Epiphenonema: can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em

Hampshire College

Philosophy of Mind

Introduction

Frank Jackson, in his paper “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, argues that we could know all the physical facts about the world, yet we would never know of qualia, and that therefore qualia are not contained in the physical world. Furthermore, he claims that qualia are epiphenomenal: that is, that they are caused by physical processes, but do not have any effect on the physical world. In this paper, I will argue that this claim that qualia are epiphenomenal destroys the Jackson’s first argument, and yet, this same argument does not work without epiphenomenalism. I will conclude by discussing the reasons I think that we should continue to believe a physicalist thesis regarding qualia.

Epiphenomenalism

In the second half of his paper, Jackson argues that there is no good reason that one should not accept that qualia might be epiphenomena—caused by physical processes, yet with no causal power whatsoever in the physical world. I do not believe that he establishes the epiphenomenalism as a sound hypothesis.

Jackson lists three major objections that he feels philosophers often have against epiphenomenalism:

1. “It is supposed to be just obvious that the hurtfulness of pain is partly responsible for the subject seeking to avoid pain, saying ‘it hurts’ and so on.”
2. “According to natural selection the traits that evolve over time are those conducive to physical survival. We may assume that qualia evolved over time—we have them, the earliest forms of life do no—and so we should expect qualia to be conducive to survival. The objection is that they could hardly help us to survive if they do nothing to the physical world.”
3. “…how can a person’s behavior provide any reason for believing he had qualia like mine, or indeed any qualia at all, unless this behavior can be regarded as the outcome of the qualia…And an epiphenomenalist cannot regard behavior, or indeed anything physical, as an outcome of qualia.”

The first objection, as Jackson phrases it, is silly, as all arguments resting on “obvious”-ness are, and so his reply to it is not very interesting for our purposes. The second objection betrays a substantial misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, and I think Jackson’s reply to it is correct[1]. The third objection, however, is very interesting, and it is in his reply to this objection that Jackson makes the argument that I now wish to deconstruct.

Jackson’s reply to this third objection is in the form of an analogy, which I will paraphrase. Suppose I read in the New York Times that the mayor of NYC is cutting funding for police. I can reasonably infer that the New York Post also reports on this fact, even though the New York Times and the New York Post may not have any influence on each other. I can do this because I know that the New York Times and the New York Post both report on issues of interest to New Yorkers, that the New York Times reporting that the mayor is cutting funding for police is a good indication that the mayor is, in fact, doing such a thing, that this is an issue of interest to New Yorkers, and that therefore the New York Post has also probably reported on this fact. The analogous case for qualia (which Jackson never explicitly lays out) is that given that my nervous system produces both qualia and certain types of behaviors (analogous to how the mayor’s actions “produce” the stories in both the New York Times and the New York Posts), and that your behaviors are similar to mine, I can infer that you have the sort of nervous system that would also produce qualia.

The difficulty with this argument, as Daniel Dennett (“’Epiphenomenal Qualia?”) points out, comes from the fact that, according to Jackson’s account, qualia have no causal powers in the physical world. Because of this, qualia cannot influence my behavior in any way[2]: otherwise what we have is not epiphenomenalism, but interactionist dualism. For this reason, it is impossible for me to know that I myself have qualia, as their existence or non-existence would make no difference to the workings of my brain.

“Ah,” it may be replied, “but just because qualia do not have any effect on the workings of your brain, they may still have an effect on the workings of your mind, say, your belief that you have qualia.” This is, strictly speaking, a valid move. However, it has troubling consequences: for example (referencing Dennett), if I lost my qualia, I would presumably no longer believe that I had them, but I would still act exactly as if I did. Mental states could no longer be said to influence behavior, as those mental states are potentially influenced by qualia and qualia cannot influence behavior[3]. It seems, then, that the epiphenomenalist is left with two options. One, they could say that qualia influence mental states, in which case mental states cannot influence behavior and my mind is completely severed from the physical world, or two—if we want to preserve the influence of mental states on behavior—that qualia do not influence mental states, in which case it is impossible for me to know whether I myself have qualia. The first option is unpalatable (as I will discuss below), yet if the epiphenomenalist takes the second position, he/she must admit that there is no way for me to infer the existence of qualia in others, since I cannot even use myself as an example!

The Knowledge Argument

“Alright,” says the epiphenomenalist. “Let us assume your analysis is correct. If qualia have no effect on the physical world, then it is impossible for us to know whether we ourselves have qualia. However, there may be many things that it is impossible for us to know about, but which nevertheless exist. For example, there might be creatures that live beyond—and will always live beyond—the area of the universe that we can observe. It would be impossible for us to ever know about them, yet that does not change their existence.”

Against this, many would argue that, in the absence of any sort of evidence, it is useless to speak of some thing’s “existence”. There is a much larger philosophical issue at stake here. Happily, we do not need to discuss this issue now. For if qualia are truly epiphenomenal, then Jackson’s Knowledge Argument—the central part of his paper—completely falls apart.

This argument is as follows. Imagine that there is a neuroscientist, Mary, who for some reason has been forced to live her whole life inside a black-and-white room[4]. Despite this, Mary becomes a specialist in color vision and, eventually, learns everything that it is possible to know about how color vision works: complete descriptions of the physical mechanisms, the functional roles that color perception and various colors play, etc. One day, Mary’s captors decide to let her out of the room. She gets handed a tomato—the fruit of choice for released prisoners—and finds that, despite her omniscience regarding color vision, the color of the tomato is a completely new experience for her. “Aha,” she exclaims, “so this is what ‘red’, the color I know is associated with tomatoes, actually looks like!” She has learned a new fact about color that was not amongst any of the physical facts: what such color is like. This would seem to imply, then, that this fact about what red is like—the quale associated with red—is not part of the physical world.

However, this story does not make any sense if we accept that qualia are epiphenomenal. Firstly, if qualia have no influence on the physical world, it cannot be the new quale that caused Mary to make any sort of exclamation. She would have said the same thing, quale or not. This objection does not mean much, though—it can easily be countered that even though we cannot know from her actions whether or not Mary has learned a new fact, it is still the case that her subjective experience obviously now includes that fact. Perhaps we can imagine that Mary merely thought about the fact that she now had this new qualia, so we don’t have to worry about its effect on her actions. This does not help, though, as we must now ask whether Mary’s thoughts are reflected in the workings of her brain. I.e., could some sort of neuroscientific Laplace’s Demon, who knows everything about the physical structure of Mary’s brain at any time, be able to tell us what she is thinking? I think Jackson would want the answer to this to be yes. Yet, if it is true that qualia can influence Mary’s thoughts, and that thoughts are reflected by brain states, then one of two options become must be chosen: either qualia can influence brain states, and are therefore not epiphenomenal, or thoughts—and this would seem to include all thoughts, not just those specifically about qualia, as any given thought could always have qualia as part of its causal history—are entirely distinct from those brain states, even though they are reflected by them. If we choose this latter option, then the causal relationship between thoughts and brain states, if one exists, must be a one-way street: thoughts are caused by the brain states, but thoughts cannot influence brain states, and are, in fact, epiphenomenal. However, if thoughts are epiphenomenal, then anything that can be influenced by thoughts would have to be epiphenomenal too (otherwise, thoughts could exert some sort of influence on the physical world). This would likely include any mental state Mary might have (thoughts are, after all, quite influential in the mental world). In fact, if the entity called Mary can learn a new fact from experiencing a new quale—Mary can be influenced by qualia—then Mary herself must be an epiphenomenon: something caused by the lump of matter that has just been released from its black-and-white room, but with no ability to influence that lump of matter in any way.

Does the Knowledge Argument work without Epiphenomenal Qualia?

We have seen that if qualia are truly epiphenomenal, and yet I can learn a new fact from experiencing new qualia, then I myself must be epiphenomenal—otherwise, qualia can influence the physical world through me. While there is no immediately apparent logical reason why this view could not, possibly, be true, I think very few would be willing to accept it. If I am epiphenomenal, then, by definition, I have no power over the physical world—not even my own body. I am merely experiencing the effects of processes over which I have no control. In my mind this consequence is a sort of informal reductio ad absurdum, and I think most philosophers would agree[5].

However, perhaps we have been too concerned with epiphenomena. Perhaps Jackson’s Knowledge Argument still works—perhaps he just made a mistake by attaching epiphenomenal qualia to it. Of course, there are numerous objections to the Knowledge Argument not related to epiphenomenalism: perhaps what Mary learns is not a new fact, but a new mode of knowing some fact—not a “what”, but a “how”, or perhaps, as Dennett points out, our reaction to the Mary story merely reflects that we cannot conceive of what it would mean for Mary to know everything physical that there is to know—perhaps, with that knowledge, she would be able to reconstruct the subjective experience of seeing red. According to Dennett’s objection, Jackson is merely begging the question by pre-supposing that knowing all the physical facts will not allow Mary to have the experience. However, I want to take a different tack. I want to argue that, without epiphenomenalism, the Knowledge Argument does not work. Of course, we also just saw that with epiphenomenalism the Knowledge Argument doesn’t work. This means that if I’m successful, the Knowledge Argument will have nowhere to go.

If qualia do exist, but are not epiphenomenal, that is, they do have some sort of influence on the physical world, how does this affect the story of Mary? Let’s go back to before Mary left the room, when she knew everything physical there is to know about color vision. If the qualia associated with seeing color have a physical effect, then this effect would have to be included in Mary’s knowledge. This would lead to one of two options: either qualia are non-physical, in which case Mary’s description of the physical mechanism of color vision would have to have some sort of causal hole in it—that is, she could say only that A causes B, and then B causes something or other, and that something or other causes D—or that qualia is included in the physical description, in which case Mary would already know the subjective sensation of seeing red before leaving the room. Obviously, the second option leads to physicalism (although it is possible that the physical description might include stuff that we have not yet incorporated into our neuroscience), so it is obviously the first option that anyone who wants to say that qualia are non-physical must choose. This option implies that the physical world is not closed under physical causation—that is, that there are non-physical things that can nevertheless have physical effects. Now, there is no prima facie reason why this isn’t a viable option. However, there is also no prima facie reason to choose one of the two options over the other (at least, not until one considers the arguments of those such as Dennett). Once again, we are faced with the problem of begging the question: Jackson must pre-suppose that qualia would not be included in a complete physical description. Of course, those who want non-physical qualia could say that the physicalist is also guilty of question begging. The question is empirical.

Qualia of the Gaps

The question is empirical, but we must ask: can it, in fact, be answered? We move now to the realm of personal opinion. It seems likely to me that there is no possible empirical evidence that could allow us to choose between the two options until such time as we do find a physicalist description of qualia. That is, there is no way that we could determine whether the causal gap we have encountered—the place where we throw up our hands and say “well, something happens”—is, in principle, impossible to bridge. The question now becomes: what assumption shall we make when we encounter a seeming explanatory gap? Do we assume that it is intrinsically inexplicable, or do we assume that we just don’t know enough, or may not even be smart enough? I think the latter is a much more satisfactory option, as it allows and motivates us to continue searching for an answer. Furthermore, the history of science includes numerous examples of the solution of seemingly insoluble problems, problems that were declared to be permanently insoluble. Physicalism has triumphed in the past, and I believe that we can reasonably assume that it will continue to do so.

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[1] Namely, that the fact that some trait exists does not mean that it was evolutionarily selected for. It may, instead, be a necessary byproduct of some other trait that was selected for.

[2] To clarify, in all following discussion I assume that epiphenomenalism defines the inability to influence the physical world as a necessary property of qualia instead of a contingent one. I.e., I take it to mean not only that qualia do not happen to influence the physical world, but that they cannot influence the physical world (at least not in our reality).

[3] At this point a particularly legalistic reader might have begun to object to my characterization of “influence”. “Qualia influence mental states, and mental states influence behavior, but you have failed to show that qualia influence behavior,” that reader may say. To this I would reply: imagine that qualia were taken out of the causal chain. Would this not change the behavior of things further down in the chain? At least one property of influence/causal power is that if in order to give a complete causal account of the behavior of B one must describe the behavior of A, then A influences B.

[4] We may suppose also that, for whatever reason, she cannot see the colors of her own body.

[5] It may be objected I am pre-supposing the existence of free-will here, which would be ironic, as I do not believe in free-will. However, I think the objection is unfounded. Even though we may not have control over our volitions, it still seems very hard to hold that those volitions do not have the causal powers that we feel they do.

Extended Cognition

Hampshire College

Philosophy of Mind

Introduction

In their paper “The extended mind”, Clark & Chalmers argue that the traditional view of cognition and the mind as being “inside the skull” is incorrect. Instead, they argue, cognitive processes—and, indeed, the mind itself—are partially constituted by the surrounding environment. Clark & Chalmers’ position is more than simple externalism—the position that a consideration of external, environmental factors is important in understanding the workings of the mind—it is radical, active externalism, arguing that the external, environmental factors are part of the mind. Clark & Chalmers focus in particular on the ways that belief can be extended. In this paper, I argue that belief is not something that can be, as of now[1], extended, and that memory can much more plausibly be considered to be extended, and I propose a criterion by which we could consider something part of the mind. The mind is extended, just not in the particular way Clark & Chalmers argue for.

Clark & Chalmers’ Argument

In their paper, Clark & Chalmers spend most of their focus on beliefs as an example of extended cognition. Specifically, they introduce us to Otto, a man with Alzheimer’s who has developed a system for keeping track of the various information that he would like to recall: he writes it all down in a notebook, a notebook that is reliably available to him whenever he needs it. When Otto hears that the Museum of Modern Art is having an exhibition he would like to see, and that the MoMA is on 53^rd St., he writes this information down in his trusty notebook. For all intents and purposes, Clark & Chalmers argue, the content of Otto’s notebook constitutes his standing beliefs about the world. Because beliefs are part of the mind, Otto’s mind extends outside his skull, and, similarly, our own mind can be considered extended, since after all we quite often store information outside ourselves and there is no important difference between our writing stuff down in a notebook and Otto doing the same (except, of course, that we do not have Alzheimer’s).

Beliefs, and Why Otto’s Notebook Doesn’t Contain Them

Clark & Chalmers make a distinction between standing and occurrent beliefs, a distinction that is useful to go over before we continue. Occurrent beliefs are the beliefs that one is conscious of at any given moment: for example, the belief that is now brought to my mind that this essay is due today. Standing beliefs are those beliefs we have that we may not be consciously aware of at this moment, but which influence our actions and may, at any time, become occurrent. It is not even necessary that we be conscious in order to have standing beliefs: my standing belief that Mars is red exists even when I am in non-REM sleep.

It is my (occurrent and standing) belief that the contents of Otto’s notebook do not satisfy the definition of standing beliefs and also lack some important properties of such beliefs that are not contained in the definition (though perhaps they should be). Imagine some unfortunate person Alicia, who has sustained brain trauma that has made it very difficult for her to access semantic information about cars. Perhaps she can’t access it at all without some form of rehabilitation[2]. Furthermore, she has no implicit memories regarding cars: she behaves exactly as one who knows nothing about them. However, she does not lack the information: with appropriate help she can access it without having to relearn it. It is simply impossible for her to access it without significant effort. Does she have any beliefs regarding cars before she is able to access the information? It is apparent that she does not.

What is it about Alicia’s case that makes it apparent that she lacks beliefs about cars? First, that standing beliefs not only influence our behavior, but that they can do so without us being aware of them. So, for example, I do not have to consciously recall my beliefs about gravity to become concerned when some fragile object falls, even though without such belief that situation would have no reason to concern me (if I have no beliefs regarding gravity, for all I know the object may become safely suspended in midair). Or, for another example, at any particular moment I may act as if there is or isn’t a God without consciously referring to my beliefs on the matter. (Indeed, it seems that quite often the only times we become aware of many of our standing beliefs is when they are challenged in some way: things aren’t where we expected them to be, someone argues against our basic assumptions, etc.) Alicia’s information about cars cannot do this. And the content of Otto’s notebook cannot do this either: it cannot influence Otto’s behavior without him becoming consciously aware of it. Secondly, and on a related note, standing beliefs can, and often do, become occurrent beliefs automatically and/or without our conscious control. For example, when someone mentions the Empire State Building the belief that it is in New York may occur to me, quite without my willing it to. Once again, Alicia’s information about cars cannot do this and, once again, the contents of Otto’s notebook cannot do this: someone mentioning the MoMA would not cause any occurrent beliefs on the matter for Otto, unless he made a willful decision to check.

There are likely many more important differences between the sorts of things that standing beliefs can do and the sort of things that the contents of Otto’s notebook can do. At least in regards to the two I’ve described, which seem particularly essential, the first by itself is justification for rejecting the description of the contents of Otto’s notebook as “beliefs”, as those contents cannot influence behavior directly.

Memories

So while beliefs can’t be plausibly extended, does Clark & Chalmers’ thesis still hold: can the mind be extended? Is there some aspect of our self that reaches out into the world? I believe that memory fits the bill. When Otto writes down information in his notebook, what is contained in the notebook is not beliefs, but memories.

The distinction between memories and beliefs is perhaps subtle, but it is clear that there is a difference. Memories can do many of the things beliefs do that I described above: they can influence our behavior without us being aware of them, they can be recalled automatically, etc. In the case of memories, however, these properties are not in any way essential. Going back to the case of Alicia, we can ask whether she has memories regarding cars. It is apparent that she does: the memories were there, she just could not access them. What would she be re-accessing otherwise? Memories need be nothing more than the storage of information[3]. (Of course, one could ask whether, without access to information regarding cars, that information, and hence those memories, could be said to belong to Alicia. I discuss this question—that of the ownership of memories—later on.)

Otto’s, and Our, Memories

Memories seem to be much more plausibly extended than beliefs[4]. Information stored outside the body seems to serve the same functional role as memory, for the same reasons Clark & Chalmers argued that such information serves the same function as belief. If we follow Otto around, we will see that where we would commit some information to memory, he writes it down, and where we would consult our memory, he consults his notebook. It is more difficult and effortful, perhaps, for him to access the information in his notebook than it normally is for us to access our memories while in a normal state; however, it is no more difficult for him than it would be for us to access our memories if we were tired, distracted, or had suffered the same sort of brain trauma as Alicia. In fact, even in a normal state the access of our own memories can be difficult: I often find, for instance, that the name of some person is inaccessible to me (despite the fact that I know it) and that I have to perform some sort of effortful memory search to re-access it. There is perhaps a qualitative difference in our memories: whereas my memories “feel” like information that I knew all along, the contents of the notebook would not. But this only reflects the fact that we are accessing the memories through different modalities.[5]

Who’s Memories?

In this discussion, the question may arise: if memories can be stored outside of the body, what makes those memories one person’s instead of another’s? Or, furthermore, what makes some information I’ve written down my memory, instead of just a record of information? I think this is the wrong question to ask. It assumes that my memories are encased in a unitary shell, that one person’s memories cannot be another’s, and that something is either my memory or it isn’t. I propose, instead, as an object of further study, that there is a degree to which a memory can be considered to belong to a particular individual. This degree is determined by a combination of properties, neither of which are necessary in and of themselves, although it is necessary that there be at least one or some combination of them: first, how easily is the information recalled by that particular person, and secondly, how important is the information to the identity of that person? By the first criteria, anything stored “in the head”, which when recalled has the qualitative sense of being “mine”, is indisputably my memory, regardless of how relevant it may be to my identity; and by the second criteria, a record of my life, sealed away so that I even cannot review it, would also constitute my memory. These are the extreme examples—most memories share both properties to some extent. In Otto’s case, the information in his notebook serves as his memory because of its reliability and ease of access, and also because without his notebook he would likely feel that he had lost an important piece of himself. [6]

But What of the Mind?

Perhaps, at this point, the reader will object that while memories may be extended, they are not aspects of the mind; therefore, the mind is not extended. Perhaps the mind is only those operations we perform on our memories; after all, there are many sources of information that the mind draws from in order to function that are not themselves part of the mind—sensory data, for instance, or, if you feel that the senses are part of the mind, the content of that data—and perhaps memory is such a source. To this, I would reply that in my formulation my “mind” is identical with my “self”, and it is our memories that make us who we are: if you remove some memory that is important to my conception of self, I would not longer be the same person, and, therefore, I am not of the same mind. Therefore, memories are part of the mind.

I think the difficulty lies in thinking of “the mind”: of the self as being one unitary thing, that if extended is extended in its entirety. Instead, I propose as a question for further study that the mind is made up of several different parts. Our conscious awareness is one such part, but our memories are also important. This non-unitary structure explains how outside sources of information can be memories and part of the mind, even though our recall of them is qualitatively different than that of memories stored “in the head”: the conscious aspect of our mind recalls them in different ways. Of course, now we need to ask how we determine what, exactly, can be considered part of the mind. There are many important factors that allow us to think—the beating of our heart, etc. How do we determine which of these should be considered part of the mind? I propose that the factors that are part of our minds are those that contribute functionally to the workings of the mind in such a way that they cannot be replaced without changing the identity of that mind—regardless of whether these factors are inside the head or not.

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[1] I don’t consider it at all impossible that beliefs could be extended through the use of neural prosthetics in the future, as long as they satisfy the requirements listed later on in this paper.

[2] That, for the purposes of this thought experiment, does not include relearning the information.

[3] Although one can argue about whether and what certain types of stored information can be considered “memories”. I do not discuss this here.

[4] Furthermore, it seems much more natural to extend them this way: colloquially, we talk about a book of recollections, or a box full of memories, or even of places that remind us of the past as somehow containing the memories themselves (“this house is full of memories”), in a way that we do not for beliefs. While this fact about natural usage of terms does not show that it is in fact wrong to speak of beliefs as being extended (although as seen earlier it seems that it is), it does lend support to that assertion, and it make it even more likely that memories can be plausibly extended, as the idea does not seem too far from our natural intuitions about the use of our terms.

[5] One objection could be raised related to recent research on memory: it seems that when we recall memories, we re-imagine and rewrite them. Otto does not do this with the contents of his notebook (or, at least, it isn’t necessarily part of the process), therefore the contents are not memories. I would reply by saying that this fact about memory as it happens to work in no way describes an essential property: it could have turned out that the recollection of memories did not work this way, yet we would still call it memory.

[6] It is also possible for entities other than individuals to have memories: collective memory is allowed for, if the information is easily accessed by and/or important to the identity of the people as a collective.

Mind-Brain Identity

Hampshire College

Philosophy of Mind

What is identity theory? In this paper, I explain it, and explain why it is flawed, namely, because it does not account for multiple realization.
Identity theory is the metaphysical doctrine that, while epistemically distinct, brain states and mental states are ontologically identical. By this I mean that mental states and brain states are the same thing: the only difference is in how one perceives, thinks about, and describes this thing. The fact that brain states and mental states are identical is an empirical observation: it is not known a priori. An analogy that will perhaps make this whole idea clearer is the case of lightning, and its identity with electrical discharge. It is known that lightning is electrical discharge; however, the way we perceive, think about, and describe lightning is completely different from the way we perceive, think about, and describe electrical discharge. Furthermore, we would not know that they are the same thing if it had not been experimentally confirmed (ala Benjamin Franklin and his kite). Similarly, evidence from cognitive neuroscience leads to the hypothesis of identity. Identity theory is a reductionist theory; it posits that the description of any higher-level phenomenon can be reduced to a description of lower-level phenomena without a loss of information, i.e., mental states can be reduced to brain states, which, being physical states, are further reducible to the laws of physics.

Identity theory is, furthermore, a theory of type-identity: it claims that any particular mental state type (such as pain) is reducible to a particular brain state type (such as C-fibers firing)—indeed, that it must be that brain state type, just as lighting must be electrical discharge. This is distinguished from token-identity, which claims merely that any instance of some mental state is reducible to some sort of brain state. Type-identities, though not without their difficulties, are much easier to clearly define than token-identities. Take, for example, the claim that “pain is C-fibers firing”. If something is pain, it is C-fibers firing, and if it is C-fibers firing, it is pain—plain and simple. Token identities are fuzzier: for example, what is it about this object in my hand that makes it a mug? If we want strict definitions of our token-identities, we must be able to say that those things, and only those things, that satisfy a certain set of criteria (has a handle, holds liquid, etc.) are tokens of a certain type. We must either posit functional types—i.e., that all tokens that are representative of the type X have the particular combination of functions Y, and that all things that have the particular combination of functions Y are X—or physical types—all tokens that are representative of type X share a particular physical trait Y, and all things that share the physical trait Y are X.

The advantages of a reductionist theory like type-identity theory are apparent: it gives our experience a sort of explanatory, causal, and even ontological coherence and closure. When things are reduced, the method of explanation for any particular phenomenon is no longer different from the method of explanation for any other phenomena: they can both be explained in terms of the same underlying process. Causally, reductionism implies that there are not separate chains of causality for different phenomena, i.e. that there are not mental processes going on according to their own laws of causality separate from the physical processes and their laws of causality. And ontologically, reductionism reduces the number of posited kinds of entities (minds, heat, etc.) down to, potentially, one.

There is, however, a problem, which may be fatal for identity (or, specifically, type-identity) theory, and, indeed, reductionism in general—multiple realization, i.e., the fact that the same higher-level system can be implemented on entirely different underlying physical systems. For an example, consider an algorithm (a set of rules for how to perform some function). Let’s say the rules of this algorithm are to take an input number and add 2 to it. This algorithm can be run on multiple, almost incomparable physical systems. For example, I can do it in my head, I can do it with a pen and pencil, I can design a contraption out of Tinkertoys to do it, I can create a program on my calculator to do it, it can be done on a Mac, and it can be done on a PC. In fact, there are a potentially infinite number of ways that this one algorithm could be implemented, with nothing physically similar about any of them.

Similarly, there seem to be multiple ways in which a mental event, for example seeing green, can be correlated with brain events—after all, the way that you see green might be quite different from the way I see green. In fact, in order for the description “seeing green” to be useful, it must describe these multiple ways: otherwise, the only thing that could be described as truly seeing green would be me, as everyone’s brain is different and I am the only person with the exactly the physical brain state that I have when seeing green! The case of C-fibers being pain would seem to be easier: C-fibers are, after all, a particular type of neuron shared by us all. But if pain is C-fibers firing, does that mean that a petri dish full of C-fibers and nothing else would experience pain? If there is any conclusion we do not want our theory of mind to entail, it is this. This would be true of any mental event: if one attempts to identify it with some very specific thing (the activities of a type of cell, the presence of a chemical, etc.) one must claim that that thing, all by itself, is the said mental event, a claim which leads to absurdity. Pain, instead, seems to identify with various events interacting amongst different parts of the brain, the specific organization of which is once again going to be less and less similar between any two people. The problem becomes even more difficult when considering the supposed mental lives of non-humans. Monkeys, dogs, reptiles, etc., have brains that are physically more or less different from ours. Identity theory would seem to suggest that these creatures cannot have the same sort of mental events we do[1]. And these creatures at least are biologically similar to us: what about computers or aliens?

In fact, everything that has mental states would seem to have to have distinct types of mental states! Our ontologically simple theory has failed us: instead of pain, for example, we now have my pain, your pain, Sue’s pain, dog pain, alien pain, computer pain, etc. Instead of simplifying our ontology, identity theory requires us to posit a new type of mental state for each possible case. This is no good—we would like a theory of mentality that not only explains the nature of mental states we happen to have, but that also has some degree of generalizability, allowing us to say something about the mental states of others in a way that such states can be related to our own. Identity theory has very weak explanatory power in this regard—it would be as if we had a theory of biology that didn’t allow us the make comparisons between different species.

Is there a solution, wherein we can avoid dualism, keep physicalism, and not run into these problems? I believe so, and I believe the answer lies in a sort of functional type-identity theory that I glossed over earlier. Let’s go back to the algorithm: I said that it was the same algorithm regardless of the physical implementation: but what makes this the case? It is that the algorithm is performing the same function. Similarly, a mental event is a sort of function processing information in a certain way. While there may be difficulties with this theory, it seems to me to be one worth pursuing.

---

[1] I must qualify this statement, because identity theory has, occasionally, done the exact opposite. If we identify pain with C-fibers firing, and another creature has C-fibers, then they feel pain: we can therefore infer that animals such as, say, cows experience the same kind of pain we do, as the physiology is quite similar. This argument, unfortunately, does not hold under scrutiny, since, as said earlier, pain identifies the interaction of several parts of the brain which is going to be very different between us and other creatures.

The Turing Test

Hampshire College
Philosophy of Mind

The Turing Test involves the following procedure: a person, the interrogator, is talking to both a machine, designed to imitate a human, and to an actual human. (The communication is entirely through text.) The interrogator’s job is to determine what is the human and what is the machine. If no interrogator can determine which is which, the machine is judged to be thinking. Is this accurate? In this paper, I will argue that it is, because we can only judge thought based on behavior, and if the behavior of the machine is identical to a human’s but the machine is not thinking, we must doubt the existence of human thought.

When discussing the Turing Test, it is important to make a distinction between what we can measure and the “inner nature”, so to speak, of that which we are measuring. The discussion then involves two questions: by what criteria are we to judge something as thinking, and is that thing, in fact, thinking?

In regards to the first question, let’s begin with considering the method that we, in fact, employ, before moving on to the method we ought to employ. I.e., how is it that we naturally determine that some particular thing in our environment is thinking? A first answer to this question might be that we ascribe thought to other members of the human race, and nothing else. This will not do, however, as we often say that certain humans lack thought: definitely if they are brain dead, for instance, and more controversially if they are mentally handicapped or a child. And although there are no non-controversial examples of non-humans thinking in our experience, we nevertheless have no problem imagining that non-human beings, such as extraterrestrials—that have no genetic or physiological resemblance to us (or, in some cases, no physiology at all)—could nevertheless think. Also, it seems that we often ascribe thought to non-human animals of which we do have experience, i.e., “the dog is thinking about where to hide its bone”. Perhaps in this later case we use “thinking” as a figure of speech, a sort of shortcut for “acting as if they are thinking”. But why then do we not say that when we talk of other humans “thinking” we are using the same shortcut? After all, we do not perceive thoughts (except for our own)—we perceive their manifestations, the acting-as-ifs. For those who need to be convinced of this fact, consider the following thought experiment.

Suppose that someone had been rendered completely incapable of moving any part of his/her body, either through nerve damage or some sort of outside force: furthermore, the parts of his/her nervous system that we believe are responsible for thought have been hidden from us in some way (perhaps encased in some material which is opaque to any sort of scan), so that we cannot determine whether they are active or damaged. (We could also suppose that there has been no damage to the nerves carrying signals to their brain, if this supposition is deemed necessary.) It is undeniable that this person could be thinking: victims of temporary paralysis can describe the experiences and thoughts they had while they were paralyzed. But it would be completely impossible for us determine whether this person is, in fact, thinking.

So how do we naturally determine whether other things in our environment are thinking? The examples given of brain-dead individuals and aliens make it apparent that this judgment is not ultimately made on the basis of belonging to a certain species, human. It may be initially made on that basis—we probably have an instinctual tendency to ascribe thought to any other human we meet and ascribe a lack of thought to any non human (for example, on encountering a brain-dead individual we might assume he/she is aware until we find out their condition, or in meeting a sufficiently strange alien we might assume it’s just a non-thinking creature until we learn more about it)—but it isn’t ultimately made on it. Instead, we make this judgment based on whether the thing behaves in a way that appears to indicate thought.[1] Furthermore, the example in the thought experiment above makes it clear that this is the only way that we can make this judgment; and, pragmatically, it is the way that we ought to make this judgment. This means that for a machine that passes the Turing Test we should judge it to be thinking: it is behaving exactly like a human, human’s think, therefore it is behaving in the sort of way that indicates thought—and if from these facts we do not infer that machine is thinking, then we are holding it to a different standard than the other things about which we make such judgments.

Now we move on to the second question. Does our judgment, made for pragmatic reasons, reflect actual reality? Is the machine, in fact, thinking?

It is useful now to define exactly what we mean by “thinking”. Turing’s definition[2] is that the sort of thing that thinks is the sort of thing that passes the Turing Test, a definition which is useful for him as a computer scientist interested in what computers can do but not very useful for philosophers of mind, as the definition makes it tautological that a machine which passes the Turing Test is thinking. For our purposes, I propose the following definition: something is thinking when the part of it responsible for thought is manipulating models of the world (which are not physical models), and when it has a subjective, qualitative awareness of the models and manipulations that it is performing on them. The first part of the definition comes from the fact that one of the things that distinguishes thought from non-thought is that while the latter consists of observably deterministic responses to force and/or stimulus and in solving problems purely by trial and error behavior (randomly producing behavior until something works), the former consists of considering the best course of behavior before doing anything, and this consideration is made by the thinking thing modeling the situation and then running through the possible solutions, noting what those different solutions do within the model—observationally, this means that something that acts as if it thinks can look at a puzzle and then proceed to quickly (relative to trial-and-error) perform the solution. This is how we, who are thinking things, behave, and it is a major part of the acting-as-if by which we judge that other things are thinking. However, the second part of this definition is important, as there are many things that manipulate models of the world that may not be thinking: any computer would fall under this category. The second part of the definition is more essential to our question, as we are making the distinction between what we can measure and the “inner nature” of that which we are measuring. Because of this, it is important to specify that the subjective awareness be qualitative, i.e., that there is something that “it is like”, so to speak, for the thing to be aware of what it’s doing—as computers can monitor and analyze their own internal processes and still not be considered to be thinking.

However, the fact that computers can do this might mean that there is something “it is like” and we just do not realize it. For this reason I will not ask the general question about what sorts of computers could think, but the specific question of whether the sort of computer that can pass the Turing Test thinks; I’m concerned with whether passing the Turing Test is sufficient for allowing us to infer thought, not whether it is necessary.[3]

We are now ready to answer the question: is the machine that passes the Turing Test thinking? We have shown that if we are to judge whether it is thinking the way that we judge whether other things are thinking, we must judge it to be thinking. And based on the facts considered so far, I believe that our judgment would be accurate. The machine that passes the Turing Test is the machine that perfectly imitates human behavior. If it is not, in fact, thinking, then humans that pass the Turing Test would not have to be thinking either. Thinking would not have any explanatory force or necessary connection to behavior, and we therefore would have no reason to assume its existence. Furthermore, it could be argued that if the machine is not thinking, humans must not be thinking, as we have a case of two things that are behaving in an identical manner and therefore it would seem that any phenomenon produced by one must be produced by the other (even if the phenomenon looks different: for example the same program run on my Mac plays music, whereas if it were run on a mechanical computer it does not). If the machine that passes the Turing Test is not thinking, then solipsism becomes a truly viable option: and this, I think, is a conclusion no reasonable person wants to accept.





[1] One who objects to this assertion might bring this up the case of the paralyzed patient who, while not exhibiting any behavior, nevertheless exhibits certain brain activity from which we infer that he/she is thinking. However, the only reason that we can make this inference is that that sort of activity is normally associated with thought-exhibiting behavior: if we had not observed such a correlation, we would not know what, if anything, the brain activity indicated. We can also imagine that a neurological (or whatever word we’d use for the study of the part of the alien involved in cognition) examination of a thinking alien might reveal completely different sorts of activity. Therefore, my assertion can be easily extended to say that, in cases where we cannot make judgments based on behavior, we can infer thought if the thing we’re dealing with exhibits some observable phenomena that is normally correlated with thought-exhibiting behavior amongst examples of that thing (if examples of that thing engage in thought-exhibiting behavior).

[2] “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, pg. 3

[3] Indeed, it is not necessary: our paralyzed patient from the earlier thought experiment would not pass it, although he/she is thinking. It is also possibly that a beings with a higher level of thought than our own would fail it: the sorts of things they might say might appear to us to be total gibberish.

Analysis "They're Made of Meat"

Hampshire College
Philosophy of Mind

Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made of Meat” raises the dual issues of the seeming disconnect between our physical baseness and our mental capacities, and of human chauvinism. In regards to the first question, we are made to see the seeming absurdity in modern cognitive neuroscience, in that “meat”, the same stuff that constitutes a hamburger, is understood to give rise to the mental life that we value so much. It is interesting, however, that the other, normal, non-meat creatures that the narrators discuss are also physical beings, although of a different sort than the “meat” on earth. Therefore, intelligence is still ultimately based in physical processes, such as the dynamics of an electron plasma. Because of this, “Meat” does not in fact suggest that the mind cannot be the result of physical processes, unless it makes that suggestion through the irony of having beings whose minds arise from physical processes alien to us finding the physical processes that our minds arise from bizarre.
This brings us the second issue, that of human chauvinism. We, humans, assume that if we find intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they will be, fundamentally, the same as us. (There are even those, such as John Searle in his essay “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, who seem to suggest [however vaguely] that mental processes can only arise from the sort of physical processes that happen in the human brain.) The story’s challenge to human chauvinism only goes so far, however, as the minds of the narrators and the non-meat beings they encounter still seem to work the same way as our own, just with a different underlying physical structure (which brings up a whole new set of issues and questions about the relationship between the mind and the physical to be discussed at some other time). Indeed, their minds are similar enough to our own that contact is possible, and while it seems we might not find them if we were looking for extraterrestrial biology similar to our own, it still seems that we would recognize their activities as carrying the stamp of intelligence (the situation is the same for the narrators of the story in regards to us: they could recognize the radio signals we produce as coming from intelligent beings). As such, “Meat” does not really confront us with the possibility of minds that are unrecognizable to us as such; we are not presented with odd situations such as Jupiter having a subjective life that arises out of the dynamics of its atmosphere, or a light bulb experiencing being on or off, or the interactions of the entire human race producing a mind of which we are as unaware and incapable of understanding as individual neurons are of our own minds. Of course, this would be an extraordinarily difficult story to write; and it would be similarly difficult, possibly even impossible, for us as humans to find such minds. And so, while being careful not to look only for physical life that is like our own, in regards to extraterrestrial intelligence we would have to rely on a sort of Turing Test: are the sorts of things it’s doing the sort of things we do? If so, then regardless of how exactly it works, we would seem to have discovered a mind elsewhere in the universe.

This is a project I'm doing for my "Freewill and Determinism" class at college. I'm trying to get the opinions of non-philosophers (as well as philosophers). Please check it out and send it around! Thanks! (if the quiz doesn't appear, please visit this link.

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Sermon for Church: The Symphony of Science

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I did a paper last semester on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. As I continued to write the paper late into the night, what began as a last-minute attempt to squeeze out the minimum of 5 pages turned into a 10 page monster. I blame Beethoven. There were so many little things to pick up on, so many elegant ways in which everything fit together, in which the entire piece was planned. For some, perhaps, this would reduce the joy of the music. Not for me. For me, every time I hear that piece, it will mean even more to me. Understanding it makes it even more sublime.

Music has a peculiar power of the human spirit. It can make us feel things in ways nothing else can. Especially words. The most inane poetry can reach us deeply if made into music. I mean, really, “in the desert you can remember your name, ‘cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain”? Because of its power, music has often been the vessel for important messages, that can resonate with you in entirely new ways. Such was the case when I first saw one of the videos of “The Symphony of Science”. I have always had a deep sense that there’s something profoundly spiritual about a scientific understanding of the natural world, yet when I watched “The Unbroken Thread” it hit me powerfully. It probably helped that it was near midnight. But also the words of scientists expressing their deep reverence for the universe, put to music, had a stunning effect.

This reverence is one I share. People have commented that the language I and those such as Carl Sagan use to describe our feelings about the universe are suspiciously similar to that used by religious people to describe their experience of god. They are absolutely right. The difference is that we take God out of the picture. Why can’t we admire the universe not because we view it as the work of God, but because it is simply something worth being admired? I feel that the natural, material world is so full of mysteries and beauty that it is almost a waste to concern ourselves with spirits and angels and gods. This is the hypothesis I’d like to put before you: that there is nothing beyond the natural, material world. No spirits, no gods, no karma, no qi. I call it a hypothesis because I honestly do not know enough to say for certain that such phenomena do not exist. But I want to show why, for me, they are unnecessary for filling the spiritual need.

Let’s start close to home. Really close to home, in fact. Let’s start in our heads. Put your fists together like this. Your brain is slightly lager than this. An utterly insignificant lump of jelly, when you get down to it. Yet there’s something bizarre about this lump of jelly: it contains you. Everything about you. All your memories, the maps of where you’ve been, your personality, your perception of me. It contains our ideas. If you are an artist, it produces your creations. If you are a writer, it is capable of inventing and keeping track of entire worlds, worlds with other personalities in them, vast fantasy landscapes contained within this small lump of matter. Think about it. Really think about it.

Think about how, when you look at the night sky, you are looking at the source of every particle in your body. Every ancient particle. You are made out of matter that has existed since nearly the beginning of time. You are constantly exchanging that matter with the universe around you. At a subatomic level, there is nothing, really, separating you and the rest of the universe. Think about how the little dots you see are stars many, many times, sometimes thousands of times larger than our earth, which is so huge we cannot even perceive it as round. Some ofwhat you see are galaxies, which are collections of billions of these starts, which look close together in a picture, but are really light-years apart. A light year is about 6 trillion miles.

Think about each individual cell in your body. The complex machinery, honed over years of evolution. And we can’t even see them. We are made of trillions of them. Think about all the other intricate machines that constitute life. (give examples)

Think about the pebble you kick down the street. How that pebble is also made of particles that have been around for nearly eternity. How it’s made of minerals that were forged in the collision of dust particles and rocks that created our earth, burped up from the inside of our earth, and hewed by billions of years of geology.

Think about a rainbow. How it is a product of photons produced by nuclear fusion deep within the sun, which take thousands of years to push their way to it’s surface, finally escaping and zipping across millions of miles of space, before colliding with water droplets in the atmosphere and getting refracted into all sorts of different wavelengths, then traveling through the air to your eyes, where the hit your retina and produce electrical sensations that travel to your brain and are perceived as color, and then spread out and activate your capacity for pleasure, for memory, for imagining the entire cosmic play I just described.

Some people are scared to think about it. For some reason, they believe that to understand beauty is to kill it. Those such as John Keats accuse Isaac Newton of unweaving the rainbow by explaining it. Why should discovering the intricate, elegant laws that underlie the world make it any less beautiful? If an artist attempts to portray the meaning of a rainbow, it is beauty: if a scientist attempts the same thing, it is somehow ugly. If someone can appreciate the wonder and beauty of a scientific worldview, they are somehow seen as a little weird: a nerd, an egghead. So many people don’t want to hear about the fascinating underpinnings of everything they experience, about the new ideas that scientists are constantly coming up with. The scientist is often the fool on the hill who sees the world going round, but who no one wants to listen to. I must admit, I am not entirely sure why. Because while people may think that because I live in a world understood it must be dull or dry, nothing could be further from the truth. I live in a world that constantly amazes and fascinates me. I am never without a source of stimulation if I want it: not when I can consider the mysteries of my brain, not when I can look at the sky and imagine space stretching out into infinity, with pricks of light that are galaxies incomprehensibly huge, not when I can feel my connection with everything around me. Not when I can look at the familiar as though it was unfamiliar, as something new and exciting. Science let’s us look a little more deeply into things. It isn’t a methodology or collection of facts. It’s an attitude. It’s an appreciation that beauty understood is even more beautiful. To understand the symphony of science is only to make it more sublime.

A Debate about God, and involving Evolution, Biblical Accuracy, Meaning, Comlexity, Morality, Chance, and whether water is needed for alien life.

(This is an extended comment [it was long enough that I wrote it as a note] I wrote in response to comments on one of my friend's notes on FB, along with the discussion that followed. The responses are to comments by 3 people. It has been edited for grammar, spelling, and clarity, and also to protect people's identities [I use initials for their names] [and also removing anything that is irrelevant to the discussion or to anyone outside my circle of friends]. Obviously the context of the comments I'm responding to is missing, but I doubt that's essential.)

"Nothing backs up evolution except the claims of people who don't want to believe the Bible. Thing is if there is evolution we would have seen it happen and proven it but we haven't and we can't so I think its BS."
We have. On a miniscule scale, of course, but that is what we would expect given the fact that our observations are made over relatively miniscule periods of time. I can give you several examples if you want them. Plus there's the fossil record, which has holes, but that's to be entirely expected: the amount of life that becomes fossilized and where those fossils survive to the present day is a small, small fraction of all the life that was, and by no means a necessarily representative fraction either.
Or there's the vestigial body parts, such as the remnants of legs in some types of whales, or the muscles that allow some people to wiggle their ears--indicative of some former, forgotten use.
Or the inductive conclusions you can draw from the similarities and dissimilarities between species, which was obviously noticed on a subconscious level even before Darwin (as he pointed out, naturalists had always classified species as if they were related to each other, even though that was not their intention. After all, we have "Families" of animals.)
Or the evidence from the genetic code.
Shall I go on?
Oh, and also the fact that natural selection is obvious if you just reason it out: if for various reasons some animal (and human) babies turn out a bit better at surviving and reproducing than their peers, which you can't deny is the case, then they are going to leave more offspring. That's basic natural selection in a nutshell, and many of its intricacies logically follow.

"I would rather live my life a fool than end it going to hell. So you can choose which you would rather do, take a chance and roll the dice or play it safe as a fool."
"I'm saying that I would rather be a fool and believe the Bible than doubt it and go to hell. The odds are not for me. I am all for acquiring knowledge."
You're rolling the dice anyway. You could believe in the wrong God and still be screwed. Besides the number of Gods people around the world believe in, there are also an infinite number of hypothetical Gods, and even if most of these Gods would be merciful even if you didn't believe in them exactly, that still leaves an infinite number of Gods who would not be (and infinity divided by infinity is impossible to determine). So not only are you rolling dice, you have no clue what your odds are (and they are no better or worse than an atheist's).

"There are facts on god, you just need to believe the facts are facts. It's called the Bible for a reason."
Many theologians throughout history have denied this, pointing out that God, if it does exist, must be so utterly transcendent that it is impossible to understand it in any human terms, and all Biblical language describing it must therefore be highly figurative. And it's obviously not true that "the fact are facts", since there are so many different religions and individuals that dispute or interpret the facts in highly different ways, and claim incontrovertible Biblical support for their views.

"If we can't trust the Bible how can we trust any historical books? All the books we see in the library are put together by a group of people or one author by using supposed historical sources--how do we know these sources aren't fictitious?"
They could be. However, the historical record has been corroborated by the independent examination of numerous records (at least ideally, more on that later): some parts of the Bible have, some haven't, and even those that have the miraculous details have not. Also, it is recognized that the historical record can contain human error, and is therefore open to revision and improvement in light of new evidence: again, your beliefs regarding the Bible imply this cannot be done. Also, why do you trust the Bible by default?

"...and you know what, I am NOTHING without my lord God. Without him what is there worth living for? There is no real ownership of anything, there is nothing to look forward too, except to attempt to please yourself in your life and then bring your kids into a world with only the hope they will live to suffer before they die?"
"To me if there was no God I wouldn't be here right now. (I would be dead) God gives me hope and something to live for, otherwise everything I go though would be somewhat of a meaningless pain."
There are many other possible sources of meaning in life. The search for meaning itself can provide meaning. Here is a document of my own search: www.dervine7.blogspot.com.

And even if there is no meaning without God, that is not evidence that he exists, simply evidence that it's useful to believe in him in order to provide meaning.
Let me digress for a moment and point out that certainty and sensation of God don't prove anything. Members of Al Quaida are as certain of their God as you are of yours. And sensations can quite obviously be illusory.

"...for example, it seems as if even through examining one cell we find evidence of a creator. Everything is so complex--how could it possibly have formed in the life of this planet? There isn't enough time."
There's 4.5 billion years, 15 billion (they think) if you count the entire history of the universe. Timescales utterly inconceivable to human beings (4.5 billion is 4,500 times the entire lifetime of humanity, and many more again times the existence of civilization).
Also, the observable universe has 3 to 7×10^22 stars (3 to 7 followed by 22 zeros, or--if stars were money--more than 30 to 70 billion stimulus packages :P ). There's probably more universe than what we can observe. So even if the chance is teeny-tiny of complex life appearing, the amount of stuff over the amount of time given means that it's probably going to happen at some point. All you need is a molecule capable of making copies of itself that manages to make enough copies of itself so that it doesn't die off, and then the molecules that happen to be a little better at surviving and reproducing, which seem to be the more complex molecules, make more copies of themselves than their fellows, etc. etc., you have life.

"If god doesn't exist what is my motivation to be good? I could be the worst scum on earth, and in the end nothing horrible would happen. And if I was ever tortured for being a scumbag, all I would have to do to stop my tormentors is die."
"When I eventually have kids I plan to love them and to teach them my religion so they have a chance of going to heaven. If there was no God, then why should anyone not kill?"
So you're only a good person for entirely selfish reasons, i.e. to avoid punishment? That's kind of disturbing. Actually, I believe people, and the basis of morality, are ultimately selfish too, but I think this selfishness has much less to do with the avoidance of punishment than with the achievement of reward, that reward being the feeling of pleasure that comes from doing good and helping other people--an instinct that exists to insure the continued existence of humanity, and that we must nurture so that it can accomplish its end.
It is also obvious to me that morality is more fundamental any particular religion, since there are moral systems such as the Golden Rule that exist in completely independent religious traditions (such as Judeo-Christianity and Buddhism)--many of which have conceptions of God so different from ours that we would be unlikely to consider it "God" at all--and even independently of any religious tradition at all (Humanism). If many different things possess attribute X, but are different in other attributes, it is natural to assume that X is the more fundamental attribute.
Will your children really be true believers if they did not have to choose to believe? The beliefs will not be truly theirs: they will be yours, given to them. They will not have earned them for themselves.
It is possible to develop ethical systems without God in them, based on logical principles: once again, you can see my own explorations in this regard (link above).

(the following is the discussion that followed this note:)

T C:

"Members of Al Quaida are as certain of their God as you are of yours."
I love this. Because not only are they both certain of their god, that particular god is exactly the same one... Jews, Muslims, and Christians all worship the God of Abraham. And yet, somehow, they all believe that their God is the right one, and the God of the other two is wrong...

That one, I just don't get.

F H:

There is zero merit in being good in hope of the reward of heaven, and out of the fear of hell. Besides, what would lead you to think that the rest of us would allow you to get away with being rotten? Who is that yoyo? To paraphrase Twain: Hell is where the interesting people will be. So I'd prefer to go there.

T C:

You know, as a well-educated Christian, I see so much wrong with this, I almost want to write my own. He's wrong on almost all points from both the scientific and the theological point of view. A decent Christian Education class might do some good.

Me:

Most of the comments are R D's, except for the first and second to last, which are by C M and A K, respectively. All more or less good friends (not more or less good, more or less friends, i.e. I only sort of know some of them :P ) that I (obviously) disagree with--and I'm all the happier for it! (It makes life much more interesting.) [note to commenters on this blog: please don't attack my friends.]
I'm wrong or the person who I'm responding to is wrong?

T C:

The person you're responding to is wrong... I didn't realize there were multiple originals.

You're fine, at least from the debatable starting point of the non-existence of God.

My response would be very much like yours, except for the inclusion of several Biblical verses and theological arguments showing where they're original premises are ALSO completely false.

Me:

I don't think I actually claim there isn't a God (although it's obviously implied)--just that their reasoning for its existence is flawed.

R D:

[...]and what I have said is what I believe to be true. I am not saying that I am nice because God exists, I am nice because I LOVE my God.

Me:

I know their your beliefs, I'm just debating. I've always been of the opinion that it is important to examine beliefs thoroughly and adjust them if reason requires. I don't want to attack anyone's beliefs, I just want to get them to do what I've stated above.
OK, but that was not how you put it in your original comments.

F H:

Yow! Well, it is perhaps a fine point - I start at the null hypothesis - There is no God - all I ask for is evidence. - The bible, both Old and New Testament, is not evidence for much of anything, except that the jews were good at syncretism and adapting other peoples mythologies when it suited them. And the fact that so many people believe isn't evidence either. To date I have been presented with 0 evidence for the existence of any deity. So I'll be your atheist.

A K:

I do believe in natural selection--I think in that way we have "evolved"; however, I really don't believe we came from monkeys. I heard someone actually mathematically disproved such evolution but apparently it's so engrained in the minds of scientists.
But even if we did come together by some sort of collision in space..where did the universe come from? Are there other universes? How do you explain the fact that somewhere around 98 percent of matter is unaccounted for?

Me:

We do share over 99% of our genetic material with chimpanzees.
I wouldn't be surprised if the mathematical proof you're talking about has to do with entropy, and if it is, it's nothing new (my physics teacher discussed the flaws in its reasoning). I can't think of any other ways someone could attempt to disprove human evolution mathematically.
If God created the universe, where did God come from? If you say nothing created God, and he just exists of his own accord, why can't I say the the same about the universe? It's as if someone said a billion is the biggest number, but when someone else said the biggest number is a million, the first person told them that that makes no sense. They're both arbitrarily choosing limits on how big number can get, and similarly the two of us would be arbitrarily choosing limits on the chain of causality.

F H:

Good questions, and science is working on them. Darwin knew that evolution was real, it was the only rational explanation of the evidence. But he didn't know the mechanism, and admitted that to be an argument against his theory. (Darwin actually stated, in print, that there were several arguments against his theory, and should any of them prove true, it would be a serious blow. To date, NONE have proved true). And no other theory was (is) better at explaining the evidence. But just because they didn't know the mechanism was no reason to stop working and say "God did it." There HAD to be a mechanism, and along came Crick and Watson and the discovery of DNA.

Me:

There might be other universes: we don't have enough evidence right now to know for sure, but my understanding is that such a possibility is actually very likely.
The situation is the same in regards to dark matter: we don't have enough evidence yet to reach a definite conclusion. We probably will eventually though, which points to the danger of invoking God to explain things we don't understand: when we do finally understand it, God ends up having one less thing to do. To go back in time to the extreme, it used to be believed, for instance, that there were no laws of nature, and everything happened due to God's (actually, at that point, several gods') direct interference. There is a trend here, and I think if the idea of God is to survive, we'll probably have to stop considering it as an explanatory causal agency altogether--even in regards to morality--lest the deeper, most sublime aspects of the idea of God disappear along with our need to invoke it in explaining things.

(If at the moment anyone is thinking "wait, I thought you were an atheist", I call myself an atheist because if I said I believed in God, my conception of God would be so radically different from anyone else's that I might as well say I own a dog when I actually own a cat.)

R D:

Organized religion is the third or fourth step in the transformation from roaming tribes into true civilizations, so whether you do or do not believe in God he has played the biggest role of any being ever

Me:

I don't deny that. In fact, I whole-heartedly agree with it. But it doesn't prove his existence, and it's also entirely possible that God is a stage of development that is highly important, but that we need to move beyond, or at least alter significantly (kind of like how our parents play the biggest and most important role in our childhood, but there comes a time when if we are to become healthy adults we must sever the bonds to some extent, or at least alter our relationship to them [it's a very imperfect analogy]).

Another analogy would be the several ideas about the world around us that as children we NEED to have in order to be healthy, and are important to our development, but that we must alter and/or discard as we become older.

Me:

Found another "mathematical disproof" you might have been talking about. Once again, it's nothing new, and the reasoning is flawed.
"When one is dealt a bridge hand of thirteen cards, the probability of being dealt that particular hand is less than one in 600 billion. Still, it would be absurd for someone to be dealt a hand, examine it carefully, calculate that the probability of getting it is less than one in 600 billion, and then conclude that he must not have been [randomly] dealt that very hand because it is so very improbable." -John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences

By the way, T C, I'd be really interested in seeing the biblical and theological points you talked about.

T C:

For some reason, people fail to read the Bible with historical perspective. Which is strange, since parts of it were written 4,000 years ago.

For instance, the creation story. If you read it, you'll notice that there are actually two of them. there's the one everyone knows in chapter 1. and there's the one in chapter 2.

The one in chapter 2 was written first. It's the actual Hebrew creation story from forever ago. The first one was written much later, during the Babylonian occupation. It's the Babylonian creation story. The Babylonians say that the Sun (they're main god) created the world in seven days. The jewish version has God creating the world in 6 days (he rested on the 7th), and on the first day, he created the Sun. I.e., The Hebrew God is better because he created the babylonian god, AND he did it faster.

It's essentially a political story, aimed at improving the morale of the Jews while they're being scattered around by the Babylonians.

Additionally, of course, is the more standard, but still sound reasoning that the Hebrew "day" in that creation story can be translated as "era". In which God created the world in 6 eras. And if you do that, it actually follows science pretty well. First came the sun and the stars. Then came earth, and sea life, and plant life, and animal life, and people.

Also worthy of note is that no one believed in the 6 day creation until the 1800s, when the fundamentalist christians started. The jews treat it as figurative. The early christians, the roman catholics, and the mainline protestants all followed suit. So this whole 6,000 year old earth theory is only about as old as the theory of evolution by natural selection anyway.

A K:

There is enough historical evidence to prove many of the events in the Bible did indeed occur. I don't really think that people can really prove scientifically that God exists, but I'm not sure how you explain my sightings of angels and demons.
There has to be a concept of truth; otherwise it would just be a figurative word.
And it seems there's something to Christianity: its the most persecuted, yet most popular religion worldwide. People die horrendous deaths everyday for it. I'm not saying that other people of other religions don't die for their God...but it is the Christians who have been the most persecuted.
I also think the reasoning behind evolution is flawed. And many of the evolutionists like Darwin and Aristotle either renounced or modified their theories before their deaths; a fact that most of the public has not acknowledged.
Also, we are actually closer to pigs genetically than monkeys.
If we formed from some sort of collision, how are we so extremely complex? How is it that the more we study the brian the less we really know? Why is it that even though the earth is densely populated with life there aren't there even the smallest life forms on other surrounding planets?

Me:

Again, not the miraculous details, and the historical evidence is speculative as late as after the Exodus, I believe; T C would probably have a better idea. There's historical evidence of Troy, but we don't believe in the Greek gods that Homer says caused the events there.
People sight all sorts of things--especially when worked into a state of religious ecstasy, which isn't dissimilar to hypnosis (not a bad thing in the slightest, don't get me wrong)--and if you were Indian you'd have sightings of elephant gods with multiple arms. We also have a knack for recognizing patterns that aren't actually there, especially when we're looking for them; one of the reasons people who believe in ghosts are much more likely to see one, when what they're really seeing is perhaps a random bit of mist that happens to vaguely resemble a human being.

Truth can exist independently of God: there is just as much reason for truth to be self-sufficient as there is for God to be self-sufficient.

What reasoning do you think is flawed?

Even this site denies the veracity of that claim.
Also, scientists are always modifying their theories: that's what makes it science.

I could find no specific info on the pig similarity, but I'm sure it's false. The reason they are looking to use pigs for organ transplants is because they are readily available: however, they have to be genetically modified so that they are not rejected by the host body. Everything I came across said primate-human transplants would be much easier because of genetic closeness, but it isn't feasible.

The article I linked to has answers to many of the complexity arguments.

We don't even have enough evidence to know for certain whether or not there's life on mars, the closest planet and the one we know the most about (though it seems like they're pretty sure there isn't).
Also, if life is very unlikely (which we also don't know: we have an entire universe to check out before we can reach that conclusion), it's to be expected that it would only pop up very rarely, just like 10 coins coming up heads is only going to happen, on average, every 1,024 fair coin tosses.

T C:

There is also, of course, the common theory that life requires liquid water. Water is only liquid for a very small range of temperatures (180 degrees) So far, liquid water has only been discovered on one planet - Earth. However, there's a small chance for life on Mars, and a lot of excitement over the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We've only been landing on other astronomical bodies for 40 years, and only landed on two of them.

How many single-celled organisms do you expect to find with a telescope?

Me:

Plus, the only reason we assume life requires liquid water is that that's what life on earth uses. Which, of course, points to the other problem with looking for life on other planets: we can only look for stuff that resembles what we know.
So do you have any info on historical confirmation of biblical texts? (as per my earlier comment)

T C:

Historical accuracy of the bible is iffy. There are some places where we take it as historical fact, because it's the only surviving record. There are other places where it's definitely wrong. The historic records from 2000BC are extraordinarily sketchy, but we do know generally that the Israelites were slaves of the Egyptians, and were put to work building the pyramids (the whole making bricks thing). There is no Egyptian record of the plagues though, for instance, so again with the miracles not being substantiated. So we have historical records of some things going all the way back into the later parts of Genesis.

There's also some pretty strong evidence of a great flood in the Mediterranean, since the Jews, the Greeks, and several other ancient cultures have myths of one. Noah's Ark itself is probably not true, but works as a serviceable myth to explain the existence of rainbows.

But there's also obvious historical flaws. At the beginning of Luke, (which was only 2000 years ago, and we have pretty good historical records from the time), it says "And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was the first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria)" Lk 2: 1-2. The problem is, that according to Roman governmental records (which are pretty accurate), Cyrenius wasn't governor of Syria while Augustus was Caesar.

So for the Old Testament, it was long enough ago, that with the shortage of records, we can only verify certain very broad things, but no specifics. And in the New Testament, we can verify some things, but prove others completely false. It leaves the Bible on sketchy territory as a historical document.

And of course, one must remember that it is heavily biased toward Israel. If the Bible were to be believed, the Israelites were one of the major middle eastern powers in ancient times. But if that were the case, some of the other major powers (Egypt, Babylon, Assyria) would have mentioned SOMETHING about them. In reality, they were a loose band of small tribes in Canaan, and pretty damn unimportant.

Me:

And you'd think the Egyptians would be kind of concerned about the plagues if they happened :P
Aren't some books in the Old Testament contemporary and/or recently historical accounts, though?

Who's the earliest biblical figure we can be pretty sure existed?
By the way, I'd still be interested in seeing your theological/biblical citation responses to R D and A K (as a contrast to my secular responses).

F H:

OK. To date, there has been ZERO evidence of the Exodus found anywhere. It is impossible that two million people could wander around the sinai for forty years and leave NO evidence. Now as regards miracles and other things - Every day many people pay good money to see Penn and Teller do the impossible. These people are EYEWITNESSES and they KNOW that they are being deceived, they're LOOKING for the TRICK, and they STILL don't see it! Just imagine how easy it is to fool someone who WANTS to believe.

T C:

@ F H: I didn't say there was evidence of the exodus. I said there was evidence of the Jews being slaves. There is a big difference. but it is worth pointing out for anyone that missed it, so thanks.

@ [my] various questions: Some of the books are "histories". The historicalness of them, however, is a little iffy, just like the rest of it. Kings, Judges, and Samuel in particular are supposedly history of the jews. Many of the minor prophets are just more detailed sections of those books (Ruth, Ester, Daniel, for example).

The newest parts of the Old Testament were written a few hundred years before Christ. The oldest are written records of oral tradition (which, by tradition, were set down by Moses, but that's almost certainly BS).

The first person in the Bible that we know existed would probably be David or Solomon (almost certainly one of the Kings, as they're important enough for other people to write about them) but I don't happen to know that particular tidbit.

T C:

"I would rather live my life a fool than end it going to hell. So you can choose which you would rather do, take a chance and roll the dice or play it safe as a fool."
"I'm saying that I would rather be a fool and believe the Bible than doubt it and go to hell. The odds are not for me. I am all for acquiring knowledge."

The two aren't mutually exclusive. My pastor was a science teacher. I feel like by reading any of my previous posts, it's pretty obvious that it's pretty easy to believe in God and science. Christianity doesn't have to make you a moron.
Also, you don't go to hell for doubting the Bible. Doubt and unbelief are very different things. Doubt is like being sick. Unbelief is like being dead. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Sickness is a necessary part of life. Doubt is a necessary part of faith.

"Without [God] what is there worth living for? There is no real ownership of anything, there is nothing to look forward too, except to attempt to please yourself in your life and then bring your kids into a world with only the hope they will live to suffer before they die?"
"To me if there was no God I wouldn't be here right now. (I would be dead) God gives me hope and something to live for, otherwise everything I go though would be somewhat of a meaningless pain."
There's no reason to own anything if you believe in God. "It's harder for a rich man to see the Kingdom than it is for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle." In Acts, the early disciples pooled all their posessions and distributed them each according to his need.
What is there to look forward to when you believe in God? The afterlife. so why not just die? If you don't believe in God, there's LIFE to look forward to.

And again, what does God give you to live for? Oh yeah, death. You're faith has GOT to be something more than "when I die, I get a reward." Otherwise, it's nonsensical.

Pain is not God testing you. It's life. God is just what helps you through the pain. People ask "Why did God let Katrina happen?" God didn't LET it happen. It happened. It was not God punishing New Orleans. God then used Katrina as a way of glorifying him - all those mission trips to rebuild, and the people coming together. that was what God had to do with Katrina.

"If god doesn't exist what is my motivation to be good? I could be the worst scum on earth, and in the end nothing horrible would happen. And if I was ever tortured for being a scumbag, all I would have to do to stop my tormentors is die."
"When I eventually have kids I plan to love them and to teach them my religion so they have a chance of going to heaven. If there was no God, then why should anyone not kill?"
So are you saying that since God didn't say not to kill anyone until the 10 commandments, everyone was totally free to kill everybody all the way through Genesis? You've got to be kidding.

People don't kill each other because it's good for society. The human race wouldn't survive very long if everyone killed everyone. so it's in the interest of the collective good that people don't murder.

Not to mention of course that you don't go to Heaven for being good. you go to Heaven for believing in God. Paul knocks this home again and again throughout his letters. We are human beings, and as human beings, we are imperfect. We cannot follow the law.

So Jesus died for our sins. Let's put this another way that may knock it home a little better. Jesus, who was perfect, and completely innocent, was executed (i.e. got the death penalty). He did it so that no one else would ever have to die again - ever. All we have to do to live forever is believe that Jesus sacrificed himself for us. That's ... Read Moreit. nothing more. and nothing but unbelief can get in the way of that. In theory, you could go out and kill everyone with no consequences whatsoever.

You're not good so you can go to heaven. you're good as a way of thanking god for being so damn nice to you, even though you're a nasty, sinful, dirty wretch, and don't deserve it at all.

One last comment.
"It's called the Bible for a reason."
Yes it is. "Bible" is from the Greek for "Holy Book." It's not a history book. It's not a manual for living. It's not a science book. It's a holy book. It teaches you about a religion.

So if you want to learn about Christianity, read the Bible. If you want to learn about science, read a science book. If you want to learn about history, read a history book. But don't expect The Origin of Species to teach you about Christianity, and don't expect the Bible to teach you about the origin of species. It's silly.

M M:

A K, a couple things I'd like to say to some of your comments back a while ago:
"I really don't believe we came from monkeys."
Science people, correct me if I'm wrong, but we did NOT evolve from monkeys. Monkeys and us evolved from a common ancestor wayyy back in the evolutionary chain.
"And it seems theres something to Christianity: its the most persecuted, yet most popular religion worldwide. People die horrendous deaths everyday for it. I'm not saying that other people of other religions dont die for their God...but it is the Christians who have been the most persecuted."
You may be right - I can't prove that for certain. But if the Jews don't beat the Christians they come pretty damn close (and probably the reason Christians are most persecuted is through sheer force of numbers - since there are a whole bunch of Christians, even a small fraction of them being persecuted is still gonna be a pretty big number).

Me:

It's also true that at many times in history Christians were the most persecutING group.

(and more often than not persecuting other Christians)

Me:

Something I meant to say earlier: early monotheists were called atheists by the general pagan population, both because they denied the existence of the pagan gods, and also because their God was so different from those pagan gods that the pagans didn't recognize it as being any sort of "god" at all.
We all deny the existence of numerous gods: I just deny the existence of God along with them.
Let me rephrase that: I don't personally believe in the existence of God as a causal entity of any sort whatsoever, with a personality, plans, and intentions. As I said, I would have no trouble saying I believe in God, except that most people's definition of that word would be totally wrong for me.

A K:

If you're serious about finding out wether there is a god...ask God if he's real and if he really is then he'll show you. But only do it if you realy want to know.

A K:

Christians founded this country and we came here to have freedom of religion..for over 1000 years people in europe were burned and hacked to pieces and tortured of they didnt abide with what the pope/Catholic church wanted. It's because of Christians that you have the freedom to be..agnostic.

Me:

The first people who came here--Columbus, the Spanish--came here for money and adventure. Many if not most of them WERE Catholic. They also decided that they were going to convert the Native American population, which they did in the manner you described: horrifically.
The pilgrims (who were one of the later waves of Europeans) came to America several decades after the Reformation--at which point they promptly denied religious freedom to anyone who didn't agree with THEIR theology and dogma. (And treating the Native Americans badly in the meantime, by the way.)
By the way, is the Catholic Church not christian?
More than a few of the Founding Fathers were only nominally Christian: Franklin, who doubted the divinity of Christ, and Jefferson, who edited his own version of the Bible with all the miraculous details left out, are two examples.
There is also no mention of God in the Constitution. Zero. Zilch. There isn't even any mention of "Providence" or anything like it. The only mention of anything religious in nature is in the First Amendment's prohibition against endorsing an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This is despite the fact that many people at the time were specifically pushing for there to be religious language in the Constitution.
Despite all this, I do not deny the debt agnostics, atheists, and humanists owe to liberal Christians of the past. Humanism grew out of Christianity, particularly it's social philosophy. And we owe our religious freedoms to liberal Christians, of course. I don't really see how that has any bearing on the discussion, though. Even if our country was founded by Christians, so what? It was also founded by slave-owners--which has no bearing on our attitudes towards slavery (just to be clear, I am NOT comparing Christians to slave owners in any way!).

Me:

I guess where that makes me a little nervous is what "if you really want to know" means. Cults will also say "don't believe us? Just open your mind and find out how great we are...if you really want to know." Or people will say ghosts exist, and the reason you never see them is because you don't believe in them. I.e., you have to accept something is true in order to determine if it's true in the first place--begging the question.

F H:

When My Aunt Mary Ann was a teacher in northern maine she grew to hate the tent revivals.
The tent revival would come to town. there would be singing and praying and "healing". In the days that followed there would always be children who returned to school no longer wearing their glasses. When asked why, Mommie or Daddie would reply "they don't ... Read Moreneed glasses any more, because they had been "healed". " Needless to say, in all the years she taught, NOT ONE of those children had been healed. Their vision was still bad. They STILL needed glasses. And now she had to fight with the parents to convince them little johnny HADN"T been healed, and really needed to wear his glasses in order to see. The glasses had often been thrown away. Gods evident reluctance to actually heal the children of the true believers, is just one of many many things that cause me to not believe.

T C:

That seems like a lame reason to not believe. (not that i really have any better reasons for believing in the first place, mind you). God doesn't go around healing all the believers. Never did. Would it be a miracle if it happened every day? (Not to mention that I mange to associate tent revivals with scam artists.) I like to believe that God heals people that actually need it. If you can see fine with glasses, why do you need your eyes fixed?

F H:

It's just one of many, many reasons. There's the evidential argument from evil, The euthyphro dilemma. The fact that 19 men of faith hijacked four planes and flew them into buildings with the express intent of killing as many people as possible, believing it to be a supremely moral and righteous act. They believed just as fervently that the Qu'ran is the word of god, as I'm certain you do that the bible is. How do you know that you're right, and that they are wrong?

T C:

I don't. The Crusades were fought by thousands of people that believed that to a supremely moral and righteous act too. I don't believe they were right, just as I don't believe those 19 men were right. But I'm not about to say that 19 fanatics with a misinterpretation of the God's word mean that God doesn't exist either. (and I take it to be a misinterpretation because my God is their God, and we all at least agree that God says killing is wrong).

Fact of the matter is that there's no substantive evidence either way, so everyone is free to believe what they'd like. In the absence of concrete evidence, nothing can be proven about anything.

As I said, I have no better reasons for believing in God than you have for not believing. I just have to take it on faith, just as you do, in the lack of any evidence.