Individually, no. But I also don’t think atoms individually self-replicate, but I think cells do. And cells are made of atoms.
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You’re right. They don’t. Then again, water molecules aren’t wet, silicon atoms can’t compute the natural log of 47, and all sorts of systems have properties that their individual parts do not. How is this surprising? And how is it that when the talk turns to agency, and only then, you forget that fact?
Ah, a short quote you picked off a web site, from a book you haven’t read, whose meaning and context you therefore can’t possibly know. Sure, that’s a great argument. I haven’t read the book either, but just looking at that quote in isolation I don’t see how it could mean what you think.
Perhaps not explicitly, but that’s what you’ve been arguing for whether you know it or not.
People tend not to think, and certainly not very deeply, about what they’re doing. Or what “they” means in that sentence. Is it too much to ask you to try?
Why isn’t it possible that “really choosing” consists of the motion of atoms (and electrons and photons, presumably) in one’s brain? After all, you have said that natural selection could evolve a brain that thinks. If that’s true, no matter how unlikely, it requires prior agreement that thinking is a process happening in a material brain.
But that’s the same thing as “I chose to do it.” You’re still not thinking about what any of this means.
No, I just know what “brain dead” means, which you apparently don’t, and know it’s not the same thing as “clinically dead”.
Sure I would. However the laptop came to be, I know what laptops can do. Of course any machine could have flaws, so one can never absolutely trust them. But the greater point, which I have mentioned every time you have brought up this idiotic and likely fictitious gotcha moment, is that the analogy between laptops and human minds/brains is poor. And any scientist Lennox suppoedly sprung it on would almost certainly have told him that.
Hard to say what Lennox means. But natural selection may or may not be aimless, depending on what you mean by that. It certainly isn’t consciously goal-directed, or consciously anything. But it results in directional movement of population gene pools. So is that aimless? If it is, then aimlessness is irrelevant to its ability to result in a thinking brain.
It’s easy to explain how something is relevant, but not to explain how something is irrelevant, just as it’s easy to show that somebody said something but not to show that somebody never said something. It would certainly be easier for you to explain the relevance of Egnor’s views to any of the questions I asked (you should look them up just to check).
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“Would” or “did”?
Also, Dawkins is a zoologist, not a philosopher. He may identify as a materialist (if he does), and he may even be one by what ever is an acceptable definition to us here. In any case, (a) that does not make him a representative of all or a majority of other materialists and (b) it does not make every position he voices a materialist position. Dawkins is not the pope of materialism.
Can’t speak for “people”, but I, for one, think both[1]. Please, explain to me what exactly is incorrect about this assessment, experimentally speaking. What does this position entail that is explicitly in conflict with one or more empirical facts?
insofar as “caused by” translates to “is”, “motion” to a broader/general change of state, regarding the former, and to the extent to which the latter can be coherently explicated at all ↩︎
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Beyond that, it is not at all clear that Dawkins is actually talking about what @lee_merrill thinks he is talking about. I have never heard Dawkins endorse illusionism, and it does not seem to be the kind of thing he would endorse. The odds are far better that Lee never read the original source of the quote. And, even if he has read it, it is even less likely he understood what Dawins was saying.
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Actually, rigorous logic dictates…
Invisible space bunnies are essential and self sufficient cuteness.
If invisible space bunnies did not exist, they could not be cute, therefore they must exist.
As rainbows are contingent and not ugly, they must have their source in invisible space bunnies.
QED
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No, I don’t
OK, thanks.
But self-replication doesn’t mean cells, and their constituent atoms, have agency somehow.
Most systems indeed are not just the sum of their parts, I agree. But how do you make the jump to agency? People do recognize that their bodies are quite complex, yet they don’t therefore conclude that their choices are some emergent property from their muscles and bones and tissues somehow. We recognize that agency implies will and intent and planning and action, apart from their physicality, and they are not forgetting something when they think this. It is only the materialists who inform themselves and others that this is a delusion, that thoughts are not apart from physicality, that they actually derive from this. But in the next breath, they must admit that they have no reason they can give for us to believe them, they are like the Hindu guru telling you that he is an illusion, you are an illusion, for no good reason than because he says so. And you are expected to believe that an illusion telling an illusion that we are all an illusion is somehow, enlightenment!
Most systems indeed are not just the sum of their parts, I agree. But how do you make the jump to wetness?
What’s special about agency?
Again, can’t speak for “people”, since they did not elect me to speak for them, but I, for one, do, actually, insofar as “tissues” can and does include the nervous system. Again, what exactly does this view entail that is in any even slight conflict with experimentally observable reality?
Who is “we”? How do “we recognize” that will or intent or planning or action are in any sense at all “apart from their physicality”, and what on earth does that mean, exactly, in testable terms?
And no, I would not say that you are expressing a delusional view. Delusions tend to be some sort of comprehensible, if not even as much as internally consistent. But naturally occurring non-physicality that has physical impact without having physical interactions with the things it impacts, that I do not call a delusion. I call it incoherent babble, which I do not only struggle to grasp the meaning of, but of which I must rather doubt that it could even possibly have any.
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Missing the point that you’ve made basic logical fallacy. Because the individual building blocks or components do not exhibit the behavior, then the assemblage/complex structure made of the building blocks/components can’t give rise to the behavior.
As the example with self-replication shows that kind of thinking is fallacious. The collection/structure can in fact exhibit behaviors and have properties not found in the individual building blocks.
There is no reason why something made of atoms can’t have agency just because the individual atom doesn’t have agency.
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It even has a name. As a matter of fact, this website actually uses @lee_merrill’s argument to illustrate the fallacy!
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You really need to wrap your head around this: What most people might or might not think isn’t of any probative value on this topic. Most people have never interacted with the philosophy of physics, mind, materialism, or anything of the sort.
In fact there is research that shows most people don’t even understand the questions being posted on questionnaires concerning these topics.
The appeal to popularity fallacy is and remains a fallacy, and all the more fallacious when the opinions appealed to are uninformed.
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It’s worse than that. @lee_merrill is arguing against the position that free will or consciousness or whatever he thinks he is talking about is an illusion.
An illusion, by definition, is something that is not real, but which is perceived as real.
So the fact that people perceive it as real is not in anyway an argument against it being an illusion.
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Yabut, people disagree.
Checkmate, materialists.
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I think it illustrates very well the materialist view, that we all are moving at the behest of purely natural forces. How is this not clear? And the direct implication is that the unenlightened masses are under an illusion, of being real agents who are responsible for their decisions, when they are sane. What do you think it means, especially if you insist we must read the entire book to get the meaning of any statement in it?
“They” means the people I am referring to, most people in this world.
Yes, in the sense that a tornado could assemble a laptop, complete with a theorem-proving program that works! I still disagree that this is a reasonable view to hold, about my laptop, or about human reason. So I don’t agree that “thinking is a process happening in a material brain.” I hold, with most people, that our thoughts are not a puppet show, the materialist explanation is too improbable to be plausible.
I don’t see how “my brain atoms made me do it” is in any way meaning “I chose to do it.” If my actions are completely due to movements of atoms in my brain, there is actually no “me” to choose, you could theoretically compute what I will do next, if you knew enough. That won’t fly in court, though, that will land you in the pokey, or in an asylum.
Dilated pupils do indicate brain death, which is also close enough to clinical death for my purposes.
John Lennox, we have a customer! Someone who will buy your laptop, even if we cannot explain who made it, or how. It just works. So far. Somehow. And that’s the basis on which you must trust it to keep working.
But Lennox is not saying laptops are good analogies for brains, he is pointing out (as I do) that the same principal can be applied to both, and Oxford scientists that Lennox knows do require good evidence that our laptops were intentionally designed and assembled. That is very reasonable, and your view, alas, is not.
So I think Lennox’s question would still be apt if your laptop was the product of a process purely directed towards survival. There’s a serious disconnect in saying we should therefore expect it to do what a laptop would be thought of as doing. We would have no good reason to take it into a lab and expect it to be useful for research. It’s just trying to survive! Still…
And I mentioned that only certain thoughts can be the result of brain stimulation, apparently. Physical movements, memories, but not abstract thought, for instance. This is unexpected, if all our thoughts are caused by operations in our brains.
Assume you are right. The brain has nothing to do with thinking. Then what is the brain for, and why do conditions of the brain affect our mental abilities? No fudging your answer now, the brain has nothing to do with thinking.
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See? You make an exception for this one thing. Atoms aren’t alive, but collections of atoms can be alive. Atoms don’t think, and that means that collections of atoms can’t think either. So much for logic.
Not sure what you mean by that, but I don’t think we recognize it. I think you want to think it, because it makes you feel more important somehow.
The reason is simple enough. We know that thinking involves the brain, and if it’s not solely a product of the brain we know of the existence of nothing else that could also be involved. Further, we know of no reason not to think that nothing else is involved.
Because it doesn’t actually say that. The implication, if any, is in your head alone.
I don’t know what it means. I bet the surrounding context would enlighten you, assuming you bothered and were capable of reading with comprehension.
But what is it that makes a plan? When you make a plan, what is the relevant part of “you”? This is something you never get to. It’s not really something you can learn by introspection or by declaring something to be a black box that inquiry should stop just outside.
No problem. All that’s required is that it be possible. Or perhaps you mean something by “possible” other than what the word usually means?
I don’t think you know what “improbable” and “plausible” mean either. Let’s put down “puppet show” as another term that allows you to stop inquiring into what’s really going on. I don’t recognize the term as a description of what anyone thinks a mind embedded in a causal universe is like. As is so often the case, you contradict yourself without realizing it.
Of course you don’t. This is not something you’re capable of understanding, though I can’t see why. It’s simply that this universe, with tiny exceptions, operates by causality, and you are part of the universe. Your thoughts, as we will call them for the sake of convenience, have causes. Those causes themselves have causes, and so on back for as far as you want to go.
I can’t believe we’re having a stupid argument about whether anyone has recovered from being brain dead.
Hate to tell you, but I can’t explain who made my computer or how, except in quite vague, general, and unsatisfying terms. But I can still tell the difference between one that works and one that doesn’t.
Sure, you can have any opinion you like of a fantasy situation.
Still looking for relevance to the questions this was supposedly responding to. Did you lose track?
I believe that Aristotle said its function was to cool the blood. Maybe that’s it.
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Wait… So what do you think thinking is, exactly? It must be either not a process at all, or one that is happening someplace other than the brain. Right?
It’s magic, isn’t it? That’s what you think thinking is. Straight-up mystical woo-woo, isn’t it? Boo!
Improbable, is it? And how probable is that, specifically? And by what calculation based on which observable data did who ever you are going to quote for this arrive at their estimate?
First of all, yes, human choices are in many cases predictable, and in many more cases unambiguously measurable well in advance of their being acted upon, or the candidate even being consciously aware of having made them.
Secondly, no, recognizing what it is that makes you the being that you are in no way erases your existence or the meaningfulness of identifying you as a whole, rather than a mere collection of your parts.
Thirdly, not only is this not at all a problem as per the second point, it is also not one to which you would have one remotely more satisfying solution. Replace “atoms” in your complaint with “soul”, and literally nothing else about it needs changing to make just as much (or as little) sense as it ever did. Whether I am made of atoms obeying physical law, or out of a spooky ghost obeying magical whimsy, one can in either case ask just what exactly “me” is, and in what sense it ever makes any choices, what ever those are.
Of course, in the case of atoms, at least they are bound to this physical realm, and at least the decisions that end up emerging through their motions are actually based on things happening in the real world, and aren’t completely disconnected and uncontrollable noise. See, if the only sort of “free will” you are willing to accept[1] is the sort that is causally divorced from nature, then sure enough you have the “free” part down, but in no meaningful way is this a “will” still.
What exactly is wrong with trusting a machine based on its observed past behaviour? Why on earth would anyone’s story about its origin be a better reason to trust its reliability, than a large aggregate of data confirming said reliability? Do you have an actual objection here at all, or just giggles?
and yes, this is entirely about your sensibilities, because as a matter of fact, as far as we can currently tell, and if we take current physics seriously and at its word, nature is deterministic on a fundamental level, irrespective of how much or how little any of us end up liking it. ↩︎
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Just curious. Why do you think you have a brain, then, why does it burn so many calories, and why does it have such unfathomable numbers of internal connections and conductors of chemical signals?
If the brain isn’t thinking, then what does it do that requires so much energy, and why does chemicals and physical trauma to the brain affect your thinking?
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And along that line, why is it so much bigger than a chimp’s brain? What does it do that a chimp’s brain doesn’t?
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