Materialism and mysteries

Prof. James Anderson responds to Bart Ehrman's (I guess one could call it) mysterian materialism in his post "Materialism and Mysteries".

Consciousness in split-brain patients

Striking finding on consciousness:https://t.co/ZMY7gGuyRd pic.twitter.com/0cFCn8PlYP

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) June 4, 2020

The existence of the soul

Currently J. P. Moreland's series on the existence of the soul is available for free here.

The future of A.I.

I notice some tech execs making casual claims about A.I as if strong A.I is a reality, but to my knowledge that goal remains as elusive as ever. For instance:

Shor: Computer proofs really haven't undermined the concept of traditional mathematical proofs, at least not yet (although in 1993, some mathematicians were certainly afraid that they would). There are at least two reasons mathematicians look for proofs:

a) to ensure that the things they claim are actually true,

b) to gain more understanding into mathematics.

Computer proofs are generally satisfactory for the first reason above, but very few of them, if any, provide us any real understanding. There are certainly lots of computer-aided proofs now, where computers have helped in performing long calculations without error, or with elaborate case analyses.  But coming up with most mathematical proofs requires actual understanding of the underlying mathematics, and computers don't have that today. So computers can help mathematicians who understand the underlying mathematics by performing infeasibly long calculations and case analyses, but although they have been very useful for these purposes, most of the time they cannot come up with proofs by themselves.

It's possible that sometime far in the future, mathematics will be dominated by incomprehensible computer proofs. This might lead to “The End of Mathematics,” or at least of mathematics as carried out by human mathematicians. But we're nowhere near that point.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/quantum-computing-for-english-majors/

The ghost in the cellphone

Gilbert Ryle is famous for a catchy, quotable phrase he used to caricature Cartesian dualism: "the ghost in the machine". 

The connotation of that metaphor is that if substance dualism is true, the soul is located somewhere in the body. If the soul exists, you ought to be able to find it by poking around inside the body. 

My point isn't to do an exposition of Ryle's philosophy, but to use a different metaphor to illustrate substance dualism. Nowadays, not only do people have cellphones that enable to them to talk to other people, but cellphones can function as miniature TV screens which enable them to see the person they are talking to. 

To take a cliche situation, suppose anthropologists discovered a tribe in the rain forest. The natives have no idea what a cellphone is or how it works. When they see faces and hear voices emanating from the cellphone, they imagine the cellphone took possession of the speaker's soul. His soul is trapped inside that little box. 

But as we know, the speaker isn't actually in the device. Rather, the device is just an interactive medium to project himself. 

That's analogous to the mind-body relation.  

Is consciousness an illusion?

From one atheist philosopher to another:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/is-consciousness-an-illusion-dennett-evolution/

This is significant because the standard atheist paradigm is committed to physicalism. And if physicalism entails eliminative materialism (i.e. consciousness is an illusion), then that's a defeater for the standard atheist paradigm.

In principle, an atheist can be a substance dualist, platonic realist, or even an idealist, but atheists resist that for good reason. Physicalism, if true, automatically disproves Christianity at one stroke. No God, angels, demons, souls, precognition, or miraculous action at a distance. 

Conversely, opening the door a crack for discarnate minds is a divine foot in the door. 

The argument from consciousness

https://appearedtoblogly.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/the-argument-from-consciousness.pdf

Denying the Signature 6

"Denying the Signature: More on Substance Dualism" by Stephen Meyer.

The divine video game

I'd like to elaborate a previous post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/09/artificial-reality.html

Some pop freewill theists act as though, if humans are predestined, then we aren't real agents. Then we are merely projections of God's mind. What we think is reducible to God thinking about himself. 

Let's take a stock distinction in philosophy of mind. The hard problem of consciousness includes the unique, first-person experience of every self-aware human. Suppose I was born blind. In that event, I can't know what it's like to be sighted. I can try to imagine what it's like. I can try to extrapolate from a sighted person's description of vision. But even in that case, my own experience remains the frame of reference. 

To recur to my previous analogy, suppose God is like a video game designer who programs artificially intelligent virtual characters. Everything they think, feel, and do was programed. 

Suppose the plot includes a teenage boy (Nate) who has a crush on a teenage girl (Angie). The fact that the Nate has a crush on Angie doesn't mean the programmer has a crush on Angie. Angie is simply a character that he created. He doesn't have the same feelings for her as Nate. He may like her as a character. A novelist may have a favorite character. But the programmer is not a teenage boy to fell in love with Angie. Rather, she's just a character in his story. The programmer doesn't experience the story from the inside out, from the viewpoint of a virtual character within the story. Nate has a unique, first-person perspective about Angie which the programmer does not and cannot share. 

Dropping the analogy, creation has its own objective existence. It has a different and distinct mode of subsistence. God is timeless and spaceless. The world is temporal and spatial. Finite.

Humans have minds. That's not reducible to God's mind. Each normal adult has a particular, intransmissible perspective. That's not equivalent to divine self-reflection. 

In addition, our mental states, unlike God's, are mutable and temporally successive. We change. We learn. God doesn't.

Humans can form intentions and act on their intentions. That's because God has made a world with cause/effect connections. I will my hand to turn a key. My mind caused the hand to move, which caused the key to turn.

"God alone" didn't make that happen. God created the initial conditions to make that possible. But the transaction is not reducible to divine agency. God doesn't have hands–I do. 

That's all consistent with absolute predestination and meticulous providence. There are other objections you can attempt to raise against Calvinism, but this isn't one of them. 

Measuring prior probability

Robin LePoidevin has written sympathetically about atheism and agnosticism. But a few years ago he made an interesting observation. He begins by stating a stock objection to theism:

The default position in any debate is whichever view is less likely to be true. The more improbable the hypothesis, the greater the need for justification. Theism is intrinsically less likely than atheism, so it stands in greater need of justification.

To which he responds (in part):

We need some means of establishing the likelihood of a hypothesis…perhaps we can measure the prior probability of a hypothesis by how much it rules out. The more it rules out, the lower the prior probability. The less it rules out, the greater the prior probability. Robin LePoidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2010), 49-50.

But assuming that's a sound principle, doesn't physicalism rule out much more than Christian theism? It precludes abstract objects (i.e. numbers). It precludes immaterial minds. Indeed, some physicalists deny consciousness altogether. Likewise, the denial of miracles is a universal negative. 

But by LePoidevin's logic, that means Christian theism has a higher prior probability than physicalism and/or atheism. And that's even before we add all the specific evidence for Christian theism.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

As a teenager, Harriet Tubman suffered a traumatic head injury, which had a startling side-effect:  

Then the pursuers would start after them. Advertisements would be posted everywhere. There was one reward of $12,000 offered for the head of the woman who was constantly appearing and enticing away parties of slaves from their master. She had traveled in the cars when these posters were put up over her head, and she heard them read by those about her--for she could not read herself. Fearlessly she went on, trusting in the Lord. 

This fearless woman was often sent into the rebel lines as a spy, and brought back valuable information as to the position of armies and batteries; she has been in battle when the shot was falling like hail, and the bodies of dead and wounded men were dropping around her like leaves in autumn; but the thought of fear never seems to have had place for a moment in her mind. She had her duty to perform, and she expected to be taken care of till it was done.  

I had given some accounts of Harriet's labor to the Anti-Slavery Society of Edinburgh, of which Eliza Wigham was Secretary. On the reading of my letter, a gentleman present said he would send Harriet four pounds if he knew of any way to get it to her. Eliza Wigham offered to forward it to me for her, and that was the first money ever received by me for her. Some twelve months after, she called on me again, and said that God told her I had some money for her, but not so much as before. I had, a few days previous, received the net proceeds of one pound ten shillings from Europe for her. To say the least, there was something remarkable in these facts, whether clairvoyance, or the divine impression on her mind from the source of all power, I cannot tell; but certain it was she had a guide within herself other than the written word, for she never had any education.  

A great reward was offered for her capture, and she several times was on the point of being taken, but always escaped by her quick wit, or by 'warnings' from Heaven--for it is time to notice one singular trait in her character. She is the most shrewd and practical person in the world, yet she is a firm believer in omens, dreams, and warnings. She declares that before her escape from slavery, she used to dream of flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains, looking down upon them 'like a bird,' and reaching at last a great fence, or sometimes a river, over which she would try to fly, 'but it 'peard like I wouldn't hab de strength, and jes as I was sinkin' down, dare would be ladies all drest in white ober dere, and dey would put out dere arms and pull me 'cross.' There is nothing strange in this, perhaps, but she declares that when she came North she remembered these very places as those she had seen in her dreams, and many of the ladies who befriended her were those she had been helped by in her visions. 

"Then she says she always knows when there is danger near her,--she does not know how, exactly, but ' 'pears like my heart go flutter, flutter, and den dey may say "Peace, Peace," as much as dey likes, I know its gwine to be war!' She is very firm on this point, and ascribes to this her great impunity, in spite of the lethargy before mentioned, which would seem likely to throw her into the hands of her enemies. Sarah Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869), 21,42,52,79-80. 

As she recovered from this long illness, a deeper religious spirit seemed to take possession of her than she had ever experienced before. She literally "prayed without ceasing." Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People (Applewood Books, 1886), 24. 

Harriet, according to Bradford, had a premonition that Fanny Seward had died. In a dream, Tubman "saw a chariot in the air, going south, and empty, but soon it returned, and lying in it, cold and stiff, was the body of a young lady of whom Harriet was very fond, whose home was in Auburn, but who had gone to Washington with her father." Terrified by the dream, Tubman ran "to the house of her minister, crying out: "Oh, Miss Fanny is dead!" and the news had just been received. Kate Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero (Ballantine, 2004), 372n41.

Assuming this is accurate, it invites one of two basic interpretations:

1. Her dreams and visions were hallucinations, caused by brain damage. But even on that interpretation, we might still view her hallucinatory dreams and visions as providential. They were a source of sorely-needed encouragement for a woman who had a grueling, harrowing life. And, indeed, they made her more devout and more effective. 

2. However, as reported, her dreams and visions seem to be vertical. What she dreamt about came true.

This might be corroborated by the fact that despite exposing herself to constant danger, with a huge bounty on her head, she always managed to elude capture. Perhaps she was just lucky. Or maybe she did have premonitions, which alerted her to danger. What Bradford called her "inner monitor." 

Yet her dreams and visions were undoubtedly related, in some way, to traumatic head injury. If they were veridical, how do we explain that?  

i) It might be analogous to savant syndrome. Due to congenital brain damage, some people have below-average intelligence, yet they have islands of genius which offset the cognitive deficit. Almost as if their brain damage frees up a latent ability that's masked by a normal brain. Likewise, her dreams and visions seem like a compensation for her traumatic head injury. 

ii) This, in turn, revisits the mind/body problem. There are two related models which are relevant to her situation: 

a) Physicalists view the producer of consciousness. But William James viewed the brain as a receiver. The mind originates outside the brain. The dualist transmission theory stands in contrast to the physicalist production theory. It's like a telephone that receives signals. If damaged, that impairs or destroys reception. 

b) On a related note with the "reducing value" or mental filter model popularized by Aldous Huxley. One function of the brain is to screen out extraneous "noise" so that we can concentrate on the physical world. It's like a tuner, which as a twofold function: to tune into certain signals, and tune out other signals. If you can hear everything, it's too distracting. Too much information is static. White sound. If the tuner or filter is disabled, there's nothing to modulate the flood of input. 

iii) Finally, it's  like those science fiction scenarios in which a spy has a little receiver implanted in his brain which enables him to hear messages that are inaudible to outside observers. This gives him uncanny knowledge of the situation on the ground. 

Moreland on Nagel

http://www.jpmoreland.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/not-PCMoreland-OnNagel.pdf

Was Dr. Pulaski racist?

i) Recently I ran across a defense of Dr. Pulaski, the short-lived character in TNG. This post really isn't about Pulaski, but since that's the springboard, I'll make a few observations before moving onto the main point.

Apparently, a lot of Trekkies hated the character, and waged a successful write-in campaign to get it axed. They succeeded.

I myself don't share their antipathy towards the character. I think the characterization was somewhat heavy-handed. The way the screenwriters depicted her was rather forced. She was basically a type.

She was, however, a good foil for Picard. Tough, independent. A strong female character. 

She was replaced by Beverly Crusher, who was more likable in the sense of being more classical feminine in appearance and demeanor. However, Beverly was bland and essentially decorative. Like Counselor Troi, she was basically eye-candy.

ii) Now to the main point. Apparently, many Trekkies hated Pulaski because she belittled Data. What caught my eye is how they put it. They describe Pulaski as "racist." On the face of it, that's an incongruous way of characterizing her view of an android. It reflects the intellectual poverty of the general culture. A lack of conceptual resources. That's the only category they know to reach for.

iii) Evidently, they sense an analogy between racism and denying that an android is a real person or "sentient being." But is that an accurate definition of racism?

Take the Antebellum law against teaching black slaves how to read. That's racist, but is it predicated on the assumption that blacks weren't real people or sentient? 

To the contrary, it presumes that given a chance, blacks could learn to read just a well as whites–which was threatening to the Antebellum caste-system.   

Or take the Final Solution. Did the Nazis deny that Jews were real people or sentient? If anything, the Nazi antipathy towards Jews reflects a resentful envy for Jewish intellectual and cultural accomplishments. 

So the implicit or intuitive analogy is flawed. 

iv) But there's the deeper issue. There's the classic question of whether artificial intelligence is possible. But there is, if anything, the more interesting question of whether artificial intelligence is detectible. That is to say, even if a computer crossed that threshold, could we tell if it was truly intelligent? That's a legitimate and difficult philosophical question. Not at all "racist," or analogous to racism." 

v) There is, of course, the famous Turning test. But that's controversial.

The question is whether you can tell, by its behavior, whether a computer is actually intelligent, or simply mimicking human intelligence. A clever simulation: clever, not it itself, but cleverly staged. 

Does the computer have consciousness? Does it have a first-person viewpoint?

Even if it did, an outside observer isn't privy to that experience. Since the outside observer isn't a computer, he doesn't know what it's like to be a computer. That's directly inaccessible. So he has no basis of comparison. He can't compare and contrast his experience with the experience (assuming it has any) of a computer. 

So the question is whether that's inferable from computer behavior. And that's tricky because computers are extensions of human programmers. They are designed to approximate human problem-solving skills. So is that really coming from the computer, or is that ultimately coming from the programmer? 

vi) Some people might object that this is just a special case of the problem of other minds. But the analogy is equivocal at the crucial point of comparison: since I know, from direct experience, what it's like to be human, it's reasonable for me to interpret the behavior of other humans along the same lines. But it's precisely because a computer isn't human that the parallel breaks down. That's not something we know in advance.

vii) Of course, the question of artificial intelligence is bound up with the nature of human intelligence. Since a physicalist regards human reason as the product of physical interactions (the brain), the presumption is that, at least in principle, it ought to be possible for a sufficiently sophisticated machine to duplicate (or surpass) human intelligence. 

If, however, the mind/body relation involves the mind (or soul) using the brain, then the AI research program is doomed to fail, although it may generate useful spinoff applications. 

viii) The character of Data was plausibly intelligent because that's fiction. The character was written by human screenwriters. They made him a sympathetic character. And he was played by a human actor. But that's not a real test of AI. Some Trekkies are so invested in a fictional character that they forget this isn't real–or even realistic. They've been manipulated by the actor and screenwriter. 

The challenge of evolution

i) The story of the Bible centers on the creation, fall, and redemption of man. As such, the theory of evolution (i.e. macroevolution, universal common descent) poses the greatest or most direct challenge to Christian theology.

Evolution challenges the first two planks–and by implication–the third. If man is not God's special creation, if original sin is a myth, then what did Christ redeem us from?

ii) However, it may be providential that not only is evolution the most challenging scientific theory, but the most challenged scientific theory. The theory that poses the greatest challenge to Christian theology is, in turn, the most scientifically challenged major theory.

Naturally, evolution has always been theologically controversial, but what's remarkable is that it's always been scientifically controversial. For instance, you have secular scientists who grant the fact of evolution, but are critical of the theoretical underpinnings. 

iii) There may also be a parallel between the hard problem of consciousness and biology. Some philosophers contend that as a matter of principle, mental experience has properties which can never be captured by a physical state. We could map the human brain all the way down to the quantum level, but the categorical divide would still remain. The problem of consciousness is insoluble given physicalism.

Of course, that's hotly contested, but it's contested by men with an absolute commitment to physicalism.

Likewise, there are intelligent-design theorists who contend that an unguided process cannot develop the organisms we find in nature.

Some go further and content that even a guided incremental process cannot bridge the gap. Nature can't assemble an organism one piece at a time. It has to start with something more than individual pieces. 

Like robotics. A robot can assemble another robot, but a robot can't assemble itself. At best, a partially assembled robot might be able to complete the process. 

My aim is not to argue the point, but simply note that if that's true, then the theory of evolution will never successfully shake off the fundamental challenges to its adequacy or feasibility. Even in principle, it can't get the job done.

Consciousness and evolution

We live in a time when many "evangelical" Christians are desperate to harmonize evolution with as much traditional theology as they can salvage. Of course, this isn't a new development. It's been going on ever since Darwin published his landmark book. In addition, the popularity of the evolution in church circles tends to wax and wane. Some periods are more accepting while other periods are more resistant. But at the moment we're living in a time when the pace of acceptance is accelerating. 

Although the theory of evolution raises many theologically significant questions about creation, providence, divine revelation, and Biblical hermeneutics, the flashpoint has always been human evolution. 

According to evolutionary theory, human intelligence evolved because the brain evolved. Human intelligence tracks brain development. As the brain became bigger and more complex, hominids became smarter.

However, one of the most ironic and interesting developments in late 20C philosophy has been the "hard problem of consciousness." On that view, consciousness has properties that are not reducible to a physical state.

There are several different arguments feeding into this position. And it's been developed by secular philosophers. These are default physicalists. They dearly wish there was no hard problem of consciousness.

If one or more of the arguments for the hard problem of consciousness are sound, then advances in neuroscience are impotent to solve the problem. 

Now, the hard problem of consciousness blows a huge hole right through the center of human evolution. For if the hard problem of consciousness is insoluble, then evolutionary psychology is false. But how can human evolution be true if evolutionary psychology is false? There's a clash of two essentially different paradigms. 

In addition, the hard problem of consciousness dovetails seamlessly with traditional Christian dualism, where man is a composite of a physical body and an incorporeal soul. The soul is the source of consciousness (mind, personality).

Although many Christians feel harried by the "evidence" for evolution, there's a sense in which the hard problem of consciousness is a gift to beleaguered Christians. This is a bulwark against human evolution. An impregnable bulwark, if it's soundly argued.

Science's incomplete metaphysics

"Thomas Nagel is not crazy" by Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson.

Jerry Coyne, as big as an ox and almost as smart

"The Confidence of Jerry Coyne" by Ross Douthat.

Mind & Cosmos in a nutshell

Conflicted atheist Thomas Nagel summarizes his thesis:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of-mind-and-cosmos/?_r=2&pagewanted=print

Self-destructive naturalism

http://subversivethinking.blogspot.com/2011/06/crispin-wright-and-moral-poverty-and.html

Mind and Cosmos review

Prof. James Anderson reviews Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel.

Prof. Anderson has more recommendations to check out here.

Update: Oops, I just noticed Steve already posted Prof. Anderson's review. I guess I'll just keep this post up since the RSS feeds have picked it up anyway.