This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There is a major paradox in this philosophy, as it often takes a maximalist tabula rasa view. The world is supposed to be nothing more than mechanistic particles, yet the human psyche is untouched by it. Biological essentialist is used as a slur in the social sciences. Subjects such as human biodiversity, heritability of criminal behaviour or Iq or differences in evolutionary strategy between males and females are the ultimate taboo. A person can be born in the wrong body which means that the person isn't their body.
The view is that we are some free floating spirit that happened to be attached to a body. The phrase my friend who happens to be black is a perfect example of this reasoning. He was created black, he can't be anything else than black. There is no he without his black body. Yet we talk about it as if there is a he independent of his body that got inserted into the black body at birth.
Descartes philosophy is deeply flawed in that he both believed in mind body dualism and a mechanistic world. Either we are meat bots, aka mind = body or the world isn't mechanistic. Mind body dualism doesn't work in a mechanistic world. If there is no ghost or spirit there is no dualism.
How this giant contradiction in the middle of the modern world view doesn't explode goes beyond me.
I’m not seeing the paradox. Even for a radical blank-slatist, there exist things outside the human mind. Things like social and economic pressures. I have yet to see someone argue against the concept of malnutrition!
More options
Context Copy link
There are millions of people who don't think human cognition is somehow beyond the realm of materialism or at least cause and effect.
There are. However, this view is difficult to combine with people being born into the wrong body or that the mind is separated from the body. If we are a meat-computer there is no dualism between the body and the mind.
The brain has an internal representation of the body — some tangle of neurons, presumably — that can be out of sync with the body's actual physical state. We see this pretty clearly with e.g. phantom limb syndrome.
There's no philosophical challenge for materialism here; both the brain's representation of the body and the body itself are entirely physical, as both a paper map and the territory it represents are entirely physical.
More options
Context Copy link
Well, yes? The brain is an organ like any other.
Signed -A meat computer
Well I'm born into the "wrong" body since I'm not a 6'8" 269 IQ biologically immortal ubermensch, but to the extent that I'm vaguely sympathetic to trans people, it's because I recognize them as other people who are unhappy with the limitations of their current physical form and consider it laudable to adapt it to one's tastes, if possible.
As far as I'm concerned, unhappy with your body? Feel free to change it. Can't change it, (yet) like trans people and their biological sex? Nobody claimed that the universe is obliged to make it easy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And yet none of them can give a material explanation of it, which is, well, the whole problem.
You can't just look at drugs having an effect on experience and handwave away that the whole thing can be explained in material terms without actually providing a material explanation. And any explanation you need to provide has to answer a whole lot of thorny questions about what is conscious, how it becomes so, how it stops becoming so in a way that is tantamount to solving the largest part of metaphysics.
As far as I know the only coherent materialist answer is the one given by modernist totalitarianism, which is to say that individual consciousness is a delusion only experienced by the mentally ill. And that one is falsified not just by ones own experience of oneself but also by practice.
Fascinating. I would make the opposite inference. If the mind was separate from the body, like if we were little ghosts remote controlling the body, I would expect drugs and brain damage to have a much smaller effect or no effect at all. You can get some effect in the brain-as-antenna model, but stuff like prefrontal cortex lesions causing personality changes and primary visual cortex lesions causing loss of color vision in memories is hard to swallow.
None of this is conclusive but it makes me lean more towards materialism.
The antenna model is indeed a good way to approach the problem with the materialist understanding.
Did you know that radio transmitters can be damaged by operating them without an antenna?
At RF frequency voltages and currents are not well behaved and will do weird things that break Kirchhoff's laws. Power devices operating at those frequencies are often fragile and without the load of the antenna there's a risk that the output device creates much higher voltage magnification than the setup is rated for...and there goes your amp.
Now walking away from the metaphor, it is very much possible that even in a dualist understanding mind and matter are entangled enough that messing with their link creates big and specific problems. After all the radio transmitter and the antenna are properly different objects despite sharing this kind of link.
But my intuitions (in the total lack of evidence we are in of course) point towards a monist understanding as well. Just not a materialist one, but a realist one, as in an Aristotelician one. I think we probably are some combination of body and mind, but I have no reason to believe that this whole combination resides solely in materially observable reality given the fact that consciousness has never directly been observed or can be completely explained by materialism.
I trust we will get more answers (and more questions) once our understanding of neurology improves.
But in this case the brain would be the receiver antenna. I mean, this is all an hypothetical so you can always make up an excuse how a damage on one end (physical) would propagate to the other end (ghost world?), none of this could disprove it but also none of what we've discovered in neurology so far reinforces the existence of an immaterial mind.
Of course. That said if you take the Ghost-in-the-Machine view you can feel just as secure as pure materialists in that nothing that's been discovered so far reinforces the idea that mind is made of matter.
We really have no fucking idea how any of this shit works. We're barely further than antic medicine on this particular issue and it's almost purely down to the invention of MRI. Given most of the stuff people care about in this debate probably happens in the deeper regions of the brain we're even unlikely to get anywhere close to asking the right questions when Neuralink is tested on many humans.
But we are making some progress, so maybe someday we'll be able to have a meaningful debate about what consciousness is instead of hypothesizing about Motoko Kusanagi.
I think this is where we disagree. I would say that everything that we have discovered so far does reinforce the idea that mind is just an emergent property of the brain: the effects of brain injuries on the mind, the effect of psychotropics, of anesthesia, the physiological roots of various memory related syndromes (korsakov, etc). The things we have failed to discover also point to no mind-separate-from-matter: parapsychology, out of body experiences, remote viewing, auras, so-called near death experiences.
The existence and spread of the mind-as-matter theory is a testament to this since it is so counterintuitive. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only real strike against it is that it is so counterintuitive because of the (presumed) universal subjective experience of consciousness.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, yes, you can.
If someone hands me a keyboard, I have no idea how the mechanics and electronics of the keyboard works, but I can demonstrate that the sounds produced correlate to the keys being pressed, and predict that there is some physical internal mechanism that produces this effect.
I don't get to say 'must be magic' just because I don't yet have a fully detailed physical model of the internal workings, that's not how Occam's Razor works.
You don't get to say must be magic indeed. The thing is I regard materialism as just as magical since it's not explaining anything.
Faced with something too complex to be understood, the correct answer is not to make up unfalsifiable theories based of one's moral tastes rather than evidence. And I denounce materialists because they pretend not to be doing than much harder than any mystic.
That is indeed not how Occam's razor works. And Occam's razor is a fallacious argument in any formal sense anyways.
Alright, this is the point in the conversation where you have to explain what you mean by 'explaining' for us to make any progress.
Because yeah, the ultimate riddle is always 'why is there something instead of nothing', and no observer within the universe can ever possibly give any explanation for that. All 'explanations' are just descriptions of how lower-level observable properties of the world lead to higher-level observable properties of the world, and there will always be a bottom level which defies further reduction into observable causes and can only be described as 'magic'.
But the magic layer for materialism is pushed orders of magnitude further down the causal chain than the magic layer for any other explanation, and materialism correctly explains far more things above its magic layer than any other framework.
That's pretty much what we mean when we say we 'have a good explanation' or 'a good model' of something, that the magic layer is pretty far down and we can use it to predict a lot of things above it.
I have deliberately avoided in this conversation referring to ultimate explanation of causes precisely because this is inaccessible.
A satisfactory theory of something has to be able to make falsifiable predictions about the phenomenon and provide precise causal insight into its mechanisms.
String theory is not yet a satisfactory theory of quantum gravity because it does not pass this bar. And yet it is internally a lot more precise than any of the speculations going around in neurology, let alone anything that relates to consciousness.
I am satisfied saying atoms (or rather what they represent as a model) are material because they can be manipulated predictably through experiment. Produce the same level of predictable manipulation and then we can talk about how much explanation you need. Because as it is you have nothing.
How familiar with the field of neuroscience are you? We can make a lot of repeatable predictions, at various levels of examination, and pretty high reliability.
We can't make arbitrarily detailed predictions with arbitrarily high accuracy, but few sciences can.
The predictions you make and explanations you give with a materialist account of the mind are a lot better than the ones you get with a non-materialist account, though. Since we can never directly access the 'truth' of the 'ultimate explanation of causes', the 'truth' that humans have access to is just accepting whichever available model does best, for now.
How familiar with it are you?
Every neuroscientist I talk to somehow always ends up complaining that their field is it's prehistory and that the only tools they have are anecdotes of weird ailments, IRMs and chronometers.
The literature is littered with grandiose books about how things might work behind the scenes with lots of good hints but scant actual evidence.
We have lots of data about brain cells but no standard model for them. We know of many communication channels between neurons but we have no idea how they actually use them to talk to each other. We know the brain processes visual information but we have no idea how. Neural engineering is compelled to rely on statistical inference as a matter of course because we know so little.
This isn't exactly "arbitrary precision". These are fairly simple questions to ask about common things this organ does. And we have basically no idea how to answer them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why makes you so sure that "we don't know" isn't an acceptable answer? Certainly beats making shit up, which is how I would frame the non-materialist position.
Drugs?
Brain damage?
Electrical stimulation?
If it can physically induce even minor changes to the brain, and that produces robustly consistent corollaries to conscious experience, it beats me what people are so intent on looking for.
Because Galileo was right, but his rivals could tell you where Saturn was tomorrow and he couldn't.
Well, good thing we sorted that small matter out eh? And that's withholding my disbelief that this claim is true.*
Materialism has explained ever greater fractions of reality, and everything else has been losing out. I know where my priors lie. It's the mark of a deeply broken mind to update when the evidence "forces" you to, as opposed to when you should.
*oh and it's not.
Your statement is completely wrong and a willfully revisionist reframing of history. Galileo was wrong about his claim that there were two moons on the opposite side of Saturn, but at no point did he manage to lose the entire planet, which would be an impressive feat, given that it's visible with the naked eye.
His geocentric rivals certainly didn't do a better job at predicting its motions, and where he outright won was to apply heliocentrism to the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter, where geocentrism failed miserably.
Evidently this historical example, which you were wrong about, was loadbearing on your beliefs about the applicability of materialism. Given that I went to the effort of correcting you, am I to assume you're a bona-fide materialist now? Didn't think so.
Edit: Oh, the irony of using empirical investigation into material causes to judiciate this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Truly, materialism is the worst metaphysical model, except for the rest of them.
When a system explains the world outside of my brain to a greater extent than I'd ever need to predict it and act upon it, and all the others can only shrug and say "well what about the mind?", I see no reason to assume that the truth is within one of the latter systems.
Is this how Elon Musk's defenders feel when he, despite being a successful unprecedented entrepreneur and engineer and all that, is mocked and belittled by redditors for posting cringe takes on Twitter?
I maintain skepticism is the only reasonable metaphysical position. We don't know how any of this works. Be humble.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link