…and this is a 
Egnor: about a century behind the times
Category: Creationism
Posted on: June 21, 2007 5:30 PM, by PZ Myers
Aaron Kinney tells me that Egnor is still going on and on about dualism. He's still floundering; are you surprised?
P.Z. Myers' reply to my observation that ideas like altruism have no physical properties, like location, leaves a thoughtful observer to wonder: why do materialists have so much difficulty with this basic philosophical principle? It's clear that ideas share no properties with matter. Ideas have no mass, or length, or temperature, or location. They're immaterial. Clearly, under ordinary circumstances the brain is necessary for our ideas to exist, but, because matter and ideas share no properties, it's hard to see how the brain is sufficient for ideas to exist.
It certainly is not clear that that is the case at all. He seems to be confusing a Platonic abstraction with the instantiation of an idea. Ideas in our brain are accompanied by crass, earthly chemistry: variations in metabolism, blood perfusion rates, chemical release, and patterns of electrochemical change. Ideas do not exist in our crania without those phenomena; they are not only necessary, but since there doesn't seem to be any other kind of activity going on (at least, that is, ghostly soul-transmissions haven't been detected), they also seem to be sufficient.
Egnor does make me laugh with his next example, though.
Yet Myers insists that altruism is located in the brain. He's had some trouble with my previous thought experiments, so I'll try another:
Imagine that we can do complete split brain operations. We can separate the hemispheres of the brain completely, and not just partially as we can do now with corpus callosotomies. We can then further subdivide the tissue, keeping the brain parts biologically alive, in quarters, eighths, etc. Ignoring for the time being what would happen to the person's consciousness (which brain part would mediate the first person experience of the original person, if any?), what would happen to the original person's altruism? Would each one-eighth brain have one-eighth the altruism? Would each lobe contribute one-eighth of the previous brain's annual contribution to the United Way? Would the altruism stay in one of the lobes- the left occipital lobe, and leave the other lobes heartless? What if we kept dividing? Is there an altruism neuron? The question seems nonsensical. Altruism, as an idea, doesn't have 'parts'. Unlike matter, ideas can't be divided or localized.
Egnor's conception of how the brain works is so naive it's embarrassing. You could apply his same logic to the function of the heart: we say it's a pump for blood, but where is the pump? If we chopped the heart up into quarters and eighths, would each piece then be able to generate part of the pressure? Or would the pumping activity be found confined to one fragment? Can we find a single pumping cardiac muscle fiber? Obviously not, the whole premise is nonsensical. Therefore, we must conclude, the pumping activity of the circulatory system is not of or in the heart—the only alternative is that there must be a supernatural locomotor force in operation.
What really made me laugh when I read his example, though, are the echoes of Hans Driesch. Driesch was a great developmental biologist, who, in the 1890s, carried out a series of experiments that quaintly drove him into the arms of vitalism. He took a sea urchin embryo, and divided it into quarters and eighths (I think you see the similarity), and asked what each fragment would do. To his surprise, each piece developed into a complete (if small) sea urchin larva. This was mind-blowing at the time. It meant the potential of the whole was present in smaller portions of the embryo, and that one embryo contained the potential for many different individuals.
It drove Driesch mad to philosophy and natural theology. He proposed that there was a kind of vital spirit to the organism, called entelechy, that was above and beyond the material elements of the egg. He became one of the leading proponents of vitalism, espoused the existence of the soul, and even published some work in parapsychology — he went a little wacky. (But make no mistake, he was a good embryologist, and his idea that each cell had the potential to become a full adult has been vindicated).
Of course, now we know that Driesch's experiments did not imply any supernatural agent at all—we know that each cell contains a copy of the complete genetic information for the whole in its nucleus. The larva itself is not the product of some maternal blueprint preformed in the egg (a point Driesch favored), it is not guided by an external agent (Driesch's alternative), but it is produced by perfectly natural material interactions during development between the cells. There is no homunculus. The absence of a discretely localizable internal agent does not imply the existence of a force or blueprint outside of the embryo, though, because a modern understanding of developmental processes reveals that later complexity is an emergent property of complex interactions between the components of the genome and between individual cells. No magic needed.
Egnor's silly dismantling of the human brain illustrates similar features. There is no "altruism neuron", or "altruism nucleus" — altruism is the product of many interacting parts of the brain. That doesn't make it supernatural.
Email this entry to a friend
View the Technorati Link Cosmos for this entry
Comments
I have just come up with a brilliant idea, which I quickly scribbled down on the whiteboard hanging on my office wall. If I take the whiteboard home with me, will the idea hang around in my office?
Posted by: Brain Hertz | June 21, 2007 5:40 PM
Cut the whiteboard into pieces. Will the idea be partially expressed in each of them, or will it be localized?
For that matter, is the idea in each letter of the words you wrote down?
Posted by: PZ Myers | June 21, 2007 5:42 PM
This Egnor guy is the brain surgeon, right? You'd think a brain surgeon would be familiar with a medical phenomenon commonly referred to as a "stroke." You'd think he might have some experience with how neurological damage resulting from strokes affects the minds of those afflicted.
My grandfather had a series of strokes a few years back. It affected not only motor skills, but his memory, thinking, and personality. He's never been quite the same.
We don't have to speculate about how the brain works when parts of it are removed/disabled. There are real-world examples with which most of us are sadly familiar. Except brain surgeons, apparently.
Posted by: Max Udargo | June 21, 2007 5:49 PM
Hey, he's advanced 2300 years!
Posted by: Blake Stacey, OM | June 21, 2007 5:50 PM
I have now joined the chorus in expressing horror of Egnor and thought that this man saws skulls open and starts cutting through brain matter. Must have been some errant and uncharacteristic bit of optimism that he really could be competent in his trade, and only egnorant in his online screeds. But, alas, nope. The last bit of optimism just decayed into an energyless state. He frightens me.
I had an idea once. Strong, earth-shattering idea. I wrote it down. The essence was in one word, "waffle". In particular it was in the second f. To be precise it was in the funny little horizontal line that makes it look more like an f and less like a slightly melted l. I lost that bit of line. Shame really. It was a good idea.
Posted by: Sean | June 21, 2007 5:51 PM
Make a hologram of the whiteboard. If I'm correctly remembering the Smithsonian exhibit I saw on holography when I was in 5th grade, you can cut the hologram into little pieces and each piece will completely express the brilliant idea, albeit with degraded clarity.
Does that count? ;^)
Posted by: Bill Dauphin | June 21, 2007 5:59 PM
"He proposed that there was a kind of vital spirit to the organism, called entelechy"
And here I thought that was George Clinton!
I believe "emergent property" is the idea Dr. Egnor is missing here. (Guess we can't blame his brain though).
Posted by: CCP | June 21, 2007 6:00 PM
Oh God, I wonder if the idiot has tried any of this with brains (granted, animal brains), or with his computer. 'Where's pi in this damned computer? It has to be somewhere, and I'll find it if I have to dismantle each atom.'
As for the concept that "ideas are immaterial," I think that these types of people really are so ignorant as to believe that because ideas aren't globs of matter, they're "immaterial" in the Platonic sense. Let me explain something to you, Egnor, there's such a thing as energy, it interacts with matter, and in fact it isn't created or destroyed (hence it is exceedingly unlikely that sensory data disappears into another realm). Sensibly we can say that ideas are energy (though almost certainly stored in some state of matter), and in the broader sense of "materialism," they are thereby "materialistic" (really, though, those words aren't very useful at this level of discussion).
Now that you know about energy, rethink everything you know about brains, matter, information, and ideas. You know, if you want to really stretch your tiny mind, think of these in terms of evolution, and I mean evolution without creationist mechanisms.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Posted by: Glen Davidson | June 21, 2007 6:01 PM
There are a lot of philosophical complications here, and we have to be careful. The sarcastic quips on the linked site do not constitute a rebuttal, either.
Both Egnor and dualism are hopeless, of course, but that does not mean that a naive "identity" theory of ideas is the only thing left. That is, it doesn't necessarily make sense to say that altruism is "located" in the brain the same way that my computer is located on my desk. Altruism, like lots of other "things", isn't really a thing at all, it's just a name we use to describe a certain class of behaviors.
In a sense, altruism is immaterial, in the same way that "Democracy" and "The price of oil" are immaterial. That is to say, they are not made of any substance, whether material or ghostly; they are just words used to identify certain patterns.
Posted by: Pete | June 21, 2007 6:04 PM
Ahhh the thought experiment, the best kind of experiment. It can be used to bolster any crazy position.
Posted by: commissarjs | June 21, 2007 6:06 PM
I still do not quite get Egnor's point. Obviously, the abstractness of ideas such as altruism is a function of the complexity of the brain, especially when rationalizing altruistic actions after their performance. As is the assignment of the tag `noble' to acting altruistic.
The formation of ideas so obviously is not immaterial, but a bio-chemical process - and the thinking process can be observed by the activation of neurons; not at a resolution that might be deemed sufficient, yet -- but we are getting there.
Now, is the brain alone sufficient for the existence of ideas? Well, considering the complex interactions between the brain and external stimuli, I would say that the brain is both necessary and, in conjunction with said outside environmental influences to which we react, sufficient for the formation of ideas.
Posted by: TheJerrylander | June 21, 2007 6:10 PM
It's like the man has survived to adulthood without ever getting even a rudimentary grasp on the concept of a system.
Posted by: Dayv | June 21, 2007 6:11 PM
It's scary how some people can get a label that we made up for ease of conversing with an actual thing.
There is no such thing as "Altruism" it is simply a man made label for a set of behaviors. That's it. Thus, it can't be located somewhere as that's meaningless to the term.
Posted by: catofmanyfaces | June 21, 2007 6:13 PM
Egnor is to biology, as water is to fire.
(Hey, it was Egnor who started this analogy thing! Though I admit I can probably not execute it with quite his flair of misappropriation.)
Or, if you wipe the board, will the idea disappear?
(For Egnor the answer is clearly "Yes". Well, maybe it applies for him personally.)
Heh! Funniest find on the web today.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | June 21, 2007 6:16 PM
I, for one, am absolutely not understanding Engor's point or what he is claiming.
Altruism, as with all concepts such as government, bravery, interest rates, evil, crime, etc., have no physical existence and exist only as concepts. (Although, as concepts, they do exist.)
So what? What is his point? It's fairly obvious that one's personal altruism (that is decissions to be altruistic) and bravery, etc. exist as thoughts in the brain although these thoughts are syntacticly different than the concept of one's altruism which has no physical existence except as a concept but... so?
What is his point and what is he trying to say?
Posted by: woozy(still bending over to understand) | June 21, 2007 6:17 PM
You could apply the same logic to a building, or, say, a fireplace, or a piece of shit. Well, maybe not a piece of shit. That's more like how the brain actually works...
Posted by: Greg Laden | June 21, 2007 6:32 PM
Another good example is a telephone call. While a telephone call is in progress, where is it?
Posted by: Happy Monkey | June 21, 2007 6:34 PM
(Disclaimer: I'm by no means greatly informed on neuroscience, so it's entirely possible and somewhat likely I'll have something a bit off. Still, I think the overall theme being expressed is correct.)
If you think about it, ideas do have a sort of tangible existence. First, drawing a parallel from computing, let us take software and hardware. Hardware is the physical medium of computing. It is matter and energy interacting. Software is an abstraction of the various things that the hardware of the computer can do. However, the software does have a physical location as variations in charge on the plate of the hard drive (or pits on a CD, or *insert media here*).
Now, in the human brain, can it really be much different. I mean, the brain isn't built anything like your computer. It's asynchronous and analog, and instead of software that can in some way be meaningfully distinguished from the hardware, it's chock full of specialized regions that perform specific operations without consulting data storage for instructions. So, ideas do have a physical existence of source, as a specific arrangement of the matter and energy in the brain.
Now, it'd be hard, if not impossible, to actually identify a specific idea within a brain, but we can find the location about which the idea is existing materially.
Now, I have a question. Is Egnor really so ignorant of his field to actually believe the nonsense he spouts, or does he totally lack scruples and is knowingly pushing outright lies and misinformation for some kind of personal gain? I have a really hard time believing one could achieve such a position as he has and yet remain so woefully wrong about one's supposed field of expertise.
Posted by: uknesvuinng | June 21, 2007 6:42 PM
I came up with a conclusive reductio ad absurum of Dualism last night, on the grounds of contingency and free will, but then before I could write it down I realized that the idea wasn't located at any particular place inside my skull, and it got away, dammit!
Anybody had my idea? It's mine, and I want it back!
Posted by: CJ | June 21, 2007 6:48 PM
Why does this surgeon have a strong desire to reopen the dualism/materialism debate anyway? Is he working his way up to proving the existence of the soul? Maybe when he is cutting open skulls, he could concentrate on the "matter" at hand. Not to deny his philosophical curiosity, but he is hardly the first, last or best person to have tackled this "problem".
Posted by: PalMD | June 21, 2007 6:48 PM
Remember how we used to say simple things "are not brain surgery?" It appears this guy thinks brain surgery isn't brain surgery, either.
Wouldn't you love to be this guy's auto mechanic?
Posted by: Ed Darrell | June 21, 2007 6:48 PM
CJ: You might want to look into tinfoil hats as a way to keep a lid on those ideas.
Posted by: Rey Fox | June 21, 2007 7:03 PM
There are a lot of philosophical complications because philosophy never met a stupid idea it didn't like. The actuality is quite simple.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 21, 2007 7:08 PM
Egnor is to biology, as water is to fire.
Shouldn't that be as fire is to water? Since water puts out fire. Although really, it would depend on how much of each, wouldn't it, since a large amount of fire would vaporize a small amount of water, and biology's a lot bigger than Egnor, in ideas anyway.
Posted by: MyaR | June 21, 2007 7:11 PM
[first time poster]
i'm going to open another can of worms by suggesting that "altruism" is, rather than a concept, a behavior
and as a behavior it has physical existence ONLY when it's being performed
eg, "running" exists when you run, but when you slow to a walk the "running" vanishes (and is replaced by "walking"). a thought about running is not "running"; only the act of running is "running"
(extra credit for figuring out "where" a thought exists, heheh)
so unless someone is engaging in altruistic behavior, "altruism" doesn't exist anywhere, not even in the mind. because, QED, thinking about altruism is not "altruism"
[/first time poster]
Posted by: skyotter | June 21, 2007 7:14 PM
Ed, if this guy dies with one achievement to his name it will be to have rendered "Its not brain surgery" meaningless.
woozy
"personal altruism bravery, etc. exist as thoughts in the brain although these thoughts are syntacticly different than the concept of one's altruism which has no physical existence except as a concept but... so?
What is his point and what is he trying to say?"
Personally, I think he has a brain disorder in which he thinks in a concrete manner and cannot handle abstract concepts. This way he thinks of concepts as "things" and if they cannot be measured, they must not only be immaterial but have a concrete spiritual existence - the soul.
People often choose careers to make up for their deficiencies, maybe that is why he became a brain surgeon.
Posted by: sailor | June 21, 2007 7:18 PM
I think it all boils down to this: "it's hard to see how..."
That statement generally means "I don't understand how...", and what usually follows is the mind-boggling assertion that a conclusion can be drawn from it, other than that the speaker needs some facts clarified.
Posted by: GTMoogle | June 21, 2007 7:26 PM
Now I just hope he is offering his own brain for this experiment. I would really like to see in which section of his brain this theory resides.
Posted by: Liz | June 21, 2007 7:29 PM
What I especially like about Egnor's brain-division thought experiment is that these are the same people who brought us "irreducible complexity". I mean, I'm no expert, but I always assumed that if you chopped somebody's brain into eight pieces that it would stop working.
I know some intelligent dualists (in the philosophy department), but they mostly seem to be clinging to things like qualia which nobody is close to an explanation of yet, I'm mystified why Egnor just doesn't rely on something safe (for now) like that?
Posted by: Matthew L. | June 21, 2007 7:31 PM
But the existence of qualia hasn't been demonstrated yet - and if we go by their definitions, it can't be demonstrated, because the concept isn't meaningful.
Demanding an explantion for something no one knows exists - and that by most definitions can't exist - doesn't strike me as particularly intelligent.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 21, 2007 7:39 PM
The more I read from this man, the more I am convinced he is either not the actual brain surgeon Egnor, or else, he is going/gone senile. A funtional brain surgeon couldn't be this stupid. No way. One would hope. This really is appalling.
skyotter -- not a bad way of thinking about it. There seems to be a general view that the impulse toward altruistic behavior is pretty much equal to this "altruism" as discussed here, but you are right that the thing can't really be said to exist unless you're acting on it. The abstract concept of what altruism is, though, and separately the decision to act altruistically (which presumably exists before the action itself) can be said to have a purely mental existance, however.
Posted by: Luna_the_cat | June 21, 2007 7:48 PM
Sheeesh! This guy is wilfully stupid or downright evil. I wonder how he explains (from his own area of supposed expertise) conditions like Receptive Amusia? Does musicality and musical appreciation come down the Godphone as well?
Posted by: SimonC | June 21, 2007 7:57 PM
I personally think he began this argument as a run-up to an acceptance of homeopathy. Cut up the little pieces of the brain nearly endlessly and drop a single "piece" of brain that once was of a whole, altruistic, brain. Dump it in distilled water, apply it to the brain of a person who is pathologically not altruistic and cure the poor bugger.
We could scrape skin cells of Jesus from the Shroud of Turin, cause i bet ol' JC was 100% pure-dee altruism, and cure the entire world of all of its selfishness!
Posted by: Mike Haubrich, FCD | June 21, 2007 8:02 PM
But wait, there's more. Egnor's inquiring mind wants to know: "What is the evolutionary psychologists' explanation for evolutionary psychology?" The fact that Egnor doesn't know the answer is somehow supposed to reflect poorly on evolutionary psychology.
Here's the answer, Egnor: I'm sure that the history of evolutionary psychology, just like pretty much every other branch of science, is documented in the literature. Once you trace it to its origin, the question that remains is this: What is the evolutionary explanation for humans engaging in science? The answer is simple: Because it's extremely beneficial for us as a species.
Keep 'em coming, Egnor.
Posted by: secondclass | June 21, 2007 8:18 PM
Hasn't dualism been debated for millenia and wasn't it, like Plato's cave, determined a century ago to be at best an interesting way to frame things but outside semantics logistics of no determinable or practical value?
I remember at a job I had a decade ago. A coworker came up and asked me if I know anything about Newton's laws of motions and the opposing aristotle viewpoints. I said I know "of" them basically and I could look them up if he wanted specifics. He then asked did Newton dispute Aristotle vis a vis laws of motion. I said that yes, that was my understanding. Aristotle, if I'm remembering correctly, thought bodies in motion proceded to inertia whereas Newton posited bodies in motion stay in motion unless of force such as friction slow them down or gravity sped them up. I think, Aristotle thought bodies under gravity ... The coworker interupted me and said he had recently recieved a letter from an old headmaster from his childhood boy school in England. I nodded to go on. This headmaster, my coworker explained, was an Aristotlean and was writing a book to dispute Newton and explain the world in Aristotolean terms. The headmast is noting Einsteinism has upended Newtonism and claiming the world is ripe for a return to Aristotlism. I put my face into the "nod politely and don't say a word" mode. The conversation was silent for a while. I, for politeness sake said, "I see....". More silence. "I think he's an idiot, myself" said the coworker. I gave a sigh of relief and told him that there was no need to think he was an idiot.
Sheesh. I guess philosophical issues are never settled.
Posted by: woozy | June 21, 2007 8:44 PM
No. It's not of value even within semantics logistics.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 21, 2007 8:49 PM
The more I read Egnor's babbling, the more worried I become for his patients. The man clearly has no idea how a brain works.
Posted by: Ginger Yellow | June 21, 2007 8:54 PM
"Yet Myers insists that altruism is located in the brain."
All the evidence so far is that Mr Egnor's brain is located somewhere near his arse, which makes it easier for him to talk out of it.
Posted by: Peter McGrath | June 21, 2007 8:55 PM
He's like the Auditors in Pratchett's Thief of Time, reducing paintings to dust to look for one atom of 'beauty'.
I wonder how he thinks his thoughts get to his fingers so he can type them? Magic?
Posted by: Chinchillazilla | June 21, 2007 9:15 PM
I like the heart in the original post because it's another biological example and so should be familiar to the biology crowd, but I as well was thinking of computing this time. However, rather than providing a defense of certain of Egnor's claims, I consider that computation clearly rebuts his point.
Consider an executable file, consisting of a million bytes or so that encode the instructions of some program. Physically, it could be stored in memory on an IC, on a disk, or elsewhere. It's a sequence of boolean values, each on or off. Cut this file into pieces, ask which of these pieces contains the program, and you're a fool. Each piece is, at best, a sequence of instructions with references to other data that can't be resolved without the rest. To break it down into bits and ask which bit contains the program is ridiculous.
The meaning of the program is in the sequence of bits constituting the entire thing. You need to have them all together properly in order for your program to run. However, you don't need the angels to come down from heaven and bless a program for it to start. Get your crude material ICs to contain the right instructions, set the program counter to the right place, and the material wonder of electronics will get it done.
Similar phenomena, where something assembled has properties that aren't local to its components, are ubiquitous. The only thing Egnor gets right is that his question is, indeed, nonsensical.
Those were initially my thoughts. Still, if stupid, he'd have to be pretty stupid indeed. I'd be disappointed if a sufficiently thoughtful child would take this seriously. If he's evil, I think he might be underestimating the intelligence of anyone who bothers reading what he writes. Fooling the masses is one thing, but everywhere you look there's something that is "greater than the sum of its parts".
Honestly, I'm coming around to thinking that the man's just flipped. In order to justify his theological assumptions, he's decided to charge right out of Plato's Cave and to set up residence in the world where ideas are more real than things are. Therefore altruism, being an abstraction, must be real (just like souls!) and must exist in the world of forms, right alongside the four elements.
Posted by: wrg | June 21, 2007 9:51 PM
I wonder if Dr. Egnor, as a neurosurgeon, can explain the profound personality changes after prefrontal lobotomy?
Posted by: T. Bruce McNeely | June 21, 2007 9:53 PM
No, listen, Egnor's explanation makes sense of all sorts of puzzling phenomena. All ideas are immaterial, so they cannot reside in the brain. Therefore they must be supplied from outside. Clearly, diplomas and scientific books and journals contain intelligence transmitters, which explains how professors get gradually smarter as they accumulate diplomas and build up personal libraries, and this also explains why they get intellectually lazy when they head off to the beach for a long vacation, far from the office. This explains why the universities with the very highest quality, broadest-band, highest-capacity transmitters (e.g., MIT, Harvard) cost so much (it is one of their biggest frustrations that no one ever takes them literally when they talk about the transmission of knowledge). In contrast, mass-produced, general-purpose, state university transmitters are much cheaper, and community colleges haven't even been let in on the secret. Likewise, it also explains why scientific journals (with their narrow-band but special-purpose transmitters) cost so much more than magazines like People (which lack knowledge transmitters altogether.
We still need to explain Egnor and Dembski. By his own admission, Dembski carries around an explanatory filter, which he needs to filter out rational explanatory ideas, in order to be able to write his stuff for UD and keep from giggling when he talks to his faithful. I suspect that he also uses a humor blocker. As for Egnor, my diagnosis is that he lives right above a stupidity transmitter.
Posted by: N.Wells | June 21, 2007 10:08 PM
Egnor doesn't care if his arguments make sense or not. His only agenda is that the arguing continues. He can say anything that promotes the existence of the soul because he knows that the Faithful don't have the savvy or the will to think logically anyways.
Posted by: RamblinDude | June 21, 2007 10:57 PM
Oh, snap!
I had never heard of Hans Driesch before. How sad yet understandable that Hans flipped out after seeing the urchins reform themselves.
It seems that Egnor is pulling a Driesch, eh?
Posted by: Aaron Kinney | June 21, 2007 11:05 PM
According to Egnor, "ideas like altruism have no physical properties". This implies that some ideas HAVE physical properties. So now we're in the position of sorting the physical ones from the non-physical ones. This is certainly weirder and more twisted than anything Descartes or Plato came up with, no?
Posted by: ken | June 21, 2007 11:44 PM
Didn't Phineas Gage do almost exactly the experiment Egnor proposes over 150 years ago? His methods were crude, but quite effective for the time. His resolution may not be exactly at the level that would satisfy Egnor, but I believe his results were pretty conclusive.
Details here: http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/phineas-gage
Posted by: Tex | June 21, 2007 11:47 PM
Er, I think that's supposed to be read as "Ideas -- such as for example altruism -- have no physical properties."
Posted by: Brian | June 21, 2007 11:47 PM
Perhaps you're right, Brian...Egnor seems to say ALL ideas are immaterial in other paragraphs. On the other hand, why should we assume that his paragraphs form any sort of unified whole?
It seems like Egnor focuses on altruism because he wants to give it exalted status over ideas like "I want to wiggle my toes". It's a Godly attribute.
It should be possible to stimulate various ideas with an electrode placed on the brain. According to Egnor, I guess, you're actually stimulating your soul, which then stimulates you to have an idea.
Posted by: ken | June 22, 2007 12:19 AM
"But the existence of qualia hasn't been demonstrated yet - and if we go by their definitions, it can't be demonstrated, because the concept isn't meaningful."
Okay, I'm going to stop lurking and stick my neck out here.
Let me begin by saying that I usually find myself arbitrarily close to total agreement with what I read here, not just in this post, but in most, and in absolute disagreement with guys like Egnor.
But this point always puzzles me.
Qualia are, as far as I can see, the only thing in the world that we absolutely do know exist.
Do you know what the color blue looks like? If I say something is blue, do you know what I mean? That experience, the experience of "blueness" is a qualia (qualium?). It's a conscious experience, or a part of one, anyway.
It may well occur (or emerge) because of certain processes in the brain--in fact I would be very surprised to learn that it didn't. And those processes are probably distributed and dynamic. But our "materialistic" understanding of those processes are all based on a point of view: looking in from the outside.
I look at the sky and see "blue". But where is the "blue"? It's not in the sky. It's not even in the lightwaves (a specific frequency may be "in the light waves", but not "blueness", not the experience I have).
It's not in my eyes, it's not in my brain (as described by science from the outside), it's not the interaction of my neurons (insofar as we can observe or map that--even in theory). We may be able to correlate "experience of blue" with certain firing patterns or something, but that's just correlation, not explanation. I can't imagine a theory that would explain why I have the experience I have when I'm exposed to blue wavelengths, and not, say, the experience of "red" instead.
We do have consciousness of color, pain, itches, and other experiences, and nothing in science has yet come close to reducing this to physical interactions, because physical interactions may be what it looks like from the outside, but experience is what it looks like, feels like, sounds like, from the inside.
So when I hear someone say that qualia may not exist, honestly, I have to think that either they are simply allowing their habits of thinking to blind them to obvious facts, or they don't really understand what qualia are, or they are mere automata, and simply don't have the experience of consciousness that I have--that they have no interior life.
My guess is that it's some combination of the first two.
I don't mean to come off condescending, but I really think this is a blind spot for people who spend all their time and focus in the sciences, looking at everything from the outside. It's also important to consult your own, internal, experience, as well.
None of the above, by the way, should be taken to be a defense, in any way, shape or form, of Egnor.
Posted by: Ken Watts | June 22, 2007 1:40 AM
It's interesting to me that most of you seem to have been drawn to the thought experiment part of this argument, because it's the opening paragraph that fascinates me the most.
I'm going to abstract his argument a little bit. Basically, he's saying that brains have physical properties (Let's lump all of these together under the label "property A"), and ideas do not. Therefore, it's difficult to see how the brain can be the sole source of ideas.
Or, to put it in a completely abstract way,
"It's difficult to see how an object with property A can give rise to an object that lacks property A"
But, the thing is, it's really easy to see how objects with a certain property can give rise to objects without it.
For example, there's that old saw about how table salt is made of two deadly poisons. There's the fact that hydrogen and oxygen are both gasses at room temperature but water is not.
How sad is it when vaguely remembering high school chemistry is enough to blow your complex philosophical theory out of the water.
Of course, his thought experiment is extremely problematical, too, I don't think I need to get into it, but it seems to suggest, ultimately, that patterns themselves can't exist without dualism being true.
Posted by: Christopher | June 22, 2007 1:47 AM
Caledonian said:
There are a lot of philosophical complications because philosophy never met a stupid idea it didn't like. The actuality is quite simple.
That's a nice philosophy you got there.
Posted by: Coathangrrr | June 22, 2007 1:52 AM
@#40
I'm not really sure anyone thought computing supported Egnor's position. If anything, computing is a shining example of the kind of emergent properties that can arise from crude matter.
Anyway, thanks for the extension on my own post. Reading back over it again, I think the actual iteration of my point might have been forgotten in my typing of the second paragraph. An edit function would be rather nice at the moment. I guess that's what I get for typing in a rush, though.
Computing and AI are beyond strong evidence that no mysterious supernatural entities need be posited to explain the brain as the source of consciousness. While employing differing mechanisms, brains and computers perform the same essential task: They take in data, operate on it, and output new data. The human mind just has a more complicated "program".
Posted by: uknesvuinng | June 22, 2007 1:56 AM
It's beyond imagining that a neurosurgeon would be unaware that a few carefully chosen cuts would not only destroy your altruism, but your entire mind or even your life... and that with far less cutting than his silly brain-dicing strawman argument requires.
This seems to be nothing other than DI-style dishonesty, though perhaps I underestimate people's ability to fool themselves when they're desperate to do so.
Also, why does he propose dicing the brain instead of the entire body, or the entire universe? ISTM that he's tacitly assuming that altruism is "located" in the brain.
And whyever does he suppose that "proving" that altruism isn't localized in the brain makes it non-material (whatever he means by that)? It's not like he has offered a hypothesis for how non-material altruism would work.
This is just another DI-style argument that relies on applying a non sequitur to a flawed dismissal of reality.
But for entertainment purposes we can wonder what keeps this non-material altruism from being left on the ground floor when we go upstairs, or left behind in interstellar space as the solar system travels around the galaxy. Does he suppose that altruism is subject to the pull of gravity? Can't pass through walls and floors, despite being non-material? Or when we take the door, does our altruism take a short-cut directly through the wall? Is there some kind of rubber band that's materialistic on one end and supernatural on the other, which attaches our altruisms to our bodies? If we find the materialistic end of the rubber band in a brain and trace it until it disappears, will we thereby discover the supernatural world?
Sounds like great fun, for some amateurish science fiction.
Posted by: Bobby | June 22, 2007 1:56 AM
So, not having any background in philosophy, I have a question:
Why limit qualia to conscious beings? What is to say that, say, atoms do not have experience of being attracted to toher atoms by various forces?
And really, what's the point of qualia, anyway? It just seems like another way to make obvious facts complicated and obscure, to me.
Posted by: Christopher | June 22, 2007 2:02 AM
Even if you focus on a single software instruction, at the nanosecond of execution, you actually can't reduce it to a single location. It is at least in:
- the executable file
- the page file
- main memory
- CPU cache
It may be in disk cache and a source file as well. And due to paging it may be at a different location in main memory every time it is executed. So where is it "really"?
With scripting languages like SQL it is common to construct instructions on the fly. So where are these instructions when the program isn't running?
If even software instructions can't be pinned down to a single location, why should anyone expect specific ideas to be so pinned down? Yet programs do in fact run on hardware. And there is no reason to suppose that minds run on anything other than brains. (Even if, in both cases, some don't work very well.)
Posted by: Stephen | June 22, 2007 2:25 AM
Re: #49
Sorry, but you still sound a lot like egnor.
Are you supposing that things are "from inside" are different, even completely unrelated to "from outside" ?
I think this is only marginally less goofy than the original egnorianism
Posted by: T_U_T | June 22, 2007 2:29 AM
It is indeed quaint, if somewhat depressing, to encounter people who have no concept of properties of organization of matter as opposed to properties elemental to matter. This crops up a lot in my personal pet peeve... the misuse of the terms Information and Complexity by people trying to be technical (most often biologists).
An "idea" is encoded in the states of various bits of matter (neurons presumably most frequently, but words on a page or electrons in a computer work too). Without the physical instantiation, it doesn't exist. Is that too hard to understand.
Anyways, there is a cool little formula deriving the minimum amount of energy (or matter via E=MC^2) required to encode a bit of information... I wish I could remember it to trot out in response to people who go on about the insubstantial nature of information or consciousness or whatnot.
Posted by: travc | June 22, 2007 3:33 AM
@#55
Well, when the software isn't actually being run, it exists on storage media, be it pits in a CD, charges on a hard disk plate, or whatever. When in use, you could put it in a lot of places, but the point still remains, there's something physical that is the software. The final result of that software bears no resemblance to the electrons and circuitry that produces it, but it's still there.
The brain is more like a collection of specialized processing units (think GPUs which are designed solely for the purpose of processing graphics, and thus have specialized instruction sets to do just that as opposed to CPUs which are generalized so as to perform a variety of functions, but without specialization to do any particular task (let's ignore added instructions sets like SSE and 3dNow and such as they aren't critical to the function of a CPU)). Altruism would therefore "exist" in whatever part(s) of the brain specifically deals with such behaviors. Without those part(s) functioning properly, altruism would be broken or missing. I don't mean to imply there's a static location, but there is a physical manifestation of the idea.
We could go unnecessary and talk about how the idea now also physically exists in our memories and whatnot as a result of dealing with the abstraction of it. But somehow a one post comparison has stretched out into 3 (or 4 counting #40). Besides, it's unnecessary. :D
Posted by: uknesvuinng | June 22, 2007 3:52 AM
Re: no. 56
I think the point of the argument in no.49 is that we definitely have experiences, and that all our knowledge of the world comes from interpretation of those experiences. I agree that it seems silly to say that we don't know if qualia exist, although it's reasonable to ask how they happen or if they're something distinctive, or just a simple result of brain processing. That is, I think it's foolish to say that I don't know if I have some experience of "redness" when I see red---the nature of that experience is fully up for debate.
My suspicion is that qualia are fully materialistic in origin, but my only justification is that of "simplest ignorance", that is, I don't know what causes it, but I have no reason to posit something non-material to explain it.
Posted by: Matthew L. | June 22, 2007 4:15 AM
Michael Egnor: Not a rocket scientist.
(I'm sure someone's thought of that before, but not on this thread - ha!).
Posted by: NC Paul | June 22, 2007 6:49 AM
You know rocket science is fairly basic physics. I've considered trying to become a brain surgeon too, thus allowing me to win all arguements in pubs.
Posted by: josh | June 22, 2007 7:09 AM
Josh, I'll happily give you Egnor's degree, he clearly has no idea how to use it.
#49 the Qualia man. Consciousness is necessary for a complex brain to work. Take a big hammer and hit your left big toe as hard as you can. If you do it properly you will feel a lot of pain probably say "ouch" and then "why did I ever do something that dumb" and then figure out how to avoid doing it again.
The pain was caused by a bunch of messages going down your neurons.
Ask yourself this - how would all that work if there was no consciousness? In order for signals to be received, processed and acted upon in a complex manner there has to be awareness. You qualia is just your brain doing that processing.
Posted by: sailor | June 22, 2007 7:44 AM
People who are colorblind often fail to realize it until it is rigorously demonstrated to them. Such a person would insist they could detect 'blueness', but actually wouldn't.
There isn't any 'blueness'. That is an illusion. You cannot describe any of the properties of 'blueness', no matter how hard you try, and this is because what you consider a sensation is just your brain making a reference to an activation state. No "sensory experiences" can be described except referring to other sensory experiences, because they have no properties other than being an association.
There's no 'there', there.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 22, 2007 7:53 AM
It seems to me that you're missing the point. Experiencing the "illusion" of blueness is still an experience, and that's what qualia are.
To deny that first-person experiences exist seems rather pointless and somewhat self-contradictory. The argument shouldn't be over whether or not they exist, the argument should be about what they signify. Do they, as Egnor would argue, signify the existence of an immaterial mind or are they something else?
Dualism, despite assertions to the contrary, is most definitely not dead in the world of philosophy of the mind. To be sure, Cartesian dualism (the sort of "ghost in the machine" argument Egnor is making) is indeed all but dead (it's being killed by neurobiology but the irony is likely lost on Egnor), but other forms like property dualism or emergent dualism are still being proposed and defended. Philosophers like Jaegwon Kim, David Chalmers, and William Hasker have all mounted robust defenses of one or more of these. What's more, these theories are completely naturalistic; there's no appeal to the "soul" or any other types of supernatural entities made to explain the processing of the brain or mind.
I think that's what's really important, here. Egnor and others like him seem to believe that "magic man done it" actually solves problems like qualia, but in reality it doesn't. Even if the mind were to be absolutely and completely immaterial itself, it wouldn't have anything necessarily to do with whether or not it were to depend upon or emerge from the material and it certainly doesn't add anything to our understanding of qualia. Adding a "supernatural" element doesn't get us anywhere closer to explaining them than the scientific inquiry that might someday actually get us there...
Posted by: Bill Snedden | June 22, 2007 8:59 AM
No, you've missed the point - the conviction that there's an experience there is the illusion.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 22, 2007 9:13 AM
I too think #65 has missed the point.
If one can not describe the experience properly, it is a fault of language. The so-called illusion is caused by the limitations of language.
Language relies on shared experience.
Posted by: rpsms | June 22, 2007 9:36 AM
No, language relies on shared properties. By the use of language to manipulate properties, experiences can be transmitted.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 22, 2007 9:41 AM
Calendonian, you've contradicted yourself. To experience an illusion is no less an experience. Illusions cannot exist unless there are experiences.
Posted by: Bill Snedden | June 22, 2007 9:48 AM
You've failed to comprehend. There is no experience of qualia. The experience is of the conviction that there are qualia when there are not.
The term is useless.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 22, 2007 9:56 AM
No, language relies on shared properties. By the use of language to manipulate properties, experiences can be transmitted.
This is just wrong.
Posted by: Coathangrrr | June 22, 2007 10:37 AM
So has anyone asked Egnor if he thinks souls are exclusive to humanity? If he truely believes that altruism comes from having a soul then he'd have to agree primates have souls as well because they've been demonstrated to show altruistic behavior.
http://www.livescience.com/animals/060302_helpful_chimps.html
And wouldn't ants or bees dying to protect their colony also be considered altruistic? So doesn't that mean that they have souls as well?
Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't that a logical conclusion to come to based on his ideas? And yet somehow i doubt he'd agree.
Posted by: Brian W. | June 22, 2007 10:38 AM
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1328/534668399_59bf96bfcf.jpg?v=0
Further proof!
;)
Posted by: Coathangrrr | June 22, 2007 10:42 AM
Caledonian:
You appear to have contradicted yourself again. The "...experience...of the conviction..." is, again, itself an experience and thus a quale. Not only that, but to describe an experience as "illusory" implies that veridical experiences exist; again a contradiction.
But perhaps