When I encounter a substance dualist, this is how I mock their position.
Consciousness arises from physically undetectable, yet also indestructible, mind-stuff, which wasn’t present until humanity reached its current evolutionary phenotype, and which, despite not interacting with the body, both determines and is affected by its actions and is also perpetually localized to each individual person until they die at which point it goes to a non-localized location that also can’t be detected.
Also, like in the comic that comes from, my interlocutor can’t tell that I’m making fun of their position.
But I won’t feel special unless there is a magical ghost living inside me!
Q: [origins of consciousness??]
A: “I’m not saying it was aliens. . .but it was aliens!”
Q: [insert obvious follow-up question]
A: “😭😭😭”
What about ‘Daemons’, do you agree with Brande? The last part of Pullman’ s Book of Dust comes out in September.
Ephraim, the village atheist has an IQ of 150. Danny, the village idiot has an IQ of 50. Is it the souls that have the IQs or is IQ a function of the material brain? Do all souls have IQs of 200, but the material brains limit IQs? I have posted this problem several times, including on Catholic philosopher Ed Feser’s website. I gets ignored a lot. He just published his new book on souls. How do souls and IQs correlate?
This is exactly what happens, according to the Catholic doctrine of ensoulment, if I understand it.
Apparently, after millions of years of mindless evolution, one day god plunked souls into some of them, and they became human. (But presumably not cursed with original sin until Adam came along).
The implication is that the previous generation who never got souls were always inhuman animals, while their kids who got souls became human and moral agents capable of sin.
The irony of this situation is, according to this flavor of Christianity, it was not immoral for the parents to kill and eat their kids, because the parents were sinless animals. And it would also not be immoral for the human kids to kill and eat their soulless, animal parents.
Christian theology gives a new meaning to “family dinner”.
I think this scenario shows the ridiculous nature of that theology.
I am convinced my cat is conscious but does he also have a soul according to Christian theology? If he’s not going to heaven then I don’t want to go there either. As for IQ he’s certainly smart when he wants to be but I don’t know how you would measure it. I envisage consciousness as an emergent property that arises from brains that reach a certain level of complexity, which is to say I have no idea what it is.
Perfect word salad that both explains and mocks. Consciousness is worthless without metacognition. There are many humans (who claim to be conscious) but they lack or refuse to use metacognition. They march to the tune of the Pied Piper and never evaluate the good and/or bad of their actions.
William Lane Craig claims God inserted souls into a pair of Heidbergensis hominids who were the historical Adam and Eve. Willie boy even wrote a book about this, “In Quest For The Historical Adam” Really!
ARTHUR: This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep’s bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.
I suspect that many, if not most of you, believe that consciousness is merely a by-product of biological life. That makes sense in our 3D, classical reality, but, it falls apart in the quantum realm. Physicists take the subject of consciousness very seriously. The observer effect is real. Everything below the scale of an atom is unrealized potential in their respective fields. A photon is both wave and particle until it’s observed, then it settles into one state or the other. How can biological entities such as ourselves effect what happens at the quantum level simply by watching it? We don’t know the answer. How does quantum entanglement work? Two particles are linked in such a way that the state of one instantly influences the state of the other, regardless of the distance separating them. They somehow communicate faster than the speed of light. Again, we don’t know how.
I’m not into New Age hoodoo, or god-creator beliefs, but the universe is a confoundingly mysterious place, at least to us. Even the Big Bang theory that I grew up with is now under review after the JWST’s recent discoveries about galaxies that are too fully formed for their age.
Instead of laughing it off, I’ll keep an open mind about the place of consciousness in the universe.
Do gods have souls?
@9
What makes you think “observation,” as used by quantum physicists, has anything to do with whether the observer is biological or not?
I think you are more into New Age hoodoo than you realize, and have been led down that path by your misunderstanding of the use of terminology.
From my understanding, the “observer effect” doesn’t require a conscious, thinking observer. IIRC, some physicists did a version of the double slit experiment where the sensor deleted the data after “observing” the electrons, so conscious scientists never obtained the information. The results were the same as when the scientists were in the loop.
The thing that keeps me from seeing it as mystical consciousness anyway is this: Observation is generally NOT a passive event. You typically have to interact with the subject in some fashion, which changes it. At the tiny scale of individual particles, it’s particularly hard to keep the effects of our observation negligible.
Sure, there’s weird stuff we struggle to wrap our monkey brains around. But I don’t see that as a reason to take dualism’s magical thinking seriously.
He is a conscious being according to the scientific consensus.
Most scientists working in the field accept that all mammals have conscious minds as well as birds and octopuses.
You don’t have to take their word for it.
Anyone who has had a cat or dog knows that they are thinking beings with their own lives and personalities.
It isn’t human grade but that has nothing to do with whether it is there or not.
I’m reasonably sure that the probability of a cat having a soul is the same as…the probability that I have a soul.
every single time i have, for a brief moment, entertained a supernatural in idea – usually via a science i don’t really understand – i’ve found myself humiliated when more information came to my attention. i’m trying not to be a mark in a world teeming with con artists, not playing that game again. the world is exactly interesting and exactly as mundane as it appears; i’ve absolutely never experienced anything to contradict this.
@John Watts #9:
There were philosophically-minded physicists who considered this, back iin the 1930s and 40s, but most ended up agreeing with Werner Heisenberg that a detection instrument is all that is needed, not a conscious mind. You’re 70 years out of date: “physicists take” should read “some physicists once took”.
Hardly any of that is necessary for substance dualism. You can be a substance dualist and think that minds are temporary, mutable, non-localized, or even non-interacting (Leibniz, most famously).
What you seem to be mocking is more or less the (modern) Christian notion of an immortal soul, which is a form of dualism, but hardly the only one.
(I don’t think there’s any good reason to believe substance dualism is true. About the best you can say is that some forms aren’t obviously false)
John Watts @9:
Depends on the interpretation. There”s no such instantaneous or FTL communication (aka ‘spooky action at a distance’) in Many Worlds.
Also, what the folks at #11, #12 and #15 said.
John Watts #9:
I think it’s more correct to say it’s neither, but it can appear as either depending on how you measure.
@14 Bébé Mélange wrote: every single time i have, for a brief moment, entertained a supernatural in idea – . . . the world is exactly interesting and exactly as mundane as it appears; i’ve absolutely never experienced anything to contradict this.
I reply: Thank you for your rational honesty. When my mind encounters anything that does not have an obvious rational explanation, the emotional part of my mind easily ascribes a supernatural cause. So, I must cautiously and intellectually guard against the purely emotional reaction of my mind immediately grasping for a supernatural explanation. I’m always trying to prevent any ‘ghost in my machine’.
I guess I’m paraphrasing (or perhaps creating a corollary to) Clarke’s third law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.)
I want to learn more about this topic. Admittedly, I’m not sufficiently intellectually sophisticated enough to fully understand how my electro-chemical brain processes allow me to engage in analytical or imaginative thoughts. But, I do appreciate that my brain is not limited to just observation followed by flight-or-fight reactions.
John Wheeler says
I wonder how many people get the distinction between substance dualism and property dualism.
John Watts @9: “A photon is both wave and particle until it’s observed, then it settles into one state or the other.”
Bad formulation.
E-prime can help: ‘A photon may be observed as either a wave or a particle depending on how it is observed’.
Notice that formulation loses no information, but allows for photons to be neither a wave or a particle, rather than being both until it is observed.
John @21: A bunch of philosophers, plus those who give enough of a shit (for some inexplicable reason) to look up the distinction on google?
John @22: Dunno what E-prime is, but that’s crap. Like every other excitation of a quantum field, a photon can only be directly observed as a particle. Wave behaviour can only be inferred, as in the double-slit experiment.
Well, Rob, one is woo, the other is not. Both are dualism. :)
(Is it really so inexplicable to care to understand whereof one speaks?)
“Like every other excitation of a quantum field, a photon can only be directly observed as a particle.”
How about indirectly observed? ;)
—
re E’: https://blogs.ubc.ca/badlanguage/2019/11/27/e-prime-a-linguistic-exercise-to-avoid-confusion-and-clarify-meaning/
Bruce @ 5
So at one point in tine the Black Monolith arrived…
This is really a pity, we should ave a few ghosts and demons to add a bit of excitement. There should of course be a regulatory authority to ensure said ghosts and demons behave.
As an idealist I prefer the substance dualist over the materialist.
Michael, that makes zero sense.
Materialism is also an idealism, no less than dualism.
On the physics discussion in this thread, let me just add that ‘measurement’ is a better term to use than ‘observation’, since the latter introduces the idea of consciousness by connotation rather than directly. The wavefunction collapses when it is measured because making the measurement requires interacting with the wave-function in some way (e.g. bouncing a photon off an electron to determine the electron’s position). The measurement doesn’t require or imply consciousness.
John
Google George Berkeley
Subjective idealism is where I land.
@John Watts #9,
Most of them really don’t. There’s a reason “shut up and calculate” is such a popular stance on interpreting quantum mechanics.
This is incorrect in two ways. First, a photon in quantum theory shares properties with both classical waves and classical particles, but it does not possess all properties of either one. Each is simply a useful model for describing certain aspects of its behavior in certain situations.
Second, observation/interaction causes a photon to (apparently) enter one of a set of states associated with that interaction, but those states are not any more wave-ish or particle-ish than the state it was in previously. To use a similar example, a classical particle has precise position and momentum values, and under quantum theory the right measurements can place an electron into a state which has arbitrarily precise position or momentum values—but by the uncertainty principle, no measurement or set of measurements can place it into a state where both values are simultaneously precise. Thus, it never “settles into” the state of a classical wave or a classical particle.
Observation requires a particular type of interaction. Biological entities, and all measurement devices that are usable by those entities, are large, warm systems with many thermodynamic degrees of freedom. When the observed system interacts with a large warm system, different components of the observed system’s wave function become entangled with corresponding components of the larger system’s wave function, such that those components no longer interfere with each other; this is called decoherence. This process is not consciousness-dependent; it’s our physical nature as large warm systems that makes it happen.
The way in which a human then experiences their own wave function components so as to perceive one measurement value or another remains a matter of philosophical interpretation, but that has nothing to do with the originally observed system. We have no reason to think that a measured photon or electron behaves differently if the researcher has a heart attack just before reading off the measurement.
This also has nothing to do with consciousness, though? Again, measurements on those particles are simply a particular type of interaction between them and their surrounding environment.
No, it’s not. It has not yet been independently verified that those galaxies are too fully formed for their age–in fact, more recent findings indicate the opposite. And even if they were, there’s a wide variety of potential explanations available that are still compatible with a Big Bang. The JWST evidence might lead to changes in our understanding of the expansion of the early universe and the roles of dark matter and energy, but that’s very different from overturning the entire Big Bang concept.
You seem to be pointing to unrelated instances of scientific error or uncertainty and concluding “so therefore my pet hypothesis might be true,” which is a pretty standard rhetorical move in both traditional religion and “New Age hoodoo.” We don’t yet have a theory of quantum gravity, therefore I’m keeping an open mind about leprechauns! sort of thing.
Michael , “Google George Berkeley” you write.
Your presumption of extreme ignorance on my part is unwarranted, but then, hope springs ever eternal, no?
Anyway, no need. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone
Even though I’m a onetime molecular biologist, my doctorate is actually in Applied Physics, and I endorse John Wheeler’s statement quoted above as the prevailing 21st-century mainstream view, fwiw.
Tbf there are, however, prominent dissenting voices exemplified by Roger Penrose’s theoretical programme trying to establish quantum effects as necessary to explain consciousness.
I have so little faith in Penrose’s biological domain knowledge, though, that I never paid that stuff much mind.
@18:
It’s more correct to say that physics, and science more generally, offers models of the universe and has absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about what something “is.” Mistaking models for a description of reality is one of the places where people allegedly doing science routinely go horribly, horribly wrong.
Robert,
Conversely, knowing models are merely a description of reality is one of the places where people actually doing science routinely go spectacularly, spectacularly right.
drsteve@35–
Reading Penrose’s Emperor’s New Mind, I came away astonished that such an intelligent, knowledgeable writer could fill a book with so many transparently wish-fulfilling arguments. I won’t go into a list of every bad argument, but the section on quantum-generated consciousness is on point here.
Penrose tried to save the concept of free will within a rational scientific framework by drawing on quantum uncertainty. He is correct in so far as quantum theory disrupts classical determinism and that we have very good evidence that Einstein’s “hidden variables” view is incorrect. However, Penrose did not really grapple with the working deterministic and semi-deterministic formulations of QM, which means determinism can’t be dismissed outright. He provided no mechanism to link quantum-level uncertainty and neuron function. And then he suggested that microtubules in neuron cells are the right size for quantum-level events, but since cells are built out of molecular structures, it is inevitable that some of those structures will be on that scale, and while microtubules have important functions in every eukaryotic cell, there is not a shred of evidence that they have special quantum influences on the function of brain cells, neuronal network signal processing, or consciousness. Penrose asked his biologist friends for a cell structure around 20-30 nm across, was told “microtubules!” and that was enough for him. The entire book is essentially a Consciousness-of-the-Gaps argument, with some very dubious gaps.
I should point out that Penrose is not religious and is therefore not performing apologetics for any personal god/s. He is, however, an agnostic teleologist of sorts, and I think his determination to find purpose in the universe coloured his thinking. (My take: if there is purpose in the universe, it is the purpose we make for ourselves. Any deeper baked-in cosmic purpose, if it exists at all, is necessarily opaque to us. I should also like to point out that even as a hard materialist, I believe in free will as a functional entity, so I’m not unsympathetic to efforts to explain it in mechanistic terms, I just don’t think we have anything like the necessary understanding to make a meaningful attempt at it.)
chrislawson makes a good point; the wooo is not just for supernaturalists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler#Participatory_anthropic_principle
From the Wikipedia article on Berkley:
In his work on immaterialism, Berkeley’s theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are ideas perceived by the mind and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived.
If something can’t exist unless/until it’s perceived, then there’s nothing to perceive in the first place; so it won’t ever be perceived. And no, it won’t just cease to exist the second people (or other conscious creatures) stop perceiving it. (Has anyone ever postulated an actual mechanism by which things are caused to come in and out of existence like that? Seriously, that’s WHOLE GALAXIES winking in and out of existence at the mere turn of a telescope!)
Of course, CATEGORIES such as “table” and “chair” are ideas formulated in our minds; but those are different from the things we perceive and categorize.
I remember it was kinda fun when I was a kid, wondering if things just ceased to exist when I wasn’t looking at them. But that was then, and, well, such ruminations didn’t exactly have any explanatory or predictive value…
Morales @34: “Appeal to the stone” sounds kinda wimpy to me. I much prefer what I call the “appeal to traffic,” which can be easily expressed as “there are no immaterialists crossing busy streets.”
@40– Berkeley summed up his immaterialism as “to be is to be perceived (or to perceive)”, so it wasn’t quite as bad as that.
IMO, Berkeley was wrong about many things, but in interesting ways that challenged the science, math, and philosophy of his time. For instance, calculus today is in part due to mathematicians working through Berkeley’s objections (note: he did not reject calculus outright).
@ John watts, #9: Quantum entanglement works like this. Suppose I have a red playing card and a black playing card. You choose one at random, and take it halfway around the universe. I turn over the card left behind and see it is red.
Has the blackness of the card you chose been communicated to me faster than light?
bluerizlagirl @43: There’s more to it than that, and it has no classical analogue. Each card would have to be in a superposition of red and black. A ‘measurement’ of either card could yield either black or red. Entanglement here means if a measurement of one card yields black, the measurement of the other card must yield red.
The key is that neither card has a definite colour before measurement. If the cards are light years apart, and one is measured to be black, how can the other card ‘know’ it has to be red*?
As I mentioned earlier, there’s no such problem in the Many Worlds interpretation.
Rob Grigjanis@44– can I ask an opinion on MWI? My understanding is that in MWI the universe includes all possible worldlines of a given quantum interaction, but an observer can only experience one of those worldlines. The probability distribution of worldlines is derived from experimental observations of many such events. If this is close to correct, do you think it’s reasonable to call MWI semi-deterministic, in the sense that the set of all worldlines is deterministic but any observed worldline is a random element within that set?
My understanding on the physics side is that the current preferred interpretation of QM is more the ‘decoherence’ model… basically, there is no singular ‘observation’ or ‘measurement’. What there are, are quantum states and entanglement. As long as a quantum state is left to evolve on its own, it will remain in a quantum state. But the more it interacts with other quantum states that can get changed by the interaction (basically the more non-reversible interactions it has), the more it gets entangled with those other states. And all the other states that those are entangled with. And then you get a cascade situation where the original system ends up entangled with so many other quantum states that it would be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for it to be reversible in any way.
Basically, there’s no magical moment of ‘measurement’, just a very short period over which any given quantum state becomes entangled with so many others it’s now a macroscopic state and can’t be stuffed back into the bottle anymore.
Penrose got brought up above… and frankly, Penrose was brilliant on some things, but his consciousness/free will work struck me as just pure argument from incredulity, with enough math to give it a facade of respectability. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t need quantum mechanics to explain consciousness… chaos theory is good enough. Chaos theory shows that ‘deterministic’ does not mean ‘predictable’ or ‘machine-like’, after all. And most arguments over free will are really semantics arguments over the definition.
chrislawson @45: Most sources do indeed call MW deterministic. The ‘universal wavefunction’, encompassing all possibilities, evolves according to some grand wave equation (analogous to the Schrodinger equation), so yeah, the reality consisting of all possible worldlines is determined. But from our point of view, ‘reality’ is just one inherently undetermined thread in that tapestry. So I personally don’t much like the label.
Brings back memories of reading Descartes and his respondents, particularly Elizabeth of Bohemia’s objection. D’s reply was rather, um, hand-wavey.
@13: I took a grad seminar on theories of consciousness. My term essay was on non-human animals, for which I did a fair amount of reading (got an A+ on the course, so I guess the prof thought I knew what I was talking about, FWIW). My feeling at the moment is that some level of phenomenal consciousness is pervasive among the Bilateria — basically any critter that’s got something like a central nervous system (which might leave out bivalve molluscs and adult tunicates).
Book rec: Kristin Andrews, The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition
Conversely, we don’t yet have a theory of leprechauns, therefore I’m keeping an open mind about quantum gravity!
The recent issue of Scientific American on AI incuded two articles by Christof Koch exponding the so-called “Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness” (IIT), and nothing to indicate that many (probably most) relevant experts consider it a load of pseudo-scientific baloney – which I considered badly misguided. IIT starts with a bunch of “axioms” (always a bad sign for something claiming to explain the real world rather than being pure mathematics or logic), and apparently implies that a network of inactive logic gates, provided it has the right topology, is conscious.
To be on the safe side, I assume that every being with a functioning nerve system has consciousness. I am not sure about souls though. If souls are what distinguishes life from non-life, then everything alive must have a soul, including mold, algae, and bacteria. I suspect most believers would disagree.
Maybe most, but not the animists, rietpluim.