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.

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.

  • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    That’s one hell of a spandrel we got there then.

    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.

    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?

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Why is this such a ridiculous claim but it isn’t ridiculous to claim matter has always been there?

    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.

    • space_comrade [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Pain is unpleasant presumably because things that hurt tend to reduce fitness

      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.

      • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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.

        • space_comrade [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          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.

          • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            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.

            • space_comrade [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              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.

              • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                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.

                Did you even read the article I linked with your full attention?

                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:

                However, our phenomenal consciousness is eminently qualitative, not quantitative. There is something it feels like to see the colour red, which is not captured by merely noting the frequency of red light. If we were to tell Helen Keller that red is an oscillation of approximately 4.3*1014 cycles per second, she would still not know what it feels like to see red. Analogously, what it feels like to listen to a Vivaldi sonata cannot be conveyed to a person born deaf, even if we show to the person the sonata’s complete power spectrum. Experiences are felt qualities—which philosophers and neuroscientists call ‘qualia’—not fully describable by abstract quantities.

                But, per Patricia Churchland:

                . . .the philosopher may go on to conclude that no science can ever really explain qualia because it cannot demonstrate what it is like to see blue if you have never seen blue; consciousness is forever beyond the reach of scientific understanding.
                What is the merit in this objection? It is lacking merit, for if you look closely, you will find that it rests on a misunderstanding. The argument presumes that if a conscious phenomenon, say smelling mint, were genuinely explained by a scientific theory, then a person who understood that theory should be caused to have that experience; e.g., should be caused to smell mint. Surely, however, the expectation is unwarranted. Why should anyone expect that understanding the theory must result in the production of the phenomenon the theory addresses? Consider an analogy. If a student really understands the nature of pregnancy by learning all there is to know about the causal nature of pregnancy, no one would expect the student to become pregnant thereby. If a student learns and really understands Newton’s laws, we should not expect the student, like Newton’s fabled apple, to thereby fall down. To smell mint, a certain range of neuronal activities have to obtain, particularly, let us assume, in olfactory cortex. Understanding that the olfactory cortex must be activated in manner will not itself activate the olfactory cortex in manner. We are asking too much of a neuroscientific theory if we ask it not only to explain and predict, but also to cause its target phenomenon, namely the smell of mint, simply by virtue of understanding the theory.

                something else other than matter that was a participant in natural selection.

                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.

                • space_comrade [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  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.

                  • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    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.

                    The Churchland quote was literally a direct response to the central nugget of the Karstrup piece. I'm not sure what else I was supposed to take away from that. Maybe you should do what you're demanding from me and read the piece with your full attention.

                    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).

                    This is a strawman. Physicalism leads to the conclusion that qualia are an emergent property of interactions of matter. It doesn't require self-similarity at every level of organization. Heck, Karstrup is the one making the panpsychist argument in his conclusion: "[consciousness] can only have been there from the beginning as an intrinsic, irreducible fact of nature."

                    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.

                    I don't know how many times I'm going to have to copy-paste this but: Qualia can be associated with neuronal activity and can lead to observable changes in behavior. Literally what the Churchland piece says, and she's arguing against your position. From further down:

                    A second and related complaint raised by certain philosophers is that even if neuroscience were to discover with what brain states being aware of a burning pain on one’s left ear is identical, we would still not understand why just those brain states are identical with precisely that sensation, as opposed, say, to feeling a desire to void. Neuroscience, it will be averred, will never be able to explain why conscious states Y = brain states X, rather than say, brain state Z. For those who are keen on qualia as metaphysical simples forever beyond the scope of science, the next step may be to infer that we cannot ever hope to understand that identity in neurobiological terms (Chalmers, 1996). Awareness, the claim goes, will always be ineffable and metaphysically basic. This means neuroscience cannot ever really explain consciousness. This complaint too rests on a misunderstanding. What is an example where a science — any subfield of science — explains why X = Y? Not how we know or why we believe that X = Y, but why X is identical to Y, rather than to Z. Using the examples already at hand, the corresponding questions would be these: why is temperature mean molecular kinetic energy, rather than, say, caloric fluid or something else entirely? Why is visible light actually electromagnetic radiation rather than, say, something else entirely, say, ‘‘intrinsic photonicness’’? By and large science does not offer explanations for fundamental identities. Rather, the discovery is that two descriptions refer to one and the same thing — or that two different measuring instruments are in fact measuring one and the same thing. Why is that thing, the thing it is? It just is. Science discovers fundamental identities, but the identities it discovers just are the way things are. There is no fundamental set of laws from which to derive that temperature is mean molecular kinetic energy or light is electromagnetic radiation.

                    Qualia are associated with physical states of the brain. Whether they're an emergent property of something more fundamental is of no consequence to evolution.

                    You specifically mentioned pain as being evolutionarily beneficial, 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.

                    Keep flailing, I think there's some straw that you missed there.