Doubting Marcus

Ghostbusters of the Mind Part 1

For as long as there has been philosophy there have been arguments about whether everything was ultimately physical or whether human minds may be an exception to this rule. In the time of Plato or even Descartes this could have been a reasonable debate but we don’t live in that age anymore. Since then we have put these ideas to the test. Every time we have found the brain to play a role for some aspect of mental life, whether that be in sensory experience or memory, we have gained reason to believe minds are physical.

Indeed there have been thousands (if not millions) of independent data points and every one of them has fit the physical mind model and every new fact that fits this model is not only makes physicalism more likely it makes the theory that minds have some nonphysical competent less likely. Sure there are things we still don’t understand about the brain and of course one could now argue that the kind of dualism is true just happens to be the variety in which only some portion of the subset of mental life we haven’t yet correlated with the brain is due to the soul. The question is that rational to do? Rational or not, many dualist philosophers have done just that arguing, for example, that they can imagine a “philosophical zombie” who has all the physical and behavioral traits of a human but is not conscious. Whether or not you can imagine such a creature, it should make essentially no difference to our conclusion. That is unless you are to claim that such possibility of imagination is the millions-to-one argument in favor of dualism which would be needed to rescue it from being extremely unlikely.

As Dan Dennett rightly pointed out who would be persuaded in the least by someone who claimed they could imagine a dog with all of it’s biological components functioning but which wasn’t really alive? No one would believe that was a good reason to accept vitalism, the belief in a mysterious life force, and similarly we should dismiss claims of being able to imagine a person with a fully functioning brain but not conscious as equally pitiful. In the face of the overwhelming evidence that has come in exclusively on the side of physical minds we’ve long surpassed the point where belief in dualism is reasonable. In fact this rule applies not just to dualism but beliefs in chakras, qi and a host of other pseudoscientific ideas which still subsist in alternative medicine but which science based medicine has rightfully abandoned.

This is one reason why though I’ve recently addressed several arguments for dualism, the era in which there was still a debate to be had has long since gone. Even if you believe dualism is coherent, which as I’ll explain in the second part of this look at dualism that you shouldn’t, we must consider dualism very unlikely just by considering the evidence neuroscience has gathered over the past few centuries.

The Geller Telekinesis Argument

Imagine someone presents you the following argument:

1. All cars used for transportation have some force enabling them to drive.
2. Uri Geller’s car is used for transportation.
3. Therefore Uri Geller’s car has some force enabling it to drive.

On a straightforward reading that conclusion seems harmless. You probably understand car propulsion has something to do with engines and fuel so concluding Geller’s car has some force is no stretch. Now what if I told you the person making this argument was arguing that Geller’s car was not enabled by the typical internal combustion engines you vaguely grasp and indeed not by any understood process at all. Instead they claim Geller’s car is moved by telekinesis and that this argument demonstrates that fact. You see telekinesis is “some force” that could in theory enable a car to drive.

Now ignoring for the sake of argument that we could actually test this claim, what’s wrong with this argument? The contention is clearly over the term “some force” as what leads you to accept the first premise is that there is abundant evidence of cars running because of physical causes. In fact all of the evidence for working cars is tied to fuel, engines, gas pedals, etc. and there is no evidence at all that cars can function due to telekinesis or that telekinesis of any kind is possible. This clearly is a case of using a term that has multiple possible meanings and switching between those two meanings, a classic fallacy of equivocation.

This scenario is strongly analogous to the Kalam cosmological argument which argues that the universe was created out of nothing and goes:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Where the Geller telekinesis argument equivocates between known physical forces and telekinesis for usable cars, Kalam equivocates between creation out of something (meaning a rearrangement of physical materials), and creation out of nothing (literally meaning something coming from nothing), in the use of “begin to exist.” In both cases all of the evidence for the acceptance of the first premise is in one meaning of a term which is then abandoned the rest of the argument. We have plenty of reason to believe things “begin to exist” if you mean the rearrangement of preexisting materials. However just as we have no evidence for telekinesis we have no evidence that things begin to exist out of nothing and yet this is what the proponents are arguing for. Ultimately simply because you can bundle two different meanings under the same label doesn’t mean we must accept one meaning which has no evidence supporting it.

I’ve previously addressed Kalam at length but I think this is a handy way to see one major issue with the argument that most people can understand.

Poor PR Decisions: Evolution, God and Design

I think I agree with creationists. No not about the existence of The Real Housewives of Bedrock but about the implications of evolution should have for theism in general and the Biblical religions in particular. Creationist outfits have been telling anyone who would listen that accepting evolution is incompatible with belief in god generally and the Bible in particular and for once I think they are right but naturally for reasons very different from what they’ve been suggesting. Unlike them I readily acknowledge there are lots of Christians and theists in general who accept evolution but the relevant question is are the beliefs really compatible?

The common claim of those who accept theistic evolution that evolution could have been a guided process just isn’t good inference. Modern evolutionary theory places enormous limitations on the history of life on this planet essentially all of which didn’t have to be true. The most common example is the claim that all life has common descent as all life didn’t have to be related but observation and experiment have overwhelmingly confirmed this. Even descent itself didn’t have to be true as a designer isn’t limited to breeding to produce new organisms. A designer just isn’t bound to a “branching tree a life” and could create organisms which have nothing or very little to do with previous organisms which means there were infinite paths to the current set of species.

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We Can Think About Things, Therefore Dualism

The argument from intentionality (AFI) relies on the claim that one physical state can’t be “about” another. That is to say intentionality, the property of mental phenomena directed upon some object, can’t reduce to physical states of the brain and because minds clearly have this capability then dualism must be true. Most simply A can’t be “about” B if they are both purely physical. Many dualists argue this is because intentionality is fundamentally irreducible and to reduce it would be to explain something else. They claim any attempt to reduce intentionality to something nonmental will always fail because it leaves out intentionality. As philosopher John Searle argues:

Suppose for example that you had a perfect causal account of the belief that water is wet. This account is given by stating the set of causal relations in which a system stands to water and to wetness and these relations are entirely specified without any mental component. The problem is obvious: a system could have all those relations and still not believe that water is wet… You cannot reduce intentional content (or pains, or “qualia”) to something else, because if you did they would be something else, and it is not something else. - The Rediscovery of Mind p. 51

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Faith is a Rule Changer… Sometimes

As a skeptic I’ve read and taken part in many debates with believers who follow the familiar pattern: A debate on a topic begins and after some time the believer acknowledges that the skeptic has made some strong arguments but instead of acknowledging that maybe they should reconsider their position the believer says “you just have to have faith.”

Now we all know you can’t argue with faith because it is by definition impervious to evidence but you can point out that the acceptance of faith isn’t a good thing epistemologically, it just doesn’t lead to knowledge. However what I find more important is to point out what just occurred. We were both playing the same game by the same rules, attempting to prove our views with logic and evidence, but as soon as it became apparent the skeptic had defeated the logic and evidence of the believer, the believer changed the rules of the contest. Now you can’t stop people from doing this but you can try to make them acknowledge that to withdraw from the use of reason purely when it doesn’t fit them anymore is an admission that the belief they hold isn’t rationally based, or at the very least they are currently out of rational reasons and should permanently stop using those arguments just refuted.

In moral terms abortion, same-sex marriage and the death penalty are all subject to faith claims on all sides of the issue. So if someone is to reasonably decide if any of these are moral we must clearly reject faith as a guide to do so. Still, for example, Obama’s support of same-sex marriage today will undoubtedly be met with claims of immorality based solely on the fact it contradicts a faith position that homosexuality is immoral. As my previous post indicated, I don’t buy for a moment any arguments that homosexuality is immoral but because morality is one of last places in public discourse where it is still acceptable to use religious beliefs as the sole justification for a position. As a result people who oppose same-sex marriage largely don’t even bother to make arguments to support their position.

However in science, where creationism and a small minority of climate change deniers disagree with established science because of their religious beliefs, it’s no longer publicly acceptable, at least not in political or legal discourse, to replace argument with an explicit expression of faith. When people do this they are roundly dismissed as unfairly, and unconstitutionally, attempting to force their religious beliefs onto secular society. Now there aren’t any moral positions supported the way the theories of evolution and climate change are, but I think secular people must be just as vigilant in pointing out the unfair and unconstitutional move from using reasoning and evidence to faith positions with regard to morality as they are about issues of science. It’s our responsibility to remind them either that retreat into faith should be allowed in every field, which would make rational discourse impossible, or it shouldn’t be allowed anywhere.

David Barton: Christian Pseudo-Historian Extraordinaire

I don’t do this often, in fact I don’t believe I’ve done this at all, but David Barton, who appeared on The Daily Show last night, represents nearly everything I stand against as a secular person. As an Evangelical Christian he constantly and falsely claims Christians are being persecuted, that the government should do more for religion and in the course promotion of his specific religious beliefs he practices pseudo-history in which, it seems, all but outright lies are acceptable.

Here is a man who has said the founding fathers of the U.S. “had the entire debate on creation/evolution” which is a statement that only doesn’t seem absurd if you don’t realize Charles Darwin was born 33 years after the U.S. was founded and wouldn’t publish On the Origin of Species until he was 50. This means if the founders did have the entire debate they weren’t just clever men who anticipated forthcoming problems, they were time travelers. Nonetheless the reason he was on The Daily Show last night was to promote his book The Jefferson Lies which purports to correct widely held myths about Thomas Jefferson.

That sounds like a noble goal until you see what he considers myths about Jefferson—that he fathered his slave Sally Hemings’ children, that Jefferson really pushed for secularizing public life, he was racist who opposed civil rights for black Americans and that he composed his own Bible by removing parts he disagreed with—which upon hearing you realize that this guy is at best a crank and at worst someone who will say whatever it takes to promote his agenda. Every one of those questions aren’t serious historical questions any longer, in fact only the Hemings question ever was, and have been settled as facts which even a minor Google search can settle.*

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“We Reason, Therefore Naturalism is False (and God Exists)”

The argument from reason, as my joking title suggests, insists that reason can not be reduced to physical states and that fundamentally matter must reduce to mental things and, not surprisingly, some say the origin of reason is necessarily god. Some versions don’t actually attempt to prove a god but only eliminate naturalism (which would leave an atheistic idealism) but as this argument universally asserts that naturalism can’t account for reason, and considering philosophical naturalism is a common position of atheists including myself, I felt I should explain why this too is a bad reason to believe in god or rule out naturalism.

The central idea in the argument from reason is that if our mental faculties are the result of natural processes like evolution, themselves the product of undirected deterministic physics, then what we think are reasons aren’t really reasons so rationality could not have emerged from these physical processes. In the same sense that you wouldn’t attribute “reasons” to the actions of glass breaking when dropped to the floor because it was just responding to determined physical processes, if our cognitive faculties are the result of determined physical processes we can’t truly say we are reasoning. Therefore, proponents say, if naturalism is true then we don’t have rationality and hence no reason to believe in naturalism as the position refutes itself. The alternative provided is that mental states are the fundamental substance (entity?) of reality and only if this is true can we account for rationality. As Victor Reppert states in his defense of the argument:

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“If We Evolved, Naturalism is False and God Exists”

To those unfamiliar with Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism the idea evolution could even conceivably undermine naturalism, when it’s generally considered one of the important pieces in naturalism, may seem a lot peculiar. However, if Plantinga’s argument is right then evolution does indeed undermine naturalism, here defined by Plantinga simply as the philosophical position that “there is no such person as God.” The idea in contention is if an unguided evolutionary process could result in “the great bulk” of our beliefs being true or our cognitive faculties being reliable, he claims it’s not probable or at least less probable than traditional theism, meaning essentially the Abrahamic god. God, if it existed, could easily guide evolution such that our cognitive faculties are reliable.

Plantinga claims the problem is in an unguided process of evolution even if beliefs effect actions, something he doesn’t concede is necessarily true in naturalism, evolution doesn’t select for true beliefs it selects for beliefs that produce adaptive behavior. A human could avoid being eaten by a tiger by correctly believing it as a threat and running away or by wanting to pet it and believing the best way to do so is to run away. Either way the adaptive behavior of running away would be selected for meaning false beliefs could be selected for and this is but one alternative way beliefs could be related to behavior. This, by the way, is already misleading because individual beliefs are not selected for, cognitive faculties which produce beliefs are as there are no genes for individual beliefs. Any geneticist could have told him this but I digress…

He presents his argument as Bayesian but, for clarity, and for my purposes it will suffice as a syllogism:

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