Re: Making your mind up

On 29/04/2024 18:46, Martin Harran wrote:

On Sat, 27 Apr 2024 15:12:31 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
 

On 27/04/2024 10:09, Martin Harran wrote:

 I'm snipping a lot of stuff here because I think some of the
discussion is moving towards endless circles. Also, my time for this
is a bit limited so I'm cutting to what I think are some of the key
points.
 […]
 

I'm a bit confused because you said earlier that "you accept science can
only study visible behavior" but now it seems you categorize gravity as
non-visible while agreeing it's something science can and does study.

 I meant that gravity does have visible 'behaviour' - we can see the
apple falling from the tree and start to test/quantify different
things falling from different heights and so on.
   […]
 

>
In terms of why I originally brought this up, I was responding to your
statement that "science cannot explain consciousness of which
decision-making is a subset". I probably misread the sentence as saying
science cannot explain those things *in principle* when you actually
just meant that science can't explain them *right now*.

 Yes, I meant science can't explain them right *now* but I also
expressed my opinion that science is focused on a particular approach
- neurological research - which I don't think will *on its own*
provide an explanation.

Did you have any comment on my disagreement with that opinion? What has brought you to think that science is focused on neurological research for explaining consciousness or decisions?

 

Even so I'm
surprised at the idea that science currently cannot explain
decision-making - but then I'm not sure what level of explanation you
were thinking of with that sentence.

 Science can explain the neurological process that go on inside the
brain whilst we are making decisions but cannot explain how we arrive
at a particular decision.
 

That's funny because I'd have said the exact opposite. Science absolutely can't currently propose a full explanation for how neurons interaction yield such a complex behavior as human decision-making, to my knowledge. That's why there are specific fields studying cognition that aren't neurology. But what would an explanation of "how we arrive at a particular decision" look like for you?

>
But all that to say "visible" in this context referred to the fact that
if we think of consciousness as causing our visible behavior, then
science absolutely could explain it in principle. And I probably
misunderstood you when I thought this was something you might disagree with.

 As I've said before, neurology has allowed us to get an incredible
understanding of the 'mechanics' of the brain but also as I've said
before, I see that like an electronics engineer who has an incredible
depth of knowledge about the electronic processes going on in my
computer but that doesn't give him any understanding about the ideas I
am using that computer to express.
 

In this case the analogy would be more to the software the computer runs. And I think it's a decent analogy, an electronics engineer wouldn't necessary know the depths of software engineering in detail and vice versa. But that's why there are many different kinds of engineers looking at the different aspects of a computer's function.

[…]
 

>
Science doesn't reject dualism in principle, it rejects it because no
dualism hypothesis meets the standards of a scientific hypothesis. "I
think we should be able to figure out ways of studying the effects and
symptoms that would come from dualism" is exactly correct! Can you give
examples of such effects or symptoms?

 Okay, to take an area that intrigues me. If our mind is just the
products of our body, I would expect it to be under the control of
that body. In practice, however, it is a two-way process- our minds
can also control our bodies. For example, placebos can "cure" people
even though they have no medicinal value whatsoever. Or take
hypnotism; someone can put me into a hypnotic state where I no longer
feel pain. That hypnosis is induced by an external force which shows
that control of our mind is not confined to our own bodies.
 Just to be clear, I'm not saying these are validation of dualism but
they are indicators of our minds being capable of being influenced by
*external* forces.
 […]
 

Please note that this isn't an example of an effect or symptom of dualism, that's an effect or symptom of physicalism that you think is at odds with observations. I'm still interested in hearing an example for dualism, because that there are none (that weren't disproven sometime in the last 200 years at least) is my whole point.
Like, "physicalism has issues" isn't a reason to adopt dualism if dualism isn't a hypothesis at all. General relativity and quantum mechanics have notorious issues but they weren't abandoned in favor of "not general relativity or quantum mechanics", even if the issues might suggest the latter is correct. Because the latter isn't actually a coherent idea. The practice is to stick with the actual idea despite its issues until a better actual idea is found.
As for this as an effect of physicalism I think your expectations are off. If our mind is a product of our body then it's a complex product, meaning it's certainly an adaptation, meaning it must have some kind of selective benefit that accounts for its evolution. The only such benefit *is* controlling the body - i.e. impacting its behavior in a way that causes it to outreproduce peers. Controlling the body is literally the first thing we'd expect a mind to be able to do. It's interesting that your go-to example was the placebo effect and not "moving our fingers to type these sentences".
I'm also not sure what the emphasis on "external" is doing. Our minds are constantly being influenced by the external world via perception - from a physicalist point of view it's also an obvious evolutionary feature, flexibly connecting perception to behavior is what brains do. Hypnosis to all evidence is induced by external forces going through the mundane perceptual channels you'd expect them to have to go through under physicalism.