentialist principles in good faith. I don't believe in it, but I think it's a respectable position. I prefer it to the 'anything goes' of particularism anyway, and it's better than out-and-out externalism (pun unintended, but now I've seen it!).


It's a very interesting question, and I will answer: neither. I don't think that a priori stipulations will work in practice because of what it is to be a person (we've evolved hypocrisy for a reason); and I don't trust people's moral intuitions as far as I could throw them (we've evolved hypocrisy for a reason!). Sorry if you find my outlook bleak...

In reply to Ratfeeder:
Edit:

Having reflected on the last bit in the bath, I think that your question


is remarkably well put and forces me to nail my colours to the mast. I would rather accept the a priori stipulation that one should weigh up the pros and cons for all people, and test my moral intuitions against that. Trusting moral intuitions is what gave us homophobia, ISIS, apartheid, slavery, etc etc.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


You're wrong. Utilitarianism was originated by Jeremy Bentham and was based on a 'hedonic calculus'. 'Pleasure' was what Bentham meant by 'utility'.


It's not the premise of an argument, it's an example of the way moral reasons work. The point about pleasure sometimes being a reason against an action remains true even if you are right about fox hunting. As it happens you're wrong. Why do you suppose the hunting fraternity were so reluctant to accept drag hunting as an alternative, if the kill was not all important? Why did they breed foxes especially for hunting, if the motive was to keep the fox population down? And why did they indulge in the hideous practice of repeatedly giving the same captive fox to the dogs, if their motive was not sadistic pleasure? As it happens I'm a vegetarian, but at least the majority of meat eaters don't go out of their way to cause suffering in the animals they eat.


It might seem self-evident to you, but it isn't to me. According to the OED the word 'should' expresses a duty or obligation. Such obligations, such as keeping promises, can sometimes prevent us from achieving the 'best' outcome (whatever that might be).


I think Samuel Scheffler's 'The Rejection of Consequentialism' would appeal to you greatly. There is a very obvious logical problem with a theory that contradicts it's own central principle. And it's not the case that 'anything goes' in particularism. We're talking normative ethics here. Normal people who witness an act of violent brutality against an innocent person would concur in their moral revulsion. They would consider such an act to be intrinsically wrong. Would you disagree? Or would you say it's only wrong if it fails to bring about the best outcome?


People's moral intuitions are usually pretty reliable unless overcome by religious dogmas, authoritarian dictates or false beliefs. I find your outlook unduly sceptical of ordinary human nature. But what really matters is that people in positions of power and authority act with the greatest moral sensitivity.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


You have this completely the wrong way around. Hitler no doubt genuinely believed that the outcome he was trying to achieve justified exterminating the Jews and his hideous eugenics programme. Stalin no doubt genuinely believed the outcome he was trying to achieve justified allowing millions of Ukranian farmers to starve to death. Our ordinary moral intuitions tell us that these acts were intrinsically wrong - not that they turned out to be wrong just because they didn't achieve the best outcomes. No outcome, however 'good', could possibly have have justified them.

It was religion that gave us homophobia, not our ordinary moral intuitions. Religion gives us ISIS, and no doubt the members of ISIS genuinely believe that the outcome they are trying to achieve justifies their unspeakable acts of brutality. The same goes for the Christians during the crusades. The same goes for apartheid. And as for slavery: if it brings about the best outcome then it's justified on consequentialist grounds. But on Kantian grounds, it can never be justified (consider the second formulation of the categorical imperative). For the internalist, slavery is intrinsically wrong, not just wrong in the event that it doesn't bring about the best outcome. The real problem is that people become blind to their own moral intuitions in the face of authority (experiments have been done that prove this).

So, it's this idea that the means is justified by the end that consequentialism embraces (by definition) and that internalism rejects (whether particularist or not).

In reply to Ratfeeder:

There's a problem in the definition of pleasure here. Bentham lists "benefit, advantage, good, or happiness" as suitable paraphrases of pleasure. Not that I'm going to defend the hedonic calculus, which is clearly a load of pointless rubbish. The principle that one should weigh up the pros and cons for all people does not mean that one should then go on to attempt to design an absurdly simplistic mechanism to do so. As a joke, maybe, but come on, as a serious idea...?


I don't agree. I might object emotionally to someone else getting pleasure from something, but I'm not prepared to elevate my personal revulsion at someone else's behaviour to the status of "moral reason". As we see with the foxhunting example, we've made a different set of assumptions about what is going on in the minds of others, what their motivations are, how they feel about their own actions. How could such assumptions be reliable?


Because they disliked having their sport interfered with by a Labour government. It's probably much like the government banning trad climbing and bolting Stanage under H&S regulations. No one outside the climbing fraternity would understand what the problem was.


I never said that argument was believable!


God knows. But you're constructing a cut-and-paste reality in which you see the elements of fox hunting that support your view vividly, and don't see all of the rest of the complex world in which that one single thing sits. It's not a compelling argument that a cultural practice that you personally disapprove of is morally wrong by some kind objective standard.



I don't understand the contradiction. If person x makes a decision by considering as best they can the consequences and weighs up the good and bad that will occur for everyone affected, then they're acting morally. No other motive is a reliable indicator of a morally defensible decision. If the decision causes harm and is challenged by someone else, "because I mustn't lie", "because I must always appreciate each person's humanity", "because it's what I felt was right" are not good enough; but "because I genuinely considered the consequences for all people and this came out the best option on balance" is an acceptable defence even if the outcome was different to that considered. I don't see the logical problem with this - unless it's to do with knowing whether someone else really tried to weigh up the consequences?


My emotional reaction would be revulsion, but if the explanation of how this was bringing about the best outcome was explained, then my moral reaction would be that it was OK. I don't believe that anything is intrinsically right or wrong, decisions bring about good and bad outcomes.


What makes you say that? I don't believe there's any such thing as moral intuitions that aren't simply a combination of basic evolved emotional responses and social conditioning. That conditioning might be a university education in science, or it might be growing up in a fundamentalist muslim community. The moral intuitions that result are likely to be profoundly different.


Yes I agree, and I think that consequentialism provides a suitable framework for judging moral sensitivity, as it's the closest to a formulation of an objective system that can be agreed upon. I still don't know how you would use particularist internalism to judge the moral sensitivity of another. Some idiot in the House of Commons - or perhaps a bishop in the Lords - might for example, with very strong internalist motivations, block legislation that would bring about much better lives for homosexuals in society. From a consequentialist point of view I can object and I can argue - how can the internalist?


But such atrocities are wrong on consequentialist grounds, we don't need to appeal to unreliable moral instincts. Demonstrably unreliable because the German people went along with it. What on earth advantage could be vast enough to outweigh that degree of suffering?


And I don't see any justification for belief in these things you call "ordinary moral intuitions". And for the specific example of homophobia I suspect it may run deeper than religion, and you need to call on the rational brain - consequentialism - to really show why it's wrong.


Just as for Hitler's programme, there is no consequentialist justification of slavery. To justify slavery, you have to believe that the people enslaved are worth less than the slave owners; once you consider people as equal the benefits of the suffering need to become immense, like saving the world or everyone living in nirvana.


But something that causes that degree of suffering is as close to "instrinsically wrong" as a consequentialist will ever get. One simply can't think of sufficient advantages to justify it. Things don't need to be classed as "intrinsically wrong" (and I don't believe that this phrase means anything) for them to be very obviously wrong for very good reasons.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


Bentham set the agenda for utilitarians ever since. Others, such as J.S. Mill, merely reinterpreted the hedonism in terms of 'higher pleasures', 'happiness' or 'preference satisfaction' etc. The point is, however, that consequentialism as such is an incomplete theory. It needs some interpretation of what's going to count as the 'best' outcome overall, and that merely defers the question of agreement in judgement from actions to outcomes.


Here's a quote from Roy Hattersley:
'I have long supported whoever it was who said that the real objection to fox hunting is the pleasure that the hunters get out of it...If killing foxes is necessary for the safety and survival of other species, I - and several million others - will vote for it to continue. But the slaughter ought not to be fun.'

I agree with Hattersley, and so, apparently, did the vast majority of people in this country.


The contradiction is between an agent-neutral principle which tells you that brutally murdering an innocent person is right if it achieves the best outcome, and an agent-relative constraint which tells you that brutally murdering an innocent person is wrong even if it does achieve the best outcome. Particularists will be the first to point out that it's sometimes right to break a promise, or to lie etc., depending on what's at stake. But in circumstances where it is right to break a promise, it is intrinsically right to do so.


We're getting to the nub of the issue here. There will certainly be an (instinctive) emotional reaction, but emotions are not necessarily irrational. The emotional/rational distinction you are using is a false dichotomy. The emotional aspect springs from a cognitive awareness of the nature of the action. I would not consider the action 'OK', if it was explained to me that it was necessary to achieve the best outcome.


I say that for two reasons. 1) Scientific tests have been done which show that people's 'emotional reactions' (i.e. empathetic sensitivity to the suffering of others) are pretty much the same (i.e. highly sensitive) - but these reactions are overcome if a figure of authority (e.g. a scientist in a white coat) tells them that they must continue to inflict suffering. 2) We can grow out of our early influences and even our educational prejudices, and we can (and do) learn from our moral experience and our moral thinking.


I would certainly prefer a consequentialist system (treated with critical wisdom) to complete amoralism. Realistically, it may well be the best we're likely to get. But I think there are other ways of looking at ethics which are better (and so do many others). A particularist would judge the moral sensitivity of another by the number of factors he takes into consideration when he tries to decide what to do in a particular situation (and of course by what he actually does in that situation).


But that's just the point - such atrocities are not necessarily wrong on consequentialist grounds. At best the ones in question were contigently wrong, but since they are not considered intrinsically wrong, they might have been right because they might have achieved the best outcome overall (how far into the future does the outcome, and its value, extend?). As for the German people, A) they were desperate, and B) they didn't know about the 'final solution' when they voted. They didn't quite understand what they were letting themselves in for.


Homosexuality was a normal and acceptable part of life for the ancient Greeks, and they hadn't invented consequentialism. There's a need for rationality, yes, but not necessarily consequentialism.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

You contradict yourself. First you say there is no consequentialist justification of slavery, then you say that the benefits of slavery would have to be immense in order to justify it on consequentialist grounds. The truth is, consequentialism would consider slavery to be justified if it achieved some utopian ideal that the consequentialist judged to be the best outcome overall. The twentieth century serves to warn us of the catastrophic results of trying to achieve utopian ideals and of imagining that such ends can justify the most brutal and inhuman means. Karl Popper took heed of this warning in 'The Open Society and It's Enemies' - one the greatest defences of democracy ever written.


Even consequentialists have to class something as being intrinsically valuable. For them it is whatever outcome is deemed 'best'. Otherwise there'll be an infinite regress of purely functional values. For the consequentialist, only outcomes have intrinsic value. For the internalist, actions can have intrinsic value too.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

In reply to Ratfeeder:


Well it would if one was foolish enough to consider that there might be a 'complete ethical theory'. Why would we think such a thing might exist? What we're trying to do when we're talking about ethics, if we're sensible, is analyse human behaviour including the way humans feel about their behaviour. Because of the complexity of behaviour and the ungraspable nature of someone else's consciousness, attempts to define exactly what the 'best outcome' means are doomed. However, reasonable people could reach a consensus on things like 'it's better to be alive than dead', 'it's better to be content than despairing', 'it's better to have opportunity than to be constrained'. That's all that's needed to make sense of a consequentialist approach to moral problems. Attempting to make such an understanding 'complete' is futile, because what we're dealing with is people's behaviour and how they feel about it – this is not an aspect of the world that lends itself at all well to 'complete theories'.

What would be useful though, is a framework against which behaviour can be judged so that we can come up with policies to help society work. This doesn't have to be a theory that we can each use individually to decide whether or not to we should save our senile mother from oncoming traffic or a stranger's baby from a fiery death. But it does have to be sensible and consistent enough for us to make policies that affect our lives, such as how the justice system should work and what behaviours ought to be legal and illegal. Sadly, we're nowhere near this in our apparently post-enlightenment society.


Well yes, I sympathise with this sentiment. But I'm afraid that sympathy with a sentiment is not what I consider to be sufficient grounds for making policy, it's emotion. Policy is by definition generalist, and thus must adhere to generalist principles, even if this approach fails at the individual level of testing every decision. In policy, we need something that gets the job done. Hattersley's principle can't be generalised: so, the farmer's kid shooting rabbits is now a criminal is he? Therefore, it's not sufficient grounds for policy.

A society which has laws made from emotional (non-)reasoning is a mess. It is unfair, and allows all kinds of vested interests and prejudices in at the structural level – criminalising homosexuality, institutional racism, that kind of thing.


This isn't a contradiction, it's a limitation that I've been clear about from the outset. I'm defending consequentialism as a consistent approach that would work if you could turn off your evolved emotional instincts, not one that actually works (because no such system exists). As such it's useful to pull out of the bag when you need to defend a moral decision, as one has to in policy. But I'm not recommending that anyone goes around with this bag over their head!


Rational arguments and emotional responses are distinct types of mental function (I'm pretty confident this could be backed up with brain imaging), which can operate in harmony or in conflict. Many people elevate their emotional responses to the status of rational argument and can't see the difference, but I try my best not to be one of them.


1). I don't believe that psychological experiments can be generalised in this way, people are not particles!
2). Yes, our socialisation continues throughout life, but we don't go from a “polluted” state in youth to a “pure” state as we gather moral experience. There is no evidence that people's moral intuitions become more “reliable” (i.e. closer to your own? More liberal?) with more experience.

I think you have to give up on this idea that there exists anything in our nature that can be relied upon to provide reliable moral intuitions. In some situations, we act nicely but when the pressure's on for resources, we have a habit of turning to war and genocide as strategies. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about human behaviour, it is merely functional, just like the rest of nature. Why would an intrinsic moral function have evolved? Unless its purpose is to increase the replication of our genes, it will not evolve. And if it didn't evolve, then it came from...?


I'm still not quite sure how the particularist judges another's sensitivity. Are you saying that the more factors are involved in a decision the better? Could we return to the example of some idiot in the House of Commons - or perhaps a bishop in the Lords - blocking legislation that would bring about much better lives for homosexuals in society. How does the debate with the particularist proceed? How do they present a rational case?


There is no contradiction. This is part of a broader pragmatic approach derived from the scientific world view. The logical possibility of a consequentialist justification of slavery is not important, what actually exists in front of us in the world is.


No! Not the bloody Ancient Greeks being wheeled out as the model of a liberal society! The kind of homosexuality they were OK with, as I understand it, was the kind practised more recently by senior Catholic clergy. It has absolutely nothing to do with accepting that 1% or so of the population seek consensual sex and relationships with their own gender.


Yes, as above we can achieve a consensus on things like 'it's better to be alive than dead', 'it's better to be content than despairing', 'it's better to have opportunity than to be constrained'.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


?? Consequentialism is an umbrella term for any moral theory (such as utilitarianism) which has a certain (externalist) structure. In that sense it's 'incomplete' because by itself it doesn't specify anything about what the 'best' outcome would be. Utilitarianism is a 'complete' theory because it does specify what sort of outcome would be 'best', though there are different versions of utilitarianism.


This begs the question of whether or not consequentialism (of any kind) does provide a sensible framework. It's certainly persuasive at first sight. But one of the chief criticisms leveled against utilitarianism (at least) it is its unfairness. To quote from Anthony Flew's Dictionary of Philosophy, 'the majority happiness may best be served by the sacrifice of some innocent party or by some manifestly unjust institution like slavery'. If we're looking for a theory on which to base public policy, a much better bet IMO is John Rawls' Theory of Justice.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

Dare I say that, through your obsessive discussion with Jon, with much airing of your philosophical knowledge, the two of you have deflected this discussion from its original purpose?

In reply to Ratfeeder:



Here's what "begging the question" means, from Wikipedia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

You are right. Sorry.

In reply to Ratfeeder:

He is right that we've wandered off topic, but the discussion has introduced me to different viewpoints on the problems of describing consciousness, and has made me think about morality in a way that I've quickly dismissed in the past. I haven't really budged from my position that moral philosophy doesn't get us anywhere, but I know a bit more about the positions I don't agree with, which is great.

If you do fancy responding to all those outstanding points, don't let Gordon put you off! I've tried to understand particularism, but it all seems somewhat wishy-washy and smacks of constructing clever arguments to avoid the obvious fact that moral consistency is just not what human beings are about. I call it "evolved hypocrisy" and I think particularism is an excuse for it. I hold that no excuse is necessary - we are what we are, and if we want to be better then we should use our rational brains to consider the consequences of our actions.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Well, I don't want to put you off: it's probably material for another thread. An absolutely vast subject in its own right. From what I remember of my studies of moral philosophy (years ago) I don't think that the principles of morality boil down to a simple choice between particularism and consequentialism. I don't think the latter is a complete or adequate theory.