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This kind of research shows how deeply dualism is ingrained in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Picture this: You decide to move your hand, then you move

This kind of research shows how deeply dualism is ingrained in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Picture this: You decide to move your hand, then you move your hand. An observer using fMRI or somesuch notes that they observe neural activity before you report making the decision, and they can even predict where and how you are going to move from observations of neural behavior. If you are a materialist, how is this surprising? Of course neural activity precedes you being conscious of making a decision and taking an action---that is the mechanism by which you make a decision and take the action. What does it have to do with free will? Not very much, if anything. It only becomes a problem if you are a dualist and believe any conscious, free-will-iferous activity must come from an a-material, imperceptible "soul".

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
I think a modern dualist would view this as hardware vs software. If all were able to measure were voltage levels on a CPU, you would say all computing is inevitably bound to changing electrical voltages/currents. However, you would miss out on all the math and algorithms and the beauty and richness that is software. A dualist might see the “soul” as the software that the physical brain executes. Of course, if all you have access to is brain electrical measurements, you see no distinction. However, if you look inside yourself with introspection, you will see a richness of ideas, thoughts, motivations that actually drive the physical brain.
- esperent 6y ago
  > A dualist might see the “soul” as the software that the physical brain executes. I don't think so (although there are multiple definitions of "dualist"). In the software/hardware analogy, the software still exists, physically. It's described directly in electrical impulses going though the hardware. For dualists, the soul is strictly non-physical.
  - weinzierl 6y ago
    The hardware is the plastic, the metal and the silicon, software is ultimately the fleeting electrical signals. That's how I see it too and a pretty common view, I think. What I read from the parent comment is different though. It's more akin to electricity belongs to the physical world, software is the non-physical.
- pjc50 6y ago
  The question of interest is are these two separate things (dualism), or the same thing seen at different scales? The Earth is beautiful when seen from space: you can see entire oceans. That doesn't mean that the ocean isn't made out of water molecules or that we must impute some special non-physical "oceanness" to it.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  Introspection is an untrustworthy self-narrative. Repeating a bunch of language that you've been told describes why people behave as they do is indistinguishable from the introspection you describe. GPT-3 could definitely do it convincingly. edit: I'd recommend Eric Schwitzgebel for discussions about introspection and consciousness http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  Hardware + software is a physicalist view. Dualist view is material hardware + astral hardware, ironically they don't quite believe in software.
  - finghin 6y ago
    There are plenty of property dualists around: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#ProDua https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#ProDua
    - mannykannot 6y ago
      Hardware + software would not qualify as property dualism (at least as described in your link) unless one was asserting that the behavior of the software could not be completely accounted for in terms of hardware operations. In that article, the example of vitalism is apposite.
Bluestein 6y ago
"free-will-iferous". (New fav word :)
dvt 6y ago
> how deeply dualism is ingrained in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. It's not, though. Dualism has been a dying breed for at least a century now. Academics like Chalmers are rare outliers.
- finghin 6y ago
  The commenter's point isn't that philosophers generally endorse dualism, it's that even those who claim to be monist materialists, etc. tend to possess latently dualist assumptions or conceptions of what consciousness is. Chalmers in particular pokes at this issues and challenges physicalists to either totally reimagine their understanding of the mind (cf. Dennett among others), which is mired in semantic and other difficulties, or perish. Moreover, dualism is certainly no longer dying (or dead)—this is confirmed both by reading the literature and surveying departments. It's certainly not as unusual as it once was.
AgentME 6y ago
I think a lot of people get mixed up by the idea that "physics determines your actions", as if that's contradictory to "you determine your actions". I love the way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-physics https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-p... puts it, that "you are within physics" necessarily bridges these two explanations.
- ajnin 6y ago
  I think there is a bit of circular reasoning here. If by "physics" we mean the way the universe works, then of course we are "within physics", and we determine our actions in exactly the same way as the rock falls to the ground : because this is the laws of physics that those things happen. The actual distinction is what people attribute to the term "physics" itself. For some it is exhaustive and it encompasses everything that exists, but for others it is not and they allow "something else" to intervene. At which point we're well within the realm of theological arguments.
  - codebolt 6y ago
    Physics is a set of mathematical relationships that aims to describe how things behave. The important distinction seems to be whether one believes that all behaviour of all things everywhere can be reduced to a simple mathematical model, or if there could be instances where something behaves non-computationally at a fundamental level.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > "you are within physics" necessarily bridges these two explanations. But, it doesn't. The reason dualism and free-will are so deeply tied up is because “you are within physics” does not provide a means by which “you” can be the root cause of anything; if you are merely within physics, then you are simply a product of material causes and can only be (to the extent physics is deterministic) a fully-externally-determined phenomenon between the original cause and other fully-determined phenomena.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
taneq 6y ago
Exactly! All of the "YOU don't actually choose to move your hand, it's THIS PART OF YOUR BRAIN" stuff makes no sense. What do you think 'you' are if not your brain plus your body?
- smeej 6y ago
  Or for that matter, what existence do you imagine "you" have apart from your body? Even the distinction between brain and body is artificial. Your brain isn't "you" in some special way that the rest of your body isn't. The whole unity is "you."
  - taneq 6y ago
    Yeah, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out, some day in the far future when we actually understand the human body properly, that we're doing all sorts of interesting processing in the peripheral nervous system and even chemically outside of nerve cells.
    - ta988 6y ago
      We already have hormones and signaling coming from other organs, and those react to other hormones and signaling, so thats possible. I ahve the feeling focus has been put on fast communication of states (potential in the synapses, neurotransmitters) but we know also about slower processes (astrocytes energy management) that also impact brain function deeply, so I would clearly not rule peripheral impact out.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >Your brain isn't "you" in some special way that the rest of your body isn't. Well, in some way it is, in that they can cut your hands and feet, and you'll still be you. And perhaps if they could just put your head/brain in a jar, and you were still coscious, you'd still consider yourself you...
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      Or if they slice your brain down the middle in put it in two different jars, would they both think of themselves as you? Then, if you keep carefully cutting small bits off of those hemispheres, when would they stop being you?
forgotmypw17 6y ago
But who is making the decision, is it "you", or is it the fabric of the Universe itself, the quarks, which is making the "decision" for you?
- mcguire 6y ago
  Yes, in a sense. :-) I'm making the decision, because it is difficult to assign the decision to any small group of things at a lower level. The quarks are part of that process, but are just doing quark things.
red75prime 6y ago
> If you are a materialist, how is this surprising? It's not. But there are other things, which should be surprising to a materialist: we don't see neuronal firings in visual brain areas. We see some kind of an abstraction over those firings. Do abstractions exist alongside the matter?
- mcguire 6y ago
  If you boil water, you see an amount of water changing state from a liquid to a gas, not individual molecules simply gaining momentum.
  - red75prime 6y ago
    Do I understand correctly that there's a physical mechanism, which creates something akin to a phase boundary from electrochemical brain processes and that "phase boundary" happens to be me and my perceptions?
    - mcguire 6y ago
      Well, no, what I was trying to say is that the behavior of individual water molecules or the electrochemical activity in the brain is not necessarily descriptive of the overall pot of boiling water or personal behavior.
      - red75prime 6y ago
        If we accept that there's nothing but physics, then there are no boiling pots or humans. There's only a complex multi-particle wave function.
Balgair 6y ago
Aside: fMRI is under quite the firestorm lately for use as a tool of mental processing. It's a great tool for head trauma or other medical diagnostics. But for interpreting the brain's activity, it's not what it's been billed as. The now classic issue is the 'Dead Salmon' experiments in 2009 out of Dartmouth. That paper was a lightening rod and the arguments are yet to die down; the field is in flux (pardon the pun). https://www.improbable.com/2020/06/05/fmri-brain-research-the-dead-salmon-has-lots-of-company/ https://www.improbable.com/2020/06/05/fmri-brain-research-th...
- mcguire 6y ago
  Yes, I was hesitant about that, but I was operating under the assumptions of the described experiments. :-)

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

I think a modern dualist would view this as hardware vs software. If all were able to measure were voltage levels on a CPU, you would say all computing is inevitably bound to changing electrical voltages/currents. However, you would miss out on all the math and algorithms and the beauty and richness that is software. A dualist might see the “soul” as the software that the physical brain executes. Of course, if all you have access to is brain electrical measurements, you see no distinction. However, if you look inside yourself with introspection, you will see a richness of ideas, thoughts, motivations that actually drive the physical brain.

esperent 6y ago
> A dualist might see the “soul” as the software that the physical brain executes. I don't think so (although there are multiple definitions of "dualist"). In the software/hardware analogy, the software still exists, physically. It's described directly in electrical impulses going though the hardware. For dualists, the soul is strictly non-physical.
- weinzierl 6y ago
  The hardware is the plastic, the metal and the silicon, software is ultimately the fleeting electrical signals. That's how I see it too and a pretty common view, I think. What I read from the parent comment is different though. It's more akin to electricity belongs to the physical world, software is the non-physical.
pjc50 6y ago
The question of interest is are these two separate things (dualism), or the same thing seen at different scales? The Earth is beautiful when seen from space: you can see entire oceans. That doesn't mean that the ocean isn't made out of water molecules or that we must impute some special non-physical "oceanness" to it.
pessimizer 6y ago
Introspection is an untrustworthy self-narrative. Repeating a bunch of language that you've been told describes why people behave as they do is indistinguishable from the introspection you describe. GPT-3 could definitely do it convincingly. edit: I'd recommend Eric Schwitzgebel for discussions about introspection and consciousness http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
Hardware + software is a physicalist view. Dualist view is material hardware + astral hardware, ironically they don't quite believe in software.
- finghin 6y ago
  There are plenty of property dualists around: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#ProDua https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#ProDua
  - mannykannot 6y ago
    Hardware + software would not qualify as property dualism (at least as described in your link) unless one was asserting that the behavior of the software could not be completely accounted for in terms of hardware operations. In that article, the example of vitalism is apposite.

Bluestein 6y ago

"free-will-iferous". (New fav word :)

dvt 6y ago

> how deeply dualism is ingrained in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. It's not, though. Dualism has been a dying breed for at least a century now. Academics like Chalmers are rare outliers.

finghin 6y ago
The commenter's point isn't that philosophers generally endorse dualism, it's that even those who claim to be monist materialists, etc. tend to possess latently dualist assumptions or conceptions of what consciousness is. Chalmers in particular pokes at this issues and challenges physicalists to either totally reimagine their understanding of the mind (cf. Dennett among others), which is mired in semantic and other difficulties, or perish. Moreover, dualism is certainly no longer dying (or dead)—this is confirmed both by reading the literature and surveying departments. It's certainly not as unusual as it once was.

AgentME 6y ago

I think a lot of people get mixed up by the idea that "physics determines your actions", as if that's contradictory to "you determine your actions". I love the way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-physics https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-p... puts it, that "you are within physics" necessarily bridges these two explanations.

ajnin 6y ago
I think there is a bit of circular reasoning here. If by "physics" we mean the way the universe works, then of course we are "within physics", and we determine our actions in exactly the same way as the rock falls to the ground : because this is the laws of physics that those things happen. The actual distinction is what people attribute to the term "physics" itself. For some it is exhaustive and it encompasses everything that exists, but for others it is not and they allow "something else" to intervene. At which point we're well within the realm of theological arguments.
- codebolt 6y ago
  Physics is a set of mathematical relationships that aims to describe how things behave. The important distinction seems to be whether one believes that all behaviour of all things everywhere can be reduced to a simple mathematical model, or if there could be instances where something behaves non-computationally at a fundamental level.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> "you are within physics" necessarily bridges these two explanations. But, it doesn't. The reason dualism and free-will are so deeply tied up is because “you are within physics” does not provide a means by which “you” can be the root cause of anything; if you are merely within physics, then you are simply a product of material causes and can only be (to the extent physics is deterministic) a fully-externally-determined phenomenon between the original cause and other fully-determined phenomena.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago

taneq 6y ago

Exactly! All of the "YOU don't actually choose to move your hand, it's THIS PART OF YOUR BRAIN" stuff makes no sense. What do you think 'you' are if not your brain plus your body?

smeej 6y ago
Or for that matter, what existence do you imagine "you" have apart from your body? Even the distinction between brain and body is artificial. Your brain isn't "you" in some special way that the rest of your body isn't. The whole unity is "you."
- taneq 6y ago
  Yeah, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out, some day in the far future when we actually understand the human body properly, that we're doing all sorts of interesting processing in the peripheral nervous system and even chemically outside of nerve cells.
  - ta988 6y ago
    We already have hormones and signaling coming from other organs, and those react to other hormones and signaling, so thats possible. I ahve the feeling focus has been put on fast communication of states (potential in the synapses, neurotransmitters) but we know also about slower processes (astrocytes energy management) that also impact brain function deeply, so I would clearly not rule peripheral impact out.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Your brain isn't "you" in some special way that the rest of your body isn't. Well, in some way it is, in that they can cut your hands and feet, and you'll still be you. And perhaps if they could just put your head/brain in a jar, and you were still coscious, you'd still consider yourself you...
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    Or if they slice your brain down the middle in put it in two different jars, would they both think of themselves as you? Then, if you keep carefully cutting small bits off of those hemispheres, when would they stop being you?

forgotmypw17 6y ago

But who is making the decision, is it "you", or is it the fabric of the Universe itself, the quarks, which is making the "decision" for you?

mcguire 6y ago
Yes, in a sense. :-) I'm making the decision, because it is difficult to assign the decision to any small group of things at a lower level. The quarks are part of that process, but are just doing quark things.

red75prime 6y ago

> If you are a materialist, how is this surprising? It's not. But there are other things, which should be surprising to a materialist: we don't see neuronal firings in visual brain areas. We see some kind of an abstraction over those firings. Do abstractions exist alongside the matter?

mcguire 6y ago
If you boil water, you see an amount of water changing state from a liquid to a gas, not individual molecules simply gaining momentum.
- red75prime 6y ago
  Do I understand correctly that there's a physical mechanism, which creates something akin to a phase boundary from electrochemical brain processes and that "phase boundary" happens to be me and my perceptions?
  - mcguire 6y ago
    Well, no, what I was trying to say is that the behavior of individual water molecules or the electrochemical activity in the brain is not necessarily descriptive of the overall pot of boiling water or personal behavior.
    - red75prime 6y ago
      If we accept that there's nothing but physics, then there are no boiling pots or humans. There's only a complex multi-particle wave function.

Balgair 6y ago

Aside: fMRI is under quite the firestorm lately for use as a tool of mental processing. It's a great tool for head trauma or other medical diagnostics. But for interpreting the brain's activity, it's not what it's been billed as. The now classic issue is the 'Dead Salmon' experiments in 2009 out of Dartmouth. That paper was a lightening rod and the arguments are yet to die down; the field is in flux (pardon the pun). https://www.improbable.com/2020/06/05/fmri-brain-research-the-dead-salmon-has-lots-of-company/ https://www.improbable.com/2020/06/05/fmri-brain-research-th...

mcguire 6y ago
Yes, I was hesitant about that, but I was operating under the assumptions of the described experiments. :-)