Thinking Christian Comments
Original Post: Mind, Purpose, and God (2)
Tom,
What you've presented here (or what TG presented) is a rehash of the Argument from Reason.
So, in the spirit of rehashing, I'll summarize my objections.
1) Every system of laws is logical because it relies on non-contradiction and identity. A state of affairs cannot be both predicted and not predicted by a law.
2) Given this fact, one physical state of affairs has logical implications for other, causally-connected states of affairs.
3) An evolutionary advantage lies in being able to anticipate physical states of affairs.
4) Instinctive, non-rational responses can represent very simple relationships between cause and effect (e.g., "upon seeing an approaching object one should expect an impending collision").
5) A system capable of analyzing abstract logical relationships has even more advantages than a non-rational one. It can model sophisticated relationships. It can learn and apply those rules within the lifetime of an individual.
6) Abstract logical analysis can infer laws and relationships in any lawful, physical world. IOW, logic is the same in any world.
7) Therefore, there is always an evolutionary advantage in being able to model the world with abstract logical reasoning.
8 ) Therefore, there is a causal connection between logic embedded within physical law and the kind of abstract reasoning ability that would work in any physical world. Through evolution, physical laws can lead to genuine abstract reasoning.
In other words, theists are drawing a false dichotomy between physical causation and logical reasoning. A physical system is always a logical system. There's no reason why a reasoning system could not evolve to sense this logical structure in the same way that, say, a bee evolves to take pollen.
Oh, and while it is true that correlation does not prove causation, you're missing a big point of the probability argument against dualism. Yes, dualism is compatible with a physical brain that correlates with thought. You might even expect correlation. But you don't expect the physical brain to actually have the functionality too.
You once mentioned Egnor's "Verizon Denier" argument which is supposed to support the theist's claim that the brain works like a radio, and that tweaking the radio breaks the functionality of the system. However, in Egnor's example, there's still some actual functionality that's supposed to reside in the broadcast and not in the radio. If you open the radio and find a singer singing a song, why persist in the belief that there's another singer elsewhere beaming the song into the singer you already have? Well, in this analogy, we've found half of the alleged radio presenters sitting inside the radio. At what point are we going to say that it's at least more likely that the radio is doing everything?
IOW, neuroscience isn't just finding correlations. It's finding causations too.
doctor(logic), this deserves a more extended response than I can provide this morning. It's interesting and thoughtful. But it's Saturday, and I'm going to go with a shorter answer for now.
You've called this your set of objections to the AFR. What it really is instead is an alternate account of how reason could arise via evolution and other physical processes. As such, it has value and needs to be taken seriously. That's what I'm going to come back to later.
In the meantime, I'll suggest very quickly that what you wrote here doesn't exactly function as "objections" to the TG argument. It doesn't address TG's proposal except by starting over again with a completely different one. You don't explain, for example, how beliefs as such--the contents thereof, that is; or beliefs as propositions--can have causal potency. It doesn't explain how they are anything but epiphenomenal, and causally effete or impotent.
I'd like to hear your response to this direct question: It would appear based on physicalism that beliefs are strictly epiphenomenal, "riders," in a sense, on top of physical events. As such they cannot cause anything whatever; they can never be anything but an effect or a result. This it is strictly wrong in every case to say that you believe P because your belief Q led you to that belief. Q does not have that power; P and Q are just passengers with no access to the pedals or steering wheel of other beliefs.
So, do you believe that a belief Q can be a cause for believing P?
Tom,
So, do you believe that a belief Q can be a cause for believing P?Short form of answer: Yes.
It would appear based on physicalism that beliefs are strictly epiphenomenal, "riders," in a sense, on top of physical events. As such they cannot cause anything whatever; they can never be anything but an effect or a result.Consider a collision between a cue ball and racked billiard balls. Is the cue ball and its energy and momentum causally effective? Yes. I don't know anyone who would say that cue calls are causally ineffective because they are just effects of lower-level physics.
Here's another way of putting it. Given the Lego of physical laws, there are particular configurations of matter an energy that obey new laws. The law of billiard balls would be one. The law of ocean waves would be another. The law of immune response would be yet another.
To declare that billiard balls are not causally effective is to illicitly redefine the meaning of "causally effective."
[That is,] it is strictly wrong in every case to say that you believe P because your belief Q led you to that belief. Q does not have that power; P and Q are just passengers with no access to the pedals or steering wheel of other beliefs.I hope you can now see my objection to this. If a belief is a configuration of matter and energy in our brains (one that meets certain criteria), then there's no reason at all why we ought to say that such configurations are causally ineffective. The rules that act between configurations of matter and energy are not equivalent to rules that apply to individual particles because the configurations contain information and structure not contained in the low-level rules.
All that is implied by the low level rules is that IF you create certain configurations, you'll see the new rules that apply to those configurations.
And one more thing, Tom. In dualism, how did you get belief P in the first place? Was it not the result or effect of a prior belief? Even if your test were valid, dualism itself could not withstand it.
I don't think you answered the question the way I asked it, doctor(logic). I think you're saying that the physical interactions in the brain just are the beliefs; that P and Q are identical with the physical interactions. That's the only way your response, comparing P and Q to billiard balls, would be a proper parallelism.
So I think you're saying, then, that a belief is not epiphenomenal, that it's not a passenger riding on the physical states interactions, that a belief just is some set of those states and interactions.
Is that an accurate interpretation of what you've said?
Tom,
So I think you're saying, then, that a belief is not epiphenomenal, that it's not a passenger riding on the physical states interactions, that a belief just is some set of those states and interactions.Basically, yes.
Is that an accurate interpretation of what you've said?
Commenting by HaloScan
