The Death of the Soul
- Thread starter phildwyer
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Could you elaborate on this more sophisticated materialism which does not 'reduce' consciousness to physiological processes? What crucial element is factored out by this reduction?articul8 said:
Your willingness to accept (even temporarily) that "consciousness is not inherently rooted in the physical" sounds like the slippery slope that leads straight to wishful thinking land.
goldenecitrone
post tenebras lux
gurrier said:
Or an over-indulgence in Ketamine.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
gurrier said:
You'll regret asking that! Sorry for the length of this but here goes:
What I mean is that there is a difference between the physiological brain and the psychical mind . You can understand all the facts of neurophysiology - the rules governing neuronal transmission etc., without understanding what a particular patient is thinking at any particular time. You might be able to infer that the regions of the brain responsive to, say, fear seem especially active. But you can't infer what has produced that fear, what determines its specific character from a purely biological description.
Ultimately, I believe that the kind of consciousness which human beings could recognise as such is inevitably dependent upon the physical. However, in the far-flung reaches of metaphysical speculation, how can we be sure that there is not an immaterial consciousness which we aren't able to even entertain the merest idea of? In other words, a la Wittgenstein, if God exists we wouldn't be able to recognise/identify/understand him (ie whereof one cannot speak one must be silent etc.). This is where I think Phil goes wildly astray - by its very nature "God" is something we can never have rational proof of, we can only choose to have faith in (or otherwise).
I see the idea of God, like the idea of our own Death, is useful to humans as a kind of limit-concept to human experience. It is by definition not something we can have experience of. Death/God is where reason has no power of description/interpretation etc. As such it is a necessary corrective to a Enlightenment idea of Reason that claims absolute mastery. It is a spur to a different kind of reason.
The kind of creatures we are - materially embodied, finite, vulnerable, needy etc. necessitates a certain speculative moment (the space into which an idea of a divine consciousness might be projected) as a kind of ultimate horizon of what an Ultimate knowldge might be.
But we will never have an ultimate knowledge. Just the kind of knowledge that it is possible to have as humans . But how do we know when we have reached the best kind of knowledge that it is possible to reach? Simply: we don't. Which is why we posit the existence of such an ultimate knowledge elsewhere: God.
You'll never prove the existence of God. He is an invention of our own devising. But (or some other equivalent kind of metaphysical placeholder) is/are (useful and even necessary) fictions which point to something inherent in our existence as humans - that our knowledge is necessarily limited. But these limits are what give us purchase on the whole philosophical project in the first place. It is because we perceive that our knowledge falls short of the Ultimate that we endeavour to correct our current, fallible understanding.
I don't disagree with you here, but I would describe it slightly differently. The concept of the mind is currently a more useful abstraction for identifying causation in terms of high level brain-state transitions than the low level abstraction of electrical charges and neural networks. Although it is quite possible that the complexity of the low level problem will mean that this remains the case for ever, I would not discount the possibility of neuro-science reversing the situation. For example, if one were able to map the various connections within the associative memory system of a particular brain and model their functioning, one might be able to conceive state transition rules for stimulus -> brain state that are much more accurate thanarticul8 said:
anything that the various fields of psychology can aspire to. For example, it could be possible to detect strong neural connections between a particular innocuous object and strongly unpleasant childhood memories and hence accurately predict a negative emotional reaction in the presence of this object and so on.
We can't. But such speculation is by definition purely abstract and unknowable. Thus people who are interested in practical exploration to try to establish the limits of what we can know generally use Occam's razor to identify the most useful paths of enquiry and leave the rest to the idle dreamers who gain pleasure from purely abstract intellectual speculation.articul8 said:
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
gurrier said:
You sound almost behaviourist in this last sentence (Pavlov's dog - Les and the Chives if you are a fan of Vic Reeves
)I am sceptical of the empiricist/positivist approach to consciousness. I just don't see how there can be any access to the "truth" of what happens in the material world (ie. the brain) which isn't already mediated by a subjective consciousness. How can a scientist observe the effect of a specifically "psychical" object looming into consciousness? ie. you might be able to observe an aversion to a particular object, which culminates in a corresponding behaviour. But suppose that the same behaviour was the result of an 'idea' that caused a similar aversion, in the absence of an object that could be said to be the 'cause'?
I tend to agree with you on the irrelevance of the wilder shores of metaphysical speculation. Most philosophical tasks IMO consist of recognising the irrelevance of certain questions!
In Bloom said:
(a) Yes, 'defining characteristic.' That which makes any thing what it is. Obviously, for human beings, there is such a thing as identity--we can identify this as a table, that as a chair, me as me, Bloom as Bloom and so forth. The essentialist view holds that identity is produced by a quality *within* the thing: its 'essence.' The anti-essentialist view, prevelent in postmodernist philosophy, holds that a thing is made what it is by what it is not--in other words, that identity is *relational*: a chair is a chair because it is not a table, a stool or anything else. This latter view ultimately makes identity a function of language, and this applies to human beings too, so this philosophy denies the existence of an essential self, or soul.
(b) Yes, consciousness depends upon the brain in living human beings. But it does not follow fom this that consciousness is *produced* by the brain. It has been persuasively argued that there are *ideas* within the mind, rather than the brain, without which consciousness would be impossible. The question of whether consciousness can exist without a brain is unanswerable. But it has emphatically *not* been answered convincgly in the negative.
(c) Nothing can be both an idea and a material thing, because ideas and matter are mutually definitive--they are concepts that have meaning only in relation to each other. Ideas may be, and are, *manifested* in the brain, but that does not make them *reducible* to the brain.
articul8 said:
I'm no more an idealist than I am a materialist, I take the dialectical view that ideas and matter are mutualy definitive. Our experience of matter depends upon our ideas quite as much as our experience of our ideas depends upon matter. We know that matter can exist without consciousness, as in a dead body. We do not, and cannot, know whether consciousness can exist without matter. But since they are two different things, we must admit the theoretical possibility.
articul8 said:
Actually I'd say that the 'human community' is grounded in language, not the other way around. But the question then becomes: what is *language* grounded in? What makes significant representation possible? Is it not ultimately the transcendental signifier, or "logos?" In which case, the source of self-consciousness is logos, and we all know what logos is, don't we?
Gmarthews said:
But there is a blatant contradiction in what you say! You say that we can *only* 'see the world' through our 'selves,' and then you say that we *only* 'see the world' through our 'senses.' But the truth is that our sense are *not* necessary for experience--we can experience ideas--but the self is. Of course, we call have senses too, but the question at issue here is whether the self can be *reduced* to the senses. I say that it cannot. For do we not all have a *unique* sense of self, an instinctive conviction that we are absolutely unreplicable individuals? And how could this awareness have come about through the senses, which are common to all mankind, and even to animals?
greenman said:Apart from this, I thought the theist view was to project a view of a threefold nature of man - Body, Mind and Soul? But on here mind and soul appear to be conflated, with some fluff about making it more palatable for the dim/evil/deluded sceptics.I thought "soul" was supposed to be some undefinable undetectable "essence", quite separate from that confluence of memory and conciousness that can be called mind?
I believe you refer to 'trichotomy,' often though erroneously identified with Paulin soteriology, and that you are equating 'mind' with what the ancients called 'spirit.' It is often argued, on the basis of Hebrews 4:12 (‘For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit’), and 1 Corinthians 15:35 (’And so it is written, “The first Adam became a living soul, the last Adam became a quickening spirit”’) that Paul preaches trichotomy; that is, he distinguishes three elements of the human being: body (soma), soul (psyche) and spirit (pneuma).
This would accord with Genesis’s description of the soul as the unity of body and spirit. In trichotomy, the pneuma is what gives life to the psyche by connecting it to God, and it can also be withdrawn from the psyche, causing its death. Such a theory is compatible with a *potentially* immortal soul, and Paul often distinguishes between the ‘outer,’ ‘old’ or ‘natural’ man (who must die), and the ‘inner,‘ ‘new’ or ‘spiritual’ man (who potentially lives forever). Paul uses the term psychikos to refer to the ‘natural’ man, and pneumatikos to refer to the spiritual man (1 Corinthians 2:14).
This reflects his belief, apparently derived from Plato, that the soul contains lower as well as higher impulses, so that a concern for the soul would involve concern for desire and appetite, and thus rank lower in the ethical hierarchy than spirit, which elevates the soul above itself. But in fact the terms psyche and pneuma are used almost interchangeably throughout the New Testament, and the opposition seems rather to be between a soul oriented towards pneuma and a soul directed towards the ‘flesh’ (sarx), by which term Paul intends *not* the material body but the ways of thinking that are dictated by the body’s desires and serve the body’s ends. It is by no means clear, finally, that Paul or any other Biblical author believed in a soul that was immortal by nature, and whose fate in eternity depended on whether its earthly orientation had been primarily spiritual or fleshly.
The concept of the *immortal* soul, which has become such an integral part of Christianity, is Hellenic, not Hebraic, in origin. Even in Greece, it develops at quite a late stage. In Homer, although human beings are referred to as ‘mortals,’ in contrast to the immortal gods, only their ‘images’ (eidola) are said to dwell in Hades after their death. The difference between the Hebrew nephash and the Greek eidolon is of central importance. Unlike nephash, the term eidolon does not designate a person’s essence; on the contrary, the ‘image’ of a person is by definition not identical to him.
The situation is the reverse of that in Platonic Christianity, where the image, or appearance, of a person dies while his essential soul survives. In Plato, and also in much Christian thought, the survival of an image along with the death of the essence is possible, but it is presented as a punishment for an immoral life: the ‘ghost’ remains when the ‘soul’ dies, or is damned. But in Homer this is the universal fate of mortals; the Iliad (1:4) remarks that the dead warriors ‘themselves’ remain on the battlefield after the departure of their eidola, and the Achilles visited by Odysseus in the underworld is literally a shadow of his former self. In order to exist as an essential self, for Homer, a person must be *alive.* In fact the earliest Greek philosophy simply equates the soul with life, or even with animation: Thales attributed souls to magnets because they can cause motion, and Democritus identified souls with atoms for the same reason.
This we see that matierialism, as Freidrich Lange famously remarked, is as old as philosophy, but not older. It is, in fact, the *childhood* of philosophy, the immediate, instinctive first reflection of the mind on its situation. The ancients had surpassed materialism by the fourth century BC, and it is a testimony to the regression of consciousness that our postmodern era has re-embraced this most elementary of all errors.
gurrier said:
Long-term readers must forgive the repetition, but when Gurrier drags out his usual silly nonsense, I usually respond by quoting the highly accurate lyrics of the Mr. T Experience's 'History of the Concept of the Soul.". Saves time and energy all round. Also, you can easily learn them by heart, translate them into prose, and impress the girls at cocktail parties:
"Homer didn't have a comprehensive word for mind.
the psyche and the conscious self had not yet been combined.
He understood events as repetition of the past,
and individual consciousness was not a part of that.
But early Greek thought played a role in the complicated history
of the concept of the soul.
By the time of Plato these ideas had taken shape.
The Phaedo and Timaeus are works which demonstrate
the consious separation of the knower from the known
and the dual nature of the body and the soul.
Modern thought was possible:
the complicated history of the concept of the soul.
Whoa!
Pythagoras and Orphic doctrines all came into play,
because Plato was a mystic in his own Platonic way.
The pre-Socratic Naturalists saw things in terms of "stuff".
But Plato's metaphysics showed that this was not enough.
This is the incredible complicated history of the concept of the soul.
Rock and roll."
But since consciousness is apparently produced by the brain, and altering the brain clearly effects consciousness (just try drinking heavily or just plain bashing your head against the wall if you really desire proof), it follows that consciousness is dependent on the brain.phildwyer said:
But if consciousness is material than the distinction between two concepts only exists within the brain. It all comes back to the same thing, you are employing circular reasoning (ideas are non-material because thought is non-material, thought is an idea, therefore it is non-material). Leaving aside the question of whether we can really call consciousness an idea (as opposed to a property).
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
phildwyer said:
Despite your claims to a dialectic approach, this claim is pure idealism. Which is why you end up talking bollocks about a transcendental signifier and logos.
What is the minimum requirement for human language (I accept that it is impossible to disprove the existence of some completely other transcendental language, but seeing as it would mean fuck all to us, I don't see the need for any further speculation on that score)?:
1) Ontology - there Being anything at all
2) The Ontic questions of their being particular beings which entails:
3) Dasein's "being with" others - the need to share a means of expression, and to require expression
These are the contingent 'givens' of our material embodiment not the outcome of some divine logocentric metalanguage.
I don't think so. Behaviourism didn't have an understanding of complexity which was its real Achilles heel. Although the brain / universe may operate in a fundamentally determinist way (on certain levels), the complexity of it may well be such that we can never say anything definite about it - leaving us with the identification of probabilities and trends as our goal rather than rules.articul8 said:You sound almost behaviourist in this last sentence (Pavlov's dog - Les and the Chives if you are a fan of Vic Reeves
Hmmm. This is a universal problem of science and it's been fairly successful at coming up with ways of minimising the effect of the observer. I don't see why the brain is any different.articul8 said:
I think with respect to the above you have to keep in mind that most systems of representation are inadequate, and because of this they inevitably simplify and distort what they try to represent (although to varying degrees). Nowhere is this more self-evident than with the concepts belonging to 'folk' psychology, many of which do such violence to the phenomena to which they refer that I think it would probably be better to retire them from service altogether.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
gurrier said:
Becuase, as I've tried to outline, the psyche does not give rise to the kind of empirically observable data that the natural scientist depends upon. So it is no wonder that physicists, say, when their work reached a sufficient level of abstraction, came upon the same difficulties (ie. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) etc.
I'm not sure that science has "minimised" this effect - it is just that responsible scientists are prepared to acknowledge (as so 'factor in' the necessity of the constraints of the method under which they are obliged to operate. (edit - cf. fruitloop's observations above on limitations of representation)
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