Sunday, December 23, 2012

Sometimes Gene Callahan tries too hard

This is an example.

He says "Darwinian and neo-Darwinian" theories of evolution are "logically incapable" of explaining consciousness and self-awareness. Why? Because teleology is not allowed and there is no reason for beings to be "self-aware" when they could just evolve the mechanisms that make them fit sans self-awareness. The best Darwinians can hope for is that consciousness is a byproduct of some other process.

Self-awareness seems to just be an organism's capacity to recognize that she exists and persists in an environment in a generalized way. It seems to me there are all sorts of situations where taking in this information, processing it, and reacting accordingly would be useful for an organism.

Of course this capacity could be evolved separately, with no sort of general self-awareness. That's presumably what Gene has in mind: something like a computer that responds to specific stimuli as it needs to. But it doesn't seem that hard to conceive of why a brain with generalized self-awareness would be far more fit than this sort of piece-by-piece evolution of stimulus and response. A self-aware brain along with abstract thinking capacity is going to be even more robust to novel risks. Why is teleology needed? A sense of self-in-the-world is surely going to get an evolving brain further along than a disjointed assortment of stimulus and response, right?

Gene Callahan's option of direction of course is not this easy to understand. It begs the question: whence the director? Unless "well it just happened" is to count, we're in a bit of trouble. Every theory is going to run into a snag at some point - perhaps a soluble snag, perhaps not. But it seems to me we'd like our snags to be as fundamental and non-complex as possible. Explaining a grand architect seems like a bigger, less fundamental snag than explaining the existence of mute matter. Notice that this is not to say that it is less true/ It's just those that appeal to such a thing should not go around scolding others for "logical incapabilities".

27 comments:

  1. The basic test of self-awareness is the mirror. Animals who realize that what they are seeing is their reflection and not another animal are self-aware. Animals who are self-aware are able to imagine situations in which they are agents among other, similar agents. That is to say, self-awareness and other-awareness are two sides of the same coin. Without self-awareness, that type of thinking is not possible. To be sure, non-self-aware thinking could achieve the same results, but it would have a more complex structure and be less likely to evolve and more difficult and costly to maintain.

    Consciousness is another question. After all, we are aware of many things of which we are not conscious. Why the additional step? Perhaps it has to do with imagination, that consciousness is necessary for that. Perhaps it has to do with thinking. General awareness is parallel, conscious thought is serial. What do we gain from serial thinking? Again, perhaps it is a contrast. Perhaps the point of consciousness is not to be aware of something as much as it is to shut out awareness of everything else.

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    1. Consciousness is tested self-reflectively, not observationally.

      One can program a robot to "react" when it "sees itself" in a mirror, but that doesn't mean it is conscious.

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  2. From Callahan: At best, consciousness is some sort of accidental, weird by-product of mechanistic evolution, something totally useless with which we are nonetheless saddled.

    I don't see how he can come to this conclusion. So without some external force gifting us with consciousness, it is useless? Why is consciousness this final thing that we should arrive at or that we were destined to inherit? Clearly consciousness has provided humans some evolutionary benefits, at least so far. It works within the context from which it arose. It has adapted as our circumstances have changed. That is far from "totally useless."

    If there is a force that makes decisions and guides the universe, it appears to be endogenous. Any ends that it "chooses" are driven by circumstance.

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  3. James Caton wrote:

    Clearly consciousness has provided humans some evolutionary benefits, at least so far. It works within the context from which it arose. It has adapted as our circumstances have changed. That is far from "totally useless."

    Mr. Caton, you're writing as if you have the above statements as independent facts, which you then cite in your argument with Callahan. But I think the only reason you "know" the above statements are true, is that you already believe that consciousness arose through standard Darwinian processes--then you deduced the above statements.

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    1. "I think the only reason"

      You also try way too hard to make your point sound reasonable on these sorts of things, Bob. Now this is one reason Jim could write something like that, it's true? But the only reason? Of course not. I can think of lots of situations where my consciousness allows me to get through circumstances that a dandelion or a clam would have no hope of coping with. Surely one needs only a few such situations to reject the idea that consciousness is "totally useless".

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    2. The facet I added to that argument is, of course, that one could imagine each of these coping mechanisms evolving separately. But a consciousness that can cope on the fly obviously has evolutionary advantages over separately evolved coping methods without consciousness.

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  4. I do believe that consciousness arose from evolutionary process. I don't think a "chooser" has to be excluded from the process. The unfolding nature of evolution and within that, consciousness, leads me to reconsider the nature of a deity if it actually exists. That does motivate me to show that it is easy to disprove that consciousness derived from evolution is "totally useless." This motivation does not invalidate my argument.

    When a libertarian shows that government intervention brings about an economic disequilibrium, does that mean that his or her argument is invalid? I think not.

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  5. James and Daniel, these were the statements I had in mind:

    It works within the context from which it arose. It has adapted as our circumstances have changed.

    I'm saying, you have no evidence of that, except for the general claim that "we have good evidence that evolution explains all kinds of stuff, and so I think it can explain evolution, and so if it does, then it must be the case that: It works within the context from which it arose. It has adapted as our circumstances have changed."

    It's not like we have fossil records showing that consciousness was different millions of years ago, and has evolved over time as the circumstances changed.

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    1. We don't know of any consciousness except that of some animals, and those animals evolved. So James and Daniel do have evidence.
      Consciousness, like sex, seems to be a characteristic only of evolved creatures. Sex surely evolved; prima facie it looks like consciousness did too.

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    2. Bob,

      Human knowledge is constrained so researchers use models to understand the world. I think evolution is an acceptable model. To the best of my knowledge, most scientists agree. Many of them compare cognition between humans, primates, and other animals in order to understand consciousness.

      Your counterargument suggests that I should not use this model to attempt to explain consciousness. What model do you suggest that I use? Is there a serious branch of biological research that rejects evolution as an analytical tool?

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    3. This is a very nice point about comparisons to apes. At what point from human to ape ancestor to fish to flatworm will Bob and Gene introduce the soul? Well why can't it be evolution, the changing brain structure and culture?

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    4. James, just to be clear here... Are you really saying that the proof that the model of evolution can explain consciousness is that some people have assumed that the model of evolution can explain consciousness?

      And Murphy does not need another model to explain anything. I can argue that the phlogiston theory is garbage without having the alternative (correct) theory of oxidation.

      "Consciousness, like sex, seems to be a characteristic only of evolved creatures."

      So is death. Did death evolve?

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  6. *Oops: "...and so I think it can explain CONSCIOUSNESS" (not "evolution")

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  7. I have turned off comments on these sorts of posts because the ensuing conversation is often so pointless, but with Daniel I will make an exception and respond here, because I think there is hope for him. :-)

    "It seems to me there are all sorts of situations where taking in this information, processing it, and reacting accordingly would be useful for an organism."

    I agree! But if unconscious mechanisms can do everything they need to survive, that point is denied. What consciousness can ADD is intentionality and teleology: but these are precisely what mechanistic theories of evolution say we DON'T need to add to explain anything!

    "A self-aware brain along with abstract thinking capacity is going to be even more robust to novel risks. Why is teleology needed?"

    You have just added teleology yourself: the 'self-aware brain,' if it is acting so as to avoid novel risks, IS behaving teleologically!
    A brain

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    1. I don't know why it says "A brain" at the end of my comment!

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    2. You have too many brains Gene!

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    3. re: "You have just added teleology yourself: the 'self-aware brain,' if it is acting so as to avoid novel risks, IS behaving teleologically!"

      I think you're abusing the word "teleology" here Gene. Teleology is the view that there are purposes inherent in the world itself. Simply showing the humans have purposes does not give you that.

      And of course, how mechanical our human "purposes" really are at a neural level is an open question as far as I'm concerned (maybe it's not an open question to a neuroscientist but I suspect it is for them too).

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    4. "But if unconscious mechanisms can do everything they need to survive, that point is denied."

      Can they actually do everything they need to survive though? You seem to be assuming that one can have a brain that does everything that the human mind can do minus consciousness + self-awareness. I don't think there is any compelling reason to say that. It may be that consciousness and self-awareness are direct products of a brain which can do what humans can do.

      Consider the following analogy. If you look at the palm of your hand, there are a whole bunch of lines and ridges. Those appear to serve no purpose. They are merely the result of the fact that your hand operates in a particular manner. One could surely theorize that a hand without those ridges could function just as well as a hand with those ridges. In other words, one could say that mechanistic evolutionary processes cannot account for those ridges. But that wouldn't make much sense. Your hand operates the way it does because of mechanistic evolutionary processes and those ridges on your hand are a product of the way your hand operates. One need not theorize some other process to account for useless ridges in the palm of your hand. The same can be said of consciousness.

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    5. Gene Callahan: "What consciousness can ADD is intentionality and teleology: but these are precisely what mechanistic theories of evolution say we DON'T need to add to explain anything!"

      So what? That is not the same as saying that intentionality and teleology cannot evolve. It is just saying that they are not external to the system.

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  8. If consciousness is an aspect of how brains operate, then his argument simply fails: it can be a useful aspect, selected for. Thus Gene's argument can be seen to be circular. He must assume conscious is more than just something brains can do.

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  9. That science does not explain consciousness is true. If it still can't in a few centuries, it might be interesting. Until then all this is just speculation. My speculation is we will find consciousness does not exist but is the composition of many different interacting processes about which we will have boundless arguments about which set of processes is necessary and sufficient to be called consciousness and about which we will recognize a wide variety of levels of consciousness, some of which will not include our own.

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  10. @PrometheeFeu

    Indeed, if consciousness is epiphenomenal, then we may imagine equivalent zombies, but, as you point out, such zombies may be impossible. :)

    However, consciousness has been studied a great deal since the epiphenomenal hypothesis was proposed. I think that there are good reasons to think that consciousness is not epiphenomenal. For me, one of the most compelling is the fact that we already have a system of unconscious (zombie) awareness, and yet we have consciousness, too. In evolutionary terms, why didn't we just stay zombies? ;)

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  11. Evolution is a science restricted to causality. It is not a science that can accommodate conscious activity. This is not to say that consciousness transcends evolutionary science, just that our minds do not treat self-awareness as causally structured.

    Teleology is logically distinct from causality, and, since evolution is restricted to causal phenomena, it means evolution does not conclusively encompass teleology. It is easy to say "Self-awareness was naturally selected", but saying that is tantamount to saying teleology is constrained to causality, which is not logically coherent.

    Neither causal monism, nor teleological monism, can be practically justified without contradiction. Physically stating either position, and claiming to be saying something meaningful in the process, can only imply that two distinct and complimentary categories of inquiry are justified.

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    1. "Teleology is logically distinct from causality"

      Tilt! Teleology has to do with final causes. Read Aristotle.

      "It is easy to say "Self-awareness was naturally selected", but saying that is tantamount to saying teleology is constrained to causality, which is not logically coherent."

      "It is easy to say "Self-awareness was naturally selected", but saying that is tantamount to saying teleology is constrained to causality, which is not logically coherent."

      Oh, come on! There is no logical problem with a system that has teleology at one level but not another.

      Besides, self awareness is not necessary for teleology. Consider a rat running a T-maze, in which the probability that it will be rewarded for turning right at the T more often than for turning left. Because of feedback, the rat turns right most of the time. All of this may be explained in terms of efficient causation, no need for teleology.

      But that is not all that happens. The rat often pauses at the T and looks right and left, before deciding which way to go. Even the behaviorists said that the rat was engaging in "vicarious trial and error." The rat had a goal, a final cause, and was acting on it.

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    2. Tilt! Teleology has to do with final causes. Read Aristotle.

      Teleology defined as "final cause" is not what we are talking about when we say teleology here on this blog. You can't just google teleology, find wikipedia's entry, then see it is as "final cause", as defined by Aristotle, then rush back here and copy paste what you found.

      We are defining teleology as purposeful behavior derived from consciousness. If you can only look at wikipedia, then the opening statement:

      "A teleology is any philosophical account that holds that final causes exist in nature, meaning that design and purpose analogous to that found in human actions are inherent also in the rest of nature."

      Wikipedia is defining teleology as something inherent in nature, which is analogous to design and purpose found in human actions. We are talking about design and purpose of human actions, not the Aristotelean definition.

      Oh, come on! There is no logical problem with a system that has teleology at one level but not another.

      I didn't say there was a problem with that. I said there is a logical problem of claiming teleology (as we are defining it, i.e. purposeful human benhavior) is constrained to that which grounds evolution, i.e. causality.

      Besides, self awareness is not necessary for teleology. Consider a rat running a T-maze, in which the probability that it will be rewarded for turning right at the T more often than for turning left. Because of feedback, the rat turns right most of the time. All of this may be explained in terms of efficient causation, no need for teleology.

      Humans are not rats. I do not know if rats think "I am I" in their minds. We are talking about human minds.

      No argument can be proven for man by references to rats. It can only ever give an incomplete explanation.

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  12. We need some definitions of consciousness and free will.

    Here's an example:
    Suppose you have a pool table with the cue ball on the foot spot and the 8 ball on the head spot. You are standing right next to the table and are able to snatch the balls. Someone shoots to hit the 8 ball. Remember you are in a position to snatch the cue ball off the table thereby preventing it from continuing on it's course of striking the 8 ball.

    If free will doesn't exist then whether you snatch the cue ball off the tale or whether you leave it is already determined by the laws of physics and the event is thereby determined.

    If free will does exist then you can choose to snatch the cue ball or leave it on it's way REGARDLESS of the laws of physics. In other words free will means you have the ability to change the future.

    Consciousness for humans is part of free will but free will but I think free will is not necessarily part of consciousness in regards to other creatures besides humans.

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  13. You may find Conway and Kochen's Free Will Theorem of interest. :)

    http://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf

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