Life is stronger than death. Good is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate. Truth is stronger than lies.
The darkness that poses a real threat to mankind, after all, is the fact that he can see and investigate tangible material things, but cannot see where the world is going or whence it comes, where our own life is going, what is good and what is evil.That does, indeed, seem to be the challenge of the era. Notice, though, that 'something can come from nothing' only if we dramatically change the meaning of the word "nothing." "Nothing" now means something, something like 'the potential for the creation of a universe.' And that, as it happens, is nothing other than the orthodox position: the universe came from that which had the potential to create it.
What kind of thing is that? To say that it is "nothing" is merely to give it a new name: but it is the same thing, whatever name you call it by.
"Today we can illuminate our cities so brightly that the stars in the sky are no longer visible," he said. "Is this not an image of the problems caused by our version of enlightenment?"
ReplyDeleteAnd then the author of that L.A. Times piece sits disconsolately in his city and says, "Who's to say there ever were any stars?" He tries to end on a hopeful note: "Living in a strange and remarkable universe that is the way it is, independent of our desires and hopes, is far more satisfying for me than living in a fairy-tale universe invented to justify our existence." But really: a universe invented to justify our existence? Is that what he thinks is the only alternative to nihilism?
I think you got it exactly right: the universe came form that which had the potential to create it, and calling that "nothing" doesn't diminish it.
Is that what he thinks is the only alternative to nihilism?
ReplyDeleteNo, he isn't advocating nihilism at all, only atheism. There is not the tiniest scrap of nihilism in that article.
"With regard to material things, our knowledge and our technical accomplishments are legion, but what reaches beyond, the things of God and the question of good, we can no longer identify," Benedict added, saying that faith was the "true enlightenment."
Then Afghanistan shall be a light unto the nations.
Notice, though, that 'something can come from nothing' only if we dramatically change the meaning of the word "nothing." "Nothing" now means something, something like 'the potential for the creation of a universe.' And that, as it happens, is nothing other than the orthodox position: the universe came from that which had the potential to create it.
When the Jesuits were indoctrinating my father, they used a false-alternatives argument in this vein to convince him they'd proved the existence of God. They pretended to have an exhaustive list of possibilities for the beginning of the universe, including odd ideas like "something came out of nothing" and the natural, seductive idea of the intelligent creator.
He never completely abandoned his faith, but it took him a long time to consider the other possibility - that there has always been matter.
Now that fits my understanding of Big Bang cosmology - and I am not claiming expertise here - that time really does have a beginning; that the term "before" as we use it simply doesn't apply at the point of origin. That is not the Orthodox position and it has no reason to be. Scientific cosmology results from the examination of data the Church fathers didn't have by means they didn't have.
Like so many things that come from modern physics, this isn't intuitive. As (I believe) Paul Dirac pointed out, this is unsurprising - our intuitions on time and motion work very well at the human scale (John Derbyshire quotes the term "medium-sized dry goods.") They do not scale well to high speeds, small sizes, or the beginning of time.
The orthodox position, as you describe it, results from using intuitive ideas about time, that fit so well in our day to day lives, and extending them back to a time when they don't apply. This was once a reasonable thing to do; it no longer is.
P.S. - I suppose technically he isn't advocating even atheism, only the absence of a creator. (Not every god mankind has imagined is supposed to be a creator.)
ReplyDeleteThe author refers to a pathetic belief in "a universe invented to justify our existence," implying that the more courageous or realistic view is that the universe has only the meaning that we find it convenient or pleasant to project on it for our own purposes. That's the false dichotomy I identify. It's not necessary to believe the universe was invented to justify our existence, in order to believe that the universe has a meaning independent of our wish-fulfilling fantasies. That's the sense in which I find his attitude nihilistic: just because he believes he can identify mechanisms for the universe's operation, he concludes that there cannot be a Creator's purpose. I don't see that that follows at all. It's a conclusion that comes naturally only if you are already predisposed to nihilism.
ReplyDelete"Uses false dichotomies" is not the same as "nihilistic" - and in any case, he isn't setting up the false dichotomy you propose. He is instead attacking one, that comes from religious people, and that I have heard my entire life:
ReplyDeleteI am painfully aware that our illusions nonetheless reflect a deep human need to assume that the existence of the Earth, of life and of the universe and the laws that govern it require something more profound. For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.
Yep. I can't count how many times I've heard that one! There is the false dichotomy, the one that leads believers to quote the famous passage from The Brothers Karamazov ad nauseum, and accuse us atheists of being immoral nihilists. And he answers it -
Does all of this prove that our universe and the laws that govern it arose spontaneously without divine guidance or purpose? No, but it means it is possible...
This is the opposite of what you say he said, just now.
And that possibility need not imply that our own lives are devoid of meaning. Instead of divine purpose, the meaning in our lives can arise from what we make of ourselves, from our relationships and our institutions, from the achievements of the human mind.
There's no dichotomy, true or false, there at all. And there is certainly not a whiff of nihilism - quite the contrary. He's saying, you can have meaning in your own life even if you don't believe God put it there. That's all he is concluding, and he's right.
Then Afghanistan shall be a light unto the nations.
ReplyDeleteIn fairness to Afghanistan, I had an Australian friend who spent a lot of time there before the Soviet invasion and subsequent wars. He liked it quite well.
What he liked most about it, I remember him saying, was that 'No matter what is going on in the world, if you want no part of it, you can go to Afghanistan.' It was a place you could travel freely and, if you were a man of good will, you would be left alone.
Subsequent research I've done, because I didn't think that could really be so, confirms that this was really true of the Afghanistan of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was a regular destination of all sorts of hippies, wanderers, spiritual travelers, and what have you.
Unfortunately that aspect of Afghanistan has been lost, but it wasn't religion that lost it. It was the Soviet Union. Religion proved to be the one power strong enough to resist that tyranny, which massacred at industrial scales; where families were destroyed and even tribes atomized by the violence, religion held them together. It gave them the strength to put a superpower on its ear.
That's not a small thing. What happened after is our fault as much as anyone's; we should never have left them in ashes, and done so little for so long to rebuild. It was the Clinton administration that made that error, and in that sense the whole ten years of war we have been fighting there lie at their door.
Always interested to learn about that, Grim. Maybe I should have used "Sudan" or "Somalia" for my example - the PA would be a little distracting I think - or if the state-cult of North Korea is really popular, maybe that place. Any spot where there's little electricity or other modern industry and lots of faith, to see the Pope's idea of "enlightenment" in action today, not just "in the limelight of Romance."
ReplyDeleteBy the bye - you may have read this piece by Theodore Dalrymple...it starts with his own trip to Afghanistan, back in those times, and matches up with your research (given the attitude he describes having had when he went there).
ReplyDelete"He's saying, you can have meaning in your own life even if you don't believe God put it there. That's all he is concluding, and he's right. "
ReplyDeleteYes, I'd have to agree (sorry, Tex), that is what he is saying. I am however one of those people who cannot imagine living in a universe with no purpose- other than that with which I choose to imbue it. I simply do not have that degree of faith in myself or my wisdom (or lack thereof) to think it's sufficient to do so. I could claim that it is not merely my own wisdom I rely on, but that of the cumulative wisdom of mankind, and I would feel better about that, but still, it would seem so unjust a universe, and I'd prefer to believe even in a myth than in what I consider such a bleak reality. If his view is truth, then what is wrong with North Korea (at least for the leading elites?). On what basis can we critique it? None that I can think of (in absolute terms), and who would we be to judge it by our standards- our preferred social contract? It would then be left to see who is willing to impose their system of ethics on the other, or to ignore the other and hope they do the same. If nature is the guide ("Because when nature is the guide — rather than a priori prejudices, hopes, fears or desires — we are forced out of our comfort zone.") then 'might makes right' and 'survival of the fittest' are the only true ethic. Not sure that would put me in my comfort zone either.
Lovely universe that.
Now, that's a topic I should have joined earlier; but I wanted to let Tex carry it as long as she cared to do.
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty clear that there is purpose in nature, at least in living nature: these are the things that Aristotle calls "final causes" in the Physics and elsewhere. We'd like to do without them (favoring some sort of Ockham's razor); but we really can't do without them. The arguments for them are fairly solid, even if they are problematic.
For example, the purpose of human DNA is pretty clear: it is aimed at a final cause, which is to say the human adult. It will grab ahold of everything it can and direct it at that end: water, bits of food, energy, all this matter is taken and structured toward the final cause that is the purpose of the DNA.
This human adult has ends of his or her own -- indeed, for Aristotle, it's rational activity that is our purpose. This very discussion is possible because we feel a drive to engage that final end; but also because our DNA has structured our bodies in such a way as to make that final end possible. That giving of order and structure is the purpose of the DNA.
This seems to be true at least of living things (i.e., things with anima, in Aristotle's terms).
I agree he's saying that people can put meaning in their own lives even if they don't believe it comes from God. Whether or not they're mistaken in that belief, the point is that I don't agree that that's all he's saying. He's also implying that the only reason to believe meaning comes from God is the human desire to justify our existence by imagining that the universe exists for the purpose of bringing us about. That's not a mainstream religious conviction, as far as I know. God chose to bring us about, but we aren't the reason for God. That gets it backward, and leads to a false dichotomy. The fact that we mightn't have happened at all if conditions had been different does not lead to the conclusion that there must be no God. It offers no helpful evidence on the question either way.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the hard part isn't imagining that there's objective meaning in the universe; I get there just by observing order instead of chaos. The hard part is whether the order is in the form of a personal God, which I agree is something you can't get to from natural law, only from revelation. But I think it's a common error to reason that any divine revelation must be an illusion, because it's "obvious" that the universe must be mechanistic and purposeless. We have no evidence that the universe is mechanistic and purposeless, only that it exhibits order. To a mind predisposed in one direction, orderly natural laws imply a soulless machine that must be operating on its own, without divine intervention. To a mind open to other interpretations, there's nothing inconsistent between natural laws and divine creation. We don't have any way of scientifically investigating the source of natural laws. At this point we just have to take them where we find them.
PS, on the question of whether we mightn't have been here at all under different conditions:
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me that I've been reading here and there for some time trying to find good ideas about how something like DNA could have arrived in the first place. If living things have the essential qualities of metabolism (conversion of energy and matter into different matter for a purpose) and self-replication (or at least competition for resources according to a pattern that expands by use, at the expense of alternative nearby patterns), I find it fascinating to wonder how those qualities first came about spontaneously -- as, being a naturalist, I assume they did. Being a science-fiction fan as well, I also like wondering about what patterns of metabolism and competitive self-replication might exist other than RNA/DNA, both of which seem awfully complicated to be inevitable. It blows my mind that organic molecules spontaneously assembled into an abstract code, and yet that seems to be exactly what happened. That was a neat trick. I would love to read a good story about some other way of pulling off the heritability trick: something we would recognize as life, but not based on DNA. (We have a hard enough time arguing over whether RNA-based viruses should be considered life, and RNA is only a small step from DNA, nothing like a truly independent mechanism.)
I know there are lots of new theories swirling around about assemblages of peptides and thin films on minerals, etc., but there's still a big gulf where our theories of origin should be. There would have to be some kind of prebiotic selective pressure for complexity, and it's not obvious what it was. A primordial string of peptides doesn't have even a faint tendency, let alone an urge, to reproduce its particular pattern in increasingly complex form. Natural selection is a powerful explanatory tool once you've got heritability combined with small random changes, but it's still hard to see how to get the ball rolling abiotically.
He's also implying that the only reason to believe meaning comes from God is the human desire to justify our existence by imagining that the universe exists for the purpose of bringing us about. That's not a mainstream religious conviction, as far as I know.
ReplyDeleteHe doesn't say that though, and in fact quite admits that the scientific evidence doesn't disprove the Creator, only militates against it. The "implications" you're seeing just aren't there.
The fact that a given explanation for religion isn't part of a religious conviction (i.e., part of its doctrine) doesn't matter in the slightest. Unless you're assuming that the religion itself is true, which he isn't.
An example. In the Old Testament, God orders the Israelites to conquer the land of Canaan. And in some spots to slaughter absolutely everyone, and in others to kill the adult males and enslave everyone else. Now I think that's a mighty convenient kind of order for a God to give. In fact, I think it's a complete human invention, to justify good old-fashioned "killing people and taking their stuff because we're strong enough to do it." Quite akin to Genghis Khan's getting similar orders from Tengri.
My explanation isn't part of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, or for that matter Mongol doctrine. Of course not! "Justification?" Perish the thought! According to those doctrines, God really did give those orders as part of his Divine Plan That Mere Mortals Must Not Question. But it is an explanation, and a pretty logical one too, and in thinking what I do I am not setting up false dichotomies or advocating nihilism - I am simply giving an explanation that doesn't agree with what these religions say about themselves.
My explanation isn't part of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, or for that matter Mongol doctrine. Of course not! "Justification?" Perish the thought!
ReplyDeleteI've argued just the same point here. I think the inescapable conclusion is that the Jewish priestly classes, during the period of their alliance with the early rulers of Israel, allowed prophecy to be manipulated for the ends of the state.
But let's not proclaim that "doctrine" as such doesn't consider these problems. Moses Maimonides had a different view of prophecy and providence: he has a view of morality that is quite Aristotelian, and holds that it is adherence to this morality that brings a man closer to God and gives him access to the divine reason. For this reason he has a problem with the Book of Job, which he views as a sort of parable.
In this basic view he was following Avicenna. Avicenna would agree that we cannot understand the mind of God, but not that we cannot understand the order of the universe. His reasons for believing that God as such is out of our capacity to understand are formal and logical, and argued at length in the Metaphysics I've mentioned before; but he thinks that we certainly can understand creation, all the way down, as an exercise of divine law that does not make exceptions.
Certainly there are no exceptions for God himself, for either of these thinkers, nor for Aquinas for that matter. It would not make sense for God to make an exception, because that would imply a change in God. Because God is simple (as we have discussed here not long ago), he not only does not but cannot change. (Also, for Aquinas, God is outside of time, so it wouldn't make sense for God to be different now from then... not God's law).
The Rabbi Gersonides goes so far as to limit God's knowledge of us to enforce this point. God isn't the kind of thing that could know about individual human beings, Gersonides argues, because God is fully actual and we contain unactualized potential: thus, for God to have knowledge of us as we are would be to have some potential 'in' his mind (and since God is simple, that's all there is -- thus, there would be potential in God). What God can know is thus not individual people at all, but the unchanging laws that govern his creation. Prophecy can do no more, Gersonides says, than warn that people who are in a given set of circumstances are in danger of a particular kind of judgment if they don't straighten up.
What you're saying about what doctrine holds was really a rather controversial interpretation when Soren Kierkegaard fashioned it in the 19th century. It happens to be dominant now, but it certainly isn't the only way of thinking about these things; and in fact, it cuts against what I tend to think is the best part of religious thought, which happens to enjoy a kind of rough unity for Christian, Muslim, and Jew.
". . . admits that the scientific evidence doesn't disprove the Creator, only militates against it."
ReplyDeleteHow so? That's the false dichotomy I'm talking about: either there's scientific evidence for a set of natural laws under which the world unfolded, or there's a Creator, but supposedly there can't be both. It's beyond me what one has to do with the other. The interesting question for me is where natural laws come from, and nothing we've ever discovered or dreamed up in the realm of science has offered a useful answer. Nor should it. It's not even part of a scientist's job.
That's the false dichotomy I'm talking about: either there's scientific evidence for a set of natural laws under which the world unfolded, or there's a Creator, but supposedly there can't be both.
ReplyDeleteSince - in the language I quote above - he explicitly abjures the "can't be both" language, the false dichotomy is simply not in his article.
It's beyond me what one has to do with the other.
Plenty! Because one of the oldest, strongest, and most persistent arguments for believing in a Creator is the idea that "there is no way to explain all the order in Creation unless somebody made it." It's not the only argument, but it used to be the most convincing, and it keeps cropping up even now.
Cicero's The Nature of the Gods contains an excellent and lengthy exposition of this argument (in the mouth of the Stoic). He goes on at length about the structure of the Earth, the Solar System, and plant and animal life...and concludes, as have so many since, that only gods could have put that together. Compare it to all the other arguments in the book, and you'll see that for the intellectuals of the day, that really was the strongest argument for belief available. (The Roman aristocrats portrayed in the dialogue are properly contemptuous of what the "vulgar herd" thinks on the subject.) In the terms he used, with the information available, he was justified in suggesting that any atheist "must be out of his mind." The modern descendants of that argument pale by comparison...because now there's more information available.
William Paley's Natural Theology, so I'm told (I haven't read it), does the same again - Richard Dawkins claims that, had he been alive in 1802, with no more information than was available then, that book would've made a Creationist of him.
Pulling out the underpinnings from that argument makes a lot of difference to a lot of people. Of course it's possible to be a Deist, in which case the invisible, undetectable God sets things in motion and then stands back. Hell, you could go further and posit front-loaded design or omphalism to get the best of all possible worlds. (Theology's every bit as flexible as a bad day of Con-law.) But those ideas don't carry the same punch as the old design-based creationism. Which is why fellows like this got fame and fortune trying to revive them a century past their sell-by date.
The "design" thing, like the "purpose" thing, is emotionally satisfying to a lot of people. (Douglas, above, very candidly places himself in that category, and I salute him for it.) So evidence against these things matters, and "has something to do" with the issue, even if it's possible to concoct a theology that answers the questions.
The interesting question for me is where natural laws come from, and nothing we've ever discovered or dreamed up in the realm of science has offered a useful answer. Nor should it. It's not even part of a scientist's job.
Which may explain why the author you're attacking doesn't talk about that?
That says - who says it's not their job? I mean, if some evidence ever pops up that could start to answer that question, I would expect scientists to start examining that evidence. And if there isn't any evidence...then why get interested in the question? "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen."
But let's not proclaim that "doctrine" as such doesn't consider these problems.
ReplyDeleteI'll admit that any conceivable question in theology has been thought up and answered by some scholar somewhere, to his own satisfaction...and probably by another to the opposite conclusion and his own satisfaction...but I'm not aware of any Christian, Jewish, or Islamic sect that actually teaches, as part of its official doctrine that members are expected to believe - "God didn't give Judea to the Israelites. The priests came up with that one to support a land-grab by the secular leaders." There could be one out there and I've certainly been wrong before, but I'm not aware of it. (I know there's at least one modern Jewish sect that opposes the current state of Israel, on the theory that the Jewish return to the Holy Land isn't prophetically supposed to happen yet...but even that one accepts the earlier occupation as divinely inspires. Just as the Hamas charter teaches that God's given that land to Muslims alone...)
I've read a lot of people -- especially Jewish thinkers -- grappling with the book of Joshua in particular. I'm not sure that it's ever going to rise to the level of official doctrine in Christian churches (since they don't really care about the specific issue very much). Still, I do think it is true that a lot of people have been revisiting the plausibility of Joshua, and the similar books.
ReplyDeleteIt may someday evolve into a doctrine, although to do so you'd need to have a standard for the critique: if you're going to challenge prophecy, especially long-accepted prophecy, you need significant standing. Maimonides provides a mechanism for the philosopher to speak as a prophet; but Christian philosophers generally don't, and Islamic philosophers actually can't.
If God (or the creator if you prefer) is beyond time as we know it, why would it be unreasonable to imagine that he is omniscient, knowing us not as individuals on a timeline trajectory, but in all our possible permutations in every alternate universe of every possible decision we could make? Something capable of creating the universe might be capable of that, so I think one can believe in the simple God, and in a God that might not be a 'personal' God in the traditional sense, but who created things in such a way that we would have the opportunity to move towards him or away from him and who would understand every possiblity and understand the probibilities of what we are in the end -to use a time based phrase- or perhaps 'know us in total' is a better phrase. I suppose one could say he doesn't need to know the intermediate us, as he already knows the total us- the 'end' or copmlete self we carry.
ReplyDeleteTo that extent, it might not be incorrect to believe that what seems to move people in the direction of God is good, and/or whatever preserves our understanding of him, even if in some ways it seems wrong from our point of view- some sins are the ethically right thing to do if larger evils are at stake. It would be right to lie to an SS officer in 1942 about a hidden Jewish family, even though lies are sinful, so might it also be right to destroy another tribe or tribes to establish and protect the message and understandings of God. Do we really know enough of the circumstances to say? That's a dangerously gray area, and rife with the prospects of abuse, to be sure, but plausible ethically and logically I think. Either way, one thing I like about the Judeo/Christian view is that understanding God is a struggle and a perpetual task, and since we are human, even with divine inspiration, we could be flawed in our understanding. Islam has things too 'perfect' for my sensibilities. I also think judging the ethical legitimacy of Israel being commanded to destroy certain tribes, how are we to accurately judge that action today, so far from that time, set of circumstances, understandings of what was a legitimate threat or not, and the repercussions of taking another tack? It's like criticizing the founding fathers for being slave owners, isn't it? If we assume that was God's order and plan, perhaps it's because that's the best course those people were capable of at that time and in those circumstances.
I also fail to understand how dismantling man's attempts to understand the universe has an effect on the creative force of it, as is implied by his statement "One by one, pillars of classical logic have fallen by the wayside as science progressed in the 20th century...". Does it not simply make the creation more clever than we had imagined, and thereby the creator more clever? Ironically, as we learn how much more complicated the Universe is, we are also realizing how simple it is in it's essence. Random chance doesn't imply or predict simplicity, does it? If something is not random, it has a cause, and therefore a 'creative force'.
I'm also interested in this part: "Experiments in the collider bolster evidence of the existence of the "Higgs field," which apparently just happened to form throughout space in our universe; it is only because all elementary particles interact with this field that they have the mass we observe today." It sounds like the very things he's referring to as fallen pillars a little while earlier, when they were not yet fallen, in fact he makes it sound almost like magic we can't understand. There were many things once like that which are no longer so. His creator is scientific theory, which requires as much faith, if not more, than the belief in a creator, I'd say.
I think I've gotten far enough afield for one evening...
[W]hy would it be unreasonable to imagine that he is omniscient...
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't! (And I don't think the author says it would.) But the point, as per my 3:34 PM comment, is that we've gone from "something that logic and evidence practically demand that you believe" to "something that it is not totally unreasonable to believe." And that is a huge difference. We've gone from placing gods on top of Mount Olympus (where a good mountaineer can climb up and see they aren't there) to making God invisible and undetectable, working in mysterious and unfathomable ways. It's almost impossible to support (or disprove) the existence of such a god with evidence, because the idea has been redesigned to be self-protected against that kind of brush with reality. But that also takes away much of its force.
Per this excellent book, these creeds hang around anyway, even if they've lost much of their intellectual punch, because they satisfy a deep instinct in human nature. (That is one reason why I respect believers and do not think that, per se, they're stupid.)
[S]ome sins are the ethically right thing to do if larger evils are at stake. It would be right to lie to an SS officer in 1942 about a hidden Jewish family, even though lies are sinful, so might it also be right to destroy another tribe or tribes to establish and protect the message and understandings of God. Do we really know enough of the circumstances to say?
ReplyDeleteAs with anything else in theology, it's possible to construct a viewpoint in which this was good and right.
But really, now, can't an eternal and omniscient God preserve his own message without needing to have a bunch of people slaughtered, to get his "chosen people" into the east end of the Mediterranean? At one point in Exodus, I believe, He gives up on the Israelites completely and tells Moses to get out of there - "and I will make a mighty nation of you" (i.e., forget them, and let's start over). And according to all the later books, He's quite willing to call the gentiles (why He waits so long to do that is a different question). It doesn't cohere.
I know at least two ways out. The most common is simply the Book of Job. God's ways are not our ways. Whatever he does is really right even though we mere humans are totally incapable of understanding why. (After all, we can't create Behemoth or Leviathan...well, soon, maybe we can!...so we need to just shut up and do what He says.)
Another -- common enough in human history -- occurs in the early part of Plato's Republic - a book I didn't get that far in reading. One of the characters, being asked about the nature of "good," replies that whatever suits the men in power is, by definition, good. God being the ultimate "man in power," you can declare that his acts are good by definition. Grim knows a lot about what historical theologians have had to say about this - he is way, way beyond me on that topic.
But even though it's possible to concoct a self-consistent theory by which these actions are good -- and by which the Mongol tyranny was divine (scroll to Guyuk Khan's letter to Pope Innocent IV), or by which Charles Manson really was the Messiah....it's possible, I say, to construct a doctrine by which these things are true...they cut against our ordinary moral instincts. Joshua and company look like a basic bunch of land-grabbing invaders, who take because they can. So do the Mongols. Manson looks like just another charismatic psychopath who turned a few human beings into lumps of dead meat. These are the conclusions I reach when i look at the evidence.
[H]ow are we to accurately judge that action today, so far from that time, set of circumstances, understandings of what was a legitimate threat or not, and the repercussions of taking another tack? It's like criticizing the founding fathers for being slave owners, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteOh, no, that's exactly what it isn't like. The founders were humans like ourselves, with a morality we can recognize. Many of them, even among the slaveowners, well knew that slavery was evil -- but they hadn't brought their actions into conformity with that knowledge. Many of their British contemporaries also knew it, and in both countries good men were acting on the subject within a generation or two. Notice the constitution, in its "stone clauses," forbids Congress to interfere with transatlantic the slave trade until 1808. As soon as 1808 rolled around...they abolished it. And you know about these fellows and what they did...and what Jefferson and Franklin had to say on on the subject. (I believe it was Samuel Johnson who noted that "the loudest YELPS for liberty come from the drivers of negroes.") There is definitely some force in criticizing them for not being rid of the "peculiar institution."
I think it's wrong to focus on only that - they were great men doing the most they could for liberty. But if they had the powers of gods, to remake the world as they pleased, then we'd attach a much greater blame to them. And if you read the Mosaic law, you'll notice that God has rules about slaves, mostly about who owns the slave or what you can do to the slave...and never bothers to say, as he could so easily, "I don't want you enslaving your fellow man anymore." As usual, God accomodates the prevailing morality of the humans who write about Him, rather than guiding them to something better. No modern version of God does this. (Except in some versions of Islam.) That suggests to me that God is not eternal, unchanging, and outside time, but rather a product of the human imagination, changing along with human ideas.
I also fail to understand how dismantling man's attempts to understand the universe has an effect on the creative force of it, as is implied by his statement "One by one, pillars of classical logic have fallen by the wayside as science progressed in the 20th century...". Does it not simply make the creation more clever than we had imagined, and thereby the creator more clever?
It has certainly made the descriptions of him, and the arguments for him, more evasive, more self-protected against refutation. (I used to describe the furniture fairies...they rearrange the furniture in my living room, but they put it all back if I look in there, down to the tiniest speck of dust. Try to put in a camera to watch them, and they won't come. Aren't they clever? Prove they don't exist.) But for your average thinker, someone like me, that is a lot less powerful than the old, evidence-based belief in a creator of Cicero and Paley. It doesn't convince the unconvinced; it merely justifies belief to the already-convinced, who are determined to say so.
err, determined to stay so.
ReplyDeleteIf God (or the creator if you prefer) is beyond time as we know it, why would it be unreasonable to imagine that he is omniscient, knowing us not as individuals on a timeline trajectory, but in all our possible permutations in every alternate universe of every possible decision we could make?
ReplyDeleteThe idea of God as outside time is specifically Christian (in fact it is Augustine's idea, from the Confessions). That isn't how Avicenna, for example, sees it.
There's actually a real metaphysical problem with this view, although I happen to hold it myself: it works with a simple God because it allows God to know only one thing -- if we view the whole structure of time as a kind of nth-dimensional object, it could even be an unextended object in the highest dimension (and thus simple). God could either know that object or be that object (and thus, by knowing himself, he would know everything else).
(Note that the choice between knowing it versus being it result in major differences in your metaphysics: consider the problem of evil. If God knows the single object, then he knows all evil but is himself separated from evil. If he is the object, then all evil -- and indeed all possible evil -- is a part of him.)
What the problem is that what he would end up knowing about you (say) is tough to make compatible with the judgment function that God is normally taken to have. If God knows the single object (which contains all your possibilities) how does he know which ones you chose? That kind of knowledge requires multiplicity, unless there is something about the object itself that contains the information. (I present a solution to this problem in the novel I wrote, although not explicitly.)
Aquinas is also troubled by the question of free will. God either does or does not know your choices before you make them. If he does, then you have no free will. If he does not, then it doesn't make sense to say that God is outside of time. Aquinas doesn't go with God knowing unactualized possibilities (which is your solution, and mine) because it violates the Aristotelian doctrine that God must be purely actual and contain no potential. There are very good reasons for that doctrine -- it underlies the theory of how the universe was created, for example -- so Aquinas can't dispose of it lightly.
What he argues is that God knows every actual choice you have made or will make, but he knows them without their causal links: he knows them all together, that is, without the chains of time linking the one to the next. Thus, you do have free will, because God doesn't know 'what you will do next'; you make that choice on your own.
This view seems like the most problematic of all to me. How do you judge a choice without knowing the reasons for the choice? It's even worse for Aquinas because his view of ethics is also Aristotelian, and virtues (as you will recall) are a kind of habit: the way you get courage is by practicing courage until you have become courageous. Thus, virtues and vices both require knowledge of choices across time: and that's just what Aquinas denies.
But for your average thinker, someone like me, that is a lot less powerful than the old, evidence-based belief in a creator of Cicero and Paley.
ReplyDeleteIt is, but the strongest arguments are still arguments about creation. The best counterargument to Avicenna, which I've seen made by some physicists in the last year or two, is still pretty absurd.
There is a problem of why something exists rather than nothing. This argument by the author of this piece under consideration isn't even the best counterargument: it just reasserts that all the evidence says that something did in fact come from nothing, so there. Fine; but I can't help but notice that now "nothing" isn't "nothing" in the pure sense at all anymore. "Nothing" means something -- it means that the potential existed for a universe.
An unactualized potential is still very much a something. So what was it that actualized the potential?
It wasn't nothing -- "nothing" either really means nothing, in which case there is nothing to do the work. Or it means something else, in which case it doesn't mean nothing.
What can we say about this something else? Exactly one thing: it must be actual. The only way a potential becomes actual is to get actuality from something else. That's Aquinas' interpretation of Aristotle, by the way, but it's just as good an argument against the physicist as it was in the 13th century.
Avicenna frames a similar argument in terms of existence. How does anything come to exist? It must obtain existence from something that already exists. That leaves us with two possibilities: the world has an infinite sequence of one thing making another (you exist because your parents made you, but they were made by their parents, etc). There are several good logical arguments against the existence of an actual infinite sequence, even given infinite time -- and our physicists don't believe that elapsed time is infinite, even given relativity.
So that leaves a finite sequence. Well, then there must be a first object. This object is different from all the others: its existence isn't bestowed, but rather, its own nature is to exist. That first object, whose essence is existence, really must exist: logic demands it. There's no way out of the chain that I can see.
What follows in Avicenna is a demonstration that this object is also God; but we can leave that for now. What is unavoidable, as far as I can see, is that what he calls the Necessary Existent really is necessary.
I don't like the author's way of articulating that point. To refer you back to my first post - the dominant cosmology now gives a beginning to time (which is why Steven Hawking's book was called A Brief History of Time - I found it almost unreadable and a terrible job of popularization, but I walked away with that at least), with matter already being present at the beginning. If that's correct, then all the talk of "something coming from nothing" - even if that "nothing" is a potentiality for something - is not correct.
ReplyDeleteWhat the wiki on the Big Bang calls the "primal atom" (in fact, all the matter in the universe very densly packed) - is I suppose what you would call the "first object." But absent a demonstration that all this matter packed densely together has a mind -- then calling that first object "God" or saying that the subsequent history of the universe is "creation" -- I don't see how you get there.
The older creationist arguments, the ones that don't work anymore, those had a real strength that anyone could see.
Avicenna's argument for why the Necessary Existent (NE) is an intellect is one that I find shockingly weak, given the care and detail of his other arguments. He argues, essentially, that it would be better; but since he has anchored his notion of The Good on the nature of the NE, it seems to me that the argument doesn't follow. It's not "better" for the NE to be one thing or the other; rather, whatever it is is what is best.
ReplyDelete(Hawking's argument is a version of the 'best' argument to which I was referring; he argues that there's no question of why there is something rather than nothing, because there just is. Put explicitly, the argument is that asking the question is to give "nothing" a standing it cannot have: just as we can't ask what the percentage chance is for life to exist on Earth -- it is 1, and nothing else, because life in fact does already exist -- there was never any possibility of a universe that was not. There's a certain absurdity here, in that they are responding to 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' as if the question were 'What are the odds of their having been nothing rather than something?': but leave that. The point is, the best that can be done is to concede the necessity of the first existent. Hawking et al also agree that the NE is necessary; the dispute is about its nature, not its actuality.)
However, I do think there is an argument for the mind of God that seems proper to me. Our best theories of the origin of life and the rise of consciousness share a feature: they are emergent properties. Life appears to form spontaneously from the kinds of matter that exist in this universe, when the right kinds of physical forces come into play; and consciousness seems to arise once those living organisms achieve a certain complexity.
Thus, consciousness seems to be present in any physical object of adequate complexity. The object we are describing as either being God or the object of God's knowledge is a physical object of an interesting type: it contains at least all actual conscious beings at all moments in all of their lives (as four dimensional objects); and may contain all possible worlds and beings (if we take seriously the concept of potentiality and possibility, rather than insisting on a hard determinism).
Thus, this object must be indefinitely more complex than the complexity that gives rise to consciousness; and therefore, it ought to be conscious.
That's an inductive argument, and there is a general problem with induction; but it seems probable, given that since relativity we've taken this 4D model to be an accurate representation of reality. It has the advantage that it solves all the problems raised by relativity theory, at least: the stranger claims prove to be mathematically quite right, and mappable, if we envision reality in this way.
You may respond that this theory lacks the intuitive simplicity that you find in earlier theories; but notice that so does Aquinas' and Avicenna's, and Augustine's, and Maimonides (who includes a long lecture toward the end of "Guide for the Perplexed" about how much work is really required to begin to understand the theory he is proposing).
You can phrase it in easy terms, though. Something cannot come from nothing, so it is necessary that some first thing exists. Consciousness arises naturally in the world when objects become adequately complex. (This far, we are on exactly the same page as the physicist). Thus, the most complex object ought to be conscious.
The real trick isn't getting here: it's getting back to God being simple. :)
By the way, an objection that some people make here is that the "first object" really is simple -- it is a singularity -- and therefore it ought not to be conscious.
ReplyDeleteHowever, remember that we're talking about God not as the first singularity, but either as the higher-dimensional object that contains everything from the first to the last; or else as a separate object who gives actuality to the potential that was inherent in the first object, and who knows the fourth dimensional object (i.e., the whole history of the universe) as a single object. In either case, you don't have the simplicity of the singularity anymore: you have the whole complexity.
That's why the problem is getting back to simplicity. It is possible to argue, though, that God should not be conscious if he is simple -- and on very similar grounds. Plotinus (to take a non-Christian thinker) argues that the One is simple and not conscious for just this reason: to have consciousness requires complexity, because you must have a thinker and something thought about. Even if you are thinking about yourself, you are making yourself into an object of thought.
Our best theories of the origin of life and the rise of consciousness share a feature: they are emergent properties. Life appears to form spontaneously from the kinds of matter that exist in this universe, when the right kinds of physical forces come into play; and consciousness seems to arise once those living organisms achieve a certain complexity.
ReplyDeletePartly true. The last popular book I read on an origin-of-life topic was Rare Earth, suggesting that places where life could emerge are extremely rare. But "the right kinds of physical forces" can be read to include "the particular conditions on earth that made this possible," so that understood I agree with that part.
However, I don't see that consciousness has to come when life forms "reach a certain complexity." Intelligence and consciousness aren't possible without some complexity, and they certainly can be an evolutionary advantage, but I don't think that's necessary. For example, plant life can get very complex indeed, and some of it is highly "successful," but I don't think any of it has consciousness. And I believe life on earth would continue, though in radically different form, if we animals were all wiped out, and there's no guarantee that consciousness would ever be part of it again.
Thus, consciousness seems to be present in any physical object of adequate complexity.
Absolutely not. A cherry tree is complex; there's no evidence it's conscious. I'm sure, given sufficient time, a team of engineers could design a Rube Goldberg machine with more moving parts than the human body - it might cover a whole planet. Its complexity wouldn't make it conscious. Complexity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness.
The object we are describing as either being God or the object of God's knowledge is a physical object of an interesting type: it contains at least all actual conscious beings at all moments in all of their lives (as four dimensional objects); and may contain all possible worlds and beings (if we take seriously the concept of potentiality and possibility, rather than insisting on a hard determinism).
ReplyDeleteThus, this object must be indefinitely more complex than the complexity that gives rise to consciousness; and therefore, it ought to be conscious.
And from my last comment, you see I reject the conclusion because I reject the idea that "complexity equals consciousness." If consciousness were the automatic result of "sufficient complexity," you could take it to all manner of absurd lengths, since the boundaries of what constitutes an "object" are flexible. One human is complex enough to be conscious. So...two humans, if considered an "object," would have to have a collective consciousness. Would they have to be touching, or could they be on opposite sides of the planet? A set of three or four humans, considered as an "object," would have another collective consciousness, again leading me to ask - whenever we think of them as one, or only when they're engaged in a group hug? Would a nation full of people have its own national consciousness, and if so, wouldn't any arbitrary grouping of humans (like, all the guys named Bob, all the tennis players, and all the Scorpios?).
And if one human is complex enough to be conscious, and it's his complexity that ensures he will be conscious, what happens when he gets a serious brain tumor, that kills his ability to think? Cancer doesn't make his cells any less complex, in fact his cells are mutating at a higher rate than other people's, giving him more variants on the genetic code than normal people, and in that sense much more complexity. Give him other tumors all over his body and he'll be even more complex, but not a bit more conscious. The complexity isn't expressed as thought, or anything like thought, so I don't think it's proper to ascribe consciousness to him based on the complexity.
Before we go any farther, my friend, I want to offer you a chance to re-examine your comparison to a cherry tree. Every four human brain neurons can be connected in sixty-four ways; and the average human brain contains a hundred billion neurons.
ReplyDeleteSo: how much do you want to stand on cherry trees as a paradigm of complexity? Horses seem to be conscious; and we've argued the unity of the Order of Reason here at some length. It seems to be a unified order, though they (being less complex) have less access to it; but that seems to suggest that higher orders of complexity have higher degrees of access.
With time I could come up with better I'm sure - I picked a cherry tree because it's a flowering plant and because I like this song.
ReplyDeleteBut if you're measuring "complexity" in terms of brain structure (number of neurons and number of connections) -- then you're weighting yourself towards consciousness, because the brain is the very thing that produces consciousness in humans and horses. (I'm conceding consciousness in horses without worrying about it.) But complexity in things other than brain structure does not necessarily bring consciousness or have anything to do with consciousness, and that is the esssence of my objection to your argument.
So if you forget neurons for a moment and say complexity is a matter of "big numbers of things that can be different from each other" then the number of base pairs in the individual cell's DNA also makes a big number; for humans only 3.3 billion, for a mouse 3.4 billion, but for the whisk fern, 250 billion - though much of it not code for proteins. A puffer fish has fewer DNA base pairs than ours, but more of them code for protein. So I read here. But if instead you limit yourself to "neurons in the brain" you are missing a gigantic step - how to show that complexity in everything else leads to consciousness.
Aggregating an individual brain with other stuff to create an "object" with greater complexity, and claiming that this greater object must have consciousness -- I see no justification for it. A human being wearing a clockwork hat may be more "complex" than a naked human, but that doesn't mean there's any greater consciousness involved in the one thing than in the other. Let alone aggregating a whole universe full of things that are not brains, nor function together in any way like brains, and claiming that must have consciousness because taken together they are complex.
Joe,
ReplyDeleteIn a sense I'm not missing that step at all, since the object we're talking about contains (and connects) all the objects that are uncontroversially conscious.
Even in the case of your whisk fern, though, you've got 250 million pairs of DNA; are they conscious? I suppose you could make an argument that they are, at a very low-level: they are able to respond to sensation. If you're following Hegel's theory of mind, for example, the ability to respond to sensation is the first evolutionary step toward mind. That's not self-consciousness, to be sure! But even for Hegel, that comes much later in the evolutionary process of mind.
250 million base pairs aren't connected in the same kind of degree as 100 million neurons, though, because they aren't all interconnected in the same way. Complexity isn't just about numbers, but about connections and interactions.
Now, if you want to object to neurons as an example, that's fine (although I dissent from the view that neurons "produce" consciousness; I think they receive it, as we have discussed in the past). The theory I'm putting forward has the unusual benefit of being falsifiable: even many physics theories aren't that, anymore.
If I'm right, for example, Artificial Intelligence can be "created" -- I would argue that it will simply appear, because the receiver will be adequate for it to come into focus -- once there is an adequate degree of complexity and processing power in computer systems. Now we currently cannot produce a computer that is able to do anything like the level of complex calculations that the human brain can do; but we have a rough sense of what that kind of processing power is. If we get to the point of replicating or surpassing it, and the computer has not become conscious, we will know my theory is wrong: there is something else (as you say) that is required.
Although it is currently somewhat harder than AI, the theory I'm putting forward also suggests a universe full of life and even intelligent life; and furthermore, it suggests that we'll be able to demonstrate a unified order of reason with alien life on the same terms as we can demonstrate it with horses.
Now, you might rightly object that neither of those modes of falsification are available right now -- but that's why this is, for the moment, in the realm of metaphysics instead of physics. Still, I think Aristotle would be proud of us for having falsified many of his metaphysical claims: he wasn't in the game to push an agenda, but to seek the truth. Whenever possible, he argues from the demonstrably logical or the empirical.
This is a metaphysical theory of that kind. If I'm wrong about it, we'll know sooner or later: but it strikes me as logically correct. If it does indeed take "something else" besides complexity, the process of trying to pursue AI will also give us a better idea of what is missing. I'll be happy to rethink the position if new evidence proves it wrong.
Now, assume that I were right: does AI prove the existence of God? No, that's too strong a claim: but it does support my theory of consciousness. I think consciousness is a background feature of reality, attainable naturally and inevitably once certain levels of complexity arise. There is also some reason to believe that life forms spontaneously from natural compounds under pressure, so that such complexity is also a natural feature of the universe.
That means that there is natural consciousness inherent in the universe. You might recall the "nothing" that was something -- it was a potential for a universe. My argument is that there is also a potential for consciousness even where we see no actual consciousness. It's just waiting for the right order to arise.
Complexity- this is something that comes up in my world of architecture and design- we discuss the difference between complicatedness and complexity- complicatedness has a lack of cohesion and order whereas complexity is ordered and has an underlying simplicity, that's been worked out to a depth that qualifies it as complex (as in nature, by and large). The whisk fern with it's large number of base pairs is indeed complicated, but it has a great deal of repetitive sequences apparently, so perhaps it isn't complex, per se. Our DNA has a large number of base pairs, but is exceeded slightly by the mouse, however our DNA also has 'enhancement' pairs that have effects on other pairs, which mathematically greatly increases the information encoded in the same number of genes as compared to say a Chimp (all according to your link). So the human DNA sequence seems to be quite well designed, and I would say is complex- perhaps the peak of complexity as DNA goes- but we really still don't know enough to say, but it's certainly interesting.
ReplyDeleteOf course, we could just look at the communications of mice vs. humans and make a functional determination of complexity that way. It seems quite a reasonable way to do it. I'm pretty sure there aren't any mice having a discussion as we are right now.
Once you start discussing multiple humans as more complex, we're getting into Buddhist territory, or perhaps it fits with the Judeo-Christian God as well- it's been said he is present in and around us all, and implied that he is in all things (sometimes by inference- the makers mark, other times implied as literally) and that in all his children we see God. So perhaps God is everything, and knows all as himself. I think it can even be argued that free will can be preserved as something necessary to the nature of the nth dimensional creature we are in total- even though it must all 'exist' or have the potential to exist through the entire time framework. Hmm, that starts to sound like as God activated the potential of the universe to be, we activate the potential for our selves in our decisions, our exercise of free will- all possibilities exist, but only the path we choose is activated. All and single path simultaneously. The more we know of quantum physics, the more something like that actually sounds quite in tune with where science is now- that particles can be in several different states/places simultaneously.
"But really, now, can't an eternal and omniscient God preserve his own message without needing to have a bunch of people slaughtered, to get his "chosen people" into the east end of the Mediterranean? At one point in Exodus, I believe, He gives up on the Israelites completely and tells Moses to get out of there - "and I will make a mighty nation of you" (i.e., forget them, and let's start over). And according to all the later books, He's quite willing to call the gentiles (why He waits so long to do that is a different question). It doesn't cohere."
ReplyDeleteWell, let's say that the Israelites don't destroy those tribes, but instead displace them or absorb them. It's entirely possible that at some later point, that tribe returns to wipe out the Israelites, or alters their society too drastically at a formative age, and that society and ethic are lost. Perhaps what they did was exactly the correct decision, the proper and even good path. We cannot know. We can say it seems like there must have been a better way, but that's easy to do a few thousand years later sitting safely in out living rooms in the most safe stable culture the world has ever known.
As for the order of revelation- we, as humanity, are young still, but were even younger then. You don't instruct or discipline a child the same as you do a teen, or an adult child. Perhaps that was the appropriate direction for a young humanity, who may not have been ready for the kind of stability we have now. Perhaps now our understandings are different, and our context is different, so we are able to do things not possible before. All that said, I get both Grim's and your position on the question of if those acts were really the instructions of God. I'm just saying I don't really know, but I can see several plausible paths, yours included.
Well, let's say that the Israelites don't destroy those tribes, but instead displace them or absorb them. It's entirely possible that at some later point, that tribe returns to wipe out the Israelites, or alters their society too drastically at a formative age...
ReplyDeleteProblem is, the rest of the Old Testament claims that God controls the outcome of battles and the fate of nations. In one place in Judges (I believe), He even takes it to extremes - he has the Israelites dismiss most of their troops before a battle (for example, the fellows who drink water straight from the river instead of from their cupped hands get dismissed, with no warning). He does it so He can make a demonstration of his superior power, by having the Israelites win over tremendous odds. If that's the case, then He is quite powerful enough to prevent any spared tribe from coming back and wiping out His Chosen People. When they lose in battle, as they often do, it's because He wants them to.
If he has people slaughtered or enslaved down to the last child, it's because he wants to do that, and not because it's necessary to preserve his people. And it makes no sense if you assume it's true. It makes a great deal of sense to take Grim's view or mine, that it was regular old mortal people who decided to kill people and take their land, and invoked "commandments from God" to justify it.
As for the order of revelation- we, as humanity, are young still, but were even younger then. You don't instruct or discipline a child the same as you do a teen, or an adult child.
ReplyDeleteMaturity is a thing that happens to individuals, not to the whole species. Now as it happens we have done some evolving in historic times - per this book, interestingly, one example of that is the increased intelligence of the Askhenazi Jews (but not the Sephardic) - but the kind of basic morality we're talking about was understood well before the Birth of Christ.
Besides, grafted onto the Scriptures, this gives the weird idea that the Israelites were way ahead of the rest of the world right up until the time of Jesus...no one else hears from Yahweh until then because everyone else is so "immature"...now, does it really fit your reading of history, that Israel was more advanced than everyone else in 1000 BC? 700 BC? What about the Fifth Century BC - the Golden Age of Athens? Do you really think that the Greeks of 400 B.C. were so far behind the Jews of that time, that they would've been unable to comprehend something in 1st-century Christianity?
On matters of morality and metaphysics, Plato and Aristotle were still among the leading lights over a thousand years after Jesus died, and on nonscientific matters they're not obsolete yet. (Which is why there is so much talk about them in this Hall to this very day.) That doesn't fit the view that Mankind, overall, was a lesser being before Jesus as opposed to after him.
There is also some reason to believe that life forms spontaneously from natural compounds under pressure, so that such complexity is also a natural feature of the universe. That means that there is natural consciousness inherent in the universe.
ReplyDeleteThis gets to the heart of what I'm objecting to. You are taking complexity to be sufficient as well as necessary for consciousness, but you haven't even begun to demonstrate it.
I quite agree that complexity is needed for consciousness. And like you, I think a true AI could have as much consciousness as we do. But complexity isn't sufficient for consciousness. (You can't be a Freemason without being a believer, but not every believer is a Freemason; you can't be a Boojum without being a Snark, but not every Snark is a Boojum, which is why I am still here.) Every consciousness I know about comes along with thought of some kind. No thought, no consciousness. Thus my example of the brain cancer patient -- his brain is still very complex because of all the rapidly growing tumors. His body is even more so because of the tumors in all his other organs (not to mention the extra complexity from his immune system working overtime). But the usual function of that brain has been disrupted, and thought is no longer taking place. Why should I think of that man as "conscious"? Just because his overall body is still very complicated? That makes no sense to me; I don't see the slightest reason why I should think he's still conscious.
Whisk Fern DNA bases are in a sense connected in the same way as brain cells...it's ultimately chemical bonds one way or another. (Connected to the bases above and below on the same strand by covalent bonds; connected to its opposite number on the other strand by a hydrogen bonds.) There aren't sixty-four kinds of connections, as you tell me there are with the brain, but given enough time you could sythesize an incredibly long strand of DNA with more kinds of bases that would meet this standard for "complexity." But it wouldn't think or feel - and if it doesn't do that, what reason is there to call it "conscious"?
Being along "the first evolutionary step towards mind" - is way, way different from actually having mind. Even a rubber ball "responds to stimuli" - poke it and it resumes its former shape - but that's nothing to do with having a mind or being conscious or intelligent.
ReplyDelete(This is ultimately going towards an idea of God, as I understand you; and a thing without a mind would not be a god, not the way anyone I know understands that word - we'll leave aside Lovecraft's "idiot god" Azathoth.)
Now, if you want to object to neurons as an example, that's fine... If I'm right, for example, Artificial Intelligence can be "created"...once there is an adequate degree of complexity and processing power in computer systems.
But if you're wrong, artificial intelligence can be created. Quite possibly with no more computing power than we have already got available. You're using a brain, that thinks, and a machine that can be made to think, and rightly saying that they have to be complex in order to think...and then, in a way you haven't shown me, making this gigantic leap to say that complexity is not only required for consciousness, but necessarily implies consciousness. It doesn't.
Now, assume that I were right: does AI prove the existence of God? No, that's too strong a claim: but it does support my theory of consciousness...
ReplyDeleteNo, it doesn't. At best, it fails to contradict it.
I have a theory that, if I have a bad dream tonight, the sun won't come up tomorrow. My theory is falsifiable - if I have a bad dream and the sun comes up anyway, then I'm wrong. But if I have no bad dream and the sun comes up, that is consistent with my theory. Would you really say that "supports" it? No, it's not evidence of any value for my theory, not even if I sleep well for the rest of my life and the sun comes up every time! As a straight thinker, you would want to see some evidentiary connection between my dreams and the dawn, before you gave my idea any weight. "Complexity is needed for a thinking being, whether made of squishy meat or doped silicon" - that seems obvious to me. "Anything that is really really complex will be a thinking being" - I haven't seen an argument that even begins to make that case.
What do you say to my other question too, about the idea of aggregating complex objects, and claiming that the aggregates have consciousnesses of their own? Like two people giving each other a hug; two people on opposite sides of the planet; the entire nation of France; the entire set of people named "Francois" - has each of these its own collective consciousness? Is there evidence for that anywhere? If it isn't so, then it's fallacious to say that "the whole universe all together" has a consciousness of its own, based simply on the fact that objects within it do.
You might recall the "nothing" that was something -- it was a potential for a universe.
Yes, and as I pointed out to you, that doesn't fit the dominant cosmology now - since there's a beginning to time, and the universe is as old as time, there is no time at which there's a "potential" that is not realized for a universe. (The universe makes some very rapid changes at the beginning. But it was there from the start.) Even should that turn out to be false, you can't say a priori that there had to be a "potentiality" before there was a universe, not 'til you disprove that the universe and the matter within it are as old as time.
P.S. - Just had a long, lovely drive with the missus and had another idea - in the same category as my cancer patient. I agree that a large enough computer running the right program could think, in the way that we think, and have consciousness as we do. I would be delighted if it happened in my lifetime.
ReplyDeleteBut what if that machine is running the wrong program -- a big, complicated, monstrosity of a program with thirty million subroutines, each taking random data and performing mathematical relations on them, then feeding them to other subroutines, which perform other operations, then feed them to another subroutine which sums all the numbers every night at midnight, divides them by two, and writes the result to memory, where a different subroutine promptly erases the data and plays "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on the computer's speakers.
That machine would certainly be very, very complicated - the interactions between the thirty million subroutines feeding each other data analogizing to the connections between neurons - and unlike my cancer patient it would be in complete working order. But that incoherent and pointless manipulation of random data wouldn't be thought in any sense we recognize, and I wouldn't recognize it as "consciousness" without some proof. Increase the complexity by doing the same thing with three hundred million subroutines, or any other number you like. Its functioning wouldn't be any more like thought or consciousness, nor would it be a whit more godlike, than it was with a mere 30 million. Increasing complexity need not mean increasing consciousness, or any consciousness at all.
Joe:
ReplyDeleteYou've got a lot going on here, and I think there is a danger that I'll miss something important if I try to respond to all of it at once. So, let me try to break out three things that seem to be particularly crucial, so we can discuss those to your satisfaction. Then, if you think there is another issue that is crucial, remind me of it.
1) The first issue I want to speak to is your comparison between the man and his corpse. This is an example Aristotle uses, actually, and it's a very good one. So, what is the difference between the man and his corpse? For Aristotle, it's the loss by the matter of a form -- specifically, his soul (a concept unlike a Christian soul, actually, a sort of animating principle), which is a form.
I like that answer, except that I notice that it's a kind of hand-wave. If the soul is an animating principle, the difference between a life man and a dead man is that one isn't animated. What does that mean? It looks like we've got a tautology rather than an argument.
Now, my answer may not be satisfying either, but it does at least apply. When the body ceases to function correctly (i.e., dies), the loss of the electrical connections vastly decreases its complexity. Naturally, then, the loss of consciousness is to be expected if consciousness is received (not produced) by complexity.
Notice that this isn't a dualist answer, and it avoids the tautology problem. If you prefer a different answer, what is it? I'm sure you won't propose a soul: so where does consciousness come from in the living man, and why is it absent from the dead one?
2) On time and creation: what you are proposing as 'the dominant cosmology' is the same answer that St. Augustine gives to the question of "What was God doing before the creation of the universe?" His answer, specifically, is that the question is malformed: there was no "before," as time came into being with the creation of the universe.
However, you don't get as much out of it as Augustine did. You can't dodge the question of a potential universe by arguing that time and matter came to be with the same movement. Fine: in fact, if you follow the 4th Dimensional theory, there's no distinction to be made between time and matter at all, except a dimensional one.
Nevertheless, given that there are time and matter, there must (at the moment of that first movement) have been the potential for time and matter. This is no more than a basic axiom of modal logic: if P, then Necessarily Possibly P. (P -> Box-Diamond-P). If there is time and matter, then necessarily there was the possibility -- the potential -- for time and matter.
I've heard some people try to argue (HIGHLY controversially) that the laws of logic were created with the world (and thus the modal logic need not apply to the pre-creation); but notice that you don't have that out. We're talking about the moment of the first movement, so the laws of logic are set.
3) Necessity v. sufficiency: I think this is a very strong counterargument, potentially. Nevertheless, I'm not actually arguing that my theory that complexity gives rise to consciousness is necessary in the logical sense; rather, I'm proposing it as a theory that should be subject to testing. It seems like it could be right, and thus I'm proposing some tests that could demonstrate that it wasn't correct.
What necessarily demonstrates (not implies) consciousness and even self-consciousness is the Order of Reason test. That's Sebastian Rödl's argument, derived from Kant, but I accept the logic of it (which is argued in this book, I think without obvious flaw). Complexity does not "necessarily" imply or demonstrate consciousness: it simply happens to be my theory of how consciousness comes to be in us. I'm glad to hear of ideas of how to falsify that theory, because that is just how we ought to proceed with a theory of this type.
That's actually Brouwer's axiom, by the way; you can also derive it in S5, but some people are troubled by it. However, you can also derive this alternative in the more basic system T:
ReplyDeleteNecessarily, if P then possibly P.
That is, Box(P->DiamondP). Either the axiom or the theorem gives rise to the problem described in 2, above: if it is necessary that if P then possibly P, and you have P (time and space), then diamond P follows.
The two formulas seem intuitively equivalent, but they aren't, because the T theorem makes a weaker claim: for our purposes, it is necessary that, if time and space exist, they are possible. Because this is a necessary truth, it holds for all possible worlds (on the usual interpretation of modal logic); but all it says is that any possible world that has time and space had the possibility for it. There thus might be possible worlds under this claim that don't have time and space.
The Brouwer axiom makes their possibility itself necessary, which -- for our purposes -- would yield the standard interpretation there should be no possible world in which there is not the potential for time and space.
You might want to object to the way I may appear to have expressed the idea in temporal terms, since you want time and space to come to be at the same time: "any possible world that has time and space had the possibility for it." You might want to object, 'No, not had... it comes to have the possibility at the same time as it comes to have the actuality.'
However, the appearance arises from an ambiguity in English. I'm not making the claim of temporal priority, but metaphysical priority. Even if time and space come into being in the same movement, necessary truths are metaphysically prior because they hold across all possible worlds. (Or all nearby possible worlds, if you want to go with the folks who believe that logical rules can differ in some distant possible worlds.)
Of course, you could object to possible worlds theory in general -- many do. However, the usual consequence of that is that you are stuck with this world, in which case you have to deal with the fact that the claim has logical priority in this world, which has our logic (and since it's the only world, that's the only logic).
1: Corpse? I really wasn't writing clearly if you think I was writing about a corpse. No, my cancer patient is still very much alive. His cells are processing nutrients and communicating with each others. One of his bodily systems (the immune system) is working overtime. Even his brain is full of living tissue. It's just that the tumors in there have completely disrupted what I called his "thinky-bits" - so he isn't thinking or feeling anymore. Yet his body and brain are still complicated - in some ways, even more complicated - than before. (e.g., there are more genetic codes in his body than in most.) This is why it analogizes to the "meaningless program" in my last post - to show you that lots of complexity doesn't mean "conscious" and increasing complexity needn't mean increasing consciousness.
ReplyDelete2: You can't dodge the question of a potential universe by arguing that time and matter came to be with the same movement. Fine: in fact, if you follow the 4th Dimensional theory, there's no distinction to be made between time and matter at all...
That's time and space you're talking about, not time and matter, and it's not really accurate, but that is a side point. (Gamow's "One, Two, Three....Infinity" is dated, but gives the best popular account that I know of that question). But to continue...
...except a dimensional one.
Nevertheless, given that there are time and matter, there must (at the moment of that first movement) have been the potential for time and matter...
No, you're still making the error of using "time and causality as they work here on the earth" and applying them to "the beginning of time" - where they don't apply. You're positing a "movement" -- a thing with a beginning in time and and end in time -- with time, space, and matter existing at the end of it but not at the beginning of it. And that is not justified here. As far as we know, the first "movement" actually has time, space, and matter at the beginning as well as the end of it. The change is in how it suddenly expands, becoming less hot and dense, and not in whether it exists at all.
It's not a law of logic that causation happens as we know it on a human scale, on the earth. That's more like a physical observation...quite valid for the times and places where the observation is made, but not necessarily valid for every other time and place. Using our everyday intuitions about time, and reasoning back to the beginning, will only get you so far. It made sense in Aristotle's day (hence the "prime mover" business) or Augustine's - but with the evidence we have now, it really does not make sense to do that anymore.
Likewise with your discussion of time and space "coming into being" in the last post - again, the phrase "come into being" assumes they aren't there at the beginning, then something happens and they are there - an unjustified assumption in this case.
ReplyDelete3: Nevertheless, I'm not actually arguing that my theory that complexity gives rise to consciousness is necessary in the logical sense; rather, I'm proposing it as a theory that should be subject to testing. It seems like it could be right, and thus I'm proposing some tests that could demonstrate that it wasn't correct.
And that's what I'm about as well. Your tests have been using complicated thinking machines to suggest "if complicated, then conscious." But I am attacking these tests because you start with a "thinking machine" and try to generalize to things that are not thinking machines, on the basis of complexity alone.
And I've been giving examples of how you could get just as complicated as these thinking machines, or even more so, without having the slightest reason to believe there's consciousness. Hence, my giant worldwide Rube Goldberg sand-sifting machine, my cancer patient whose body is a multipolar war of tumors, and my meaningless program with 30 million subroutines (or 300 million, or 300 billion, if you prefer) all feeding each other info.
...hence also my "aggregate consciousness" question - two guys named Bob are more complicated than one guy named Bob. Collective consciousness? etc.
ReplyDeleteJoe:
ReplyDelete1. On complexity and cancer: You seem to be missing Douglas' distinction between complicated and complex. A complex system is ordered, by nature or art; it isn't just more and more stuff.
It may be that what you think I'm missing is really already there: what we have in complexity is a combination of 'lots of stuff' and 'order.' That's exactly analogous to Aristotle's idea of what form does in matter: it brings it into order and gives it an ability to function in a certain way. For example, it gives the organs of the body the ability to work together for the preservation of the human form.
Thus a cancer patient has lost complexity, not gained it: the tumor-affected portions of the body are no longer joined in the complex order, but are working on their own thing. The immune system is certainly more active, but it isn't either more or less well-ordered: it's doing just what it ought to do.
2. Matter and space: I do tend to use matter and space analogously, because in ancient and medieval philosophy "matter" means something different than it does in modern physics. As Avicenna explains it, matter is a capacity for extension. As you know, modern physics uses the term to mean various kinds of stuff. Since I spend more time thinking in medieval terms than modern ones, I often forget to translate so that modern speakers will understand; but you can see why "space" and the medieval "matter" are analogues. I apologize for forgetting the context of our conversation; you are talking about things I spend a great deal of time thinking about, and I forgot we don't share terms.
3. On beginnings: The question of how a motion gets started is a problem that Aristotle treats in the Physics at length -- and in logical rather than empirical terms. Few people read it anymore, but it's a real conceptual problem that concerned the Greeks a great deal (to the point that many of them argued that motion must be impossible, because they couldn't sort out a way in which it was logically possible).
So your counterargument strikes me as odd, as I think it would have struck Aristotle:
You're positing a "movement" -- a thing with a beginning in time and and end in time -- with time, space, and matter existing at the end of it but not at the beginning of it.
To have a beginning and an end is to be extended, and thus divisible -- however 'long it took,' we can say, 'Well, let's talk about half that time.' So at the time of the first movement (however long it took) there must already be extension; and at any point inside of that movement, you will find that time and space (that is, a capacity for extension) do exist and therefore they must logically possibly exist.
What you want to talk about is what happened before. This is a singularity, analogous to a point. There is no time and no space because there is no extension.
There was (in the timeless sense appropriate to this thing), however, a potential for extension or we would never have observed time and space. Where did that potential come from? It's not in the object itself. It isn't extended, and therefore it cannot move. To experience a motion of any kind requires a beginning and an end, as you said -- and that's true not just of locomotion, but of heating up or cooling down or anything else.
So we're back where we were thirty or so posts ago: you've got a something, and you've got a something else that gives it potential or that actualizes a potential the something already had.
1: On complexity and cancer: You seem to be missing Douglas' distinction between complicated and complex. A complex system is ordered, by nature or art; it isn't just more and more stuff...
ReplyDeleteOur Douglas or some other Douglas? No matter. If this is how you mean "complex," then it makes hash of your main argument.
What you argued above, as I understand it, is: (1) Humans are complex, and therefore have consciousness. (2) The whole set of living things is complex, because it contains these complex objects (humans), and therefore it has consciousness as well. (3) And that great, overarching consciousness...is God.
It's not news to you that each cell in a body, even a cancerous cell in a disease-ridden body, is a pretty organized thing. It has organelles as the body has organs, and through its enzymes guides a pretty amazing set of reactions to keep itself going, reproduce itself, and carry out its function. But you say that the overall set of cells loses complexity when it is no longer as organized as it was.
Well, then, step (2) in your original argument fails. If the whole giant set of "stuff" in the Universe is not "organized by nature or art," then it does not have "complexity" the way you are using the term, when you take it all together. Not even if the individual pieces do have that complexity.
That also answers my question about the shared "Bob consciousness" and so forth - but in a way that is fatal to your conclusions. The Bobs aren't "organized" into a collective consciousness - their brains function alone. The same is true no matter how much you scale up. So there is no need to posit a collective consciousness for all Mankind, let alone the inanimate matter that surrounds us.
My "pointless program," unlike my cancer patient, really is "organized by Art" and is carrying out its function. But that function is not thinking or feeling, such as we cleverer animals do. Do you have any reason to suppose that "complexity" which is not expressed as thinking or feeling still creates consciousness?
I don't, and find it hard to see that endless round of useless calculations, writings, and erasings counts as "consciousness." (This is aimed at step (1) of your argument as I paraphrased it above - the idea that complexity alone implies consciousness.) And no matter how much you scale up that pointless activity, I see no reason to think it gets "more conscious" the more subroutines you add, no matter how much data they send to each other.
What I am suggesting is that a thing can be complex, even in your sense or Douglas', without really thinking or feeling. And if it doesn't think or feel, it doesn't have consciousness, no matter how complex it is, and it isn't a "God" in any sense of the word I have ever seen. I don't yet see the slightest reason to think otherwise - certainly not by generalizing from brains and machines that really could be made to think.
(In The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose gives some very challenging edge examples for those of us who think an AI would have true consciousness...talking about them here would be distracting; but if you haven't read it and are dealing with these questions you might find it worth a gander.)
P.S. - The language of yours that I am referring to is this:
The object we are describing as either being God or the object of God's knowledge is a physical object of an interesting type: it contains at least all actual conscious beings at all moments in all of their lives...and may contain all possible worlds and beings...
2: Okay.
ReplyDelete3: Well, a great deal we now know would have struck Aristotle as odd, but his mind was a great one, and if he had the evidence we had today...I rather think he would revise his opinions on the subject of physics.
To have a beginning and an end is to be extended, and thus divisible -- however 'long it took'...at any point inside of that movement, you will find that time and space...do exist...
I know; I've been saying much the same.
What you want to talk about is what happened before...
No, that's what I want to stop you from talking about. You seem to have been saying, starting in the original post, that we've got a "potential for matter, time, and space" that exists before those things do.
And my only point on that score has been that, given the cosmology we have now, that is not necessary; that you can have all of these things right from the beginning of time, with no "before" whatsoever. (I think the author you linked to, and were commenting on, put that part of his article very badly.)
P.S. - I didn't write very precisely a couple posts up, as I know you are only arguing the set of "conscious beings" rather than "living things" makes the Mind of God - but my argument still applies; if the set of conscious beings isn't "organized" (and it isn't) then it isn't "complex" by your definition and doesn't create the Mind of God.
ReplyDeleteJoe:
ReplyDeleteMy actual argument re: the mind of God is not that we make it, but that it is the origin point for the consciousness we experience. This is a neoplatonic argument: the reason we are conscious is that consciousness inheres in the universe, and we come to experience it when we achieve a certain level of complexity.
This is why I keep referring to consciousness as "received" rather than produced. The analogy might be to a through-the-air television set; it's one signal, but a differently tuned TV will pick up a different channel. Thus, since our bodies are differently tuned, we pick up on different aspects.
We are, therefore, different individuals -- but knock someone out of tune through physical damage, and the signal gets fuzzy or ceases. By the same token, retune them sufficiently and you're dealing with a different individual: an example being the rugby player who became a gay hairdresser after suffering physical damage.
Plotinus has an interesting argument for why he thinks this has to be the case, which we haven't touched on here at all. It has to do with the question of how sense perception and communication are possible: that is, how could I possibly unify all the sense impressions I get into a single object; and if we can get past that, why should I have sense perceptions that agree with yours? The question becomes even more interesting when we ask why my horse (whose sense impressions are quite different -- their vision, for example, is nothing like ours) can understand what we are doing and communicate with us in limited ways.
Plotinus' theory, which I have come to believe is true, is that there must be an underlying consciousness in which we are all participating. (Aristotle believes this too, by the way, although in a different fashion: he speaks of the "active intellect," which is necessary to explain certain aspects of how we interact with the world. I find it much more mysterious as a concept than Plotinus' approach, though, because there's nothing to explain it: it exists for Aristotle in a sort of Sherlock-Holmes way, because he's excluded all the other explanations that seem to work, so that's what is left).
Thus, if you're looking for my argument to prove that we produce the mind of God, you certainly won't find it; the point about unification is not that it produces the consciousness of God, but that such unification seems to explain some things about the conscious beings.
If this is the source of consciousness for all of us, and we obtain consciousness by becoming complex enough to receive and understand aspects of its consciousness, then naturally it must be conscious.
The current model -- that brains etc. produce consciousness -- really doesn't have a good explanation of the problems of consciousness. Modern theories of mind have a lot to say, but generally end up in the same kind of skeptical position that the Greeks were about motion: it's not clear from the modern theories that communication or understanding should be possible, so the theories often deny that they really are (following Kant's first critique). But, as Aristotle pointed out about motion, we do it and see it all the time.
If you're not talking about "before" then I am glad to stop talking about it, as you're going quite beyond the point I was addressing. (The concept of a world without time or space that would still be a world...well, it's not something I want to take up today.)
ReplyDeleteSo, back to that other business. A moment ago, you were telling me that the whole set of conscious beings, possibly including the ones who don't exist, is "complex," and therefore is itself conscious because it is complex. Then you tell me that something isn't complex unless it is organized - which means the whole set of conscious beings isn't complex unless you can show they're organized - which, it seems to me, kills the main argument that I was attacking. But I also made an argument or two to the effect that complexity, even in your sense, implies anything we'd recognize as consciousness. If there's no more to say on that subject, perhaps a new thread? (This one's at the bottom of the page anyway.)
Plotinus' theory, which I have come to believe is true, is that there must be an underlying consciousness in which we are all participating.
That's a heckuva "must" - I would genuinely be interested to hear where that "must" comes from.
The current model -- that brains etc. produce consciousness -- really doesn't have a good explanation of the problems of consciousness. Modern theories of mind have a lot to say, but generally end up in the same kind of skeptical position that the Greeks were about motion: it's not clear from the modern theories that communication or understanding should be possible, so the theories often deny that they really are...
Wha - ? Who on earth says that? Not Penrose, I know (though he wrote that understanding thought would require some additional findings in physics), nor Pinker either, I've read him too, so who? And what kind of "communication or understanding" are these people saying is impossible? Communication or understanding between humans? That would be a very strange thing for them to say.
The question of why your horse has developed the ability to communicate with you, albeit on a crude level, has an answer that seems pretty obvious to me but that doesn't require collective consciousness or a world-soul or any other consciousness that exists outside of a physical brain. Horses and humans have been co-evolving for millenia -- a good thing for the horses, whose wild cousins are all extinct. There's a large reproductive fitness advantage for the animals that make good mounts and work animals; and the psychological side matters as much as the muscular. Especially for a creature you're going to be riding, the ability to pick up your cues and let you know what's going on would have to be invaluable, even if he you and he can't discuss Plotonius together, and you might occasionally need to "come to an understanding involving a large whip."
Dogs are similar, and can be awfully good at picking up on humans' cues. One of their distinctive features, the bark, serves to communicate with humans in a simple way, and is absent in their nearest wild cousins. Something similar has been going on with domesticated foxes in Russia.
And, of course, a set of humans who can understand or at least model each other's thoughts, and communicate with each other, have a gigantic advantage over creatures that can't - some popular books suggest that much of our evolved intelligence was driven by precisely that, the need to understand and manipulate each other in social settings. Given that this is such an incredibly useful ability, do we need some kind of "consciousness separate from ourselves" to explain it? Why? Why couldn't a pursely physical brain develop this ability all on its own without the aid of "outside" consciousness?
ReplyDeleteInteresting story on the rugby player, but you know, if the modern theorists (and I) are right and thoughts and perspectives come from a physical brain, with no need for some external source of consciousness...you would still expect some personality changes if that brain is damaged. Usually the change is pretty obviously "damage," as with old boxers who get "punchy," experienced soccer players who lose points of IQ, and Phineas Gage.
P.S. - Okay, Zebra aren't extinct, so I can't say all the horse's wild cousins are.
ReplyDeleteNo, that's what I want to stop you from talking about. You seem to have been saying, starting in the original post, that we've got a "potential for matter, time, and space" that exists before those things do.
ReplyDeleteI'm willing to stop talking about that, except that if we're within the first movement (not before it), you have to deal with the logical argument presented above. Since P now exists, P must be possible. If you want to say that the possibility arose from the actuality, that's fine; you can phrase the claim that way.
However, notice that this is a necessary truth, so it should hold for all possible worlds. If we follow Brouwer or S5 logic, the actuality in this world proves the necessity of possibility even where space and time do not exist. If you prefer the T logic, there remains a necessary truth about any possible world: we can say something about the potential for time and space even if it is a world with no time or space.
Thus, you see, the metaphysical priority seems to hold even without the temporal priority. You can deny that there are any other possible worlds (which is reasonable, I think, but runs against the strong current of modern and contemporary logicians); but in that case you don't get away from Avicenna. You are making exactly the same argument that he is making about the origin of the necessity.
Joe:
ReplyDeleteI'll follow your suggestion for a new thread. Note that I have edited my last comment (now below yours) to clarify the distinction between the two necessary logical propositions, which seemed important to me on reflection.
P.P.S. - Okay, Plotinus. (So I mixed him with Polonius, so sue me.)
ReplyDeleteI won't sue you, but I will take a little while to try to put together an explanation of just what Plotinus and Aristotle seem to be saying, and why it's a problem.
ReplyDeletewhich means the whole set of conscious beings isn't complex unless you can show they're organized...
That's just what we shall undertake now: to show that they are organized by participation in a unified principle of consciousness. I'll need a bit to frame the argument, though, because it's a complicated one (or possibly a complex one!).
"The Bobs aren't "organized" into a collective consciousness - their brains function alone. The same is true no matter how much you scale up. So there is no need to posit a collective consciousness for all Mankind, let alone the inanimate matter that surrounds us."
ReplyDeleteI'd have to add here that since we know so little about how the brain actually works, and also about the elements of quantum physics that seem to defy time and space to some extent, we cannot say definitively whether or not there is some unifying force- we might be able to say we as yet have no evidence of it, but it's curious in itself that we've seemed to believe something is there apparently since we were able to consider the idea.
Also, to refine the discussion about complexity a bit more, to take the cancer patient, he may have components that are now more complex, but they are no longer working in harmony with themselves or the rest of the body, and so there is a quantitative loss of complexity even with a concurrent increase in complicatedness. Think about taking a bunch of car parts that work perfectly, but are made for different cars, and then trying to put them together to work- you're likely to run into some significant problems as the parts weren't designed to work in that particular system, so as complicated as the new system may be (and it may be many degrees more complicated then the ones they were designed for), it may not be complex as in maintaining an order and intent inherent to the design of the parts. Now, there might be criticism here in that it seems to presuppose intent, or inherent purpose (what Aristotle would call 'form', I think) which could be construed to imply design, and thus a designer, and Grim mentioned earlier this might be a tautology, but there's yet no disproving it, and I'm one to think our 'sense' of things matters, and should be explored further, not dismissed as irrelevant.
Also, I meant to comment on the 'scaling up; issue- just as a carburetor can't be scaled up to be an engine, there's no reason to assume scaled up humans would be this mysterious thing I'll call a universal consciousness for lack of a better term.
ReplyDelete