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genes, minds, and information
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Dawkins and Dennett
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21 thoughts on “Dawkins and Dennett”
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There was no substance for it to be lodged in in the first place.
You're again assuming that there is something beyond the measurable relational properties. This is not a necessary assumption and is quite natural to deny given that our descriptions can always be broken down into relations between a thing and us or one thing and another thing.
Take a look at David Lewis' article 'Ramseyan Humility' or Bertrand Russell's discussion of colors in his work on physics.
I am troubled by substance-based metaphysics as well. I am criticizing Dennett's view here, not trying to lay out my own, which would be based more in a process metaphysics, i.e. Whitehead.
Are you not typing this all up on a computer? Have you never used any computer but the one that you're on? I assume that you have used multiple computers to access youtube. How is that possible given that they have different body/matter?
It is because it is a program that is realizable in a variety of material substrates. In the same way, it is quite natural to think of our minds as programs realized in carbon rather than silicon circuits.
I suggest you check out AI: The very Idea by Haugeland.
I am not questing whether digital information can be realized in multiple physical platforms. Obviously it can be. I am questioning whether the analogy between conscious experience and digital information is sound.
Look: I think you're right to point out that functionalism is in some ways similar to plato's theory of forms.
I don't think, though, that viewing the mind as a kind of pattern of 'doings' that various materials can carry out (and thus that the same mind is realizable by multiple kinds of material) shows any type of metaphysical dualism of the kind Plato or Descartes argued for.
Furthermore, since patterns are abstract, we need not existentially quantify them. The universe is still tidy.
Dennett denies qualia in any sense that could challenge a functionalist model of the mind. I'm thinking here of 280ish in Consciousness Explained, 140ish in Brainchildren, and most powerfully in his article 'Quining Qualia'.
Conscious experience is *just* the interaction of systems. On this view, thermostats are 'conscious' in the same sense (though to a limited degree) that we are. If a system has a way of representing outside structures, it is 'conscious' of them (in the uninteresting sense).
I can't deny that some accounts of qualia are incoherent, and Dennett has rightly criticized them. But nonetheless, there is something it is like to be (…a human, a dog, a bat, a bacterium, etc); there is phenomenological experience. Consciousness is more than representation. It is the experience of a representation (understanding what words mean, for instance).
I do not think consciousness is something in the brain, though. It is in the process realized by brain, body, and world together.
I think Dennett would agree that there is something that it is like to be a human, a bat, a dog, a thermostat, etc. He might also be willing to grant that consciousness is realized by brain body and world–he would probably just say that the Turing test offers us proof that a computer with architecture set up just like our brains is just like us. If you disagree with him, you'll have to try and find a non-question begging way to deny the pull of the spirit of Turing's argument.
I like your videos by the way–they are a bastion of non-idiocy in the veritable ocean of morons here on youtube.
I refer you to Robert Rosen's book "Essays on Life Itself" (2000) for an argument against the idea that organisms could be modeled based on Turing's architecture. Hopefully you can find it in a library, because it is rather expensive. But the basic argument is that living systems are closed to efficient causation, because every function is entailed by another function within the system itself.
Rosen's understanding of organisms is similar to that of the theory of autopoiesis created by Maturana and Varela. His claim is that this kind of organic organization is not Turing-computable. He attempts to prove this mathematically in his book, but this comment section is no place for me to reproduce the argument. You'll have to read the book if you find the attempt to disprove Dennett's idea at all interesting.
You may be right that the turing machine would not, itself, in-line-processor par excellence, be able to model (in a temporally efficient manner) the massively parallel system that is our brain.
Two points:
1) A turing machine can model any function whatever (even embedded functions). This we know because we know that any algorithm at all is computable on a turing machine.
2) The turing test need not use a turing machine exactly–we could construct a parallel circuit to pass the turing test.
This IS interesting. Before we go on, is he arguing that genetic material/chemical decoder is not turing computable or that brain circuits aren't computable?
The distinction is VERY important here, because the former would not rule out the computability of the latter (and maybe even vice versa, but I'm not sure…).
He is arguing something more general, that the organization of any living system (ie, autopoiesis) is not Turing-computable, because it operates with operational closure (which implies a kind of self-referencing circularity such that the organism brings forth its own domain of environmental significance based on its internal organization). IOW, an organism's behavior cannot be modeled as an input/output processor, as what counts as information is endogenously determined by the organism itself.
There is obviously a lot to unpack here, which I can't really do with a 500 character limit. I urge you to check out the book, or find one of Rosen's papers online, if you are interested.
There is a larger context to the autopoietic approach, which is that cognition cannot be understood if we isolate the brain/brain circuits from the rest of the body and world. Nor can we understand evolution by isolating genetic material from body/world.
I'll have to check this out. Infinity and recursion are interesting and conceptually frustrating. Especially frustrating, I might add, when they are so pertinent to so many discussions.
Thanks for the referral.
Indeed, : )
Have you read Hofstadter's "I am a Strange Loop?"
Only parts, after reading GEB I didn't feel like 'I am a Strange Loop' offered much in the way of new material. I recently ordered his 'Le Ton beau de Marot' and plan on reading his book on fluid analogies some time.
I'm glad you bring Hofstadter up. He is the guy that comes to mind whenever I think about embeddedness and infinity within the finite. Him and Cantor, I suppose.
I would recommend you get a good philosophical dictionary and look up the terms materialism (or better physicalism) and Platonism. You also might want to read up on the gene-centred account of natural selection, which was not founded by Dawkins (although it was popularized by him) and is not unique in taking DNA to contain informational structure (this is something that all modern biologists accept).
Interesting young man.