0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
You could have reawakened the Sheldrake thread with this
...American philosopher Daniel Dennett frames the problem quite lucidly. Take lobsters, he argues—they’re just robots. Lobsters can get by with no sense of self at all. You can’t ask what it’s like to be a lobster. It’s not like anything. They have nothing that even resembles consciousness; they’re machines. But if this is so, Dennett argues, then the same must be assumed all the way up the evolutionary scale of complexity...Dennett gets to humans...In Dennett’s formulation,"Yes, we have a soul. But it’s made of lots of tiny robots. Somehow, the trillions of robotic (and unconscious) cells that compose our bodies organize themselves into interacting systems that sustain the activities traditionally allocated to the soul, the ego or self. But since we have already granted that simple robots are unconscious (if toasters and thermostats and telephones are unconscious), why couldn’t teams of such robots do their fancier projects without having to compose me? If the immune system has a mind of its own, and the hand–eye coordination circuit that picks berries has a mind of its own, why bother making a super-mind to supervise all this?"Dennett’s own answer is not particularly convincing: he suggests we develop consciousness so we can lie, which gives us an evolutionary advantage. (If so, wouldn’t foxes also be conscious?) But the question grows more difficult by an order of magnitude when you ask how it happens—the “hard problem of consciousness,” as David Chalmers calls it. How do apparently robotic cells and systems combine in such a way as to have qualitative experiences: to feel dampness, savor wine, adore cumbia but be indifferent to salsa? Some scientists are honest enough to admit they don’t have the slightest idea how to account for experiences like these, and suspect they never will.Do Electron(s) Dance?There is a way out of the dilemma, and the first step is to consider that our starting point could be wrong. Reconsider the lobster. Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures...But in fact, scientific observation has revealed that even lobsters engage in some forms of play—manipulating objects, for instance, possibly just for the pleasure of doing so. If that is the case, to call such creatures “robots” would be to shear the word “robot” of its meaning. Machines don’t just fool around. But if living creatures are not robots after all, many of these apparently thorny questions instantly dissolve away...
...“there appears to be something hard-wired into humans that gives special attention to negative information.” There followed what is by now a characteristic note: “I think it’s evolutionary biology.”Negative campaign advertisements are the least of it. There is, in addition, war and male aggression, the human sensitivity to beauty, gossip, a preference for suburban landscapes, love, altruism, marriage, jealousy, adultery, road rage, religious belief, fear of snakes, disgust, night sweats, infanticide, and the fact that parents are often fond of their children. The idea that human behavior is “the product of evolution,” as the Washington Post puts the matter, is now more than a theory: it is a popular conviction.It is a conviction that reflects a modest consensus of opinion among otherwise disputatious philosophers and psychologists: Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, David Buss, Henry Plotkin, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Peter Gärdenfors, Gary Marcus. The consensus is constructed, as such things often are, on the basis of a great hope and a handful of similes. The great hope is that the human mind will in the end find an unobtrusive place in the larger world in which purely material causes chase purely material effects throughout the endless night. The similes are, in turn, designed to promote the hope.
Niels Bohr's arguments indicating the non-applicability of quantum methodology to the study of the ultimate details of life given in his book "Atomic physics and human knowledge" conflict with the commonly held opposite view. The bases for the usual beliefs are examined and shown to have little validity. Significant differences do exist between the living organism and the type of system studied successfully in the physics laboratory. Dealing with living organisms in quantum-mechanical terms with the same degree of rigour as is normal for non-living systems would seem not to be possible without considering also questions of the origins of life and of the universe.
What they thirsted after was a world of life and thought driven by a neatly controlling syntax that played itself out with something like cause - and -effect necessity. They imagined this causal necessity much as they imagined the external impact of particle upon particle, molecule upon molecule, where one thing “makes” another happen. And if this is how things work, then why should they worry about what the Book of Life might turn out to say when they could actually read it? Their confidence that they had wrested the textual secret of life from the cell’s nucleus even before they had a clue to its reading is the proof that they were not really thinking in textual terms. It wasn’t the still - unknown meaning of the text that excited them so much as their conviction that a cut - and - dried, mechanizable logic had been found for preserving certain “machine states” from one generation to the next.
The supposedly linear structure of letters, words, and sentences into which DNA has been decoded simply does not articulate a clean, unambiguous, command - and - control authority sitting atop a hierarchical chain of command. Only a misguided preoccupation with an imagined set of well-defined syntactical relationships could have led researchers to dismiss the greater part of DNA — nearly all of it, actually — as “junk DNA.” The junk didn’t seem to participate in the neat controlling sequences researchers were focused on, and so it seemed irrelevant. But more recently the erstwhile junk has been recognized as part of a “complex system of distributed regulation” in which “the spacing, the positioning, the separations and the proximities of different elements...appear to be of the essence” (Moss 2003, p. 191).
But even more devastating for the centralized command - and - control view has been the discovery of “epigenetic” processes. These yield hereditary changes that are not associated with structural changes in DNA at all. Rather, they arise from alterations in how the rest of the organism marks and employs its DNA. And beyond this, researchers have been exploring effects upon DNA from the larger environment. In a dramatic reversal of traditional doctrine, investigations of bacteria show that gene mutations can arise from — can even be guided by — environmental conditions in a non-random way. In sum, genes are no more the self-determining cause of everything else in the organism, than they are themselves the result of everything else.
Of course, we have seen that the equation of mechanical computation with mentality was based on the extraordinarily naïve assumption that machine logic is the essence of thinking and language. But if we can look past this reductionism, what we find is that geneticists have glimpsed more truth than they realize, and the reason for their confusion is that, due to their mechanistic compulsions, they cannot bring themselves to accept their own inchoate insight. If they have been driven to textual metaphors with such compelling, seemingly inescapable force, it is because these metaphors capture a truth of the matter. The creative processes within the organism are word-like processes. Something does speak through every part of the organism — and certainly through DNA along with all the rest. Geneticists are at least vaguely aware of this speaking — and of the unity of being it implies — and therefore they naturally resort to explanations that seem to invoke a being who speaks.The problem is that their insistence upon textual mechanisms blinds them even to the most obvious aspects of language — aspects that prove crucial for understanding the organism. If I am speaking to you in a logically or grammatically proper fashion, then you can safely predict that my next sentence will respect the rules of logic and grammar. But this does not even come close to telling you what I will say. Really, it’s not a hard truth to see: neither grammatical nor logical rules determine the speech in which they are found. Rather, they only tell us something about how we speak.
The best argument in favor of scientific realism is known as the “no miracles” argument, according to which it would be nothing short of miraculous if scientific theories did not track the world as it actually is, however imperfectly, and still managed to return such impressive payoffs, like, you know, the ability to actually send a space probe to Mars. Even so, the anti-realist can reply, we know of scientific theories that are wrong in a deep sense and yet manage to be empirically adequate, Newtonian mechanics perhaps being the prime example.
I talked about the pessimistic meta-induction at TAM a couple of years ago, and Richard Dawkins approached me afterwards to let me know that — clearly — the Darwinian theory is the obvious exception to the meta-induction, thus displaying a surprising amount of ignorance of both the history of biology and the current status of evolutionary theory. Cue the onslaught of incensed comments by his supporters...
The same goes for causality: when historians, economists, biologists and so on talk about “X causing Y” they are simply deploying a concept that is useful for capturing patterns that are affected by time asymmetry, and that are no more or less illusory than patterns at any other level of analysis of reality. The only difference between physics and the special sciences, according to Ladyman and Ross, is that the former is concerned with patterns that have for all effective purposes a very very large domain of stability (both in space and time). Biologists, instead, are concerned with patterns that have local stability both in space (earth-bound, for now) and time (the duration of the life of an individual, or of a species).The surprising upshot of all of this is that physicalist reductionism — the idea that all the special sciences and their objects of study will eventually reduce to physics and its objects of study — is out of the question. And it is out of the question because of a metaphysics (ontic structural realism) that is based on the best physics available! If you are not blown away by this you may not have caught the thing in its entirety and may want to go back and re-read this post (or, if your philosophical and physical chops are adequate, ETMG).This has all sorts of implication for those increasingly popular (and, I think, annoying) statements about determinism and reductionism that we keep hearing. Turns out that they are based on bad physics and worse metaphysics. There is no fundamental determinism for the simple reason that there is no fundamental causality, and that “cause” is a conceptual tool deployed by the special sciences that has no counterpart in fundamental physics, and so it cannot be reduced to or eliminated by the latter.
Today science and the “philosophy of mind”—its thoughtful assistant, which is sometimes smarter than the boss—are threatening Western culture with the exact opposite of humanism. Call it roboticism. Man is the measure of all things, Protagoras said. Today we add, and computers are the measure of all men.Many scientists are proud of having booted man off his throne at the center of the universe and reduced him to just one more creature—an especially annoying one—in the great intergalactic zoo. That is their right. But when scientists use this locker-room braggadocio to belittle the human viewpoint, to belittle human life and values and virtues and civilization and moral, spiritual, and religious discoveries, which is all we human beings possess or ever will, they have outrun their own empiricism. They are abusing their cultural standing. Science has become an international bully.Nowhere is its bullying more outrageous than in its assault on the phenomenon known as subjectivity.
The Closing of the Scientific Mind David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale. His book Subjectivism: The Mind from Inside will be published by Norton later this year.QuoteToday science and the “philosophy of mind”—its thoughtful assistant, which is sometimes smarter than the boss—are threatening Western culture with the exact opposite of humanism. Call it roboticism. Man is the measure of all things, Protagoras said. Today we add, and computers are the measure of all men.Many scientists are proud of having booted man off his throne at the center of the universe and reduced him to just one more creature—an especially annoying one—in the great intergalactic zoo. That is their right. But when scientists use this locker-room braggadocio to belittle the human viewpoint, to belittle human life and values and virtues and civilization and moral, spiritual, and religious discoveries, which is all we human beings possess or ever will, they have outrun their own empiricism. They are abusing their cultural standing. Science has become an international bully.Nowhere is its bullying more outrageous than in its assault on the phenomenon known as subjectivity.
To assume that the laws of physics are supreme is to remain within the confines of this Humean world. Physical laws assert what are supposedly eternal regularities, but there is nothing necessary about them: we can have no guarantee that the law that holds today will hold tomorrow or, for that matter, that it isn’t just a local effect applying only to our observable part of the universe, and that different laws may apply elsewhere.For Nancy Cartwright this is all the wrong way about. For her, the world presented by the laws of physics is largely a fiction. The world in which we live, unlike that inside the laboratory, is a messy, unpredictable place, marked by discontinuities and fractures. The regularities promised by physics are rarely apparent. It is a more dangerous – in some ways a more interesting place – than the supposedly absolute and eternal laws of physics would suggest. There is a lack of fit between the laws and reality as we know it: to find the regularities promised you need to look hard and deep and under certain special conditions; you need, ideally, to be in a laboratory.If not much that happens in nature is, in fact, as orderly and regular as we have been led to believe by physics, then we must expect even less order when we enter the world of the human sciences. Hence, if the economist attempts to lay down laws, he or she is well-advised to equip them with ceteris paribus conditions – that is, if he proposes that “taxes increase prices” he will protect his hide by informing us that they will only do so if other things are equal. But other things rarely are equal. All kinds of countervailing trends may be at work, as well as quite unexpected events – a run on the dollar, an oil bonanza, a devaluation of the currency – so that it is possible that a tax increase, far from raising prices, may be followed by a fall in prices.Does this mean that the ‘law’ in this case is wrong? Not at all. In explaining why the law failed to apply on this particular occasion the economist will have recourse to counterfactuals: that is, he will explain that the tax increase would have caused a rise in prices if x or y or z had not occurred. In which case, one may think, it is not much of a law, if it cannot guarantee that the cause will give rise to the effect. However, Cartwright argues that this situation is scarcely peculiar to laws of economics; it applies equally to the laws of physics.
