4 ms·

Seems arrogant to say there’s no such thing as a soul when we have a hard time even defining consciousness.

shrimp_emoji 4y ago
A problem with this is why one's heuristic should tend toward magic from mythology. When you encounter unknowns and feel compelled to fill in the blank, why should you reach towards "souls"/"god" than towards more prosaic things like physics and computation? The answer is obvious: you shouldn't because there's a solid track record of magical memes being fictional. (Also, imo, if you can't define concepts like consciousness, that might be a clue that they don't exist either. Or, at the very least, you're not communicating anything meaningful when using those concepts even if you feel like you are.)
- warent 4y ago
  You're describing external phenomena. Our experience of consciousness / qualia is simultaneously "known" and ineffible. How can we talk about what consciousness isn't, when we can't even talk about what it is?
- strogonoff 4y ago
  Physicalism is easy to argue for: if all you have is STEM, then everything looks like physics. However, considering you have to grant magic existence to all those bits and bobs and atoms with all the arbitrary rules for how they interact—not being able to define those bits and bobs from first principles without involving conscious observers, yet pretending that mind and consciousness (you know, those only things you actually have access to) are an illusion—it actually becomes quite contrived. The more elegant solution is in fact idealistic monism: if the only phenomenon we can grant objective existence to is our minds, by treating time-space as merely a simplified interface to it we can avoid creating many unnecessary entities. Which is not an argument against physics—just that we should not assume physics has the answers to questions that are fundamentally outside of its scope.
  - blululu 4y ago
    This was a dead-end in the history of Western thought. We started an irrelevant definition of knowledge (Cartesian Rationalism where geometry is the paragon of knowing) and arrived at equally irrelevant conclusions about metaphysics (Cartesian Dualism which eventual collapsed into Spinozaist monism (Hegel is correct in his assessment of Leibniz on this point)). Kant is trying to solve a set of non-problems with a highly innovative method that offers some seriously questionable solutions when you really get deep into German Idealism. The simply reality is that our knowledge and methods of understanding the physical world is more robust than the Rationalists would acknowledge, and our knowledge of our metal world is far more tenuous than we would care to accept. We really don't have access to as much of our minds as we intuitively think we do. The unravelling of this theory starts with Freud but modern psychology and neuroscience present a huge number of examples where it is very clear that we do not have direct access to the thing we call a unified consciousness or the self. The isn't about physics answering the question as much as the fact that the origin of mind and thinking will have a physical origin. Reductivism is equally played. Trying to reduce this process down to bits and atoms is probably not helpful or interesting. But it is really a moot point as to whether an emergent phenomenon is an ontologically separate thing from it's substrate. It is physical nonetheless in more or less the same way that we would think of the more basic entities. A form of soft-immaterialism might be secured in trying to ascribe existence to this emergent state of matter, but given what we know about people's ability to introspect their own consciousness I doubt that the traditional concept of 'soul' handed down to us from the Scholastic tradition can really be salvaged.
    - strogonoff 4y ago
      This trying to salvage time-space as implicit objective reality is tired for reasons I won’t repeat. Saying “mind and thinking is rooted in physical reality” doesn’t make it so. That aside, not trying to discard them as illusions is appreciated.
      - blululu 4y ago
        No-one said anything about space, time or objectivity. Those are all weird, but external reality is something we know just as well as we know internal reality. (Internalist conceptions of mind don't pan out). Saying mind and thinking can exist without any physical basis doesn't make it possible either, but I will point out that everyone I've ever met who was capable of thinking had a healthy living body. The arguments that have been deployed to show that incorporeal thinking is possible and the subjective knowledge is the only true knowledge have always been flawed in their theory of knowledge. They all treat geometry as the paragon of knowing. When, in fact, the rationalist mode of knowing is a rather peculiar and idiosyncratic form of knowledge that doesn't really generalize. In some highly reductive sense, you can argue that we don't really come into contact with an external reality, and people have. Though in the same sense we also don't come into contact with an internal reality except in an very unimpressive fashion. So while people have spun up plenty of complicated arguments to show that we know nothing about anything, in a very real sense we clearly know quite a lot about the world around us. We know that when someone is knocked unconscious they weren't off thinking great thoughts when their brain was flatlining (if/when they come back they confirm this). Our knowledge of this is, surprisingly more solid than our ability to accurately introspect our internal state of consciousness. As to what exactly changes when the innumerable pulses of neurons sprang back to life, that's a mystery. Something is happening. It is pretty clearly connected with thinking.
blululu 4y ago
This is an argument for agnosticism. All else being equal it would be just as presumptuous to postulate the existence or non-existence of an entity. But I think that the arc of history would suggest that all things are not equal. We do after all know a thing or two about consciousness even if a clean definition eludes us (we also don't really have good definitions for lots of things so maybe finding definitions is not the more urgent goal of philosophy). It was less than 100 years ago that vitalism held sway in the philosophy of biology. We find a similar state in the study of mind. You can still postulate the existence of something like the soul, but I think it is increasingly hard to say that this thing is not generated by matter as people once said.
taneq 4y ago
One philosopher’s arrogance is another’s “not even wrong.” Why bother refuting something that isn’t defined?

A problem with this is why one's heuristic should tend toward magic from mythology. When you encounter unknowns and feel compelled to fill in the blank, why should you reach towards "souls"/"god" than towards more prosaic things like physics and computation? The answer is obvious: you shouldn't because there's a solid track record of magical memes being fictional. (Also, imo, if you can't define concepts like consciousness, that might be a clue that they don't exist either. Or, at the very least, you're not communicating anything meaningful when using those concepts even if you feel like you are.)

warent 4y ago
You're describing external phenomena. Our experience of consciousness / qualia is simultaneously "known" and ineffible. How can we talk about what consciousness isn't, when we can't even talk about what it is?
strogonoff 4y ago
Physicalism is easy to argue for: if all you have is STEM, then everything looks like physics. However, considering you have to grant magic existence to all those bits and bobs and atoms with all the arbitrary rules for how they interact—not being able to define those bits and bobs from first principles without involving conscious observers, yet pretending that mind and consciousness (you know, those only things you actually have access to) are an illusion—it actually becomes quite contrived. The more elegant solution is in fact idealistic monism: if the only phenomenon we can grant objective existence to is our minds, by treating time-space as merely a simplified interface to it we can avoid creating many unnecessary entities. Which is not an argument against physics—just that we should not assume physics has the answers to questions that are fundamentally outside of its scope.
- blululu 4y ago
  This was a dead-end in the history of Western thought. We started an irrelevant definition of knowledge (Cartesian Rationalism where geometry is the paragon of knowing) and arrived at equally irrelevant conclusions about metaphysics (Cartesian Dualism which eventual collapsed into Spinozaist monism (Hegel is correct in his assessment of Leibniz on this point)). Kant is trying to solve a set of non-problems with a highly innovative method that offers some seriously questionable solutions when you really get deep into German Idealism. The simply reality is that our knowledge and methods of understanding the physical world is more robust than the Rationalists would acknowledge, and our knowledge of our metal world is far more tenuous than we would care to accept. We really don't have access to as much of our minds as we intuitively think we do. The unravelling of this theory starts with Freud but modern psychology and neuroscience present a huge number of examples where it is very clear that we do not have direct access to the thing we call a unified consciousness or the self. The isn't about physics answering the question as much as the fact that the origin of mind and thinking will have a physical origin. Reductivism is equally played. Trying to reduce this process down to bits and atoms is probably not helpful or interesting. But it is really a moot point as to whether an emergent phenomenon is an ontologically separate thing from it's substrate. It is physical nonetheless in more or less the same way that we would think of the more basic entities. A form of soft-immaterialism might be secured in trying to ascribe existence to this emergent state of matter, but given what we know about people's ability to introspect their own consciousness I doubt that the traditional concept of 'soul' handed down to us from the Scholastic tradition can really be salvaged.
  - strogonoff 4y ago
    This trying to salvage time-space as implicit objective reality is tired for reasons I won’t repeat. Saying “mind and thinking is rooted in physical reality” doesn’t make it so. That aside, not trying to discard them as illusions is appreciated.
    - blululu 4y ago
      No-one said anything about space, time or objectivity. Those are all weird, but external reality is something we know just as well as we know internal reality. (Internalist conceptions of mind don't pan out). Saying mind and thinking can exist without any physical basis doesn't make it possible either, but I will point out that everyone I've ever met who was capable of thinking had a healthy living body. The arguments that have been deployed to show that incorporeal thinking is possible and the subjective knowledge is the only true knowledge have always been flawed in their theory of knowledge. They all treat geometry as the paragon of knowing. When, in fact, the rationalist mode of knowing is a rather peculiar and idiosyncratic form of knowledge that doesn't really generalize. In some highly reductive sense, you can argue that we don't really come into contact with an external reality, and people have. Though in the same sense we also don't come into contact with an internal reality except in an very unimpressive fashion. So while people have spun up plenty of complicated arguments to show that we know nothing about anything, in a very real sense we clearly know quite a lot about the world around us. We know that when someone is knocked unconscious they weren't off thinking great thoughts when their brain was flatlining (if/when they come back they confirm this). Our knowledge of this is, surprisingly more solid than our ability to accurately introspect our internal state of consciousness. As to what exactly changes when the innumerable pulses of neurons sprang back to life, that's a mystery. Something is happening. It is pretty clearly connected with thinking.

blululu 4y ago

This is an argument for agnosticism. All else being equal it would be just as presumptuous to postulate the existence or non-existence of an entity. But I think that the arc of history would suggest that all things are not equal. We do after all know a thing or two about consciousness even if a clean definition eludes us (we also don't really have good definitions for lots of things so maybe finding definitions is not the more urgent goal of philosophy). It was less than 100 years ago that vitalism held sway in the philosophy of biology. We find a similar state in the study of mind. You can still postulate the existence of something like the soul, but I think it is increasingly hard to say that this thing is not generated by matter as people once said.

taneq 4y ago

One philosopher’s arrogance is another’s “not even wrong.” Why bother refuting something that isn’t defined?