I have NEVER said citing quotes was ‘doing science’ That has been your gig for a while.
I view the quotes as capturing concepts, Ideas, interesting factoids, and I want to be able to give credit to the person I got that idea from—that seems only fair to do. I do it by quoting them.
I also view my use of quotes in two other ways. A. It is a form of relying on the scientific work of others. You rely on the work of others in what you say, but unlike me you can’t easily give them credit for the parts of their work that became part of your world view. and B. Quoting the source in a quote can give my readers, a chance to say—'oh oh, that guy withdrew that idea, or that guy is a known fraud.
Quoting other scientist in one’s article is a time honored tradition in the literature. You denigrate this but it happens in physics all the time. So it seems that it is only when someone with my views quotes people it is an awful thing to do. I will acknowledge that it doesn’t happen in scientific articles written for experts in the field as much as I do it. However, the audience here is a mixed one; not everyone here is an expert in the issues I am discussing, and to use shorthand to leave them out, seems rude to me. Those quotes help them get up to speed on anything I say that they don’t understand. I want them to understand.
EVERY footnote in every scientific paper is an implicit quotation. It directs the reader to a page where so-and-so supports or rejects the view being discussed in the paper. All I am doing is making them explicit quotations so people can see them.
Now, can we get past this absolute nit-pick/distraction you have about my using the ideas and concepts I have collected over a life time?
BTW, one of the patents was a chemistry patent–I never took another chemistry course past high school. I won’t discuss the exact idea but it turned natural gas into liquids. There is lots of money to be made if that can be done economically. I figured it out from this data base of mine. My company KM, spent $50k getting a grad student to build some special substances and equipment to test the idea and it worked with a higher efficiency than my boss, a very smart engineer thought it would. He had several patents and said, the first test might be low but we can always improve it upon scale up and better tech. He was quite pleased with the results. Unfortunately for me, and maybe for the world. My employer was bought by another oil company and their lawyers quickly called me and other patentees into their offices and said, “We don’t waste time on patents. We are withdrawing all of them.” I argued with them to no avail. I dang near cried when this particular thing got deep sixed.
Isn’t that like saying we should remain agnostic towards the question of evolution vs creationism because the Bible can accommodate both. The point I am making is that the Bible is not our sole basis for belief about things. Thus I would argue that we may have subjective reasons for a particular position on Cosmology other than the Bible.
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I was only referring to models of the early universe, pre-big bang theory type of stuff. I meant that we should be agnostic towards those models until we can take more data. I also added not to prefer one over another for philosophical or theological reasons.
Yesterday, Gordon Simons sent me a link to an article in a Catholic Magazine from the UK about two Christian physicists discussing Hawking. it is entitled " How Stephen Hawking’s work creates new opportunities for understanding God". Given that Hawking was an atheist of some renown it made me curious. I didn’t find too much in the article except for this description of Hawking’s model, which I knew about but thought of a different way of looking at it. They say:
"In Hawking’s model of the universe, the universe makes itself by exploiting the uncertainty of the quantum field and the possibility of there being many, many universes. There is a beginning to the universe, he says, but a beginning does not need a temporal cause or external action. God is not required, so the theistic argument fails.
What are we to make of this? Can the universe really make itself?
Well, I have seen other ‘creation of the universe’ theories from physicists which start from the vacuum. Edward Tryon proposed as much
" If it is true that our universe has a zero net value for all conserved quantities, then it may simply be a fluctuation of the vacuum, the answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time." Edward P. Tryon, “Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?” Nature, 246(1973):396- 397, reprinted in John Leslie, ed., Modern Cosmology & Philosophy, (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 224
“ In his paper Tryon argued that even if most of the universes are tiny, observers can only evolve in a large universe and therefore we should not be surprised that we live in one. But this falls short of resolving the difficulty, because our universe is much larger than necessary for the evolution of life "
“ A more fundamental problem is that Tryon’s scenario does not really explain the origin of the universe. A quantum fluctuation of the vacuum assumes that there was a vacuum of some pre-existing space. And we now know that “vacuum” is very different from “nothing.” Vacuum, or empty space, has energy and tension, it can bend and warp, so it is unquestionably something. As Alan Guth wrote, "In this context, a proposal that the universe was created from empty space is no more fundamental than a proposal that the universe was spawned by a piece of rubber. It might be true, but one would still want to ask where the piece of rubber came from. "
“ The picture of quantum tunneling from nothing has none of these problems. The universe is tiny right after tunneling, but it is filled with a false vacuum and immediately starts to inflate. In a fraction of a second, it blows up to a gigantic size. ”
“ Prior to the tunneling, no space or time exists, so the question of what happened before is meaningless. Nothing-a state with no matter, no space, and no time-appears to be the only satisfactory starting point for the creation . ” Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), p 185-186
But there is a problem with Vilenkin’s idea and it involves information. For background:
" The origins of the quantum information revolution are to be found in the pioneering work of Rolf Landauer, a physicist who became an IBM Fellow in 1969 and who, until his death in 1999, worked at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, near New York City. ‘Back in the 1960s, when I was still in school,’ Deutsch said, 'Landauer was telling everyone that computation is physics and that you can’t understand the limits of computation without saying what the physical implementation [i.e. type of hardware] is. He was a lone voice in the wilderness. No one really understood what he was talking about—and certainly not why. ’
" The prevailing view at the time was that computation was ultimately an abstract process that had more to do with the world o f mathematical ideals than with the physics of machines. But Landauer’s view began to take hold when he, and subsequently his IBM colleague Charles Bennett, discovered a crucial link between physics and computation, which we’ll explore in the next chapter. " Julian Brown Minds, Machines and the Multiverse, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 21
Landauer’s importance came from the connection of information and the second law of entropy. I believe Szilard was the first to discover this but Landauer made it popular. Of Szilard, it was written:
" Szilard published in 1929 a very remarkable paper on the problem of Maxwell’s demon, and discovered for the first time the connection between information and entropy. This was really pioneer work, and the importance of this paper was overlooked until recent developments of the theory brought it back into the foreground. " Leon Brillouin, Science and Information Theory, (New York: Academic Press, Inc, 1956), p. 176
Rolf Landauer’s Physics Today article entitled, “Information is Physical” says:
" Must information be discarded in computation, communication and the measurement process? The question has physical importance because discarding a bit of information requires energy dissipation of order kT. " Rolf Landauer, “Information is Physical,” Physics Today, May 1991, p. 24
One more item on information before asking the question which must be asked. I wrote this in 1999 in answer to a question about a book that had been recommended to me. It contains the reality of how information exists. It is always encoded by some scheme involving matter:
>Did you “enjoy” the Overman tape? What about the information argument?
GRM:It wreaked, stunk etc. This is another example of why I have come so close to leaving Christianity over the past few years. We have a lawyer passing himself off talking about information theory (and I bet he can’t do the simplest calculation. He said that Yockey’s book was difficult to read–I work info theory in my job and Yockey’s book is not difficult–it is easy). He said that information was neither energy nor matter–ridiculous. try to conceive of information which is NOT coded by matter. There is newsprint, there are electrons in a computer, there are magnetic polarity bits on a hard disk, there are knots in an Inca’s rope, etc. Anywhere you put information it must be associated with matter. And information, for your information is energy. Information represents the amount of energy rescued from the 2nd law. I won’t bore you with the equation unless you ask but believe me this fellow didn’t know what he was talking about. And this constant tendency for Christians to listen to any non-expert as long as it agrees with their own view, is very depressing to me. It makes me wonder what I can trust when a Christian teaches me something. I am serious. I can’t go listen to a preacher anymore without wondering how bad his facts are.
So, as we have seen Guth say that starting with the quantum vacuum is no different than starting the universe with a piece of rubber, Does Vilenkin’s quantum tunnelling out of nothingness pass the ultimate test? No. To refresh one’s memory Vilenken said:
" The picture of quantum tunneling from nothing has none of these problems. The universe is tiny right after tunneling, but it is filled with a false vacuum and immediately starts to inflate. In a fraction of a second, it blows up to a gigantic size.”
“Prior to the tunneling, no space or time exists, so the question of what happened before is meaningless. Nothing-a state with no matter, no space, and no time-appears to be the only satisfactory starting point for the creation .” Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), p 185-186
Here is the problem. Quantum tunneling requires logic and math to pre-exist the event. Quantum tunneling must obey the rules of quantum mathematics–and if information must always be associated with the arrangement of material objects, how did the nothingness of Vilenkin’s scenario encode the laws of quantum mechanics? Before the tunneling event there was no material stuff to hold the information contained in the math–unless one posits something existing prior to that, something that has the logic encoded in itself–say, God, Vilenkin can’t say it is another universe from which we tunneled, because he has already committed to saying we tunneled from nothing, If it is from another universe one can quickly get into Aristotle’s infinite regression of causation… If it is God, He has a different way of encoding information, maybe without using matter.
This brings me to a wonderful quote from George Ellis who wrote a book on cosmology with Stephen Hawking. I say this because he is no slouch of a physicist. Ellis’ view of the world is quite different from Hawking. But he discusses with a narrator the nature of man. What he says in two spots is well worth considering:
“You can explain all of the properties of the brain in terms of the physics of the molecules and neurons and all the rest of it but you can’t explain all the ideas in there. It isn’t even conceivable that you could do that”
“Narrator;So that phrase that Rosenberg where he says that the physical facts fix everything.”
"It’s not true. I think a very good place to start is a digital computers. a digital computer is at the bottom-most level is its electrons flowing through the gates in a particular in a particular way and that’s what controls what happens at the screen. So there’s the hardware sitting there it doesn’t do a thing until you load it up the program. So the hardware per se does not determine what happens… What determines is the program that you load in A computer program is an abstract entity, it’s not a physical thing. The abstract logic then gets written into a high-level code, and then interpreters or compilers write it down into the low level- level languages. Exactly the same logic is present at every layer. and at the bottom level it gets turned into instructions at the gate. So what is the program? Its the equivalence class of all these representations. it’s an abstract thing. does it have causal power. yes it causes things to happen. "
“Narrator: so you are saying an abstract logic…”
"Abstract logic has physical outcomes in the real world through being what is implemented in the computer. "
“So then of course the old philosophers of mind would say, 'so you’re taking a dualist position, aren’t you?. My answer is yes I am, a computer is a dualist machine, it is the hardware and the software. So I take the completely unpopular position, on the mind and the brain. I’m a dualist, there’s the mind and the brain, and the mind inhabits the brain, or thoughts, Let’s say thoughts inhabit the brain. and thoughts are not physical things, thoughts are abstract things which get represented in a physical way. And again, we do not understand how this happened. but the brain has a hierarchical structure, thoughts have a hierarchical structure, and in the computer you can see these different levels, you can understand them, and you have got these interpreters or compilers which do it. I think eventually when we understand the brain enough we will see exactly the same kind of structure happening in the brain.” George Ellis University of Cape Town, Meaning Seeking Beings, Curiosity Stream,
GRM: gap of a few minutes where they talk to other people, then Ellis comes back on:
“Abstract entities are driving the physics at the bottom level. Physics is not controlling what happen and from my viewpoint, existence isn’t just physical existence there’s the abstract existences So then you should ask me in philosophical terms, how do I justify the word existence, and I’ve got a very simple answer to that. I take the existence of physical entities as being real, so in other words, I’ve got in my hand a pair of spectacles, now how did that come into existence? Someone had the idea of a pair of spectacles and then created these by a machine and so on. If they hadn’t had that idea tis wouldn’t exist. So that idea has to be real too, even though it’s not a physical entity.”
“Narrator: so that realm of ideas that you are talking about you would say that came into existence on the big bang along with…”
" I wouldn’t necessarily say it came into, I think it might, in some sense pre-exist the big bang. " George Ellis University of Cape Town, Meaning Seeking Beings, Curiosity Stream,
I guess this is your friend talking here? Anyway that straight up doesn´t follow and is in fact part of the argument from James Ross, first encountered in Saul Kripke, for the immateriality of the mind:
At least some thoughts are meaningfully determined.
No material object is meaningfully determined.
So thoughts cannot be material objects.
For information to be identified with matter or energy, there have to be processes in which those aspects have to be identical. The best example for the transfer of information is probably language, either in the spoken or written kind, in the former where the information is transmitted through the soundwaves between transmitter and receiver and in the latter as the meaning within the written word. That your friend asserts that a transmission of information or meaning is always associated with matter can be accepted for the sake of argument. However the conclusions he draws from that don´t follow and that can be demostrated:
a) The soundwaves representing spoken language and the ink splotches representing written one only have said information when a mind is associated with it. This can be a primitive one, too, like a dog barking when a stranger approaches. It isn´t necessary for the information to be understood at all, to be sure that it is there. If the dog barks in order to react to a particular situation, then at least for him he is doing something in a meaningful way, even if he, as a non-rational being, might not perceive himself to do so. Instincts are sufficient here.
If I tell someone it is raining outside, the soundwaves received by the person have its meaning attached to it by me intending to do so and, in the best case, transmitting them in a way that the receiver understands it. (If I use a made-up language the information transmitted is the same, due to my intention, but the soundwaves change. This difference already suffices to demonstrate non-identity and refute your friends position, but we can go way further). The receivers (hopefully correct) interpretation of the soundwaves transmitting the sentence happen in his mind. The question would now be if the interpretation could be a wholly material process interpretating the (kinetic) energy of the waves. I will treat that later.
b) The points I made can be made more clear when we look at the written language. Let´s take for example the word “hat”.
What does it mean? Everyone here knows it and knows what it is refering to, but the key issue is what exactly that it what we know about it. What makes this word in the english language refer to the piece of clothing people wear on the head? The position of your friend would entail that the information possessed by the word is identical to the ink splotches (or here pixels) being recognized by my brain. However this is absurd in several ways. This same splotches refering to a piece of clothing in english refer to an act of possessing something in the third person singular in german. We could of course maintain that the word inherently has both meanings in a different context, but the evolution of language and the changing meaning thereby refute this idea. The information seems not to be associated with the material processes per se, but rather with the mind. Suppose for example that the word “hat” was written down by nobody, but was the result of an earthquake causing the pen to write it down in an accidental way. What we now have is a situation analogical to a reader making a textual analysis to a poem. Unlike in the latter example though, the accidentally written word has no information whatsoever attached to it, while the poem has some (perhaps unknown) information intrinsically. What happens in both cases is that the reader comes to the wrong conclusion upon reading the words and making assumptions about the authors intention. There is none to be found within the accidentally written word beyond what the reader wrongly attached to it by assuming an intentional author. In the case of the poems, the information just was wrongly interpretated.
Does your friends examples of electrons in a computer or magnetic polarity bits on hard disk provide counter examples? Not at all. In fact both examples collapse in the same manner as above. The bits on the disk and the electrons enabling the computer to compute the software also only derive the information from an intentional enabling force, the manufacturer. The software codes only have said information because the programmer orders the machine to produce certain output based on the kind of input. But this “intentionality” (directedness) of the process toward a certain end (producing the intended output) can once again not be identified with the material process in itself, but has to be traced báck to the programmer, because the meaning attached to the process is not intrinsical to the process itself, but only derived.
This is also the reason why the mind interpretating certain material processes to gain the information cannot possibly be a material process: The intentionality found in those processes is the property of “aboutness”, it is about something, e.g. in my first example the fact that it is raining, as opposed to the mere “physical intentionality”, which means “directedness”, is a property only encountered in minds. Material processes by itself are never about anything. The “N” on your compass pointing towards the northern pole, cannot be reasonably said to be about the northern pole, rather this information is abstracted when a mind encounters this fact. The genom associated with certain genotypes and phenotypes by itself is not about such results, rather this results are only inherently meaningful if a mind abstracts such information e.g. for statistical regularities.
Every such processes are associated with matter and energy. However in none of these cases can the infromation be identified with said matter and energy. Your friend saying that “information is the amount of energy saved from the 2nd law” is nothing but handwaving and I don´t see how this idea is even coherent. He would have to spell that out a lot more. Note also, that he has pretty much acknowledged much of what I said himself, when he said that “try to conceive of information which is NOT coded by matter” and “Anywhere you put information it must be associated with matter.”. What he doesn´t seem to realize though is that his original claim is way stronger and I don´t quite understand how he couldn´t see that. Anyway I think it is quite clear that information is prior to matter, since the latter in its form isn´t necessary to transmit the former (different soundwaves, ink splotches etc.).
The points made above are best represented in this talk by Edward Feser
as well as in his paper “Kripke, Ross and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought”.
Other arguments can be made, but I think this suffices for now. It is also the reason why every attempt to naturalize intentionality has been an abject failure.
Added: Ellis later making an analogy between mind and computer to make a point for dualism should also be taken as an analogy, because the computational model of thought is rather to be found in materialist theories like in Churchland, Millikan or Dennett. But the distinction between the hardware and the software is useful to explain the arguments above.
I largely with @pevaquark on this one, since there are different theological reasons for different views on the age of the universe. What is often forgotten is that Big Bang Cosmology has been something quite recent and for some philosophical considerations I would actually prefer an eternal universe, so there is that. Aristotle has accepted for an eternal universe, while distinguishing between an accidental and an essential causal series, of which only the former could be infinite. Aquinas accepted the eternal universe in the Summa Theologiae for the sake of argument and only believed in a beginning based on scripture. Islamic philosopher Avicienna completely rejected the idea of God causing the universe to exist. So I think the theological implications are overblown. A quick look at tradition demonstrates as much.
I want to add though that there are good philosophical reasons to accept causal finitism (impossibility of infinite (accidental) causes), while accepting mathematical infinities. Therefor I think that the Kalam Argument is actually correct.
Nope, that was me speaking there. Let’s be clear what the context was in that note. We were speaking of Shannon information. And the usual misunderstanding of the physicists use of information is not the colloquial meaning. Indeed, Shannon information has nothing to do with meaning. Meaning is an agreement between a group of people that this symbol or that symbol means something. Let me cite Shannon.
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have _meaning-, that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. *These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.” C. E. Shannon, " A Mathematical theory of Communication" The Bell System Technical Journal, 27(1948):3:379-423, p. 379
You wrote:
The soundwaves representing spoken language and the ink splotches representing written one only have said information when a mind is associated with it.
Wrong, they have MEANING when a mind is associated with it. The mathematical definition of Shannon information is H = -P(I) log (P(I). It is a mathematical definition, where P(I) is the probability of each character in the message. I won’t explain the equation further right now, but Yocky’s book, I referred to in my post was all about that equation. If you only have 1 character in the message, no matter how many there are, the probability of finding that character as the next character is 1. Thus log P(I) =log (1)=0.
Let’s take the case where you tell a friend if I send you 5 a’s in a text, you are to come immediately. The text you send “aaaaa” has meaning but zero information according to the above equation because it has precisely 1 character in the message and the log of 1.
People conflate meaning with physical information all the time, Thus continuing this is not useful.
You wrote:
The bits on the disk and the electrons enabling the computer to compute the software also only derive the information from an intentional enabling force, the manufacturer.
I don’t know why you would think I disagree. Ellis said the same about the spectacles. Intentionality is not information, and it isn’t meaning. It is a third item whose relationship to meaning and information is not clear cut. I have intentionality to go to dinner tonight with 2 of my sons and their families. That has nothing to do with information or meaning other than it was a meaningful sentence in English.
I don’t watch hour long video’s someone wants me to watch. That is a bit beyond the pale to demand that much time of someone. But I looked at the paper you attached, and I think I will surprise you here.
We agree that mind does not arise from matter. Somehow you think I’m a materialist? I am not. I suspect you get that from my discussion of information, which as formally defined, is material. Gordon Simons and I wrote an article on the evidence quantum mechanics shows about the observer NOT being subject to the laws of physics. you can find that here in the Wigner’s friend thread or at my blog The Migrant Mind: Quantum Soul
Also, my quotation of Ellis should have been a big clue–Ellis is a dualist–you know, Cartesian dualism where the soul is not part or arise from matter.
I will say this, that information on this side of death, be that information meaningful or not meaningful has to be encoded in matter. I have never seen anyone provide an example of stored sequences of data, again meaningful or not meaningful, stored without using matter. Do you have one? Mind you, I don’t think you can use your consciousness as an example since we can see the brain change structure when it stores its data.
Edited to add: Here is another author saying the same about Shannon information, and the paradox of noise. Pure white noise is random and has the highest levels of Shannon information, but it is meaningless. This is the hardest thing to get people to understand about the physicists use of the word information. It isn’t like meaning and people often equivocate meaning and information to be the same thing. Hariri et al were griping about this in this paragraph:
This sentence commits the logical fallacy of equivocation. They equivocate on the word information, using it first as "meaning/knowledge and then as H=sum p(I) log p(I). Eliminate the equivocation and the paradox goes away Shannon & Weavers treatment of information content leads to a paradox with regard to the role played by the presence of noise in an otherwise highly-structured message. This noise paradox has been addressed by both Atlan and Wicken. The paradox is as follows: noise introduced into any message reduces the fidelity of the message, thereby reducing its information content while increasing its uncertainty. Yet according to the Shannon-Weaver formulation, any increase in uncertainty of a structured (non- equiprobable occurrence) sequence results in an increase in information content. Ali Hariri, Bruce Weber and John Olmsted
III, On the Validity of Shannon-information Calculations for
Molecular Biological Sequences, J. Theoretical Biology,
147(1990):235-254, p. 237-238
The first use of information in that paragraph is as information is used colloquially, the second is Shannon information–they are not the same thing.
My bad, I have deliberately conflated it here, since I thought you conflated it in the quoted passage. As such I thought that (physical) information and (semantic) information were interchangeably used.
Understood. However the context of the quote was that someone claimed that information was neither material nor energy so I assumed that it was an argument for the immateriality of the mind, especially since the term “information” is seemingly used in a different way context-dependend. The rest of your reply seems to show that you agree that there are ways in which “information” is used in which it being neither matter nor energy is true.
Since my interpretation was wrong it would be nice to know which point this lawyer was trying to make. Was that supposed to be an argument about creation?
Because of me attributing wrong intentions to the author based on the information and thus ironically proving my own point I made in b).
I don´t think this is the right way to formulate it, but I get what you are saying. In recent decades, I think mainly due to rediscovery of such aspects in philosophy and the unfamiliarity with anything published before 1980, there have been an emerging usage of traditional terms in a confusing way. Intentionality was originally “directedness+aboutness” while nowadays philosophers use the term “physical intentionality” which is only “directedness”, but which was known under the term “(Aristotelian) teleology”.
I´d suggest to define intentionality as what is expressed by the conjunction of meaning and semantics, so that the statement “I will have dinner with my family” expresses the intended end (dinner with family) as well as the thought about said event.
I don´t demand anything from you. This is a free country and I don´t see us as having a dispute where the one side absolutely doesn´t understand the other, in fact your clarifications resolved the issue I had with the quote while preserving my points. But I also know that some might not understand what I wrote and there is never too much external information that one can provide. Also, some are perhaps interested in how one would argue for the immateriality of the intellect. And some prefer to listen to a lecture over reading a paper.
Yup. Like I said, I thought infromation was used univocally here. Also I thought I criticised someone elses position.
Interesting link by the way. A similar position can be found in Stephen Barr, who is always interesting to listen to.
I know George Ellis and watched several of his lectures. But he is no cartesian dualist. He is much of a platonist and as such a substance dualist. He also accepts Aristotles “Four Causes” which are opposed to the central premise of the cartesian distinction.
This is an important distinction and a criticism I have of your post: Although some philosophers like Richard Swinburne are cartesian dualists, if you want to have an easier time to persuade someone familiar with philosophy of mind literature, you should expand to substance dualism as a whole, of which, in my opinion, cartesian dualism is the weakest and most vulnerable to the interaction problem (although it is not fatal here either, but we want to reduce tensions). Because I accept physical intentionality/teleology, as well as emergent properties (formal causality) in physical objects, I cannot accept cartesian dualism in which matter is denied any such inherent tendencies. For someone like a Swinburne teleology cannot exist apart from a mind, which I would deny while at the same time being drawn toward a traditional version of substance dualism.
Phew, good question. But contrary to what you indicate using the mind as an example is a valid way for the dualist, despite the change in brain structure. Let me explain:
An uncontroversial opinion in Christian Theism is that our matter is a genuine part of our selves. Being disembodied is not the final nor intended end for us, reflected in the idea of a new creation. Aquinas himself argued for only our rationality surviving death until the new creation takes place. As such it should come as no surprise that the mental and the material brain are closely linked so that the one causes changes in the other. This is something even Descartes would have accepted. The idea of the content of the mental being in some way stored in the immaterial but affecting the material through restructuring the brain is consistent when we regard the brain as a kind of tool used to move the body. Therefor a trauma affecting and destroying key features resulting in memory loss is compatible with the concept of immaterial storage, since it is the brain by which those memories are accessed. I´m actually persuaded by Aquinas idea of us being unchanging after our death, due to our lack of material parts. This theme can be encountered in the scholastic tradition in general.
In general it is uncontroversial to say that we only communicate by using matter. Some aspects have to be material. The question is though if a whole isn´t wholly material if it still shoud be regarded as encoded in the material.
One example I think could be universals or natures. If the human being is not identical to the matter making him up, like we both agree, can it still be said that the nature of humans itself is stored within matter? I think this can be reasonably disputed. The same would go for “life” if life isn´t reducible to physics, which, looking at the failure of reductionism, it isn´t. Such things, the Aristotelian calls “forms” aren´t stored in the material, rather they are expressed through it, which is certainly different. But much of that is dependend on the definition of matter.
I deeply respect this. I hope I didn’t conflate things. but it does happen to all of us from time to time.
You wrote:
Interesting link by the way. A similar position can be found in Stephen Barr, who is always interesting to listen to.
Yes, Barr is great. You should look up the works of Euan Squires. I think he is even better, but he died young in a cricket game in the UK. It was very interesting to me and Gordie that not a single Christian publication had interest in our Quantum soul stuff. It is almost like we Christians don’t think there is another side out there past death.
You wrote:
I know George Ellis and watched several of his lectures. But he is no cartesian dualist. He is much of a platonist and as such a substance dualist. He also accepts Aristotles “Four Causes” which are opposed to the central premise of the cartesian distinction.
Maybe I conflated something here. In my experience in philosophy, Dualist when it comes to mind, almost always refers to Cartesian dualism. Now, I can see where your statement could easily be true, in that the consciousness lives in a Platonic kind of world, but, in some sense that is not that much different than Descartes. You might go watch that show if you have access to it. They have a variety of opinions about what we are (nothing at all) to dualist, to materialist. Descartes never said where his soul existed as far as I can recall, he just said it was not part of matter and its existence couldn’t be doubted, Correctly quoted as, I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am [I exist].
I am delighted to find someone here willing to tackle some of these issues. My hat is off to you.
One final thought, even if Ellis places consciousness in a Platonic world, the same informational problem exists, into what substrate are these things encoded prior to the Big Bang? To me, that brings us face to face with the need for a divine being, or accept the infinite regression of Aristotle.
Nope, the problem Mitch has is that things that violate natural law can’t be accepted. And he was quite in opposition, not that I could figure out why when I first came here. But I think mitch puts spiritual things on one side and material on the other. In the Wigner’s friend thread as I recall he said our consciousness arises from matter, so in my book that makes him a materialist at least on this side of the great divide.
This isn’t quite what I said. I was saying that there has to be a way for information to be encoded in something other than matter. that doesn’t come from QM. QM pretty much screams that our consciousness isn’t subject to the laws of physics–meaning it doesn’t arise from our brains as some epiphenomenon of the brain.
Well you two have worked through enough things that you probably know better. But I know he has told me he thinks quantum mechanics might be (he may have put it more optimistically than that) a pathway by which God can directly influence things in the natural world without violating the natural order (since QM also falls under that heading). But I shouldn’t try to characterize his position since it is over my head.
On the contrary, gbob has displayed very little desire to understand my actual viewpoint and seems to prefer characterizing it as something (even when this directly contradicts my words) easier to ridicule. This is why I have asked him to stop saying anything about my viewpoint since they are little more than outright lies.
Correct. QM shows that the mathematical laws of nature are not a closed system. It was one of my reasons for belief that this suggests a backdoor through which the creator can keep his hand in things without contradicting Himself as gbob seems to insist that God must do to show how great He is.
gbob doesn’t seem to understand the difference between believing in a continuation of our existence past death and expecting to find such an existence in our material nature. For me the very idea is absurd. Our material aspect blindly follows rules which are completely mechanistic and is therefore ultimately subject to things having very little to do with who and what we are. That is another of the reasons why I believe in a spiritual aspect to our existence – something closer to our essence by being responsive to our own choices.
QM doesn’t even suggest (let alone scream) any such thing. What it tells us is that physical events are not completely determined by natural law. Thus it leaves open the door for both divine action and the freedom of will. The point is that this is not a closing gap of scientific knowledge but a gap which science itself has discovered in the very way things work. Therefore the objection to “god-of-the-gaps” type arguments does not apply. It points to the limits of the scientific methodology itself and it is our choice whether to think there is anything beyond those limits.
It reminds me of the mistaken notion that the universe has some sort of boundary about which we can ask what is on the other side. There may be no such boundary in space but there is a boundary in time and there is this boundary in causality as well because of QM. Atheists may choose to see nothing beyond the boundary of causality in QM and only more natural law beyond the boundary in time, but that is a choice which is as theological as any religion with no objective evidence to support it.
Because people rarely really give it a second thought. The cartesian version is just the most famous one, but because if people judge it to be sufficiently attacked, they rarely give a second thought to the alternatives or traditional answers. But, like I said, I think it is also the weakest one.
It´s not, but the few differences are important. The interaction problem asks how a purely mental/spiritual substance can affect a physical one (matter). But only Descartes assumed such a sharp distinction, which would have been rejected by Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides and Aquinas. On the classical view matter has attributes beyond what physicist measure and I would ascribe most things we discover in chemistry and biology to the nature of the material itself, while accepting that they are not reducible to what physicists discover. All attempts of such a reduction have been utter failures. However the consequence of the classical view is also that the sharp cartesian distinction is wrong. This has interesting implications; for one it is actually more certain that dualism is true, if the cartesian distinction were correct. As such that classical view discovered in the works of the most important medieval philosphers and theologians actually is less certain of dualism. Aristotle was none (on most exegesis, although it is a bit mysterious). Aquinas hold that only human rationality survives death, while everything else ceases with the composition of matter and form.
But now try to formulate the interaction problem for substance dualism if the distinction is rejected. I haven´t yet come across a good version and I´m not even sure it can be done.
In my humble opinion one of the most interesting versions of dualism can be encountered in David Oderberg who developed Aquinas´ account of Aristotle: “Hylomorphic Dualism”
We don´t need a beginning of the universe. Aristotle distinguished between an accidental causal series (causal series in time) and an essential causal series ( causal series independend of time/simultaneous) and took himself as having proved the existence of God because of causality. Following Aristotle, there are no uncreated beings apart from God and everything we conceive as encoded is rooted within him. Later platonists like Plotinus agreed. As such I´d answer that consciousness prior to the big bang would have to be located within the divine itself. This also works if we assume for the sake of argument that the universe is eternal. So I think you are presenting a false choice.
The conscious human being is made up of different contingent objects in an essential series. He is made up of organs, which are made up of cells, which are made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms, then protons, neutrons and electrons, then quarks and whatever physics will discover. If the human attributes like consciousness are irreducible to those parts, such that consciousness is not reducible to the movement of the molecules, then it has to be accounted for in another way, at least if we say that an explanation is required (sounds trivial, but there are enough nowadays that accept brute facts which have no explanation in principle).
An essential causal series necessarily has to terminate and cannot be infinite. Suppose you raise your arm and put it back down and the movement took one second. The finitude of the causal series can be shown in two ways. First the action took place in time, since a second passed. The smaller and smaller physical parts caused the larger to act a certain way. Assuming that within this action an infinite amount of causes happened would lead to the absurd idea that within a second an infinite amount of time dependend causes were possible. The second way is that there has to be a ground of being which has to have the causal power intrinsic to itself in order to make the cause happen. Aquinas used the example of him holding a stick to move a stone. The stick has the causal power only derivative from the hand holding it. It cannot move the stone by itself. Even if the stick were infinitely long, it would always need a hand holding it in order to be able to move the stone.
Now we have a finite simultaneous series and have accepted a very weak version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Principle states that there is a sufficient reason for a state of affairs). What is entailed by the PSR is the PPC, the Principle of Proportionate Causality, which states that the cause has to be in some sense before the effect. A billard ball only moves because another, already moving ball transmitted the kinetic energy of its own movement to the receiving ball. Similar to consciousness. If the mental would just come up from the non-mental we have neither a sufficient explanation for its appearance and being, since it isn´t identical to the non-mental material and on top of that we violated ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing) since a prior non-existent property just showed up without metaphysical grounding. As such the ground of being necessarily has to possess something analogous to what we regard as intellect. (I accept analogous talk about God here, but normally I´m much more inclined to follow Maimonides and accept negative theology).
That was an amateurish exposition of a version of the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument, the best versions can be found by Alexander Pruss: http://alexanderpruss.com/papers/LCA.html
Ironically among the best defenses in the last few decades are two by apatheists (Richard Gale and Richard Taylor) and an atheist (William Rowe).
I liked your previous post because it points to a lot of the oversimplifications in the treatment of things by Cartesian dualism. I simply think that scholastic thought is hardly the final say and that there are more complexities in these issues than just those overlooked by Cartesian dualism. I think duality between physical and spiritual is not the same as that of mind and body and that all these dualities are all effective dualities rather than absolute or metaphysical.
I definitely think there is something correct about this also. I have often described death by the metaphor of running out onto ice, where suddenly being without friction we can only continue moving in the same direction according to the inertia of the choices we have already made. I don’t think this means we are changeless but rather that our changes are according to a nature created by the choices we have made in life. Thus I see heaven and hell as the ultimate consequence of the two competing directions these changes can take, either that of the self-creative changes by growth and learning or by the self-destructive changes dictated by our bad habits. Indeed these two directions may be summed up as life and death.
I believe the above mentioned friction is supplied by the laws of nature which largely care nothing for our beliefs and desires but follow mathematical laws rather blindly. This is often a source of irritation but it is also a means by which the world and others in it can break into our life/psyche/world and challenge our stubborn ideas of what is really important.
I think it is dubious however that you can have something non-physical consistently affecting something physical. I think that is something which scientific methodology would detect. I don’t think it has and don’t think it ever will. Instead I suggest that the mind is a physical living organism residing in the brain and that the spirit (body and mind) reflects only that which is really a matter of our choices and thus truly who we really are. This spirit survives regardless of may happen to either our body or mind irrespective of illnesses which may affect either of these. Thus this is an example of an additional oversimplification which I am discarding which might make the mistake of attributing mental illness to something spiritual.
Just because something is not causally reducible to physics doesn’t mean that it is not physical in the sense of identifiable with its physical material state. I very much think that we will discover that life is a process that science can fully describe without having to resort to something supernatural or outside our material existence. And I think consciousness is a part of that process of life also.
Perhaps. I didn´t assume that I presented a coherent picture, at least not on the fly. I´m not that great yet in the philosophy of mind. I also don´t claim that the dualistic picture will be able to answer every question, but what I would claim is that a) in a traditional form of substance dualism the issue of the interaction problem is no more pressing than in any other ontology and b) that it gets us further than the alternatives. The linked paper on hylomorphic dualism for current state probably presents the best version of such a defense as it takes both the hylomorphism of Aristotle and such arguments like Ross´s for immaterial aspects into account.
The question is anyway what personal identity is and its relationship to the material. This is also the reason why substance dualism in itself doesn´t necessitate a survival of death if identity is the composition of the material and the immaterial. This would be as much of an afterlife like a dead person has because the matter making his body up is still there.
To your point of scientific detection, I think this makes assumptions I would reject. After all I don´t believe in the strict cartesian distinction and hence what physicists discover is not the whole facts about matter. Furthermore it is dependend upon a certain interpretation of the data which I possibly wouldn´t make. I think that the essentialyl holistic picture of higher beings adapted in Aristotelian philosphy makes a distinguishable detection of the kind of causation through the method of the natural sciences pretty much impossible.
This might be of interest:
Depends on the particular definition. Qualitative states of mind aren´t reducible to quantitative. As such it doesn´t make sense to reduce a particular sense datum to e.g. the charge and energy of the neurons transmitting. Hence in order for it to be a material state, we have to adopt the more traditional richer picture of matter. Between you and me I think adapting that is uncontroversial.
What I deny here would be that life is a process reducible to quantitative science. There is no indication of that and the old debate between mechanism and vitalism has ended with taking both to be wrong and having to be synthesized.
Anyway I don´t know if making the material object account for all the properties will do it. First of all the answer won´t be found in the matter making a form up, but in the form itself and if that could account for all the mental and irreducible properties by itself without reframing to immaterial aspects, I´ve become quite skeptical of and the argument presented in aboves comment is one of the reasons why.
In general I doubt that we will ever have a full picture of matter. What seems quite clear though is that assuming that the quantitative facts are exhaustive, is a non-starter if we want to fill all the sciences into one picture of the natural.
