A debate - God is a necessary precondition for human reason

The debate is over... here it all is (in two parts):

Opening statement (Bnonn Tennant):

I am charged with defending the moot that the Christian God is a necessary precondition for human reason. JC, my opponent, takes a physicalist approach; meaning that he believes everything about reality can be ultimately reduced to the physical universe; that the supernatural does not exist, and does not need to exist. While his particular view is, I think, trivial to refute, I am faced with a particularly challenging task in going further and proving that the specific supernaturalism taught by the Bible is the only kind which makes human reason possible.

Definitions

Lest we find ourselves arguing at cross purposes because of some ambiguity, it seems to me that the meaning of the entire moot ought to be briefly considered—
The Christian God

I affirm, of course, the God of the Bible; but to exhaustively prove all of his attributes as necessary to human reason would require an argument from biblical rationalism. Since I have agreed to present an argument from reason instead, I must settle upon some attributes which are both useful to that argument, and unique to God himself. I am going to select aseity and trinity.

Aseity is the condition of being underived, noncontingent, and necessarily existent. This is in contrast to the material universe, which is derived from, contingent upon, and coincidentally existent because of God. Trinity is the state of being one single, united, indivisible substance comprised of three distinct persons.

Given the attributes chosen, and the limitation I face in having to prove the Christian God as necessary without an epistemological appeal to his Scripture, I would like to preclude speculative deities. It seems unreasonable to place such a burden of proof upon me that I must not only show that the physicalist worldview lacks the preconditions for reason, and show that an aseitic and trinitarian God is necessary; but also show that no counterfactual deity fulfilling these criteria is adequate. If I can show that an aseitic and trinitarian deity must exist, then, given the existence of such a deity in Christianity and his absence from any other religion, I consider that sufficient to persuade the unprejudiced intellect.

A Necessary Precondition

A necessary precondition is simply something which must be the case in order for something else to be the case. In this example, I contend that if the Christian God did not exist, then human reason could not exist. In one sense, the word necessary is superfluous; however, I wished to include it so that the moot was as clear as possible. Note that I am arguing that the Christian God is a necessary precondition. I have not chosen to defend the moot that he is the necessary precondition. This is simply because there may be other preconditions which are also necessary, but are not God. For example, JC may argue that the human brain is a necessary precondition for human reasoning. Since it may be beyond the scope of my own presentation to say whether or not this is so, and whether or not God is the necessary precondition for human brains also, it seemed best to simply leave the moot open to these possibilities.

Human Reason

I take human reason, broadly, to mean any process of the mind; for example, the process that you are going through at the moment in seeing these words, apprehending their individual meanings, relating them into propositions, and reflecting upon those propositions. I include qualia (subjective, first person experiences of objective, third-person phenomena) within the scope of human reason, since they are often integral to it despite not being rational per se. However, I will be focusing on what we might call the "core" of human reason: logical inference itself. I include the ancillary items of qualia and apprehension and the like because they seem, in a functional sense, to be inseparable from this core rational process.

The Argument

I contend that God is the precondition for reason. Although it is trivial to argue that physicalism makes human reason impossible, I have spent a lot of time pondering precisely how to develop this argument from a negative one into a positive one in defense of Christian theism specifically. I have come to the conclusion that the best way to attempt this is to focus on the heart of the topic: logical inference.

We would all agree that, if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. We believe that we apprehend this conclusion in view of the two premises, and the relationship we perceive between them. Now, it is evident that this relationship is not a physical one; and the premises are not physical things; and the properties they have of being about something (which is called intentionality) and of being true or false are not physical properties. In every way, this is a non-physical situation. A physical person named Socrates may be at the center of it, but the actual argument is clearly not a physical thing. Neither is the mind in which the argument is apprehended; but rather it is a real, but immaterial, non-physical entity. We might say that it is made of mental substance, as opposed to the brain which is made of physical substance. If you're unconvinced about this, consider that a mental state can be about something, or that it can be true—and now try to say the same thing of physical brain states. We know that it doesn't make sense to say that one state of the brain is about another, any more than that an electron is about a photon. Truth and intentionality are not physical properties. They are mental ones.

We know, because we are immediately aware of it through introspection, that we believe Socrates is mortal because of the premises: that all men are mortal, and that he is a man. When we say because of, we are acknowledging a causal relationship between the premises and the conclusion. The relationship is real; believing the premises really does cause the belief in the conclusion. We therefore conclude that our mental state in which we apprehend that Socrates is a man, and our mental state in which we apprehend that all men are mortal, are both causally linked in some way to our mental state in which we apprehend that Socrates is therefore mortal. There is a real, non-physical relationship between these premises and the conclusion.

None of this denies that our mental states may correlate to physical states in our brains. But we cannot reduce the mental states to these physical states, because we would then remove truth and intentionality completely, since they are non-physical things. Similarly, we cannot say that the mental states are caused by physical states, because then the only real causation would be physical causation while the mental states are just along for the ride, having no actual influence on what happens. But we have just established that mental states do really have causal influence on other mental states. If they don't, then logical inference does not actually take place, and the relationship between premises and conclusions does not really exist.

But we agree that this relationship does exist. What is interesting about it, however, is that, although it entails a mind (because it is a mental relationship), it does not entail our minds. We could none of us exist, and yet we must acknowledge that this mental relationship would still hold. We perceive that it is a necessary one, and that it could not be otherwise; that it applies to everyone, and it is not a matter of convention, but of necessity. It is what we might call a mental law—or, really, mental laws, since there are several discrete relationships which we apprehend. We give them names, like noncontradiction and identity.

But mental laws do imply a mind. By definition, the mental entails a mind; and so universal, necessary mental laws therefore must imply a universal, necessary mental mind. We could otherwise phrase this by saying that such laws must imply an aseitic God. A necessarily existent, noncontingent, underived, and immaterial Mind exists. To the best of my knowledge, this formulation of God applies to only a very few deities. In fact, it seems only to describe YHVH—whether that be the Jewish, Muslim, or Christian understanding of him. However, I am not an expert on comparative religion, and so JC is welcome to dispute this point.

Now Judaism and Islam believe, and strongly affirm, that God ultimately is one. That is to say, he is a unity, and is also unary. They deny that he is several persons in one substance. While this does permit them to claim a unifying principle between propositions, since God, being one, is ultimately unity, it denies them the ability to have propositions themselves in any meaningful way. This is because propositions tend to describe things which are different—and if God, ultimately, is one, then how could plurality come about? This problem is only satisfactorily resolved by the Christian God; who, being three in one, represents an equal ultimacy of unity and plurality. Therefore, of the three religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), only Christianity remains viable, because God has revealed perspicuously in the New Testament that he is a trinity.

This, basically, is the position I will defend as we proceed: that there must be a real mental substance and real mental laws in order for argumentation to be possible (including argumentation against a real mental substance); that these mental laws entail an aseitic Mind; and that this aseitic mind must be a unity and a plurality, which implies the Christian God.


Opening statement (Steve Zara):


The capabilities of the human mind are astounding, and its place of residence the brain, is the most complex thing we know of, and possibly in all of the universe. I believe this complexity functions to produce all the workings of the mind. I will attempt to explain how this is possible for a particular function of the mind, reasoning, and in doing so I am responding to the claim that reasoning requires the existence of the Christian God. That is a very specific claim, indeed it is both far more specific than I need, and at the same time too vague for me to be able to target specifics. To be honest, I'm not sure what the term “Christian God” means. Is it the God of the Orthodox Church, of Roman Catholics, of the Mormons or of the Anglicans? But no matter. I don't need this specificity to address the claim. I intend to show that reasoning does not require that theism is true: no metaphysical entities are required at all, even if some metaphysical statements may be necessary.

To start, I want to address the apparent need to invoke any non-physical realms for an explanation of the reality of experience. This has a long history. Aristotle considered the world full of “universals” - standards that supposedly explained the consistency of experience. Redness, goodness, even “apple-ness” were all considered by many to have an actual existence of some kind. The universals I will come on to discuss are the ones considered relevant to reasoning.

Aristotelian metaphysics has influenced thought down the ages, and has been increasingly influenced by science. To illustrate the influence, I shall consider a colour universal: redness. Although the question of the sensation of redness is still a matter of discussion, we have an explanation as to why a particular object has this quality, in terms of the selective reflection and absorption of different wavelengths of light. The idea of a universal in this context is now largely redundant. We don't talk about an “essence of red” that is part of the make-up of an object that appears red. However, some apparently universal “qualities” seem to have been more resistant to explanation in material terms. These include the moral attributes of good and evil, and the propositional attitudes – the realm of belief and intentionality that seems such a vital aspect of human reason, and the processes of logic.

Before discussing how these may be described in naturalistic terms, I would like to point out that in the past there has been a tendency to imbue excessive qualities to objects because of preconceptions about the nature of mind, of humanity, and of life in general. Vitalism is a useful illustration of this. Through most of recorded history the idea of life being some specific essence in and of itself, and it took the work of Wohler and the synthesis of “organic” compounds from clearly non-living constituents to start the process of breaking down this myth, and although there is a considerable amount left to learn about the functioning of cells, scientists are confident that this explanation will be entirely naturalistic. So life may well be purely physical at the level of the cell, but what about at larger scales? Is there anything emergent? Well, we find no requirement for any extra non-physical factors in the operation of organs in the body. The liver appears to need no supernatural aspect, and neither do the heart, kidneys, spleen, skin; and few theologists would claim that that such an aspect is present. Of course, one of those cellular organs is the brain.

Having seen the mistake of vitalism, are we also making a similar mistake of “mind-ism”? I think so. We know that minds are associated with brains, because of the causal connection between changes in brains and changes in minds. The effects of injury to the brain have shown that certain regions of the brain have different functions, such as processing visual information, interpreting language, planning, and so on. It isn't just injury to the brain that reveals the physical basis of the brain's functions; genetic differences can lead to changes in the capabilities of brains and minds. Dsylexia, a reduced capacity to deal with language can be inherited as can prosopagnosia, an inability to distinguish faces. Significant aspects of our ability to perceive and process even quite subtle information can be dependent on a few minor changes in DNA.

So it is clear that the brain contains structures that appear to be associated with the collection, storage and analysis of information. Are the types of structures present in the brain all that is required for such activities? It seems so. Decades of research into neural networks (digital simulations of the kind of activities and connections believed to operate in and between nerve cells in neural tissue) has revealed that even apparently relatively simple systems have great power. Networks have been built that can process many types of information, which can be interpreted as having different levels of meaning. Some networks can act in the manner of the visual cortex, analysing colour and intensity data. Other networks can be trained to distinguish faces: the same concept – interconnected nerve cells with feedback connections – works at many levels. Other networks can process language syntax. Even though an observer of the networks can impose different semantics as to what is going on, the operation of the networks is the same: simple transformations and switching of signals with feedback.

So although we don't know the details, we have no doubt of the power of the brain as an incredibly sophisticated information processor. The question relevant to this debate is whether the workings of a physical brain are sufficient to explain the experiences of a mind in terms of reasoning.

I believe they are, and the reason is evolution. Nervous systems evolve to control bodies. They have been selected to process information from the senses and from their internal states in order to help a body survive and reproduce. It is clear that this selection can result in the development of systems that can recognise some truths and usefully process them to obtain correct conclusions, as in Nature mistakes frequently lead to death. Much of this processing is automatic: a fish will catch a fly above a pond correcting for the distortion of light without understanding refraction. A bat will change the tone of its echo-location as it approaches an insect without an understanding of sonar.

Two important (for this argument) stages in the evolution of the brain were the development of self-awareness, followed by language. As humans, we not only realise that we have experiences, but we attempt to describe these in symbolic form, and we have the experience of what it is like to manipulate those symbols. What needs explaining is why we have these feelings of intentionality and meaning. This is because we mentally model minds; this is a necessary part of how we live as an intelligent ape. We need to consider what other people may or may not do, or what they may be thinking. And the natural way to consider that is in terms of what their intent might be, and what may be significant to them. It is easy to see that with sufficient mental processing power, this modeling of others can take off, and allow the consideration of even more hypothetical and abstract situations, and while such consideration is taking place, the same “truth”, “meaning” and “intention” detection mechanisms would be available as when dealing with more concrete situations, as wondering if a neighbour is planning to steal food, or that tiger is going to attack.

The question is whether this mental processing implies what many say it does – that the propositional attributes have any reality, a reality which some imply requires the existence of a deity.

This takes us back to the matter of the mistaken invocation of universals. In the past, people have assigned meaning and intention very widely. For example, talk of the intention of the Sun and the Moon was common, sometimes resulting in the worship of those objects in order that they grant favours (such as renewing the cycle of seasons each year). We can still see the influence of the false assigning of meaning in the practice of astrology. This surely raises the question of when, even if, we should assume meaning and intentionality, indeed we should even question if it is present within our own brain-based minds. This may sound absurd, as surely we know our own minds. But there is no reason to believe that this must be true. We are all susceptible to illusion from our senses, and that is just as true for the “sense” of introspection. Memories are nowhere near as reliable as we tend to assume, and much of our second-by-second experience is extrapolated by the brain from surprisingly little information. I suggest that, without evidence to the contrary, all we have is the experience of truth and meaning when certain processing of information produces results that trigger (based on past experience and training of the mind) our mechanisms for detecting “truth” and “meaning” - just like we have the feeling of a colour when certain neuronal firing patterns occur.

So what are we left with? We have models of brain function that, even if incomplete, reveal the possibility that the forms of processing of information that we call reasoning can be performed by sufficiently complex neural networks. We can see reasons for the development of neural analogues of the propositional attributes based on evolution. We have no proof of this, but that it is conceivable within a purely naturalistic framework dispenses with the requirement for any god, let alone that of Christianity.

[I would like to thank cand. phil. Michael Bauer, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, who has provided resources and advice]


First rebuttal (Bnonn Tennant):


Steve begins his opening statement by describing the mind's "place of residence" as the brain—an organ of such complexity that he believes it "functions to produce all the workings of the mind". What is immediately obvious to me, though, is that complexity, in and of itself, is not really at issue. If complexity, qua complexity, were all that was required in a physical system to give rise to a mind, then Steve would surely be faced with some difficult questions about other systems which are not intelligent. For example, even if the human brain is the most complex self-contained physical system in the universe, it remains the the universe itself is a vastly more complex self-contained physical system. Does Steve contend that the universe, like us, is intelligent? If not, what is the distinction between us? What is it about the brain which gives rise to intelligence, when the universe—despite its greater complexity—remains unintelligent? Or, if Steve believes that the universe is intelligent, then what is it which is inherent in complexity itself which gives rise to intelligence? In order to establish his case, Steve really must establish the relationship between complexity and intelligence. To simply assert that some unexplained relationship exists is insufficient.

Steve then moves into a brief description of the distinction between objective and subjective facts. He explains how redness is not an inherent objective quality in substances which causes light to reflect at the wavelength we perceive as red. Unfortunately, this is both a misdirected and an insufficient argument. On the one hand, whether or not Aristotle thought that redness is an objective quality irrelevant to the fact that I do not. On the other hand, the fact remains that the qualia, the perceived sensation, of redness is indeed a subjective event for us. Describing the objective physical events and qualities which appear to cause the perception of redness does nothing to explain that subjective perception itself. So when Steve says that "some apparently universal 'qualities' seem to have been more resistant to explanation in material terms", he is being a little disingenuous. Redness has not actually been explained in material terms either: it is just as resistant to explanation as the universal "qualities" under discussion. What has been explained is the physical characteristics associated with redness. Redness, a subjective perception, remains quite a mystery to naturalists—since science by definition is descriptive of objective facts; not subjective ones. That being said, Steve is correct to note that moral and propositional attitudes are not even explicable to science in terms of their objective properties in the way that redness is. There does not appear to be anything at all physical about goodness or truth in the way there is about redness or hotness.

Following this introduction, Steve argues that since all the other organs of the body—such as the heart and kidneys—require no "vital essence" or animating force, it follows that the brain has no similar kind of force. He claims that an argument for "mind-ism" is similar in nature to an argument for vitalism; and that since vitalism is clearly fallacious, mind-ism must be also. However, this argument fails on numerous counts. Firstly, Steve has a long way to go in establishing that vitalism even is fallacious. It is far from clear, for example, that there is nothing more to human life than the operations of various organic compounds organized in a certain way. Scientists are certainly not able to build a living human body from scratch. Steve may suppose that, in principle, this is simply a matter of technological limitations—but if I suppose differently there is really no way to be sure.

Secondly, mind-ism (from here on I shall call it by its proper name: dualism) is manifestly not similar to vitalism in the way Steve supposes. Life itself need not necessarily be defined by any non-physical characteristics. Although it often is defined in that way, a scientist might indeed state that life is "an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction" (Merriam-Webster Online, 'life'). A plant may be alive without entailing an invocation of vitalism, for instance. And a Christian might even agree with this conclusion. The question that vitalism seeks to answer, in other words, is not necessarily one which cannot in principle be answered in purely physical, naturalistic terms. The question that dualism seeks to answer, however, is completely dissimilar. The very point under discussion, and the very argument that dualism makes, is that in principle there can be no cogent physical explanation for the mind. The reason dualism is forwarded as an explanation of the mind is precisely that a purely physical explanation is impossible by its very nature. If the mind can be reduced to physical events, then the very attributes which comprise it either cease to exist entirely, or become irrelevant to its functions. Things like intentionality and inference are either denied ontological existence at all in a naturalistic philosophy of mind, or become what philosophers call "epiphenomenal"—an incidental byproduct of physical events which actually have no causal involvement in what goes on.

This leads into the third point on which Steve's argument fails: the assertion of mind/body causality. He says that "we know that minds are associated with brains, because of the causal connection between changes in brains and changes in minds." He mentions brain injuries and genetic traits as examples of this causality. But as an armchair scientist, Steve ought to know that correlation between things does not entail causation; and, if causation is present, its direction or directions still must be established. So the fact that the brain and the mind are correlated does not necessarily entail a causal relationship. Furthermore, even if there is a causal relationship, it is tantamount to begging the question for Steve to assume that the direction of causation is only from the brain to the mind. Unless he assumes his own conclusion, he has no reason to dismiss the possibility that the mind may also causally affect the brain. We know, for example, that when people think of certain things, particular parts of their brains become active. But is that because the brain activity is causing the thoughts, or is it because the thoughts are causing the brain activity?

None of these concerns, though, are ultimately relevant. They do not address the issue at hand—the impossibility of human reason in a purely physical universe—and they never can. None of the additional points Steve raises as he builds his case are actually relevant to this question. The fact that neural networks can analyse certain signals and perform certain transformations on them, for example, does not pertain at all to the fact that reducing the mind to physical phenomena necessitates that we reduce logical inference, reasons, intentions, and decisions to physical phenomena as well—and thus remove their causal role as inference, reasons, intentions, and decisions from events which are clearly caused by these things. Similarly, the fact that the brain is an incredibly sophisticated information processor is really inconsequential to problem that the naturalist faces, that information is meaningful only subjectively, and not objectively. As Steve correctly recognizes, "the question relevant to this debate is whether the workings of a physical brain are sufficient to explain the experiences of a mind in terms of reasoning." Unfortunately, his reason for believing that they are is simply a reiteration of the irrelevant details listed above, regarding the power of physical systems to perform certain tasks:
I believe they are, and the reason is evolution. Nervous systems evolve to control bodies. They have been selected to process information from the senses and from their internal states in order to help a body survive and reproduce. It is clear that this selection can result in the development of systems that can recognise some truths and usefully process them to obtain correct conclusions, as in Nature mistakes frequently lead to death. Much of this processing is automatic: a fish will catch a fly above a pond correcting for the distortion of light without understanding refraction. A bat will change the tone of its echo-location as it approaches an insect without an understanding of sonar.

In truth, it is really very far from clear that evolution could result in the development of systems which can recognize some truths and usefully process them to obtain correct conclusions. The fact that mistakes (that is, wrong conclusions) frequently lead to death does not mitigate this. For one thing, wrong conclusions don't necessarily lead to death. For another, true conclusions don't necessarily offer an evolutionary advantage. Alvin Plantinga has argued persuasively to this effect. However, even if we assume for the sake of argument that natural selection can be relied upon to often favor mechanisms which arrive at correct conclusions, and to often select against mechanisms which arrive at false ones, we are left with the problem of identifying which mechanisms and which conclusions these are. Since we are relying on the very mechanisms themselves to attempt this process of identification, we have to presuppose their reliability—but we have no actual justification for doing so since, if they are faulty, we might never know it.

Additionally, it is obvious that the kinds of conclusions that will be selected for might not have anything to do with the actual nature of things, because they are selected for based on their usefulness to survival, rather than for discovering truth. These are manifestly two completely different categories. Imagine, for example, a creature which evolved to consistently interpret round objects as being square. As long as interpreting roundness as squareness conveyed no particular disadvantage to the creature, how could it ever know that "square" things are actually round? Or, if this development did convey a survival disadvantage, what if interpreting round objects as ovoid was a sufficient evolutionary development to mitigate this disadvantage? Again, while closer to perceiving the actual nature of things, the creature is still in an epistemically hopeless position. How could it ever know that "ovoid" things are actually round? This is the position of any creature which is supposed to have evolved—including human beings. We can also extend this argument further: for even if it can be shown that evolution will select for generally true conclusions about physical reality, what relevance does this have to metaphysical questions? How does the ability to correctly identify a circle or a triangle imply the ability to correctly identify a logical fallacy or formulate a sound argument? What does modus tollens have to do with workable wheels; and what does the law of noncontradiction have to do with strong bridges? Evidently nothing at all. What reason is there, then, to think that faculties which developed to come to useful conclusions about physical, evolutionary pressures are in any way equipped to come to true conclusions about other things?

Having dealt with these problems, though, it is still clear that the argument Steve has forwarded has no explanatory power in terms of solving the main problem inherent in the naturalist philosophy of mind, and which constitutes the thrust of my argument. It is possible to assume everything that Steve has put on the table as true, and still refute him. This is made obvious by Steve himself—when he gets to the point of attempting to explain "why we have these feelings of intentionality and meaning", he says that

This is because we mentally model minds; this is a necessary part of how we live as an intelligent ape. We need to consider what other people may or may not do, or what they may be thinking. And the natural way to consider that is in terms of what their intent might be, and what may be significant to them.

But it is painfully clear that the idea of "mentally modeling" what someone's intent may be presupposes the concept of intentionality. It does not explain it—rather, it requires it. Additionally, some of the sorts of intentionality which Steve talks about here are very primitive. A tiger may "intend" to attack; but it is certainly not evident that it entertains the notion of attack in a way which entails the sort of propositional intentionality which we ourselves experience. But if propositional intentionality is not required in Steve's argument to model other minds, then where did it come from in the first place? If we were once on the same level as tigers in terms of intelligence, what was it that caused this remarkable development, wherein propositional attitudes replaced simple primitive representation? Indeed, once again, there appears to be a chasm in principle between primitive representation and propositional intentionality. The one may be perhaps an entirely physical thing, as in the case of neural networks, and may result in a survival advantage. Yet the other is clearly something more, since it entails not merely physical representation, but mental interpretation. A shift has taken place from the objective to the subjective. A neural network does not have a subjective understanding of anything, for example. Steve needs to explain how our subjective perceptions developed from objective, physical events.

Steve once again correctly identifies that the "question is whether this mental processing implies what many say it does – that the propositional attributes have any reality, a reality which some imply requires the existence of a deity." Unfortunately, he does not actually interact with either of these questions; choosing to instead merely reiterate again his belief that "without evidence to the contrary, all we have is the experience of truth and meaning when certain processing of information produces results that trigger (based on past experience and training of the mind) our mechanisms for detecting “truth” and “meaning” - just like we have the feeling of a colour when certain neuronal firing patterns occur." The difficulty he faces is that the evidence to the contrary is now before him in my opening statement: the evidence is that his view is self-refuting, because without there being actual mental events called propositions, which lead to other actual mental events called conclusions, via actual mental laws called inference, Steve's own argument would be impossible. We could not know it was true; indeed, to speak of it being "true" would be meaningless, since physical states of reality cannot be true or false. Yet that, indeed, is what Steve appears to be suggesting.


First rebuttal (Steve Zara):


It seems to me that the discussion is wandering away from the topic of the debate. The question is whether or not human reason requires the existence of God. It is not, I believe, a discussion about the nature of life, or of the existence or otherwise of purely subjective experiences (although I am happy to cover those matters, and I will). I mentioned those as illustrations of how our past notions of reality have been shown to be flawed, in the way that our “common sense” understanding of how our minds work, and what our minds consist of certainly is.

I also feel we need to stay focused on what human reasoning consists of, and not be tempted to abstract matters to ever higher levels so that they are always beyond whatever a materialistic view of the world can explain. One of the tools of reasoning is Occam's Razor. We should stick with the simplest level at which we may be able to begin to explain things, and only move up from there if absolutely necessary. We also have to be careful about how we would justify moving to a different level. The history of science and reason has taught us that common sense, incredulity and ontological arguments are not good justifications.

So, let's review what needs to be explained. I say that it is the ability of our minds to recognize truth, to reflect on it, and to draw correct conclusions.

I think this is an appropriate time to discuss where our connection with “truth” comes from. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that evolution only tunes our minds to know what is necessary, but not truth. This implies that we may be living in some kind of mental fog of unreality, unable to correctly assess reality. This is a rather puzzling idea, because to survive, minds have to be able to detect and remember truths about the world. Even simple animals with minimal brains can have the ability to learn. Learning is based on reward and punishment. Eat the right kind of fruit and you get a full belly. Eat the wrong kind and you get sick. An animal living in a fog of delusion about the world is going to get sick much of the time, and won't be as good at producing offspring as one that has better access to the truth. This is not to say that we always recognise truth. It can be useful for minds to over-detect certain patterns. It is better to mistake a stick for a snake than mistake a snake for a stick. However, even this is constrained, as too many “false positives” will result in a waste of energy. The tendency to false positives can also reduced by experience, and by discussion with others, and by research. In the end, when we carefully prod the stick, we find it is indeed just a stick.

There is a term used in computing - “bootstrapping”. This describes how a computer can “get going”. A computer needs to “know” facts about how to deal with its hardware: how to fetch information off the internal disk drive, for example. In the earliest machines the first few instructions had to be fed in manually, through switches. Then, this could get the machine starting to read what is now a barely remembered form of data storage – paper tape. The tape loaded up enough to start reading either a disk or a magnetic tape, and then the system was fully functional. Computer scientists knew that surely there had to be better a system. What was needed was some way that the computer could “pull itself up by its own bootstraps”; get itself going (in a way that seemed almost paradoxical, hence the metaphor) with no intervention. This was achieved using information stores that could be accessed directly by the central processor of the computer and which did not lose their information when the computer was unplugged. In older computers this was in the form of magnetic rings (core memory). In modern computers this is in ROMs (Read Only Memory). All the computer needs is to be hard-wired to always look in the same location in these stores for the first instruction to execute. I will come back to computers and their hardware again, as they provide an interesting parallel to brains in many respects, but for now, introducing the concept of bootstrapping has been important. Our brains have been “bootstrapped” into recognising and processing and analysing truths about the world by the survival value of interacting successfully (in terms of reproduction) with the world, and especially with the other living creatures within it.

One of the problems in discussing the mind is that most of us seem to think that we are experts about what goes on in our own heads, and what it feels like to have those processes going on. I need to re-iterate what I said at the start of this response, and I will do it as follows: If a process walks like reasoning, and it quacks like reasoning, then we have a reasoning duck! To look at the process and claim that it simply can't be reasoning because it is physical is not acceptable. If a physical system is sufficiently powerful to give the appearance of reasoning, then it certainly is reasoning. If we were to try and argue otherwise, that would be begging the question about the nature of human reason. Evolution can produce solutions that we can find difficult to understand. It should not be surprising then that we haven't yet sorted out in detail how brains give rise to minds. I would like to give an example of the power of evolution and how it can lead to effective yet mysterious results. To do this I am going to come back to computer hardware. In the 1990s Adrian Thompson of the Department of Infomatics at the University of Sussex performed an experiment. He wanted to see if he could evolve a computer circuit out of 100 components that could discriminate between two different signal frequencies – one and ten cycles per second. So, he varied parameters of the circuitry at random and selected from the results. It took thousands of cycles of mutation and selection, but in the end, he succeeded. The results were rather odd. They were nothing like anything designed by a human. After some analysis, redundant components were removed (removal was not part of the selection process). Various feedback loops were present in the circuitry, and strangely, some components were needed even though they were not connected to the others. They contributed to the electrical properties of adjacent circuits. To sum up, the circuit produced by evolution was, for a time, a mystery. It only worked in certain temperature changes, and the output of circuit changed if it was moved to a different area of silicon. One of the most significant aspects of this experiment was how efficient the result was in terms of components – only around 1/3 of the available components were used in the evolved design. The implications of this (and subsequent experiments) are that we should beware of invoking magic where there is mystery. There was no magic here, just evolution. We see similar mystery in the brain, only with trillions of components, not tens. So, it is not surprising that we aren't yet close to understanding consciousness.

That example of the evolved circuit shows one way that complexity can arise – by the input of energy and resources combined with selection from variation. However, clearly, not all complexity is of the same nature, and it can arise in various ways. A watch is complex, but not in the same way as a tree. Brains are complex in ways that allow for intelligence. But, we need to be careful about definitions, otherwise we may end up calling intelligence “whatever a mind does”, and instead avoid considering its general nature. Although we have not achieved general intelligence in artificial systems, we have certainly achieved specific functions that are usually considered intelligent in nature – recognition of voices, faces and even handwriting, learning, planning, game-playing. We know of different kinds of complex systems that can achieve this level of functionality. One kind is a result of software engineering in the form of huge and carefully-written programs. Another kind is fuzzier, with a greater emphasis on hardware – neural networks. We may, for all we know, discover other kinds of complex system that exhibit this behaviour. What we have seen is behaviour from artificial systems that, if a human exhibited such behaviour, would certainly be called truth recognition and processing, in other words – reasoning.

Another matter raised in this debate is that of causations versus correlation in terms of the connection between brain and mind. I am afraid that attempting to explain things away using correlation just won't wash. It is beyond anything we would accept in any other area of life. Above a certain level of correlation, we accept the likelihood of causation – that smoking is bad for you, that cars run by gas rather than magic. There is only so much “prodding” of a system and observing the results that needs to be done to get an idea that the prodding itself is having the effect. The alternative is absurd – that some non-physical process is constantly monitoring the state of all the neurons in the brain in order to figure out what is going on in order to manipulate the state of some non-physical mind. One would have to ask – what would the point be? It would surely be easier to just leave the mind fully working when the brain suffers a stroke.

Now I am going to return to some matters discussed in my previous contribution to clear up what I believe are misunderstandings. My discussion of the universals was meant to illustrate how misleading it can be to assume the actual existence of certain attributes of physical systems. In discussing redness, I showed that the assumption of an essence of redness as an extra physical or metaphysical property of something that appears red is mistaken. This was not to do with the experience of “redness”, but that “redness” does not have any independent existence from the physical world. I did not state that moral and propositional attitudes aren't explicable to science in terms of the material world; I had rather hoped that my statement had shown that they were. What I stated was that there was still resistance to the idea that they are explicable in these terms, in a way that there is no longer for “redness”. There is no “essence of redness” that is present in the world, and there is no “essence of morality” or “essence of propositional attitude” that is present. They are simply terms that describe certain kinds of mental processing, and the experience of having such processing going on.

Regarding the issue of intentionality and modeling other minds, the actual mental state of a tiger that may attack us is of no relevance to the matter of how our minds can deal with this issue. Our ability to recognise intentions in other minds comes from the necessity to predict what the tiger will do. Our minds recognise the living nature of a tiger because we need to model what it may do, and we realise that sufficiently complex living creatures aren't as predictable as, say, a rock. We usually tend not to assume that a rock is “out to get us” (although there is certainly some advantage to assuming the remote possibility it might be, as an enemy may be behind it, waiting to push). Our abilities to recognise and to deal with intentionality aren't mysterious: they arise from having to share our world with both predictable events and the less predictable objects that are creatures with minds.

To conclude, I have dealt with the issue of how the ability to recognise and deal with supposed universals of reasoning, such as truth, can “bootstrap” into brains through selection – no metaphysical standards for these need to exist. There may be some issue about the fact that it is like something to have experiences, but there is nothing about that that implies anything non-physical. There are interesting discussions to be had, I feel, about the nature of experience – why it seems to feel like it is something to have neural processing going on in one's head. There are fascinating times ahead in neuroscience. We are able to follow the activity of neurons to an ever-finer detail, and model that activity. At some point, we will be able to observe, and model, what happens in a brain when we reason. This modeling will be a consequence of the use of the scientific method to understand reasoning. Any explanation of how we reason must itself involve the use of reason, and must include both a description of mechanism and predictive power. Supernatural explanations don't provide either mechanism or predictive power. They involve magic, and that really isn't any kind of explanation at all. To pick up on one particular point, if it is proposed that some supernatural spirit follows the state and activity of nerve cells (so as to reproduce the effects of drugs, or brain lesions), then it is necessary to provide a description of the mechanism by which those nerve cells are monitored. The scientific approach will allow observation of the mind in action. It does not require such mechanism, as the patterns of activity of trillions of nerve cells is itself the mind. The results of that observation may be a million, or a billion, times more complicated and, initially, mysterious than the puzzling nature of the evolved frequency discriminator circuit described above, but we will get there in the end. The speed at which the human genome project was completed reveals the exponential rate of progress of science.


Second rebuttal (Bnonn Tennant)


I believe I should start this post with an apology. In my previous statement I addressed my audience while referring to you, Steve, in the third person. This strikes me as perhaps a little rude. As much as the audience will benefit from this debate, it is with you that I am debating. Let me then apologize and address you directly now:
I agree that the discussion has wandered somewhat. You’re correct to point out that we aren’t discussing the nature of life or the kind of existence that subjective experiences have. We shouldn’t let these things unduly distract us. Even if they are examples of notions which have been wrong in the past, it is really of little consequence—because, getting back to the point, it is simply impossible that our notion of duality be in error. The mind must be a separate thing from the brain, or our ability to reason simply falls apart. That is the first premise of my overall argument. Let me prove it by focusing, as you rightly suggest, on “what human reasoning consists of”—

The need for a non-physical mind

To look at the process and claim that it simply can’t be reasoning because it is physical is not acceptable. If a physical system is sufficiently powerful to give the appearance of reasoning, then it certainly is reasoning.

Well, the argument I am forwarding is precisely that physical processes cannot in principle constitute reasoning. Therefore, if a physical system gives the appearance of reasoning, either it is an appearance only, or something more is going on than we are able to see using only physical means. There is simply a disconnect, in impassable bridge of principle between what is needed for reasoning to be reasoning, and what is possible given a purely physical world. In other words, if reasoning were indeed a physical process only, then its very nature would not actually be what we understand reasoning to be. And if reasoning is not really reasoning, the person making the assertion has some obvious and very profound epistemic problems.
Although I’ve stated this argument informally in my opening statement, let me explicate it more formally now. The way I’d like to present it is as a demonstration of the tension between two beliefs which you hold to be simultaneously true:

1. We draw conclusions in virtue of what their premises are about. What I mean by this is that, when we see that all men are mortal, and that Socrates is a man, what these premises are about causes us to believe the conclusion that Socrates is mortal. How they do this may not be entirely clear, but we know that the premises really do cause the conclusion in some way. I’m confident you’ll agree that this is self-evidently true. If it were not, we wouldn’t be engaged in debate right now.
   
2. Human beings are purely physical creatures. What I mean by this is that there is no non-physical soul or mind or spirit—just the body itself. Everything which happens in our minds—including reasoning of any kind—is in fact completely caused by physical objects (such as neurons) with physical properties working according to physical laws.
   

Now, it’s my contention that these two beliefs contradict each other: such that if (I) is true then (II) is false; and conversely, if (II) is true then (I) is false. But if we conclude that (I) is false we refute ourselves, because we cannot very well draw this conclusion by virtue of any premises without that conclusion relying on its own falsehood in order to be true. So (I) must be true because it actually cannot be false. On the other hand, (II) does not have this luxury. Obviously it could be the case that human beings are not purely physical. We might find this an unreasonable or undesirable conclusion depending on our other beliefs, but it is not intrinsically absurd. It does not refute itself. Therefore, if there is a contradiction between (I) and (II) so that only one of them can be true, we are forced to conclude that it is (I), and that (II) must be false. Let me now defend my contention of this contradiction—it is based on the following assertion:

Human reasoning cannot be described in terms of physical processes: physical objects with physical properties following physical laws

We cannot say “such-and-such a neuron fires, and causes such-and-such an inference.” If we say this, we actually make reasoning impossible. Arguments about representation, such as those forwarded by Mike in the comment stream of your most recent statement, do not help here. Consider the following reductio ad absurdum of (II):

1. Human reasoning is completely caused by physical processes (as per II).
   
2. It does not make sense to say that anything physical is about something.
   
3. Therefore, it does not make sense to say that human reasoning has the quality of being about something with respect to causes.
   
4. But if human reasoning cannot be said to be about something with respect to causes, (I) is disproved because it could not be the case that conclusions are caused by virtue of what their premises are about. This is self-refuting. Therefore, if we do not want to discard (i), (ii) must be false, and it must be sensible to say that something physical can be about something.
   
5. But it is self-evidently meaningless to say that my kettle is about my dog (or about anything for that matter); or that the law of gravity is about Saturn or anything else; or that the physical neurons firing in my brain are about Socrates. Therefore, (ii) is self-evidently true, and (i) must be false.
   

But you might argue, as I think Mike does, that the problem is one of semantics. Maybe we human beings have developed this concept of “aboutness” or intentionality as a way of referring in the first person to what is really just simple representation. So perhaps instead of saying that the physical processes in my brain are about Socrates, which obviously makes no sense, we should say that these brain states represent Socrates. But this gains us nothing, because physical representations must operate according to physical laws. Consider; let’s call the brain state representing “Socrates is a man” S, the state representing “all men are mortal” M, and the third state representing “Socrates is mortal” SM—

1. The physical state SM is caused purely by a conjunction of the physical states S and M acting in virtue of the physical laws which govern all three.
   
2. Physical laws are inapplicable to, and indifferent about, what a brain state represents. (Even if we could tell that a certain configuration of neurons represented the proposition “Socrates is a man”, we know that physical laws have no bearing whatsoever on this proposition. They only pertain to the physical state itself—not the abstract idea it represents.)
   
3. But if my belief that Socrates is mortal is caused completely by the conjunction of prior physical states in my brain, then it is not caused in any part by virtue of its premises. But we know from (I) that it is self-refuting to claim that premises have no causal role in forming conclusions.
   
4. Therefore, (vi) must be false. But if (vi) is false we once find that (II) is false: it cannot be the case that human beings are purely physical creatures, because it would make human reason impossible, which is self-refuting.
   

Note that this is not an argument that we don’t yet know how to explain human reason in physical terms, as some people mistakenly think. It is rather an argument showing that explaining human reason in physical terms is impossible in principle. It is necessarily the case that the mind cannot be reducible to the physical brain, because the alternative ends in absurdity. What I have shown, in other words, is that mental events occur in a mental thing, which we call the mind. This is a real thing; not just an abstract thing, or what philosophers call an epiphenomenal thing. It is neither physical in nature; nor is it simply of the physical. It is something of a different, but no less real “substance” to the physical. It is a substance to which properties can be applied which cannot be used to describe physical things: such as intentionality and truth. And it is a substance to which properties cannot be applied which can be used to describe physical things: such as mass and size. Two other important things are evident from this which force us to conclude that the Christian God exists: the universality of mental principles; and the internal tension which arises from them. I’ll address each briefly.

The universality of mental principles

It is obvious from internal reflection that there are certain ways of thinking which cannot be altered, and which we can see could not be otherwise. The law of noncontradiction, for example, says that A cannot be not-A at the same time and in the same sense. We can see that this law could never be broken, and it could never be changed, because it is actually a precondition for intelligibility. To speak of it being broken is meaningless, because it is a prerequisite of speaking at all. It is not simply a case of convention, such that we generally agree that it is best that A never be not-A at the same time and in the same sense. Rather, such agreement would rely on the law already being true. Like physical laws, it is something we cannot change; a principle which does not originate in any of us, but which is imposed upon us.
It is equally obvious that the existence of these mental principles implies that some kind of mental realm exists which supersedes any and all individual minds. I have discounted already the possibility that these mental principles could have their origin in the physical world by demonstrating the bridge of principle between mental and physical things. So we must look elsewhere as we consider what this superseding mental realm is like.

Now the fact of the matter is that mental things are mind-related things; mental principles are principles which act upon minds; and minds, whatever their actual substance, are personal, intelligent, aware entities. Therefore, the nature of this superseding mental realm in which mental principles are found cannot be non-personal, non-intelligent, and non-aware. This would violate the very nature of mental things to begin with. It must be the case that the superseding mental realm is itself some kind of a mind. The difference between it and us cannot be a difference of essential nature; it must rather be more like the difference between cause and effect.

What I mean is, we experience reality as it is imposed upon us. We are contingent upon it for our existence, and we have little control over it. We are finite and limited creatures without the capacity to impose laws of the kind under consideration. But there could exist a mind which is infinite and unlimited; who, rather than having reality imposed upon it, imposes itself upon reality, being noncontingent in and of itself. Only this sort of mind could originate mental principles like the law of noncontradiction. And, given the existence—the necessary existence—of these mental principles, it in fact must be the case that such a mind exists. It is as necessary and inviolably existent as mental laws. Indeed, these mental laws would simply be a description of the way in which this mind works.

In other words, mental principles imply a mind which possesses the quality of aseity—one of the two qualities I chose as defining the Christian God in my opening statement. The second is trinity.

The internal tension of mental principles

Something that is less obvious about the mental realm is that there is a strange internal paradox present. On the basis of the fact that there are mental laws which act as unifying principles upon us all, I have argued that the mental realm is ultimately a single mind upon which everything else is contingent. The difficulty with this is that unifying principles require something to unify. But if the mental realm is ultimately contingent upon a single mind, then what is there to unify in the first place? A mind is itself already unified; it contains no parts which must in turn be unified; and neither could it, or it could not act as the origin of a unifying principle in the first place, but rather would rely on some other unifying principle first. (Memories, thoughts, and the like, it should be recognized, are reflections of a pre-existing plurality outside the mind.) But if the aseitic mind I have deduced is ultimately one, then how did plurality come about at all? How can diversity come from what is intrinsically not diverse? The problem is the converse of the question that got us to this aseitic mind in the first place: how can there be unity between things which are intrinsically diverse?

The only evident answer to this question is that the aseitic mind must be both a unity and a plurality. It must be somehow both one mind, and more than one mind. Now you might think that this is a strange way for me to prove my case: to answer a paradox with another paradox. But consider that the alternative is actually not merely paradox, but absurdity. Either the mental realm is ultimately one (in which case plurality is impossible and individual minds could not exist); or the mental realm is ultimately diverse (in which case unity is impossible and logical laws could not exist)—or it is both, in which case we resolve the absurdity at the expense of a fully explicable answer. So this is the only solution which avoids complete incoherence, and is therefore the solution we are compelled to accept. It is the only solution which could be true.

It is also a situation which, due to its very nature as paradoxical and inexplicable, is rejected by religions which nonetheless affirm the existence of an ultimate, aseitic mind. Therefore, when we see that there is just a single religion which claims this paradoxical nature of God—as a trinity of the Father, Son, and Spirit—it starts to become quite unreasonable to discount this religion as just another man-made belief system. Given the nature of this aseitic, many-in-one mind which I have deduced, it is certainly plausible that it not only created us, but has communicated facts about itself to us through interaction with its creation—facts which have been recorded in written documents and compiled into a single compendium. Therefore, in the absence of any alternative religions, in the presence of the overwhelming evidence I have presented above, and in the spirit of impartial and fair-minded investigation, it would constitute unwarranted prejudice to dismiss the trinitarian Christian God as the necessary precondition for human reason. To remind you of your own principle: if the Christian God looks like a necessary, aseitic, many-in-one mind, and walks like a necessary, aseitic, many-in-one mind, then we have a Christian duck!


Continued here:
http://zarbi.livejournal.com/136234.html