I was playing around with another post on the existence of the soul. I was going to line up the various options we’ve discussed, from the concept that ‘soul’ is just another name for ‘life force’ through to the concept that our ‘soul’ is the real us, and the body is just a temporary home. (Neither of these is the Catholic teaching, by the way.)
Then I came across a post of DarwinCatholic’s, which seems to address part of the issue, so I’m posting some of that, instead:
Darwin talks about a scientist who believes we can create a potentially unlimited labour source by scanning people’s brains and downloading them into a computer (whole-brain emulation). Darwin asks:
Why should we believe that the sum and total of what you can physically scan in the brain is all there is to know about a person? Why shouldn’t we think that there’s something else to the “mind” than just the parts of the brain and their current state? Couldn’t there be some kind of will which is not materially detectable and is what is causing the brain to act the way it is?
The scientist replies that we’ve been looking, and we’ve never found anything. Darwin again:
When we say, “Physicists have done all this work, and all they’ve ever found is matter and energy,” you are really saying, “Given the tools and methodology physicists use, all they are able to detect is matter and energy.” But I’m not clear how getting from that to, “Therefore there is nothing other than matter and energy,” is anything other than an assumption.
Is there any valid reason why we should accept the jump from, “Tools that scientists use to detect things can only detect the existence of material things,” to “Only material things exist”?
This seems particularly troublesome given that the project here is supposedly to create an emulation program which can be given a brain scan and then act like an independent human. If our experience of being human is that there is something in the driver seat, something which decides what is beautiful or what is right or who to marry or whether we want rice pudding for lunch today, then unless there is some active, non-deterministic thing within the brain which can be measured by this scan, then what you get is going to be, for lack of a better word, dead.
Read the whole thing and let me know what you think.
Why should we believe that the sum and total of what you can physically scan in the brain is all there is to know about a person?
Because that’s all we’ve discovered thus far.
Why shouldn’t we think that there’s something else to the “mind” than just the parts of the brain and their current state?
Scientists are open to the fact that there could be more to it than that, it’s just that they haven’t got the evidence to prove it.
Couldn’t there be some kind of will which is not materially detectable and is what is causing the brain to act the way it is?
Yes, but as yet we have no evidence to prove it, which is why, on the preponderance of evidence, most scientists do not believe it.
KA
KA, can you not see that this is exactly the arrogance you accuse believers of?
Scientists could say that they do not yet fully understand but they are working on the hypothesis that the material is all there is, or that they are examining the material and are not competent to pronounce on that which is not material, or any one of a number of other perfectly reasonable statements.
Instead, we get:
That is not based on evidence. That’s a statement of belief. Fine. I have nothing against belief. But at least recognise it for what it is!
To look at it another way, the “emulations” might well be conscious and able to participate in the spiritual side of reality. — In which case we would be manufacturing slaves and committing a terible crime.
Yes, though even then we wouldn’t know where the spiritual side came from.
Chesterton:
“Popular errors are almost always right, in that they refer to a transcendant truth that the people who correct them have lost sight of”
It matters not a wit to the issue whether or not we could conjure a conscious being into existence. – We could of course never be certain that we had done so.
The wonderful thing about the truly subjective is it doesn’t become any less of a mystery no matter what we learn about the brain. Ditto with existence, it doesn’t become any less of a mystery no matter what we learn from cosmology.
Naturalistic materialism — that is, the thesis that everything can be explained in material terms, has the great disadvantage of being self evidently false. The solution most of its advocates come up with is to refuse to worry about anything they can’t deal with using their favorite tools.
“Don’t bother me with wishy washy metaphysical stuff, just keep busy with our method and don’t look up from what your working on”
Joyful Papist:
“unless there is some active, non-deterministic thing within the brain which can be measured by this scan, then what you get is going to be, for lack of a better word, dead.”
I think that is a way of thinking about the issue that does not lead anywhere. It’s known in cognitive science / philosophy of mind as the (humorously) “homunculi theory”.
That it, the idea of a little guy inside the brain (our real self) “at the controls” as it were. The other common image is that of “our real self” watching information provided by our sense via the brain – that is the “movie theatre model of the mind”
The problem of course is that the viewer of the movie, and the guy at the controls, are precisely what we’re trying to explain in the first place.
I’ve found a nice visual aid on wkipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cartesian_Theater.svg
Well, Darwin does begin that part of his article with an ‘If’ – but the passage is doing exactly what I’m accusing the scientist he quotes of doing – assuming the answer and begging the question.
Mind and soul may be emergent properties of the hardware (or, in this case, meatware). They still wouldn’t be measurable, but they would be capturable.
On the other hand, mind and/or soul may be something separate and additional to the meatware, but linked to it. In which case they would be neither measurable or capturable.
It would be interesting to find out, but ethical? That’s another question!
Just in case, whole-brain emulation efforts should (in my view) be hedged about with restrictions that allow any emergent being the same freedoms and rights as any other human.
JP,
This is what I said:
————–
Why shouldn’t we think that there’s something else to the “mind” than just the parts of the brain and their current state?
Scientists are open to the fact that there could be more to it than that, it’s just that they haven’t got the evidence to prove it.
Couldn’t there be some kind of will which is not materially detectable and is what is causing the brain to act the way it is?
Yes, but as yet we have no evidence to prove it, which is why, on the preponderance of evidence, most scientists do not believe it.
————
How can that be arrogant? You’re the ones who say that you’d never believe it even if we did prove there was no god.
KA
I can’t remember ever saying that, KA. It would be a silly thing to say.
Sorry, KA – I wasn’t clear. Not your arrogance. The arrogance of the scientist I quoted.
It certainly opens up some potentially nightmarish possibilities, I hate to think what a ghoulish sci-fi writer could do with the idea. (We can’t create heaven in this world, but maybe hell?).
If we took the “emergence” theory simply for the sake of argument, however sophisticated our account of how an “I” is produced, it would never be a complete account, and once the “I” exists it is ontologically a thing in itself, not reducible to its building blocks. There is a sense in which we CAN talk about an “immaterial thing” that transcends material explanation, we just have to be careful about assuming it in advance when we explain things. But when all is said and done the incredible fact of real subjectivity is still a scandal for materialism, advances in the study of the brain simply DEFER facing an irreducible mystery in my view. (An exactly equivalent situation pertains for cosmology).
Sorry about the caps, I can’t do italics.
Or, strangely, I can only do italics 🙂
I’m particularly fond of Bicentennial Man, by Isaac Asimov. There are a number of other stories along the same lines, but that one is a favourite.
BTW, none of this would have bothered St Paul as much as it would bother some later Christians. He knew very well that to be human is to be the material and immaterial inextricably enmeshed. But quasi-gnostic views have always tempted Christians, despite official Church teaching
Yes, it wouldn’t have worried him a bit.
The human story is our story. Who knows what stories God is or will be telling to other sentient beings.
.
Sooner or later, someone – be it Catholic or Atheist – is going to be accused of ‘arrogance.’
So, at least we know arrogance exists. Immaterial though it is.
Toad blames dogmatism.
“We know X exists, though we can’t prove it.”
“We know X doesn’t exist, though we can’t prove it.”
Dogmatism – the insistence on the existence of Dog, without empirical proof.
But the deeper question is, if there is a dog, is he a good boy?
Mr B,
Now that’s just sexist. Why would you assume that canis canis would be male? 😉
KA
A dog-ma is presumably female … a bitch, in fact. Carry on like this and we will get into terrible trouble.
🙂
“Dogmatism – the insistence on the existence of Dog, without empirical proof”
… Dog exists. We have a garden full of outcomes.