As a newcomer here, it's hard for me to tell what rules can and can't be bent. Like most 'Net old-timers (why sonny, I remember the days when you paid $300/mo for a 9600baud SLIP line to UUNet Canada and you were **grateful** to get it) I'm a refugee from the USENET's so I do support the idea of moderator rules.
Dace, I apologise for my first reply to you. Upon reflection and rereading, it comes off much worse than I should have let it become. I have profound disagreements with the Cartesian idea of minds existing separately from bodies. This is at the root of a lot of my problems with both the hopes and aspirations of artificial intelligence and the tenets of certain linguists and philosophers (Roger Penrose comes to mind, Searle is another) who oppose the entire programme of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. That doesn't excuse me for being dismissive and I apologise for it.
Philosophy is not an area where I consider myself a great expert. I've never heard of some of the names being used in this discussion, (like Bhashkar) and I'm going to have to catch up on my reading on several others. I don't exactly know how to approach a philosophical argument while sober - most of my arguing of this type has been in bars. I do know something of the philosophy of science, but that is knowledge of a very unsophisticated and pragmatic nature. Therefore, I apologise if my arguments are somewhat naive.
Now, I am going to compound that error by making light of your arguments. I apologise in advance.
> This is a Cartesian argument. You're saying there are two things--
> mind and brain-- and the mind is "in" the brain. You cannot escape
> the Cartesian trap merely by leaving open the possibility that minds
> don't exist at all.
> If the mind does not exist, then it's a hallucination. But hallucinations
> are a mental property. According to your materialist Cartesianism, this
> hallucination would presumably be located in the brain.
I'm not entirely sure what a mind is, but I firmly believe that human cognition - thinking, feeling, and planning - all take place within the confines of the human body. A lot of people in the cognitive sciences see the mind as some kind of program running on the brain's hardware. I am inclined to disagree - I don't think the brain is sufficiently abstract in structure to make that work. Humans evolved to certain bodies and certain environments. Our mental functioning is a part of our physical functioning, completely dependent on that environment and evolved to meet the needs of survival within it. I don't think people can be separated from their bodies by some sort of futuristic brain scanner any more than I think they have some sort of existence on a separate plane, as Descartes proposed (or at least as I understand him as proposing.)
> This is not evidence to support the notion that the mind exists in the
> brain. Let's take an analogy: If a radio receiver is damaged, then the
> sound that comes out of the radio will be altered or even eliminated.
Does
> this prove that the signal arises from within the radio itself?
Now comes the "making light" part. Let's take this as a scientific hypothesis for a moment. Having already announced an affinity for falsificationism, I'm going to throw your hypothesis before Revolutionary Tribunal of Popperite Scientific Justice and we'll see if we have to send it to the firing squad. :^)
Is this hypothesis falsifiable? I would have to answer no. No matter what functions we can physically locate in the brain, it is always possible to answer that something else is located externally to the brain.
Is this hypothesis productive (by Popper's definition)? Again, I have to answer no. We can't solve any problem by holding it to be true. Instead of incresing our knowledge about how the brain works, we simply relocate the problem to some other plane of existence where we can never test our hypotheses and never gain any knowledge. Materialist cognition, however, has had a great deal of success in increasing our knowledge.
Let's take the example of depression. In some cases, perhaps in most, we can modify or even eliminate a state of depression through the use of certain drugs, which must have a physical impact on a person's body, since they are physical in nature. It is therefor quite a reasonable hyothesis that depression is a physical state. Since something as important to human behaviour and thinking as a state of depression can be located in our bodies, why should we think that other cognitive activities should be outside the brain? Without a reason to think minds exist outside of the body, this just multiplication of entities.
With radios, we can pick up the transmissions on different receivers and measure electro-magnetic variations that accompany certain behaviours of the radio. If we have minds that exist outside of the physical plane, they must interact with the brain in some way. Yet, by definition, this cannot be a purely physical process. It is not possible for us to study this activity. On the other hand, if human thinking and behaviour is a purely physical process, we can make hypotheses about it that are, at least in principle, measurable and subject to experimental falsification.
So, I think we need to call in the firing squad on the whole mind/brain problem and go back to studying the physical processes of cognition.
> This is not a scientific statement. It's an assumption, i.e. an article of
> faith. Why should it be necessary to ask how mentality can persist through
> time? Is there something about time that would preclude this possibility?
> Do we even understand anything at all about time? Do we have any knowledge
> of time outside of our experience? Time is subjective.
Acutally, we do know a bit about time. We know the arrow of entropy only points one way, and that we can, within limits, trade time for space. We also know some really freaky things about it through quantum mechanics.
> The amount of time an event takes is all in our minds. Why should a
> second last a second?
Well, if several different people can measure the time something takes, and get the same results, I'm inclined to think that the passage of time is a real thing.
Phillip K Dick had an interesting definition of reality that I think fits neatly in a basically Popperian conception of knowledge: "Reality is whatever's left when you've stopped believing in it." I can not, by act of will or disbelief modify the passage of time.
> What exactly is a clock measuring? Looks like space to me.
(Digital clocks
> don't measure anything. They just count.)
According to Einstein, space and time form a single continuum, however, that hasn't any bearing on this. Take a look at a barometer. What does it measure? By your standard, a barometer simply measures the angle that its indicator moves through. Yet, you must agree that that is a poor conception of barometers.
> In the objective world, what we
> have is not time, but sequence. Why not compress all the events of a
> sequence into an instant? Or why not stretch them all into an eternity?
> Why does time exist, and why does it exist in the amounts that we find it
> in? Instead of asking why mentality persists through time, why not ask why
> matter *fails* to persist through time.
Order fails to persist in time due to the laws of thermodynamics. Matter more or less persists, althogh that's a question of some controversy in physics.
> Mentality embraces time as a
> whole-- always current yet also retaining the past. Matter remains current,
> yet it does not retain the past. Why is matter temporally impaired? Not
> that I'm complaining, of course. If it weren't temporally impaired, then
> you could never cross the street, because you'd be hit by all the cars that
> have ever driven down it. It's probably for the better that matter is too
> dense to have memory.
I am able to impose infomation on a floppy disk. How does this process differ from matter having memory?
> Again, you are not making a scientific statement. You are assuming that
> there is an alogorithm, and that it is stored. Just because we *could* use
> an algorithm to understand a statement doesn't mean we really do. Why
> assume we think the way computers "think"?
Actually, I don't think people think that way computers do. However, the more important question is why assume a magical process of thinking when an algorithmic one will do?
> Beware of a theory that "doesn't even make sense." It might not make sense,
> or then again it might be the harbinger of a paradigm shift.
Now, I'm going to explain why I don't think anything good has come of Kuhn. Every idea that's too weird to explain, that makes no predicitons and is either unlikely or impossible to falsify dismisses it's oppentents by claiming "paradigm shift." Scientists don't work this way. To his credit, Kuhn knew that. Things that don't make sense still don't make sense, no matter what paradigm you're using. Relativity could have been explained to Isaac Newton and he would have understood it. Quantum mechanics was devised by people trained in the same old Newtonian paradigm. Ideas may be radical and different and may draw on new insights, but they still have to be coherent.
>> Okay, so you're saying minds do exist in the brain? I'm confused.
>> As for language existing "across time" in what sense does it do so that the
>> brain doesn't?
>
> Welcome to the wonderful world of philosophy. I'm not suggesting minds
> exist in brains. "Mentality" and "matter" are both questionable concepts.
> As a former student of physics, you should be aware of just how "strange"
> matter has become. It has so many special rules now that maybe the whole
> thing should be chucked.
And replace it with what? As someone else here said (and I'm going to agree with in my next post) We don't just chuck ideas out without finding replacements. Actually, I don't see that matter or mentality are questionable constructs. They are stranger than one might image, but they do still exist. See my definition of reality from Phillip K Dick above.
> Body and mind are the same thing (and are therefore irreducible to
> each other).
The first part I agree with, after a fashion. I don't think people are big meat robots being driven by software running in their brains. The second, however, doesn't follow from the first, or doesn't mean much depending on how you look at it. Bodies and minds are both reducible to physical phenomena, or rather I think that they are and I see little to be gained in thinking otherwise.
> They seem different only because
> space and time are different. Whatever this "thing" is, the body manifests
> it in space, and the mind manifests it in time. This means that the mind
> exists in time in a way that the body does not.
How does the mind manifest itself in time differently from the way the body does? Both have a temporal extent - lifetime - and both are limited to the physical dimensions of the body.
> As an object, the body
> exists only in the current moment. It has no past, and if we destroy it, it
> will have no future. Let's take, as an example, the March 20 issue of The
> Nation. (I'm a little behind, no thanks to this list!) When did this
> magazine come into being? Well, according to the mast, it was printed on
> March 1. But what if this is a misprint? Or what if that portion of the
> mast had been torn out? I would have had no way of knowing when it was
> printed, because the magazine's history does not inhere to the magazine
> itself. It's full of words, but I can't ask it anything. It has no memory,
> just information that records its past in the present. Its entire existence
> is limited to the present. Furthermore, if I were to burn this issue of The
> Nation, it would entirely cease to exist. This is not the case with
> memories. If a portion of the brain which has facilitated a certain kind of
> memory is destroyed, that memory still exists and can be facilitated by
> another portion of the brain.
Yes and no. Memories can be destroyed. Certainly, I have never heard of anyone recovering a memory from the brain of a dead man. How is the loss of all the copies of a particular issue of The Nation different from the loss of information that accompanies the death of the body? What part of this process can't be understood in purely physical terms?
Here's an example: as a student, I was once required to write a neural network program to do optical character recognition. This is a surprisingly easy program to write. It had about 100 intermediate nodes in total and was trained using a bunch of pictures of numbers. It quickly learned how to recognise those numbers. In what sense is what this program did different from the brain remembering how to recognise numbers on paper? I can remove one or two nodes, and the neural network still "remembers" how to recognise each letter. If I remove too many nodes, it looses accuracy and begins to "forget" the forms of numbers.
How is this different than what the brain does? It's hard to say, since it seems likely that the brain doesn't work in exactly that fashion, but since this very brain-like process can be encapulated in an algorithm, why is it wrong for me to think other brain activities can be described using algorithms?
> Yes, language changes over time, but do the rules that generate it change
> over time? Can we express these rules as equations? Isn't an equation
> ideal and atemporal? You stated that the algorithms by which we understand
> statements are stored. In other words, they exist as an arrangement of
> molecules. So, here's my question: Is it Platonic Chomsky or Atomic
> Chomsky?
My answers in the order you asked the question: yes, but only in evolutionary time; yes, but not yet; yes, but the physical phenomena it models may not be ideal or atemporal; and for the last question, neither. I am a evil reductionist materialist, so is Chomsky. However, even though we can, in principle, derive the principles of climatology from the principles of chemistry and thermodynamcics, it isn't necessarily the best way to try to understand climate. In the same way, even though we ought to be able to derive everything about human minds and human behaviour from neurobiology, it isn't necessarily a good research programme to try to do so. I think Chomsky and I agree on this.
Scott Martens
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