Podcast description: Materialism is dead. There are simply too many questions left unanswered after years of studying the brain. Now, people are scrambling for a new way to understand the mind-body relationship. Cartesian dualism has become a whipping boy in philosophy, but it has advantages over the alternatives. Dr. Joshua Farris discusses Cartesianism and philosophy with Dr. Michael Egnor.
Can you though? You see an image in your conscious mind and with the same mind you (or well some scientists) devised a mathematical model that explains those images rather well in most cases.
All you really truly know is your own consciousness and whatever sensory input it contains, the rest is a model (again within your own consciousness). Not sure why you would subvert this first truth you know about the universe (that your own consciousness exists) in favor of this weird dogmatic reductionism that posits that nothing beyond this model can exist, and if it seems as if it does you must be mistaken about it somehow.
For me the killer argument was this: https://web.archive.org/web/20200206121950/https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-cannot-have-evolved-auid-1302
Basically when you try to put reductive physicalism together with the theory of evolution you get a hell of a fine tuning problem if you don't allow consciousness in of itself some kind of agency.
I think it makes sense to separate metaphysical idealism from political idealism. In the political context materialism is still king IMO no matter which metaphysic turns out to be true eventually.
If you're interested in metaphysics I highly recommend other works from Bernardo Kastrup, for example his book "Why Materialism is Baloney" or this video series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDbCTxm6_Ps
Politically he's a lib but I can see growing skepticism of western institutions in his recent rants, he's an alright dude IMO.
:doubt:
It's the only truth that's immediately and ineffably accessible to you and it was like that since you were born. All the other truths are derived from that first one.
I know that my consciousness exists and that I perceive the world though my senses but I've had enough panic attacks to know that my perception is not at all reliable and cannot form the foundation for Truth. I can alter the world through my actions in the world, and never through imagination or mere imposition of ideas. On the other hand I can eat things that will bend my perception entirely out of shape regardless of my intentions, and then a few hours later I realise that nothing changed and nobody ever noticed anything was ever different.
It's not about blindly believing your every perception to be the ultimate truth, that's clearly not a good idea, it's more about knowing that your consciousness does indeed exist on a base ontological level.
When you properly internalize that then reductive physicalism doesn't really make that much sense anymore.
What do you mean that consciousness exists on an ontological level? Materialism is useful to me because it allows me to quickly discard any theory that assumes there's any interaction between consciousness and matter beyond what, in the case of humans, a motor neuron is physically capable of.
In that way I can discard rain rituals, most kinds of sacrifice, telepathy, the theory of great men, the innate theory of gender, wishful thinking, marginalism, and so on.
I'd urge you to reconsider some of that and do some research beyond thought terminating gotchas that the rational nihilist debatebro types spout all the time. I used to think like you but then I delved into the topic a bit more into detail and the more I did the less hardline reductionism made sense.
"Consciousness is just what the matter in the neurons does and nothing else" is a tenuous position that's not even all that backed by actual data, it's at best one of the working theories but far from proven beyond reasonable doubt. The only reason it's considered a valid position IMO is because it's en vogue to be a hardline reductionist nihilist in mainstream western scientific circles.
I don't listen to rational nihilist debatebro types, I developed my (rather rudimentary) ontology though practice in science first and and reading Engels, Althusser, Deleuze and others second.
I'm precisely asking you what thought is there beyond it. What real phenomenon can you explain that I cannot. In particular what is the meaning of having "actual data" about consciousness if you say it's beyond the purview of the material world, and therefore above all measurement instruments I can think of.
Consciousness itself.
Reductionism cannot even conceptually close the explanatory gap between the quantitative world of matter and the qualitative world of conscious experience. Even if you get damn near perfect 999 sigma correlations between states of matter and reports of conscious experience the gap is no closer to being closed.
Also Engels would call you a "vulgar materialist" and wouldn't really agree with you there.
so you say, no greater deception than the one by yourself for your "self", would lack of consciousness change your action and perception, well through alcohol we know the first ain't true and the second is a byproduct of believing the first, are we all? nothing is less assured or more tenuously within our grasp, also truth and knowledge as such do not exist :chefs-kiss:
That article is a long argument from personal incredulity. Some of my favorite chestnuts:
The concept of spandrels describes a situation in which a phenotypic trait isn't the product of direct selection. At the genomic level, a given mutation doesn't have to have a positive effect on fitness to become fixed in the population; random mating in a finite population is enough to get it there. You could argue that something as complex as consciousness isn't governed by the same rules as a single allele, but you're still giving away the game by acknowledging that consciousness emerges somehow from genes. Genetic expression is limited to a set of chemical reactions, governed by physical laws. All genes can do is produce proteins; all proteins can do is chemically interact with the other components of the cell.
I don't think materialists actually believe this. Qualia can be associated with neuronal activity and can lead to observable changes in behavior. Emotion, for example.
But okay, what if we concede that consciousness cannot have evolved? How did it get there, then?
That's one hell of a spandrel we got there then.
What are the odds of this strange "spandrel" appearing to just so correspond so well to our body, why does getting hurt feel bad as opposed to good? The chances of this happening by accident are inconceivably small considering you can imagine countless of ways it could have developed differently, including no consciousness happening at all yet our bodies doing what they do normally.
Why is this such a ridiculous claim but it isn't ridiculous to claim matter has always been there?
Sure would be, but this is just an extension of the "tornado in a junkyard" trope that creationists use all the time. The argument in the article isn't that "consciousness is improbable" or "consciousness may have an origin other than evolution," it's "consciousness cannot have evolved"; both spandrels and selectively neutral mutations are examples of ways that evolution can act without direct selection on a given trait. The argument starts on a flawed understanding of evolutionary biology.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, why does a puddle fit perfectly in the depression in which it resides? The fact that consciousness corresponds to our physical experience of reality is, as far as I can tell, an argument in favor of an evolutionary origin of consciousness, not one against. Pain is unpleasant presumably because things that hurt tend to reduce fitness and any organisms that evolved a positive response to pain are probably selected out of the gene pool. Perhaps - we could argue - that consciousness is a spandrel that developed out of selection for organisms that can remember, contextualize, and avoid repetition of fitness-reducing experiences or seek out fitness-increasing experiences. The point here is not that we can definitively state an evolutionary origin for consciousness, merely that the nature of consciousness does not preclude the possibility of an evolutionary explanation.
Endosymbiosis didn't have to happen either, or photosynthesis, or the Krebs cycle, or any of the other myriad prior developments it took to produce people. Improbable does not mean impossible.
This is just a rehash of the "well evolution doesn't explain explain the origins of life" red herring. It's not incumbent on evolutionary theory to explain the existence of matter, and evidence suggests that - whatever its origin or lack thereof - the existence of matter predates the existence of life and that matter is capable of existing independently of life. What evidence do we have that consciousness exists independently of the physical matter of the brain? What does it even mean to say that consciousness predates conscious beings? That the brain somehow developed into a sophisticated antenna for tuning into something that we have no physical evidence of and doesn't fit into our existing physical models? That the universe itself is conscious and is teleologically oriented to producing conscious beings? That we're just God dreaming? I don't see how the claim leads to anything that resembles a testable hypothesis or is in any way distinguishable from a god of the gaps argument.
But by saying that you're implying consciousness has causal efficacy in of itself, meaning it cannot be a spandrel, yet reductionist physicalism claims it doesn't. You're contradicting yourself.
That's circular reasoning though.
"Qualia is the way it is because of this and that specific evolutionary beneficial neuronal activity and the neuronal activity is like that because the qualia feels bad or good in evolutionarily beneficial ways"
That's the thing with hardline physicalism, you're always gonna end up chasing your tail, it's an epistemological dead end when it comes to consciousness.
Not sure what you're saying here. Do you really think I'm a creationist or something? Did you even read the article I linked with your full attention?
Nobody is saying the theory of evolution is wrong, just that there was something else other than matter that was a participant in natural selection.
Oh yeah I'm really into Kastrup. IIRC he is the only person ever alive who has sucessfully defended a PhD on this topic, pretty much everyone else gets laughed out of the room. I feel like it's bullshit though, but some of his arguments against hard physicalism are fairly convincing.
spoiler
I think he might be pretty solidly left wing tho, not a communist but he definitely has that bent from what I've seen him post on FB
edit: One of the most insane things I've ever read in a book was Kastrup talking about how there was a tribe in like, the Amazon that had a huge suicide problem because they were so detached from materialism as a metaphysics people had ZERO fear of death and would immediately off themselves when family members died to follow them
If what he's proposing is bullshit I feel like it's way less bullshit than hard physicalism. "Everything is Mind" is a hard pill to swallow but it makes more sense to me than "nothing is Mind".
I think he's still a lib but one of the good ones, he seems to be able to sniff out the bullshit that comes out of western media. I can totally see him getting more radical in the coming years.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Dennett is the most ridiculous one of the bunch, philosophically he's a complete charlatan. Just endless sophistry and obscurantism to avoid ever considering what the questions is all about.
deleted by creator
I don't quite understand this take, having read a few of his books back in the day. I feel like people get really hung up on the qualia existence thing or something.