A Physicalist and Compatibilist Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 11:22 pm
Ophir (perhaps the only person who still reads this blog) had some objections to a previous post in the comments here. Although I initially considered responding as a comment, I think the explanation is long enough to warrant a post.
Here’s some of the original comment, a little bit redacted:
If your personality and behavior are indeed nothing but the biochemical makeup of your brain then [your choices are] no different from a rock falling to the ground (and not floating in the air) or a sunflower seed developing into a sunflower (and not a tulip or an elephant). In other words, from the very first instant of the Big Bang it [...] was [...] completely inevitable that I’d be writing this comment on your blog.
There’s a lot of assumptions in there that I disagree with, and it would be difficult to unpack them all. But the basic assumptions are something like this: if a mind is a purely physical phenomenon, then human actions are predetermined; if human actions are predetermined, then there is no free will. (Please correct me if I’m wrong, Ophir.) There are two issues here: physicalism versus dualism, and determinism versus free will.
I remember sometime in my teens quietly disowning the doctrine of nonphysical souls. I had read enough of the Bible to see that it wasn’t really mentioned in the earlier parts – arguably the Jews didn’t have a concept of an incorporeal human soul until perhaps the time of the second temple – and the scant few references in the New Testament that Christians built their doctrine of the immaterial soul on – well, these were shaky ground to say the least. The modern concept of a nonphysical soul, at least across the Western world, is owed largely to Descartes, who in order to preserve his Catholic faith in the light of reason drew a stark metaphysical line between the “physical” and the “spiritual” – a line that previously had not existed. Descartes hypothesized a lot of silly things to keep up this presumption: e.g., that man was both physical and spiritual, two realms which never interacted. But if they never interacted, how was mankind both? One of the more famous bits of silliness was the postulation that a gland in the brain was used by the spiritual soul to manipulate the physical body. Ever since, philosophers who like a physical-spiritual dualism have pondered how the physical and the spiritual (or logical, or however they want to term it) interact. I don’t see any reason to postulate such a dualism – I don’t see any evidence for this bicameral existence, no one has yet come up with a good definition of what exactly it means to be “nonphysical,” and as we know from things like computers and primitive biological nervous systems, arrangements of physical components can create logical systems (and, one would hypothesize, perhaps even consciousness). The physical atoms and molecules run along on their own, following physical laws, and as they do they create logical states which do their own, logical things: some logic (software) running on top of a physical, biological system (hardware). While there may in fact be a “nonphysical” realm (whatever that means), I have no reason to believe in its existence. As a philosopher friend of mine has put all this, “Descartes needs to die.” His dualism is just untenable.
As a Christian, when I quietly disavowed all of this spiritual-physical dualism (keeping it on the down-low, having seen how attached most Christians were to their nonphysical souls), I squared this away with the very-Jewish concept, inherited into Christianity, of resurrection. If God was God, then God could reconstitute physical matter into its previous configuration, thus resurrecting whatever creature existed before its physical body was destroyed. I thought of this physical soul – and still do think of it – much as a building. You can tear down a building, but if you still have the blueprints for it, you can reconstruct it. The human body is exponentially more complicated than any building, but the analogy still holds. The building is me, my physical personality, my physical soul. It will one day die. The question then became if you destroy a building, you don’t destroy its blueprint – so while the thing’s physical manifestation might’ve been demolished, where has the idea gone? Does it still exist? (xkcd says no; I’m not so sure) This gets into questions about the ontological status of information and ideas. I still do not have an answer to any of that. I may not want to say information exists in the same way that atoms exist, but does that mean it doesn’t exist at all apart from its physical manifestation? I don’t know.
Many years after my deconversion from Descartes’ cartesian dualism I read Dale Martin’s The Corinthian Body (amazing amazing scholarship), which explains, among other things, the Greek medical concept of pneuma – usually translated “spirit” – and how that informed Paul’s interpretation of the body. Though this was not Martin’s main point, it does tie in nicely with dualism because he shows that this modern concept of mind-body/spiritual-physical dualism did not exist in the ancient world. There was nothing “nonphysical,” just degrees of physicalism, from light (pneuma) to heavy (earthly) stuff. In short, he ended up confirming to me that the Christian case for dualism was very impoverished indeed..
But whether or not there is a Christian case for it, I do not think there is a good philosophical case for dualism. Physical systems can and do create logical, information-carrying systems. There is no soul pushing around the atoms in a computer. We are a different form – a far, far better form – of information processing than computers, but we are still a form of information processing. We don’t know how we do all we do, but we know some of it, and in the absence of evidence for a soul pushing the molecules and squeezing the chemicals in my brain, I’ll opt for the brain just being the physical stuff on which the patterns of my personality play. It’s frightening at first, but in the end it’s a little bit magical and awe-inspiring.
To the second matter of determinism versus free will: as a former, and repentant Calvinist, and someone who went gradually from Calvinism to more-or-less Pelagianism* before he (de)converted away from Christianity, I have done a lot of thinking on determinism and free will. Not to say any of it’s right, just that these thoughts have been echoing around inside my skull for some time, with all the emotion and logic and passion that goes on inside a human skull.
I was allured to Calvinism by my church youth group when I was in middle school. All of the church youth ministers were Calvinists. And they seemed to have a pretty logical system worked out for it. Though I now think their reading of Romans 9 was miles off the mark, they did have a hermeneutic they used, along with passages like Romans 9 (or Ephesians 1) to back up their beliefs. And this was my first exposure to an attempt to reconcile human behavior and choices with belief in a deity. I did reading and praying on my own, and speaking with various youth ministers before I “came out” as a Calvinist. At the time I found it very compelling. Although there are other relational events that happened then (coming out as a Calvinist to my family was second worst – and bad although on an entirely different plane of bad – to coming out gay), those are peripheral to the story. The story was: I was a young kid, in high school, reasonably intelligent, and totally a Calvinist. I loved Jonathan Edwards, John Piper, the whole lot of those Calvinist superstars. They had their theological systems for answering so many questions.
But what eventually ended Calvinism for me was another question: the question of the goodness of God. Although I would argue vehemently that God could be good while still damning people to hell or saving them to heaven based on his (inscrutable, and almost irrational – or as we’d say supra-rational) will, in the end I had to face the fact that Calvinism raises severe questions about the goodness of God. Either there is no such thing as goodness, and goodness is just a label we assign de facto to everything God does; or there is such a thing as goodness, and a Calvinist God is not good. The first to go was the idea of double predestination (John Piper’s favorite), and then limited atonement (the “L” in TULIP) and I was a four-point Calvinist for a while. Eventually, and accelerated by more study into various Christian thought over the centuries, I rejected Calvinism altogether as being an immoral and monstrous view of God. I truly repented of it, in every sense of the word, and embraced personal choices as the cornerstone of morality.
I haven’t thought about determinism and free will as much since my deconversion away from Calvinism. However, I have found myself, at least presently, loosely in a space called Compatibilism. What Compatibilism says is: it doesn’t matter if our future decisions are predetermined or not, because we still make choices. If, ever since the Big Bang – or at least ever since life started evolving on a scale large enough to be immune to quantum effects – the future of life has been set, then so what? So what if I am writing this blog because a billion years ago a quark bumped into another quark and made a proton instead of a neutron? Even if that is so, I still do not know the choices I am about to make. I have to weigh the options, or give in to passion, make sense of input, rationalize, and make the choice. I have no crystal ball that tells me what I’m going to do. I – along with everyone – behave as if I have free will. Even if the future is totally determined, it doesn’t matter because I don’t know the future. If I were capable of seeing my future choices, then you might argue that it matters, but in the end, in this world and in this place that I inhabit, it doesn’t. And what would it mean for my will to be “free”? Free from what? Does anyone ever make a decision free from outside influences? A decision totally free from inputs is totally random. Is this what free will is? How free is it? Does anyone make a decision free from their life history, from past events, from considerations and suggestions bombarding them consciously and unconsciously? Is it possible, and could anything short of total randomness be considered truly “free”? But that wouldn’t be any sort of will at all, it would just be chaos. What matters to me is that we are responsible for our choices, even if these are not separable from our personal histories – after all, that’s what it means to be living in time – and whether my future actions have some element of chaos in it or if it’s all laid out by the laws of Newtonian physics, I don’t know what those decisions are and I continue to make my choices independent of the future. And so I end up being in that strangely liberating space of Compatibilism. Even if the future is determined, I am more than a rock falling to earth because I still make choices. I am still responsible for them.
This ended up being more about my personal history than a philosophical defense. But I’m a personal being embedded in time, and that’s okay.
*My personal opinion: when it comes to the foundational doctrines of Christianity, Pelagius was more right and Augustine was more wrong. But this is a whole ‘nother very long post.
Lovely as always. However, I can’t believe you ever liked Pelagius! You’re a dirty heretic!
That emoticon was just for you.
Hey, sorry for the lag in replying. I have at least five important exams to study for, and the number may increase depending on the extent to which I lose my mind. Which brings us to our topic.
Your response covered a lot of ground and I won’t address everything, but I will address the main points. In particular I want to focus on the mind-body problem and less on the question of free will. I probably did not phrase my response to the other post as best as I could. What prompted me to respond was your very strong conviction that there is only a physical body; an idea which I think does not justify such confidence. I threw in the issue of free will because for the most part I do think any extreme physicalist position does imply complete determinism. As you pointed out however, these are two separate issues. I want to focus on the first. Also, I won’t touch on the religious aspects you mentioned, as the mind-body problem is not a specifically religious problem, and for me at least it never was. In essence the mind-body problem is the problem of consciousness.
At the outset I should say that I am not a dualist or a monist. Perhaps it’s a sign of indecisiveness but I don’t see a reason to “pick a side” in this and many other philosophical debates, at least not at this stage of my intellectual inquiries. What I do seek however is to understand the problems. I have no answers, only questions. Another thing I want emphasize is that my inquiries here are epistemological, not metaphysical or ontological. That is, I’m not concerned here with the broader problem of whether there is a nonmaterial mind and if so how or whether it interacts with the body, only with the question of whether we have any reason to think that such a mind exists or does not exist. As I said I’m not a dualist, but I find the dualist case stronger than the monist case. Hopefully, I’ll be able here to articulate why.
This is the mind-body problem summed up. You have emotions, passions, feelings, desires, memories, likes, dislikes, ideas – all of which you perceive and experience as real nonphysical phenomena. You also have a skull, inside which is the brain, which you know is a complex physical organ, a part of your physical body.
You mentioned Descartes. While I don’t think one can say that a line between the physical and the “spiritual” didn’t exist before Descartes drew it (the mind-body problem existed already in ancient Greece and in all the major religions), it is true that he is the person who emphasized the problem more than anyone else before him and thus defined the mind-body problem in the modern philosophical form which concerns us to this day (incidentally, he did not claim that mind and body are two separate realms that never interact, rather that they are two separate realms that do interact, and that each one could influence the other). For that, and for other important achievements in philosophy, in mathematics, and in science, I think he deserves more credit than you give him. That said, I agree that his attempts at solving the problem of mind-body interaction were not only unsuccessful but downright bizarre. His glandular solution is not even a solution as all it does is redefine the question of how the soul interacts with the body, to how it interacts with a specific part of the body, the pineal gland.
You say you don’t see any reason to postulate mind-body dualism, but in the sentence I quoted above, you provide an example of just why the problem is so complicated. What Descartes and others after him pointed out was that we are aware of two things:
1) The world and everything in it (and that of course includes the human body and the human brain) are physical, and can be measured and described in physical categories – mass, volume, temperature, physical-chemical composition, etc.
2) We experience mental phenomena that cannot be measured and quantified in such a way.
This is a problem which requires a solution. As I said earlier, I’ll focus only on this most basic epistemological foundation of the mind-body problem and not get into broader metaphysical or ontological issues such as the nature, so to speak, of nonphysical entities, the interaction and causal relations between mind and body and the question of free will and determinism.
The physical world, its mechanisms and processes are in the public domain of knowledge. That is to say, all people are equal with respect to the knowledge they can attain about the physical world. Consciousness, however, is in the private domain and is completely inaccessible to anyone but the person who experiences it. This also brings up the notorious problem of other minds, but that’s a separate issue.
Right now I’m typing this response to you. You can study my fingers, their anatomy and the process by which I move them up and down and across the keyboard. You can study my motor and sensory systems whereby my brain interacts with my fingers and you can study all the physical-chemical processes going on in my brain. Despite the fact that it’s my brain, I have no advantage over others in studying it. My brain as a physical entity can be studied by all and whatever I know about the processes going on in my brain – you can know. But only I know why I’m replying to you and what I’m going to type, and only I can experience the feeling of my fingers hitting the keys and the challenge of expressing myself clearly. By studying my brain all you study are chemical processes, it doesn’t explain why I feel the keys against my fingers and why I know I’m going to end this sentence with a period. My brain doesn’t feel anything; I feel. I want to type and my brain sends signals to my fingers and they start typing. What gave my brain the signal that I want to type?
You compared the human body to a computer. That comparison is sound but it serves the dualist case just as well, if not better, than the physicalist case. Leibniz preceded your comparison by about three centuries with a comparison of his own. The only difference between your computer and Leibniz’s windmill is that your computer is a much more complicated machine than an 18th century windmill, but essentially they’re the same. As physical entities, their mechanisms do pretty much parallel biological processes, which are merely the most complicated form of physical and chemical processes. You can see how your computer works like you can see how your brain works. In the computer and in your body, all that’s going on are physical and chemical processes. I question whether the difference between a person and a computer is merely a matter of degree, as you suggest, or whether it’s a qualitative difference.
The computer is really the perfect tool for understanding the complete chasm between the physical and the mental. All physical processes can be measured and quantified, which means they can be translated into the language of a computer. Mental phenomena cannot be measured or quantified and not even the most super-duper of supercomputers can give any sort of output regarding them.
The distance between Tel Aviv and Eilat is greater than the distance between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. This a physical statement so the computer can tell you exactly, down to the millimeter or down to whatever decimal place you want, by just how much the distance between Tel Aviv and Eilat is greater than the distance between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Jacob’s love for Rachel was greater than his love for Leah. By how much was Jacob’s love for Rachel greater than his love for Leah? You can’t ask a computer this question and it won’t be able to give you an answer. Love cannot be measured or assigned a numerical value.
Now, you might say that you disagree with the question. That you maintain that love, like all conscious phenomena, is an illusion and that it is nothing but chemical processes going on in the brain, and that those can be measured. But chemical processes are just that – why ascribe love to them? How do we deduce love from electrical pulses and chemical reactions? Why assume any consciousness here, even an illusory consciousness? I want to point out that the issue is not whether Jacob loves Rachel more than Leah out of his own free will; the issue is that he feels he loves her more than Leah. He has the experience of loving Rachel more than Leah.
Let’s take an even more arresting example. Do I think that 2 + 2 is 4? You’ll probably say: Well, anyone who is remotely sane and minimally intelligent thinks that, and as you don’t seem like an escapee from an insane asylum I believe that you do in fact think that. Now, that’s a fair assumption, and I think it’s safe to say we all believe that others around us would agree with that statement. But, by what conceivable means could you possibly tell that that’s what I think? Is it that we don’t have machines sophisticated enough to detect the content of my thought, or is it that it’s impossible? But if thoughts are physical products, why should it be impossible? Even assuming you could somehow know for certain the content of my thoughts in the way you know the content of a water molecule, how could you understand my experience of thinking? Everyone is equal with regards to what they can know about the physical world. That means you should be able to know my experience and feelings as well as I do.
A final example: colors are physical products which are assigned numerical values and which can be detected by machines. Blue for instance has a wavelength of about 440-490 nm (at least according to Wikipedia). It’s entirely possible that we both will agree that the sky is blue, but how can you know that what I perceive and experience as blue is not what you perceive and experience as red? Consulting a machine won’t help.
There’s a lot more that can be said about the problematic fact that we experience consciousness which cannot be described in physical properties, but I think this suffices. Does this mean that a nonphysical mind exists? Not necessarily. But it does mean that dualism is not as untenable as you imply, and that physicalism is a very problematic supposition of its own.
With regards to free will, I agree with you and I think even the most hardened determinist would have to agree with you, that we experience having free will and act accordingly. As such we are all responsible for what we do of our own volition, regardless of whether that volition is free or not.
Ophir,
Let me make clear that when I reference “dualism” I essentially mean a view which accepts that the “mind” is made up of a different substance (be that physical or nonphysical) than the body. When I spoke about the nonphysical soul being an idea originating with Descartes, I mean it: though the soul was a concept before Descartes (a concept I find useful and use myself), the idea of this soul being something other than the physical stuff of the world was, as far as I can tell, new to him. You mentioned the mind-body problem in ancient Greece, but for most of Greek history, the soul was comprised mostly of pneuma, a physical, though very light and “rarified” substance which belonged mostly to the air. Pneuma was still “stuff” and a part of the rest of the universe. This idea of a parallel “spiritual realm” to the physical one is (I think) a Descartesian invention.
Now, that aside, it seems like we have drifted into the related realm of the problem of consciousness. There’s an easy and a hard problem of consciousness. The easy one is something like “why is there consciousness?” Not easy in the sense that you can answer it over tea, but consciousness is necessary to solve certain forms of complex or adaptive problems and one would assume would have an evolutionary advantage. How it arose, okay who knows, but it’s conceivable that an answer could be found. The really hard one, and the one you’ve brought up, is “why does consciousness [b]feel[/b] like anything at all?” You can postulate some system of thought and adaptation, but why this should feel like something and why it should be so personal is… well, difficult.
Now, to my mind, this is a separate question from whether the consciousness is something “of this world” or not. As I suggested in this post, I don’t see any reason to think it isn’t part of this world. I certainly can’t make anything approaching an airtight argument, but I can gesture toward hardware and software and say, “see, you can come up with logical, adaptive systems without the need for nonphysical properties.” Yes, that doesn’t address the hard problem. I’m not going to dare attempt to address it because it seems to me pretty near insoluble. As you mentioned, the problem of other minds is here too: I can’t demonstrate you have a consciousness, I just assume that you do. I maintain my adaptive advantage by not slipping into solipsism. And plus, I think solipsism is silly.
You asked me questions like measuring love and so forth, and I think we could, given the right equipment, measure the chemicals and hormones that produce the experience of love. We cannot, as you brought up, measure the [b]experience[/b]. We cannot, at least not presently, “get inside” anyone else’s mind so that we experience the same things. But this says nothing one way or the other about mind-body dualism. I may very well not be able to experience what you experience because I have a different physical brain which is undergoing different chemical processes and processing that information. It doesn’t tell me why it is that I feel ownership over me, so that I am “me” and you are not. But we can assume the obvious reality of conscious subjectivity without driving a wedge between body and mind, and brain and mind.
To sum up my point, I don’t disagree with you. I find it very hard to believe (though do note that I have no choice but to resort to belief) that there is anything non-physical in the universe. However commonsensical this belief may seem to me, no one has been able so far to prove it. More frustratingly, I doubt it can be proved. This creates all sorts of very interesting and very complex scientific and philosophical problems which have occupied man for about three millennia and which I doubt will be solved in the next three. That said, it would be ridiculous not to try to solve them.