Back to irreducible complexity (PART TWO) (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, February 11, 2010, 11:02 (5196 days ago) @ xeno6696

I wrote: If one day you and your computer buddies build a machine that is conscious, sentient, imaginative, creative etc., the mystery may be solved. I'm aware that such a project is in the pipeline, but you know what a sceptic I am. I'll believe it when...if...-I won't repeat your immediate comments on this, because I'm afraid they're based on a complete misunderstanding of what I wrote. I'd assumed you would fill in the rest of the cliché for yourself (= I'll believe it when...if...I see it), and my scepticism referred purely to the project of building such a machine. That's why I said the mystery may be solved. In other words, if such a brain is built, I'll believe that the mind is a purely physical phenomenon. Until it is, I'll keep my explanatory options open. But I'm afraid we can't stop there. Although I will then regard the existence of a "soul" as having been disproved, the fact will remain that it took supreme, Nobel-prize-winning intelligence to build that machine. I will therefore still be unable to believe that chance could build it. Whether it's worth bothering about the existence of a God if we're to disappear with all our cells is a different story.-As for the Buddhist perspective, it's entirely up to us whether we think the question of chance v. design, or a prime cause, matters or not. The fact that Buddhists and Nietzsche think it's meaningless is their concern. -I find the remainder of your post rather confusing. You write:-If you're familiar with Freud, "I think" comes only from the ID and I think it would be right to say that Buddhism thinks of consciousness similarly to the ID and that is why they practice "here and now".-Freud's "id", as I'm sure you know, is the UNconscious, (I think, therefore I am asleep?), but I'd have expected even Buddhists to acknowledge that part of us is conscious (ego), part of us is unconscious (id), and part of us consists of unconscious structures formed in our early years (super-ego). Why would this make them practise the here and now?-You continue: "In Nietzsche's terms, all of this is the result of a language based on subject and predicate: our language is necessarily deterministic, this necessarily means that we then try to think of everything as deterministic (even when it's not) [...]"-If I've understood Nietzsche correctly (has anyone?), the idea that you can't separate the subject from the predicate is just another way of saying we are what we are, but I don't see what that has to do with the here and now either. Nor am I sure what you mean by deterministic. Philosophically, determinism boils down to the law of causality, as a result of which there's no such thing as free will. I can see the relevance of this to morality, but what is its relevance to the quest for truth, in the sense of whether there is or is not a God, or whether life did or did not originate by chance? If it's OK for Nietzsche to say God is dead, why shouldn't a Christian say God is alive? This has nothing to do with the subject-predicate structure, and everything to do with belief. -But perhaps by deterministic you mean the fact that language tries to pin reality down to a determinate form. This is certainly true, and is the point I tried to raise in my post on 'Language' (28 January at 11.10). The problem as I see it is less the subject-predicate structure than nouns (particularly in German, which specializes in substantives!). Your Freud example is as good as any. The terms 'id', 'ego' and 'super-ego' are extremely useful categories when it comes to analysing the 'psyche'. And because these names are now established, people refer to them as if they were realities, i.e. as if we knew what they actually were. But if we want to understand the material/immaterial make-up of the psyche, the source of consciousness, how all its different manifestations actually function, what sparks off the electrical discharges and what controls them or is controlled by them, we are totally ignorant. Similarly we refer to memory, the imagination, love etc. as if the words were already an explanation. That's how language can lull us into a false sense of knowledge. But the quest for truth (which can hardly exclude consideration of a prime cause) is impossible without language, so we are all in the same "trap" ... you, me and Nietzsche. If Nietzsche decided that the quest was "a fool's game", I have to admit he was probably right, but only because I don't hold out much chance of getting a result before I shuffle off this mortal coil. It actually gladdens my heart, though, to think that scientists, philosophers, and people like you and me are still searching. That makes me proud to be human. -In spite of the above, however, in the context of chance v. design, material v. immaterial, I really don't think my scepticism is caused by my falling into language traps. On the contrary, I would like to think that it's partly my awareness of the misleading determinacy of language which has brought me to my position of indeterminacy.