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.

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.

Read More

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

Read More

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.*

Read More

Libertarian Free Will is Patently False

Attempting to create this post is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not because this was a difficult argument to construct but because I had to attempt to define libertarian free will, a notoriously unclear concept. Most basically free will is “the ability of agents to make choices free from certain types of restraint.” The libertarian version of this, essentially, claims this free will “requires that an agent be able to make more than one decision under precisely the same given circumstances” of its own volition. That is to say an agent is neither solely bound by determinism, mechanistic processes caused exclusively by previous events and constants, nor by randomness. Many proponents of this idea believe such “freedom” is necessary to know reason to be sound or for people to be responsible for their actions and it is a pillar of the Christian and Islamic moral systems in which such “freedom” is necessary to make reward and punishment just. However once you weed through the jargon I believe you are forced to conclude whatever libertarian free will is, it does not exist.

The easiest way to see this is to flesh out the implications of determinism and randomness. An event would be deterministic if it is determined necessarily by the events in the past and/or forces that don’t have a temporal dimension, like gravity. If, for example, the throwing of a ball was deterministic then all the events which led up to that throw were either within time or constants, like the gravitational force which has no temporal index. Already one can see combining the two sets of influences which make an event deterministic would include any proposed supernatural entities or influences that exist outside of time as they would appear to us to be constants if outside of time and just another kind of temporal cause for events if within time. However one thing that is missing from this set is the future but regardless of whether one believes the future exists or whether it influences the past it doesn’t help one escape the scope of determinism.

If the future does not exist, or it does but doesn’t influence the past, then there is literally nothing outside of the above set of influences to determine an event, and hence libertarian free will is false because it depends on there being such an entity not bound by these influences. If you contend the future does exist and in some way influences the past this does not create an escape out of events being determined but merely creates an expansion of the possible influences that cause an event. Possible causes for a deterministic event would now merely include the future and again there is no influence independent of causation and hence libertarian free will is again false.

In fact the only extent to which an event could be non-deterministic would be if it was actually random, not just apparently random to us due to our epistemic limits, because the event would have to depend on literally nothing else. So with random and determined events taken to their logical consequences there are no other other options for causing an event. “Free” is not a viable third option here because there is no third option. All possible influences are encompassed in determined and random processes so merely saying there exist some neither determined nor random option which is “free” is incoherent and functionally the equivalent of saying “free” is a third option in any other true dichotomy like exist, nonexistent, and “free.”

So despite its numerous proponents, whose arguments are frequently steeped in theology, libertarian free will can not exist and this, I dare say, is about as patently obvious as philosophical positions can get.

What Would Convince Me God Exists

One of the most important ideas within skepticism is that there ought to be some amount of evidence that would convince you to change your mind about a topic. We frequently back away from discussions in which the other party acknowledges that they can’t conceive of anything which would change their opinion but I’ve realized of late that when it comes to belief in god I can seem to fit into this category. However last June I outlined what would convince me to consider a particular religion to stand above any for consideration. I gave three examples of claims which would give more credence to one religion over others namely the existence of miracles, the specific effectiveness of prayer and a perfect holy book.

These all seem to be necessary but not sufficient steps to justifying any particular religion but because we just wouldn’t be in a position to say what caused any miraculous displays even these now seem pointless. Even if all of these were true, and it’s not clear how we could ever really know that miracles were happening, it could no more prove that the particular god of that religion were real than it could prove that 6 advanced aliens created our universe as a game and are “answering prayers” through the manipulation of the programming in our world. This seems to be an inherit problem in arguing for the existence of beings in an inaccessible realm of reality which doesn’t apply to other fields generally under the umbrella of skepticism.

That is to say claims of gods are not like homeopathy which, no matter how unlikely it may seem due to having no plausible mechanism, could be proven beyond reasonable doubt with a few sufficiently large double-blind controlled clinical trials. God claims suffer from a lack of coherency and even if this is ignored they all seem fall into the categories of the demonstrably false or completely unknowable. For example, deism is by definition physically undetectable while theistic claims depend on the unverifiable because it would be impossible to distinguish the acts of a theistic god from natural processes. This leaves only logical arguments but having only ever seen unsuccessful attempts to argue for a being outside of our universe, and given the inherit limits of knowledge about what is happening independent of our universe, I don’t know what a successful argument would look like and they may in fact be impossible.

So what would change my mind? Any claim would have to begin with a coherent definition which is both free from fatal contradictions and knowable. Given that I haven’t a clue about how you could ever demonstrate such claims without testable evidence I provisionally assume any proposed gods would have to operate in a manner that is testable. Some would at this point claim “if it is god then it isn’t testable” but if that is the case then by definition no possible physical evidence could support this claim and I wouldn’t believe anything presented would be sufficient reason to believe in such a being. However I realize to some believers this merely seems like I’m being just as stubborn as the most fervent of the faithful but this is because they fail to see the difference between rejecting possible evidence for a claim simply because that belief isn’t based on evidence and being unable to even conceive of evidence because the proposed concept is incoherent or can’t be supported by evidence. The former is a faith position devoid of evidence but in the latter the fault lies in the concept itself.

I’m still open to changing my mind given a workable concept and sufficient evidence, the problem is all concepts of gods seem to be divorced from ever being supported by this kind of evidence. If and when this changes I’ll be listening.