> Given that lots of very smart philosophers think mind is fundamental, you shouldn’t be extremely confident that it’s not fundamental.
I am extremely confident that mind is not fundamental. I'm sure there are a number of very smart philosophers who think mind is fundamental, but smart people can spend their whole lives side tracked on dumb ideas, particularly when they become disconnected from empirical evidence and mathematical reasoning, which is kindof philosophy's whole M.O.
If we are going to do the looking to the experts thing, there are whole fields of science - psychology, linguistics, behavioral economics, etc - that study the human mind using actual data and mathematical reasoning. And while these sciences may not be as developed as we might like, they are all absolutely clear that mind is a particular special case of material thing, and a rather complex material thing at that. Why would you disregard all of that science in favor of a few philosophers who lack data?
One could just as easily claim that geocentrism does not disagree with any of the results of physics, astronomy, or cosmology, and in there is a technical sense in which one would be correct. Every observation can be explained consistently with geocentrism if one works hard enough. There was never a particular observation or experiment that disproved geocentrism. What there was was a gradual buildup of vast amounts of data and theoretical understanding which consistently pointed in the direction of heliocentrism over geocentrism. The mathematically rigorous heliocentric models worked better than the geocentric ones. The reasons people had initially believed geocentrism were still around - it has more intuitive appeal when you look up at the night sky, and it was supported by the church. But at some point those paled in comparison to the empirical evidence and mathematical rigor in physics and astronomy. The idea that the mind is just what the brain does, that it is a complex material thing, is supported by psychologist, linguistics, and behavioral economics in the same way. Even if there isn't one slam dunk result, the overwhelming weight of empirical evidence that points towards materialism, and the complete lack of any results pointing towards dualism, makes the conclusion unavoidable.
To use a different analogy, I feel like you've told me that plants get their energy from magic fairies, and asked me what result in biology conflicts with this or proves that plants get their energy from the sun. I don't actually know the history of biology well enough to point to a particular experiment or paper that proves photosynthesis is real, and you can construct a fairy-energy theory that is consistent with just about any observation, but it is still the case that fairy-energy is so incredibly outlandish and photosynthesis is so well established in science that I know which one I believe in and which one anyone serious about understanding plants believes in. Here's a question for you. What hypothetical observation would you consider as proof that dualism is false, that the mind is just what the brain does?
Well, there are results that are very hard to explain consistent with geocentrism, even if you can find ridiculous ways to explain them away (for example: what you see in telescopes). But nothing in any of those fields actually challenges dualism--what we learn is that there are lots of correlations between mind and body, something perfectly consistent with dualism and that dualists have never denied.
From what little I know of minds, they’re all limited and have a backstory. An unlimited, eternal mind is so radically different than any other mind we refer to or know about that it sounds a lot like a category error. And I still can’t see how one primal “mind,” which so distorts the meaning of the word, is obviously simpler than one “field” or whatever other term we choose to take similar liberties with, in the same way I can’t see how complex concepts like reasoning, moral truth and motivation are necessarily less complicated than some fundamental equations.
But we often explain the known by simple and weird unknowns. Strings of string theory are very different from the stuff we see in various ways but they're a fine explanation.
What exactly are the principles you assert that God must have to be a “mind”?
I’m worried that “mind” could be just a more poetic way to describe “ultimate source” or “force” or whatever term might admit more sensible ignorance about his nature. Your exact principles would also help me see that what you describe as simplicity isn’t actually a dense gob of slippery properties stuffed into a few words.
You can definitely have unconscious mental states. Is your thesis that a system must have at least one conscious mental state in order to count as a mind?
So this is where these discussions usually break down for me. I don’t know what you really mean, other than maybe there’s something that it’s like to be god. Since god is perfect and unchanging, it complicates the typical meaning of experience. Is it timeless awareness? God learns nothing new. I don’t really know how to imagine experience without effect. I feel like I’m speculating too much.
You’re incredibly generous with your time and no doubt this goes beyond the scope of a short reply. Thanks for explaining and take care.
some naturalists came up with great definitions of what it means to be simple, in terms of the length of description of a turing machine implementing something. it seems hard to fit the above thoughts in a similar framework
Well, you want description length in an ideal language. You can easily describe God in an ideal language in two symbols--one for limitless the other for mind!
This pushes the Q back to whether an ideal language would have symbols for "mind" and "limitless." So maybe already what you were talking about when you raised Qs about joint carving/naturalness.
It's very hard to have non question begging arguments about this. Lewis sometimes talks about naturalness in terms of the categories that an ideal physics would be about, but that's obviously going to be more appealing to a naturalist. For my own part, I think a plausible constraint is that maximally natural, joint carving categories admit of no vagueness whatsoever. That's related, I think, to the idea that they should figure in totally exceptionless generalizations (laws of nature).
And that pushes me towards naturalism and away from theism; the categories you're suggesting might be joint carving--stuff like minds, goodness, power, benevolence, knowledge--strike me as pretty vague. The possibility that there might be highly informative, completely exceptionless generalizations couched in those terms strikes me as pretty hopeless. Psychology is not physics, and has no hope of being physics. By contrast the prospects for highly informative completely exceptionless generalizations about strings (or quarks or whatever) strike me as much better.
Many contemporary dualists (eg, Chalmers) grant that our pre-theoretical mental categories are not joint carving. They say the joint carving mental categories are ones we have no grasp of: not phenomenonal categories like pain and pleasure, but protophenomenal categories which stand to pain and pleasure as quarks stand to tables and chairs.
But then it seems like a problem if the mental categories we used to describe god are the vague, ordinary language mental categories rather than the hypothetical precise ones of which we have no grasp.
Do you think psychology--the science that tries to find generalizations about minds--has any hope of finding exceptionless generalizations like those we're looking for in particle physics? Or do you think minds being non vague is compatible with generalizations about minds being at best ceteris paribus?
Fair enough! As I understand this stuff, there's a pretty tight connection between some type of entity being metaphysically fundamental, claims about that sort of entity being non-vague, and the entity figuring in informative and exceptionless generalizations (laws) that play some role in explaining the ceteris paribus generalizations that hold of less fundamental stuff.
This is the bit that bothers me. It sounds very much like I am creating God by trying to define whether a dog with a human mind is simpler than one without it. All I have to do is create symbols for "dog" and "mind". Then we have a dog with a mind! Is it a dog mind? It is my maximally simple mindform that is on a dog! What are its attributes? Well, whatever you think they are. We are in agreement!
it would be good to know what that would be translated to some language we already know. candidate approximately-ideal languages that we know have something of a continuity where translating between them doesn't change the length much. if the translation of these two symbols would be very long in any language we know, it makes the idealness of the language suspicious
I'm not sure I follow the idea that if there's any chance a theory is maximally simple, then the theory gets a very high prior. Presumably, a theory that had a 1/1000 chance of being maximally simple but was otherwise monstrously complicated such that it would have a negligible prior is about 1000 times less likely than a theory that's definitely maximally simple and otherwise has the same theoretical virtues and evidence for it.
Also, I think naturalism has a chance of being much more simple than it seems. The physical laws might seem complicated now, but that assumes they don't emerge out of simpler fundamental laws that we just don't know about. And they might be much more elegant too - for me, a mind seems quite complicated and therefore it seems contrived and arbitrary to posit one as fundamental.
Also, I'm not sure that defining God as a mind with no constraints works. That would imply, for example, that there are no constraints on how many false beliefs he can have, or on how evil he can get. There needs to be some further specification of which constraints count. Likewise, a being with unlimited power could use his power in stupid ways if he wasn't already omniscient and rational, and thus never come to be perfect.
What I'm saying is that you should mostly prefer a theory with the best chance of being maximally simple and not one with the lowest average simplicity.
Even if naturalism is simple, there's no plausible story for the ultimate laws being the simplest way possible for reality to be.
He's not constrained qua mind. He doesn't maximally instantiate every property, just has no limits in regard to being a mind (a mind is limited if it doesn't know or can't do something, but it's not if it believes a bunch of false things).
Wouldn't some kind of creative force that creates regardless of whether its creation is good or bad be "simpler" in this sense than an omnibenevolent entity that actively cares for our souls? This is why I hold it to be more plausible that there is such a creative force behind generating the multiverse rather than the type of actively engaged entity people usually mean when they say "God". It seems that for God to care for and rescue each and every one of our souls, it would require a complex mind that would be far less simple than a principle that runs on the maxim of creating everything possible to create without having to actively contemplate and seek the eternal benefit of its creation.
Concise version: the all-knowing god can't know that he isn't deluded in thinking he knows everything.
Verbose version:
The infinitely powerful all-knowing god is the only thing that exists until he creates other things, let's call them universes. He then knows all about those universes cos he created them, presumably from his own substance, anyway he's fully in touch with the minutae of his creations.
So he knows everything about what he's created but what does he know about himself? How does he know that he knows everything about himself? What is his justification for believing that he is all-knowing?
He knows he can create another equally powerful all-knowing god (or even a more powerful one) without letting him know that he was created. How does the original god know that he isn't such a god? What's his creation story? How does god justify his atheism?
Even if he uses his powers to make it so, there's still the unknowable state before that.
What kind of "theory" are we supposed to be choosing between here? Some of your claims (like the claim that there's "only one way for [God] to know every fact") seem to amount to categoricity claims which require us to go beyond the power of first-order logic at some point, but you don't mention that and it seems strange not to bring it up.
Less importantly, you say that "It makes no sense to talk about a limitless material object or a limitless abstract object". I don't really see any problem in either case, so I think I don't understand what you mean by "limitless", and you don't explain it particularly well. It's not even clear you use the word with only one meaning - e.g. you later talk about a universe with a "limitless size", and obviously material objects can have sizes, indeed most of them seem to have limited sizes, so it would be strange if attributing limitless sizes to them were meaningless.
These complaints are probably nitpicky and boring but I have a few more like them and they combine to pretty much complete incomprehension.
Mind does 2 things. First, it does Newton and Einstein type things about explaining reality, and second it does unambiguously ape-specific things about moral philosophy and stuff. There's nothing universally interesting or impressive about either of those things.
Also, "Lots of smart philosophers" claims really suck.
Pity the omnipotent, all-knowing, benificent god. He knows his entire future. He has no free will cos for every decision he can only make the best choice: when two alternatives seem equally good, he just needs to check a few more decimal places. So he's a bored automaton for eternity.
His best option would be to create a world inhabited by finite intelligences where he could serially live their lives, unaware of their futures. Perhaps add a quantum multiverse to keep it going a bit longer before he has to return to his tedious existence. Since all the evil inflicted by the finite intelligences is ultimately inflicted upon himself, there's no moral problem. (I rather like the idea that the spririt that moves Putin and Netanyahu is the same sprirt that suffers in their victims.)
AIUI, the naturalistic view is that the big bang was immediately followed a number of symmetry breaking events. Maybe before the big bang, there was a symmetry-breaking event that separated good and evil. Evil is ultimately self-defeating so the evil subuniverse would wither away and leave only the good subuniverse.
But if we define evil as suffering, we seem to live in a universe where evil predominates over good, by virtue of the majority of conscious minds belonging to r-strategist animals where the majority of their offspring starve or are eaten shortly after birth. So if there is an evil and a good universe, our own observations seem to suggest we're in the less fortunate world.
Analytic philosophers, whether theists or atheists, frequently use those terms in their discourse. They consider them precise and essential ways of differentiating key concepts in the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind.
> Given that lots of very smart philosophers think mind is fundamental, you shouldn’t be extremely confident that it’s not fundamental.
I am extremely confident that mind is not fundamental. I'm sure there are a number of very smart philosophers who think mind is fundamental, but smart people can spend their whole lives side tracked on dumb ideas, particularly when they become disconnected from empirical evidence and mathematical reasoning, which is kindof philosophy's whole M.O.
If we are going to do the looking to the experts thing, there are whole fields of science - psychology, linguistics, behavioral economics, etc - that study the human mind using actual data and mathematical reasoning. And while these sciences may not be as developed as we might like, they are all absolutely clear that mind is a particular special case of material thing, and a rather complex material thing at that. Why would you disregard all of that science in favor of a few philosophers who lack data?
Well, when we argued about that, I do not recall you having anything convincing to say regarding the arguments for a fundamental mind.
Dualism does not disagree with any of the results of psychology, linguistics, and behavioral economics. Which judgments do you think conflict?
One could just as easily claim that geocentrism does not disagree with any of the results of physics, astronomy, or cosmology, and in there is a technical sense in which one would be correct. Every observation can be explained consistently with geocentrism if one works hard enough. There was never a particular observation or experiment that disproved geocentrism. What there was was a gradual buildup of vast amounts of data and theoretical understanding which consistently pointed in the direction of heliocentrism over geocentrism. The mathematically rigorous heliocentric models worked better than the geocentric ones. The reasons people had initially believed geocentrism were still around - it has more intuitive appeal when you look up at the night sky, and it was supported by the church. But at some point those paled in comparison to the empirical evidence and mathematical rigor in physics and astronomy. The idea that the mind is just what the brain does, that it is a complex material thing, is supported by psychologist, linguistics, and behavioral economics in the same way. Even if there isn't one slam dunk result, the overwhelming weight of empirical evidence that points towards materialism, and the complete lack of any results pointing towards dualism, makes the conclusion unavoidable.
To use a different analogy, I feel like you've told me that plants get their energy from magic fairies, and asked me what result in biology conflicts with this or proves that plants get their energy from the sun. I don't actually know the history of biology well enough to point to a particular experiment or paper that proves photosynthesis is real, and you can construct a fairy-energy theory that is consistent with just about any observation, but it is still the case that fairy-energy is so incredibly outlandish and photosynthesis is so well established in science that I know which one I believe in and which one anyone serious about understanding plants believes in. Here's a question for you. What hypothetical observation would you consider as proof that dualism is false, that the mind is just what the brain does?
Well, there are results that are very hard to explain consistent with geocentrism, even if you can find ridiculous ways to explain them away (for example: what you see in telescopes). But nothing in any of those fields actually challenges dualism--what we learn is that there are lots of correlations between mind and body, something perfectly consistent with dualism and that dualists have never denied.
Thanks for the piece.
From what little I know of minds, they’re all limited and have a backstory. An unlimited, eternal mind is so radically different than any other mind we refer to or know about that it sounds a lot like a category error. And I still can’t see how one primal “mind,” which so distorts the meaning of the word, is obviously simpler than one “field” or whatever other term we choose to take similar liberties with, in the same way I can’t see how complex concepts like reasoning, moral truth and motivation are necessarily less complicated than some fundamental equations.
But we often explain the known by simple and weird unknowns. Strings of string theory are very different from the stuff we see in various ways but they're a fine explanation.
What exactly are the principles you assert that God must have to be a “mind”?
I’m worried that “mind” could be just a more poetic way to describe “ultimate source” or “force” or whatever term might admit more sensible ignorance about his nature. Your exact principles would also help me see that what you describe as simplicity isn’t actually a dense gob of slippery properties stuffed into a few words.
A mind is something that has experiences.
Can't you have unconscious minds?
You can definitely have unconscious mental states. Is your thesis that a system must have at least one conscious mental state in order to count as a mind?
So this is where these discussions usually break down for me. I don’t know what you really mean, other than maybe there’s something that it’s like to be god. Since god is perfect and unchanging, it complicates the typical meaning of experience. Is it timeless awareness? God learns nothing new. I don’t really know how to imagine experience without effect. I feel like I’m speculating too much.
You’re incredibly generous with your time and no doubt this goes beyond the scope of a short reply. Thanks for explaining and take care.
some naturalists came up with great definitions of what it means to be simple, in terms of the length of description of a turing machine implementing something. it seems hard to fit the above thoughts in a similar framework
Well, you want description length in an ideal language. You can easily describe God in an ideal language in two symbols--one for limitless the other for mind!
This pushes the Q back to whether an ideal language would have symbols for "mind" and "limitless." So maybe already what you were talking about when you raised Qs about joint carving/naturalness.
It's very hard to have non question begging arguments about this. Lewis sometimes talks about naturalness in terms of the categories that an ideal physics would be about, but that's obviously going to be more appealing to a naturalist. For my own part, I think a plausible constraint is that maximally natural, joint carving categories admit of no vagueness whatsoever. That's related, I think, to the idea that they should figure in totally exceptionless generalizations (laws of nature).
And that pushes me towards naturalism and away from theism; the categories you're suggesting might be joint carving--stuff like minds, goodness, power, benevolence, knowledge--strike me as pretty vague. The possibility that there might be highly informative, completely exceptionless generalizations couched in those terms strikes me as pretty hopeless. Psychology is not physics, and has no hope of being physics. By contrast the prospects for highly informative completely exceptionless generalizations about strings (or quarks or whatever) strike me as much better.
Many contemporary dualists (eg, Chalmers) grant that our pre-theoretical mental categories are not joint carving. They say the joint carving mental categories are ones we have no grasp of: not phenomenonal categories like pain and pleasure, but protophenomenal categories which stand to pain and pleasure as quarks stand to tables and chairs.
But then it seems like a problem if the mental categories we used to describe god are the vague, ordinary language mental categories rather than the hypothetical precise ones of which we have no grasp.
I guess I don't see why minds are vague! I think that minds are actually maximally non-vague.
Do you think psychology--the science that tries to find generalizations about minds--has any hope of finding exceptionless generalizations like those we're looking for in particle physics? Or do you think minds being non vague is compatible with generalizations about minds being at best ceteris paribus?
I think think minds being non vague is compatible with generalizations about minds being at best ceteris paribus?
Fair enough! As I understand this stuff, there's a pretty tight connection between some type of entity being metaphysically fundamental, claims about that sort of entity being non-vague, and the entity figuring in informative and exceptionless generalizations (laws) that play some role in explaining the ceteris paribus generalizations that hold of less fundamental stuff.
This is the bit that bothers me. It sounds very much like I am creating God by trying to define whether a dog with a human mind is simpler than one without it. All I have to do is create symbols for "dog" and "mind". Then we have a dog with a mind! Is it a dog mind? It is my maximally simple mindform that is on a dog! What are its attributes? Well, whatever you think they are. We are in agreement!
it would be good to know what that would be translated to some language we already know. candidate approximately-ideal languages that we know have something of a continuity where translating between them doesn't change the length much. if the translation of these two symbols would be very long in any language we know, it makes the idealness of the language suspicious
I'm not sure I follow the idea that if there's any chance a theory is maximally simple, then the theory gets a very high prior. Presumably, a theory that had a 1/1000 chance of being maximally simple but was otherwise monstrously complicated such that it would have a negligible prior is about 1000 times less likely than a theory that's definitely maximally simple and otherwise has the same theoretical virtues and evidence for it.
Also, I think naturalism has a chance of being much more simple than it seems. The physical laws might seem complicated now, but that assumes they don't emerge out of simpler fundamental laws that we just don't know about. And they might be much more elegant too - for me, a mind seems quite complicated and therefore it seems contrived and arbitrary to posit one as fundamental.
Also, I'm not sure that defining God as a mind with no constraints works. That would imply, for example, that there are no constraints on how many false beliefs he can have, or on how evil he can get. There needs to be some further specification of which constraints count. Likewise, a being with unlimited power could use his power in stupid ways if he wasn't already omniscient and rational, and thus never come to be perfect.
What I'm saying is that you should mostly prefer a theory with the best chance of being maximally simple and not one with the lowest average simplicity.
Even if naturalism is simple, there's no plausible story for the ultimate laws being the simplest way possible for reality to be.
He's not constrained qua mind. He doesn't maximally instantiate every property, just has no limits in regard to being a mind (a mind is limited if it doesn't know or can't do something, but it's not if it believes a bunch of false things).
Wouldn't some kind of creative force that creates regardless of whether its creation is good or bad be "simpler" in this sense than an omnibenevolent entity that actively cares for our souls? This is why I hold it to be more plausible that there is such a creative force behind generating the multiverse rather than the type of actively engaged entity people usually mean when they say "God". It seems that for God to care for and rescue each and every one of our souls, it would require a complex mind that would be far less simple than a principle that runs on the maxim of creating everything possible to create without having to actively contemplate and seek the eternal benefit of its creation.
No simplicity is about fundamental properties and God has one limitless fundamental property.
> Similarly, the hypothesis that God knows everything is much likelier than the hypothesis that God knows every fact but one.
Wouldn't both events have the same measure though (zero), given that there's an uncountable number of facts?
Concise version: the all-knowing god can't know that he isn't deluded in thinking he knows everything.
Verbose version:
The infinitely powerful all-knowing god is the only thing that exists until he creates other things, let's call them universes. He then knows all about those universes cos he created them, presumably from his own substance, anyway he's fully in touch with the minutae of his creations.
So he knows everything about what he's created but what does he know about himself? How does he know that he knows everything about himself? What is his justification for believing that he is all-knowing?
He knows he can create another equally powerful all-knowing god (or even a more powerful one) without letting him know that he was created. How does the original god know that he isn't such a god? What's his creation story? How does god justify his atheism?
Even if he uses his powers to make it so, there's still the unknowable state before that.
I find this post unpleasantly confusing.
What kind of "theory" are we supposed to be choosing between here? Some of your claims (like the claim that there's "only one way for [God] to know every fact") seem to amount to categoricity claims which require us to go beyond the power of first-order logic at some point, but you don't mention that and it seems strange not to bring it up.
Less importantly, you say that "It makes no sense to talk about a limitless material object or a limitless abstract object". I don't really see any problem in either case, so I think I don't understand what you mean by "limitless", and you don't explain it particularly well. It's not even clear you use the word with only one meaning - e.g. you later talk about a universe with a "limitless size", and obviously material objects can have sizes, indeed most of them seem to have limited sizes, so it would be strange if attributing limitless sizes to them were meaningless.
These complaints are probably nitpicky and boring but I have a few more like them and they combine to pretty much complete incomprehension.
Mind does 2 things. First, it does Newton and Einstein type things about explaining reality, and second it does unambiguously ape-specific things about moral philosophy and stuff. There's nothing universally interesting or impressive about either of those things.
Also, "Lots of smart philosophers" claims really suck.
Pity the omnipotent, all-knowing, benificent god. He knows his entire future. He has no free will cos for every decision he can only make the best choice: when two alternatives seem equally good, he just needs to check a few more decimal places. So he's a bored automaton for eternity.
His best option would be to create a world inhabited by finite intelligences where he could serially live their lives, unaware of their futures. Perhaps add a quantum multiverse to keep it going a bit longer before he has to return to his tedious existence. Since all the evil inflicted by the finite intelligences is ultimately inflicted upon himself, there's no moral problem. (I rather like the idea that the spririt that moves Putin and Netanyahu is the same sprirt that suffers in their victims.)
Well he's infinitely well off and has an infinite relationship with infinite conscious beings!
AIUI, the naturalistic view is that the big bang was immediately followed a number of symmetry breaking events. Maybe before the big bang, there was a symmetry-breaking event that separated good and evil. Evil is ultimately self-defeating so the evil subuniverse would wither away and leave only the good subuniverse.
But if we define evil as suffering, we seem to live in a universe where evil predominates over good, by virtue of the majority of conscious minds belonging to r-strategist animals where the majority of their offspring starve or are eaten shortly after birth. So if there is an evil and a good universe, our own observations seem to suggest we're in the less fortunate world.
Analytic philosophers, whether theists or atheists, frequently use those terms in their discourse. They consider them precise and essential ways of differentiating key concepts in the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind.