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.
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.
I'm saying these are creationist claims wrapped up in a veneer of philosophy and being promulgated by a creationist in the podcast that you linked.
Dang, dawg, I don't even have evidence that you read past the first couple sentences in my reply above. Yes, I read the article. It's not very well written and makes a lot of baffling claims, some of which I tried to address. Let's look at what we might describe as Kastrup's thesis:
But, per Patricia Churchland:
Ah, so the game is to redefine "physicalism" as to exclude everything that isn't matter? Again, I don't think anyone believes this. Information is not material - it can be encoded on and retrieved from physical substrates. Yet I don't think anyone is out there arguing that information in and of itself does not or cannot exist.
I didn't reply to every bit of your comment because most of it is just missing the point in ever more convoluted ways, and that includes most of this one. The Churchland quote in particular bares no relevance at all for what I'm trying to convey here so I'm not gonna be replying to any of that.
My argument (and the article's) is more specific than your vague gesturing:
Physicalism denies qualia (whatever that may be) in of itself any causal efficacy in the material world, whether by (somehow) equating it on an ontological level with configurations of matter or claiming each fundamental particle is a tiny bit conscious (that's usually called panpsychism).
If the specific qualities of qualia in of themselves (whatever they may be) cannot effect any change in the material world and if the theory of natural selection is true then it is quite wonderous that they correspond so well with what our body is currently doing.
You specifically mentioned pain as being evolutionarily beneficial (which I agree, it clearly is), and by doing so you inadvertently gave it causal efficacy, so that statement cannot possibly make sense in a purely physicalist account of consciousness unless you assume this wonderous coincidence that it just happens to be so.
When you think about it that sounds more like creationism than what I'm proposing.