Nagel used the phrase “something it is like” to describe its subjective quality. In my personal view, that is the self.

Nagel also famously stated that it is intelligible to assert that it is “like something” to be a bat (although we can never know what it is like to be a bat). Do bats therefore have selves?

David Chalmers once wrote on the subject.

Chalmers accepted the notion that the world as described by the natural sciences is causally closed: “For every physical event, there is a physical sufficient cause…there is no room for a ‘ghost in the machine’ to do any extra causal work” (“The Conscious Mind,” p. 125.) (StephenB should love the causal closure, but not the exclusion of ghosts). It has been many years since I read that book, but IIRC his solution to the problem of consciousness in light of this was to conclude that consciousness was “real,” but had no causal powers whatsoever: a non-conscious zombie that was otherwise physically identical to a conscious person (a logical possibility once you deny that consciousness derives exclusively from physical structure and processes) would behave identically, right down to making claims that it knew it was conscious because its consciousness was immediately apparent to it. (Chalmers may have changed his position an it is certainly more subtle than this, given that this is a ten year old recollection, at least).

– “Going back to my previous illustration, suppose aliens came to Earth after we had become extinct. They find one of our books and recognize that the marks on the paper are some form of code. But without being able to read the symbols and understand the language are they likely to get the message?”

– “And since the only people who could get the message, assuming there was one, are dead and gone, where is the message?”

Because something may be unknown to the alien, does not mean it doesn’t exist. The message is still in the book, regardless of any ability to understand it. There are many artifacts we ourselves do not understand; even as we are capable of understanding they have meaning. This is hardly a controversial idea.

– “In what sense can we say the message “exists”?”

In your illustration above, the message existed when it was authored.

- – - – - – - -

– “…when I, or anyone else, looks at that car, what we are actually seeing is a reconstruction in the brain of the image falling on the retinas in our eyes. Can that mental ‘model’ of the car be said to “exist” in the same way as the car itself?”

One is a representation of the other, and they both do indeed exist.

– “The existence of the physical body of a human being can be verified in the same way as that of the car but the “self” is a somewhat more nebulous concept. How would you define it?”

The material body is composed of mechanistic functions. Yet, those functions do not account for the accompanying phenomena of conscious experience. Nagel used the phrase “something it is like” to describe its subjective quality. In my personal view, that is the self. It is the thing that not only receives the image of the car, but experiences it outside of the functional aspect of the physical image falling onto the retina. If you are now asking if the self actually exists, then I will ask you why exactly you think it doesn’t. David Chalmers once wrote on the subject:

According to this line, once we have explained the functions such as accessibility, reportability, and the like, there is no further phenomenon called “experience” to explain. Some explicitly deny the phenomenon, holding for example that what is not externally verifiable cannot be real. Others achieve the same effect by allowing that experience exists, but only if we equate “experience” with something like the capacity to discriminate and report. These approaches lead to a simpler theory, but are ultimately unsatisfactory. Experience is the most central and manifest aspect of our mental lives, and indeed is perhaps the key explanandum in the science of the mind. Because of this status as an explanandum, experience cannot be discarded like the vital spirit when a new theory comes along. Rather, it is the central fact that any theory of consciousness must explain. A theory that denies the phenomenon “solves” the problem by ducking the question.

– “The advantage of not having an “intellectual commitment” to one particular religion or philosophy is that I am free to decide for myself what morally acceptable or unacceptable. I am not bound to accept the – possibly arbitrary – choices of some other being nor am I placed in the unenviable position of having to justify, for example, passages from scripture that I might otherwise find indefensible.”

The “intellectual commitments” that were being requested earlier on this thread dealt solely with rationality and reason, not religion. The inquiry centered on the question of whether we are “free to decide” to abandon rational thought within the debate. Religion and morality had nothing to do with it.

– “As far as I understand it, the world we experience around us is a ‘model’: a virtual reality reconstructed in our brains on the basis of sensory input.”

The world around us is real, and so is our experience of it.

– “To do that it also needs to include us as a part of the model. That could be what we mean by “self”.”

It’s a reflection of the reality that we are a part of the reality.

– “Who or what is it in our brains who is looking at this model we build in there?”

The Self.

– “Unless consciousness can emerge from some sort of self-referential model that watches itself. Or the “self” is just the part of the model that represents the subject and that awareness of self is just a reflection or illusion”

None of your comment addresses the distinction between the functionality of receiving a certain wavelength of light in the eye, versus the experience of deep blue. In any case, your need to categorize it in one way or another (to suit your personal distaste for stories in an ancient book) does not make it non-existent.

– “I honestly don’t know.”

I am certain that is a comforting admission if you begin your day by denying your self in reality. A chance to equivocate on the proposition that the you in you doesn’t even exist is…well…something to believe in.

I also noticed from the structure of your paragraph that you used the words “Unless” then “Or”. And yet, before accepting that it might be an illusion, you forgot to accept that it might be real.

– “And it is good to be able to admit that without being thought to have fallen short in my “intellectual commitment” to a particular philosophy or my adherence to a particular faith.”

This is self-serving rhetoric. Again, the “intellectual commitments” referred to on this thread had only to do with rationality, not faith. You are using the avoidance of an issue to applaud yourself. And you are doing it as if intellectual independence is something your opponents lack.

– “Of course, I realize, that doubt and confessions of ignorance are of no use to those who crave certainty and the corresponding sense of security.”

Now you are just grandstanding. You seek no less than anyone else. You’ve found what you want through repeated denial (design, self, good & evil, a basis of rational thought).

– “That is why there is religion and I would not take that away from people even if I were able.”

You continue to avoid the issues, to you own magnanimous applause.

– “What I have a problem with is when one group tries to assert their own brand of faith as the only true one and tries to have it taught in the public schools as such.”

No shit! So do I, but there is little I can do about it. Academia, the media, and the courts have sought to codify ONE worldview into the laws of this land under the guise of a scientific consensus based on an unfalsifiable premise. They’ve re-fashioned the founding father’s ban on the establishment of a state church into a bowling ball to knock down any religious pins that the population might carelessly have lying around. And because those courts have taken control over what is taught in the public schools, we have ended up with ONE worldview being taught there. How ‘bout that?

– “If I had children, I would not want them to have to learn only your faith just because you believe it is true.”

That’s interesting Seversky. If you had children I would not want my faith taught to them in public schools at all, with the possible exception of a religious studies setting (if they so chose to take the course). And I damn sure wouldn’t want it taught in a science class. But I have news for you; your faith was taught to my children. They were told that life began in a primordial soup, that humans were nothing more than evolved primates, and that there was no objective meaning to the universe. All of these topics could have easily been covered without injecting your faith into the studies, but they weren’t. The opposite was true.

– “What is worse, though, is if – I repeat, if – the campaign to have something like Intelligent Design inserted into the school science curriculum as an established scientific theory is actually using it as a Trojan Horse to get Christian creationist belief in through the back door. That would be unacceptable”

I have always found this to be the most specious of the anti-ID claims.

I am not interested in replacing one dogma for another. Nor do I think a high-school biology class is the battleground for design theory. So, I rarely approach these side issues. I believe they are almost always disingenuous. But please do tell me Seversky; what are your fears for the children? Spell them out, one by one. List them in bullet points. Let us examine the substance of what you are afraid of. What does “Christian creationist belief” smuggled through the back door of your local grade-school science class look like, exactly?

When you are through with all that, then I’ll remind you that science is suppossed to be a search for truth in reality – not fodder for the prosecution or the defense.

Why not cease the fake battle between science and religion, and just follow the evidence where it leads? Do you actually have a better idea?

“A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound-a proof that there are no such things as proofs-which is nonsense. Thus a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: `If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true … and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.’” [Haldane, J.B.S., "Possible Worlds," Chatto & Windus: London, 1927, p.209] But Naturalism, even if it is not purely materialistic, seems to me to involve the same difficulty, though in a somewhat less obvious form. It discredits our processes of reasoning or at least reduces their credit to such a humble level that it can no longer support Naturalism itself.” (Lewis, C.S., “Miracles: A Preliminary Study,” [1947], Fontana: London, Second edition, 1963, reprint, pp.18-19.

It therefore follows that all knowledge whatever depends on the validity of inference. If, in principle, the feeling of certainty we have when we say `Because A is B therefore C must be D’ is an illusion, if it reveals only how our cortex has to work and not how realities external to us must really be, then we can know nothing whatever. … This admission seems to me completely unavoidable and it has very momentous consequences. In the first place it rules out any materialistic account of thinking. We are compelled to admit between the thoughts of a terrestrial astronomer and the behaviour of matter’ several light-years away that particular relation which we call truth. But this relation has no meaning at all if we try to make it exist between the matter of the star and the astronomer’s brain, considered as a lump of matter. The brain may be in all sorts of relations to the star no doubt: it is in a spatial relation, and a time relation, and a quantitative relation. But to talk of one bit of matter as being true about another bit of matter seems to me to be nonsense.” (Lewis, C.S., “De Futilitate,” in “Christian Reflections,” [1967], Hooper, W., ed., Fount: Glasgow UK, Fourth Impression, 1988, pp.86-88)

“What makes it impossible that it should be true is not so much the lack of evidence for this or that scene in the drama as the fatal self-contradiction which runs right through it. The Myth [of Evolution] cannot even get going without accepting a good deal from the real sciences. And the real sciences cannot be accepted for a moment unless rational inferences are valid: for every science claims to be a series of inferences from observed facts. It is only by such inferences that you can reach your nebulae and protoplasm and dinosaurs and sub-men and cave-men at all. Unless you start by believing that reality in the remotest space and the remotest time rigidly obeys the laws of logic, you can have no ground for believing in any astronomy, any biology, any palaeontology, any archaeology. To reach the positions held by the real scientists- which are then taken over by the Myth-you must, in fact, treat reason as an absolute. But at the same time the Myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of the irrational – if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel- how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution? They say in effect: ‘I will prove that what you call a proof is only the result of mental habits which result from heredity which results from bio-chemistry which results from physics.’ But this is the same as saying: ‘I will prove that proofs are irrational’: more succinctly, ‘I will prove that there are no proofs’: The fact that some people of scientific education cannot by any effort be taught to see the difficulty, confirms one’s suspicion that we here touch a radical disease in their whole style of thought. But the man who does see it, is compelled to reject as mythical the cosmology in which most of us were brought up. That it has embedded in it many true particulars I do not doubt: but in its entirety, it simply will not do. Whatever the real universe may turn out to be like, it can’t be like that.” (Lewis, C.S., “The Funeral of a Great Myth,” in “Christian Reflections,” [1967], Hooper, W., ed., Fount: Glasgow UK, Fourth Impression, 1988, pp.117-118)

“Charles Darwin himself once said, `The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?’ [Darwin, C.R., Letter to W. Graham, July 3rd, 1881, in Darwin, F., ed., "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," [1898], Basic Books: New York NY, Vol. I., 1959, reprint, p.285] In other words, if my brain is no more than that of a superior monkey, I cannot even be sure that my own theory of my origin is to be trusted. Here is a curious case: If Darwin’s naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin’s own theory of human origins must therefore be accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or set of propositions to be true. C.S. Lewis puts the case this way: `If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves.Our convictions are simply a fact about us-like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform. [Lewis, C.S., "Miracles: A Preliminary Study," [1947], Fontana: London, 1960, Revised Edition, 1963, reprint, p.109] What we need for such certainty is the existence of some `Rational Spirit’ outside both ourselves and nature from which our own rationality could derive. Theism assumes such a ground; naturalism does not.” (Sire, J.W., “The Universe Next Door: A Basic World View Catalog,” [1976], InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, Second Edition, 1988, pp.94-95. Emphasis original)

You need to stop bluffing and actually access your own links, read both Dr. Schneider thesis and ev simulator. When you do that let us know to which real biological scenario does ev simulator map.

But let me help you by quoting Dr. Schneider from the ev web site you linked:

“A small population (n=64) of `organisms’ was created, each of which consisted of G= 256 bases of nucleotide sequence chosen randomly, with equal probabilities, from an alphabet of 4 characters (a, c, g, t).”

Now all you have to do is tell us, what might these 64 living and reproducing organisms, with a total and unchangeable genome one quarter of the size of one typical gene, be?

What can be easily demonstrated that these cannot possibly be single nor multiple cell life forms, not even virus nor any other known organism. This prevents any kind of model validation.

Therefore your claim that ev simulator demonstrates anything relevant to real biological organism is bogus.

“As for a non-material or immaterial world, what is there for physics to describe? Physics can only study what exists. You talk about abstracts like morality or information as if they exist in the same way as my car yet plainly they don’t”.

The message contained in a book of words does not exist, but only the paper and ink?

Good question.

Going back to my previous illustration, suppose aliens cam to Earth after we had become extinct. They find one of our books and recognize that the marks on the paper are some form of code.

But without being able to read the symbols and understand the language are they likely to get the message?

And since the only people who could get the message, assuming there was one, are dead and gone, where is the message?

In what sense can we say the message “exists”?

Or is this yet another suggestion that the “self” does not exist either?

No, but we need to be clear what we mean by “self” and also to understand that ‘existence’ is not quite the black-and-white concept some seem to think it is.

I referred earlier to my car out in the parking lot having an objective existence and how we are able to verify it.

But when I, or anyone else, looks at that car, what we are actually seeing is a reconstruction in the brain of the image falling on the retinas in our eyes. Can that mental ‘model’ of the car be said to “exist” in the same way as the car itself?

The existence of of the physical body of a human being can be verified in the same way as that of the car but the “self” is a somewhat more nebulous concept.

How would you define it?

When you stated elsewhere that you were giving your personal moral code and beliefs, who was the originator of the code and beliefs you were talking about?

My moral beliefs, like a lot of people’s, have been compiled from a number of sources: my religious upbringing, reading and talking about other faiths and philosophies and from “gut reactions”. In fact, I suspect a lot of it is post hoc rationalization of more visceral responses to what happens, both for me and for others.

The advantage of not having an “intellectual commitment” to one particular religion or philosophy is that I am free to decide for myself what morally acceptable or unacceptable. I am not bound to accept the – possibly arbitrary – choices of some other being nor am I placed in the unenviable position of having to justify, for example, passages from scripture that I might otherwise find indefensible.

Are you saying there is no self whom even thinks of himself as Serversky, instead there is a complex chemical reaction that excretes the arbitrary identity of Seversky as a means of survival.

As far as I understand it, the world we experience around us is a ‘model’: a virtual reality reconstructed in our brains on the basis of sensory input. We use that model to navigate our way through the outside world so it has to be a reasonably accurate representation of what is there. To do that it also needs to include us as a part of the model. That could be what we mean by “self”.

In evolutionary terms it seems to be a strategy that works. We have become the most successful species on the planet even though it costs each of us a significant portion of our available resources to build and run such a large brain.

Unfortunately, the mental model hypothesis doesn’t answer an obvious question. We build models for us to look at and manipulate. Who or what is it in our brains who is looking at this model we build in there? Unless consciousness can emerge from some sort of self-referential model that watches itself. Or the “self” is just the part of the model that represents the subject and that awareness of self is just a reflection or illusion, as you say.

I honestly don’t know.

And it is good to be able to admit that without being thought to have fallen short in my “intellectual commitment” to a particular philosophy or my adherence to a particular faith.

Of course, I realize, that doubt and confessions of ignorance are of no use to those who crave certainty and the corresponding sense of security. That is why there is religion and I would not take that away from people even if I were able.

What I have a problem with is when one group tries to assert their own brand of faith as the only true one and tries to have it taught in the public schools as such. If I had children, I would not want them to have to learn only your faith just because you believe it is true.

What is worse, though, is if – I repeat, if – the campaign to have something like Intelligent Design inserted into the school science curriculum as an established scientific theory is actually using it as a Trojan Horse to get Christian creationist belief in through the back door. That would be unacceptable

Seversky,

The fact that science is not yet able to describe every link in the causal chain between quantum-level events and human thought does not mean that it never will.

It cannot, it would be self referentially incoherent.

Could you explain that in a little more detail, please?

I am a Stanford graduate and was watching the Stanford Oklahoma game. It is starting to look grim for Stanford.

Have a great New Year

…and Happy New Year to all that come here.

From post #33.

If a materialist is intellectually committed (in my experience they have no real intellectual commitments) to the idea that all that is real is material, that is matter and energy, or the physical world, or the natural world, or the things described by the natural sciences, or whatever the latest version of the nonsense is, THEN, the only explanatory resources they have are the laws of physics.