how are scientific beliefs caused?

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Re: how are scientific beliefs caused?

Post by Metacrock » Wed May 24, 2017 6:13 am

I've sort of last track of the original issue
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Jim B.
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Re: how are scientific beliefs caused?

Post by Jim B. » Thu May 25, 2017 6:34 pm

The Pixie wrote: Ultimately I was matching your vague claims of "good arguments against the supervenience of consciousness". Anyone can claim there are good arguments for their position, but at the end of the day, it counts for zero until you present them. What you said was entirely vacuous. I matched that with an equally vacuous response.

If you want to proceed, perhaps you could say why you think Frank Jackson's argument is a good arguments against the supervenience of consciousness, because even after reviewing it, I still do not see it.
Well, in a nutshell, in every other case of supervenience, we can understand the supervenience relation. It's transparent to people who investigate it, at least in principle. The properties of H2O molecules constitute liquidity at the macro-scale. This relation doesn't hold from micro-properties of brains to consciousness. There's a gap that's conceptual and not empirical in nature; at least that's the default position. If the reductionist says, "well, it will be filled in later," that's hand-waving. Without an idea of how the two levels even conceivably could relate on anything like a supervenience relation, such a statement is tantamount to a tenet of faith.
It's highly plausible that Mary learns something new. If she learns something new, that would indicate that there are new facts there that she is learning, and those new facts would not be physical 3rd person type facts. Reality therefore would not be exhausted by physical, 3rd person type facts.
So why do you make these decision if not because of the prior conditions?

Again I will ask, can you give a real-life example?
I make them based on the reasons supporting them; reasons not being identical to causes, they don't compel my decision but inform it. I make them because of the kind of person I ideally desire to become which doesn't now and will almost certainly never exist, so the content of this propositional state would not be able to exert any causal force. The actual desire I have to desire this state exists, but that doesn't capture what this state is about. When I decide, I'm actually becoming the person I ideally want to be, if even in an extremely small way. There's an element of commitment and enactment that prior conditions alone have trouble fully accounting for.

Let's say I'm trying to decide on whether to join the PeaceCorps or go to art school. There are sets of reasons supporting each choice, but those sets are not fixed. They're changing all the time depending on criteria that I choose or that occur to me all the time and so on ad infinitum. I'm not just looking at what my strongest beliefs and desires happen to be; I also have to actively prise out what it is I should desire and which beliefs i should consider and how to interpet and 'weight' those factors, etc., and then to decide on what the criteria for those decisions should be and so on. I'm not trying to determine what my actual mental state is but what it should be and so on. It's happening over an infinite number of dimensions or axes of criteria. Of course, this process will be realized by actual conditions in my brain/body, but what reasons would we have to think that they are identical with what these conditions are about, aside from a prior commitment to determinism/reductionism? Of course, whichever of the 2 I choose, there wil be that reason-set that we can look at and say "This set caused your decision": but that would be equally likely regardless of what i chose. It's self-ratifying and not very enlightening. How could it be proved wrong?

In the second post of this thread I said:

"Purpose emerged from the minds that were a product of evolution. If you want to call that a new mode of causation (as seems reasonable), then I disagree with these purported naturalists.

I became an atheist because the arrangement of atoms in my brain allowed consciousness to emerge, and that allowed me to evaluate the evidence.
"

Does it now transpire that actually you agree with me?
How is what you've been describing a "new mode of causation"? It's just a very complex version of event causation. There's nothing new about it.
But that is you!
How can that be me if my mental state is always changing? What is the basis for my identity over time? And what is the basis for the ascription of responsibility over time? How can i be charged with a murder i committed last year when the conditions that caused that decision no longer hold?
[/quote]
Now sure I understand. Could you give a hypothetical maybe?[/quote]

Let's say that the voice in my head tells me that you are trying to kill me so I kill you instead in order to save my own life, or so I believe. This has all transpired through my internal mental states, but I am not responsible for my decision because i could not have done differently under the same circumstances. my psychosis compelled me to do it. What I am and am not held responsible for tracks "choice/no choice" not "internal/external."
But why would you? Are your choices just arbitrary? If not, then will make the same choice every time, if the conditions are perfectly identical.
They're done for reasons, but i'm not compelled to consider the reasons i consider or to interpret them the way I do. These things ocur at a different level of description from necessitating causes.
So what is the alternative? Do you think you have a choice if the tram goes randomly left or right? Or say you can go left, into a dark tunnel, or right into a dark tunnel, and both outcomes are, as far as you know, identical. You choice, then, is entirely arbitrary. Does that make it meaningful?
The alternative is that I sometimes decide, I being not a set of conditions but a center of consciousness, values, meaning, intentions, responsibility. These things are conceptually different from a set of conditions. If a random quantum event in my brain compels my decision to go left, then it's not my decision any more than if a mechanical malfunction compels the tram to go left.
So we both agreed your mental state could necessitate it in some cases at least.
Yes, but those actions wouldn't be freely chosen then. Think of the distinction that people make between something a psychotic person would do and something I would do; what is it that this distinction is tracking? Is it anything important, anything 'real,' or just social constructs, and if the latter, what would those constructs be based on?
Do you think the legal system is generally a good guide to the nature of consciousness?
I don't know how good a guide it is to consciousness, but i would put more stock in it as far as 'mens rea' responsibility etc than neuroscience. Even neuroscientists admit that their field isn't ready for primetime when it comes to deciding culpability. I'd put a little more stock in a hundreds of thousands of years worth of folk attitudes, even though these aren't unimpeachable either.
It takes two to tango, Jim. If it is trivial, why are you still arguing it?
Gee, I don;t kw. There was someone else who I recall who kept bringing it up.
Read what I typed in my first post on this thread.
There it sounds like we agree but on the last two or three pages we disagree. The question is, do you agree with yourself?

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Re: how are scientific beliefs caused?

Post by The Pixie » Tue May 30, 2017 7:30 am

Sorry it took so long to rep,ly. I started days ago, but life got in the way.
Jim B. wrote:Well, in a nutshell, in every other case of supervenience, we can understand the supervenience relation. It's transparent to people who investigate it, at least in principle. The properties of H2O molecules constitute liquidity at the macro-scale. This relation doesn't hold from micro-properties of brains to consciousness. There's a gap that's conceptual and not empirical in nature; at least that's the default position. If the reductionist says, "well, it will be filled in later," that's hand-waving. Without an idea of how the two levels even conceivably could relate on anything like a supervenience relation, such a statement is tantamount to a tenet of faith.
Why is consciousness not transparent in principle? It is vastly more complex than the water molecule to liquid system, so it will take a lot longer to work out, but that is just a question of scale.

I asked about the spider before, and you said it is not conscious. Do you think a spider's brain will one day be fully understood? Already scientists are modelling the nematode brain; it has only 302 neurons so is relatively simple.

A house fly has a quarter of a million (could not find a figure for spiders). Could that be modelled? Ultimately, I believe so. And why not then also model the 86 billion of a human?

Maybe one day even the 257 billion of an African elephant!
It's highly plausible that Mary learns something new. If she learns something new, that would indicate that there are new facts there that she is learning, and those new facts would not be physical 3rd person type facts. Reality therefore would not be exhausted by physical, 3rd person type facts.
I think she would learn something new. The experience of red is not the same as the analysis of red. I am somewhat colour blind, so my experience of red is almost certainly different to your own.

So what? My experience of red is due to a deficiency in my eyes; something purely physical. It all seems to come back to the physical world, which seems to reinforce my view that consciousness supervenes on the physical.
I make them based on the reasons supporting them; reasons not being identical to causes, they don't compel my decision but inform it. I make them because of the kind of person I ideally desire to become which doesn't now and will almost certainly never exist, so the content of this propositional state would not be able to exert any causal force. The actual desire I have to desire this state exists, but that doesn't capture what this state is about. When I decide, I'm actually becoming the person I ideally want to be, if even in an extremely small way. There's an element of commitment and enactment that prior conditions alone have trouble fully accounting for.

Let's say I'm trying to decide on whether to join the PeaceCorps or go to art school. There are sets of reasons supporting each choice, but those sets are not fixed. They're changing all the time depending on criteria that I choose or that occur to me all the time and so on ad infinitum. I'm not just looking at what my strongest beliefs and desires happen to be; I also have to actively prise out what it is I should desire and which beliefs i should consider and how to interpet and 'weight' those factors, etc., and then to decide on what the criteria for those decisions should be and so on. I'm not trying to determine what my actual mental state is but what it should be and so on. It's happening over an infinite number of dimensions or axes of criteria. Of course, this process will be realized by actual conditions in my brain/body, but what reasons would we have to think that they are identical with what these conditions are about, aside from a prior commitment to determinism/reductionism? Of course, whichever of the 2 I choose, there wil be that reason-set that we can look at and say "This set caused your decision": but that would be equally likely regardless of what i chose. It's self-ratifying and not very enlightening. How could it be proved wrong?
As you say, reasons inform the decision.

The reason-set is your mental state at that moment, just viewed at a higher level. And that reason-set necessarily caused that outcome. We know that because that was the outcome.

Say you could not decide. That is an outcome of a slightly different reason-set in which neither choice is a clear winner; this is a slightly different mental state.
How is what you've been describing a "new mode of causation"? It's just a very complex version of event causation. There's nothing new about it.
Because it comes from consciousness, which is a property that has emerged from that complexity.

Think of the water molecules and the liquid state. The molecules in the liquid are not behaving in a new mode, the new mode emerges from them interacting as a whole.
How can that be me if my mental state is always changing? What is the basis for my identity over time? And what is the basis for the ascription of responsibility over time? How can i be charged with a murder i committed last year when the conditions that caused that decision no longer hold?
How similar are you to the teenager version of you? How similar to the toddler version? The reality is that we are changing. Sometimes we feel happy, sometimes angry, sometimes we sleep. Our mental states change significantly even over the course of a day.
Let's say that the voice in my head tells me that you are trying to kill me so I kill you instead in order to save my own life, or so I believe. This has all transpired through my internal mental states, but I am not responsible for my decision because i could not have done differently under the same circumstances. my psychosis compelled me to do it. What I am and am not held responsible for tracks "choice/no choice" not "internal/external."
I would be curious to know how your own beliefs handle the morality there, as that looks problematic whichever way you look at it.

I am not saying we do not make choices, I am saying our decision, when presented with a choice, is determined by our mental state, which in turn comes from our experiences, beliefs, etc.
They're done for reasons, but i'm not compelled to consider the reasons i consider or to interpret them the way I do. These things ocur at a different level of description from necessitating causes.
Right, it is happening at a different level. On one level, it is a necessary consequence of your mental state. On a high level, that mental state is what you are thinking, your reasons, and at that level, this emergent level, you are making a choice.
The alternative is that I sometimes decide, I being not a set of conditions but a center of consciousness, values, meaning, intentions, responsibility. These things are conceptually different from a set of conditions. If a random quantum event in my brain compels my decision to go left, then it's not my decision any more than if a mechanical malfunction compels the tram to go left.
If going right led to the tram going off a cliff, would you say you had a choice? Or a compelling reason to choose left? Or no choice?
Yes, but those actions wouldn't be freely chosen then. Think of the distinction that people make between something a psychotic person would do and something I would do; what is it that this distinction is tracking? Is it anything important, anything 'real,' or just social constructs, and if the latter, what would those constructs be based on?
I do not know. I think this is very shaky ground. I would guess mental illness is a spectrum, and people range along it from (for example) 0% psychotic to 100% psychotic. Someone has decided upon an arbitrary value, above which you are considered insane and not responsible. Do decisions suddenly stop being freely chosen in that case?
I don't know how good a guide it is to consciousness, but i would put more stock in it as far as 'mens rea' responsibility etc than neuroscience. Even neuroscientists admit that their field isn't ready for primetime when it comes to deciding culpability. I'd put a little more stock in a hundreds of thousands of years worth of folk attitudes, even though these aren't unimpeachable either.
Okay... Do not remember saying anything about culpability with respect to neuroscience.
Gee, I don;t kw. There was someone else who I recall who kept bringing it up.
I responded when you mentioned it, you responded when I mentioned it. How it works in these discussions. Neither one of us "kept bringing it up", and if at any time you had not mentioned in in a post, it would then have been absent from my response. So maybe your recall is showing some bias here?

Jim B.
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Re: how are scientific beliefs caused?

Post by Jim B. » Tue May 30, 2017 2:06 pm

The Pixie wrote:
Why is consciousness not transparent in principle? It is vastly more complex than the water molecule to liquid system, so it will take a lot longer to work out, but that is just a question of scale.
Because it really seems to be a conceptual rather than an empirical gap. Nothing personal but I really don't feel like rehashing all of that again. Here's a link to a previous discussion:[/quote]


viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2642
I asked about the spider before, and you said it is not conscious. Do you think a spider's brain will one day be fully understood? Already scientists are modelling the nematode brain; it has only 302 neurons so is relatively simple.

A house fly has a quarter of a million (could not find a figure for spiders). Could that be modelled? Ultimately, I believe so. And why not then also model the 86 billion of a human?

Maybe one day even the 257 billion of an African elephant!
I didn't write that the spider was not conscious. I said it processed information from its environment and that it probably doesn't initiate causal chains the way humans do, but i said maybe they do. This topic of teh supervenience of consciousness isn't related to understanding or modelling brains and neural functioning.
I think she would learn something new. The experience of red is not the same as the analysis of red. I am somewhat colour blind, so my experience of red is almost certainly different to your own.
It sounds like we agree then that not all facts are reducible to 3rd person, physical facts. Her new knowledge could not have been gotten through even a completed neurosicence. When all is known about neuroscience, there will still be something more to know about redness.
So what? My experience of red is due to a deficiency in my eyes; something purely physical. It all seems to come back to the physical world, which seems to reinforce my view that consciousness supervenes on the physical.
But we don't say that H2O causes water; we say it constitutes water. Reductionists like Dennett aren't content with saying that physical events cause experience; they make the bolder claim that the two are the same.

As you say, reasons inform the decision.

The reason-set is your mental state at that moment, just viewed at a higher level. And that reason-set necessarily caused that outcome. We know that because that was the outcome.

Say you could not decide. That is an outcome of a slightly different reason-set in which neither choice is a clear winner; this is a slightly different mental state.

Informing doesn't equal necessitating. There don't seem to be the constraints there when I deliberate that we associate with causation. It could be that "I" emerge as a center of consciousness and agency, and that this "I" is deciding, at least in some cases. I can initiate causal chains, informed by reasons but not necesitated by them. We don;t know enough empirically to say whether your scenario or mine or some other, like causal indeterminism, is the most likely, but there is ample evidence for strong emergentism in nature. What is incoherent about either agency theory or causal indeterminism, ie that the brain generates indeterminacy at times when whatever outcome is generated will be supported by the reasons I consciously and intentionally hold? Some form of libertarianism comports much better with our own experiences of deliberation as well as wit ascriptions of responsibility, regret, angst, gratitude etc than your theory does. These things don't mean free will is right but that there's a greater explanatory burden for determinists.
Because it comes from consciousness, which is a property that has emerged from that complexity.
Why would consciousness be necessary if it's all a complex deterministic process? What would consciousness be selected for? If it's all event causation (event 1 at time 1 necessitates event 2 at time 2, and so on) how does consciousness make it a new type of causation?
How similar are you to the teenager version of you? How similar to the toddler version? The reality is that we are changing. Sometimes we feel happy, sometimes angry, sometimes we sleep. Our mental states change significantly even over the course of a day.
We did a couple of threads on this topic too. I'll link to them:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2682


Sure, we psychologically change all the time, from second to second actually. But is there anything underlying this constant flux that might unite them, any 'youness' that's perhaps more durable than your moment by moment psychological changes, other than your physical body/ brain? And if one day it's possible to upload 'you' to a computer, even your physical body would not be necessary for maintaining your 'youness.' And if what you say is right, it wouldn't make any sense to hold me responsible today for what i did yesterday if I am no more than whatever cocktail of states happens to bubble to the surface at the moment.
I would be curious to know how your own beliefs handle the morality there, as that looks problematic whichever way you look at it.
The psychotic person would normally not be held morally or legally responsible for the action. Their illness necessitated them to do it.
I am not saying we do not make choices, I am saying our decision, when presented with a choice, is determined by our mental state, which in turn comes from our experiences, beliefs, etc.
Sure, but why is your scenario any more likely or coherent than mine, besides being in line with a prior commitment to reductionism?
If going right led to the tram going off a cliff, would you say you had a choice? Or a compelling reason to choose left? Or no choice?
I may make a choice to end my life, assuming I'm alone on the tram, due to consideration of reasons. But aside from that extraordinary circumstance, the will to survive is usually so strong, instincitive you might say, that I wouldn't have chosen to go left any more than I chose to give money to someone with a gun to my head.
I do not know. I think this is very shaky ground. I would guess mental illness is a spectrum, and people range along it from (for example) 0% psychotic to 100% psychotic. Someone has decided upon an arbitrary value, above which you are considered insane and not responsible. Do decisions suddenly stop being freely chosen in that case?
It's a gradation, like so many things (When exactly does someone become "bald"?). I was assuming the extreme case of absolute full-on psychosis for the sake of argument. There are gray areas, but that doesn't mean there aren't such things as 'psychosis' or 'baldness.'.
Okay... Do not remember saying anything about culpability with respect to neuroscience.
We were talking about accountability and how I thought that your theory has trouble making sense of that. Moral responsibility is generally thought to be a crucial factor in the free will debate.

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