Episode 031: In Search of the Soul, Part 3

Did you refer to Dennett as a biologist? He’s actually a philosopher.

Good podcast. I thought you did a good job explaining the different views. Here’s some brief commentary on those views on my part, for what it’s worth:

I find non-reductive physicalism to be obscure and unmotivated. Even if there is such a thing as top down causation, as long as the higher level processes supervene on the lower level processes, all of our actions are still determined by the lower level processes (at best, all there is is systematic causal overdetermination). Furthermore, from a physicalist POV, it seems to me that reductive physicalism offers a much more straightforward and eloquent solution to the problem of mental causation – mental events just are physical events that cause other physical events. I reject physicalism, but it seems to me that if one is a physicalist, reductionism is the best way to go.

The constitution view of human persons is just wacky. Are there two material objects sitting in my chair right now, occupying the same space, composed of all the same subatomic parts etc.? Answering “Yes”, as (I believe) David Lewis put it, “wreaks of double counting”. Also, if there are two objects sitting in my chair occupying the same space, etc., do both of those objects think? If so, there are two beings sitting in my chair having all the same thoughts – how do I know which one is me? If not, then mental properties fail to supervene on physical properties, but that seems to be something a physicalist would want to deny. The best way to go, if you want to think that human beings are material objects, imho, is to adopt something in the neighborhood of what Peter van Inwagen presents in his book Material Beings.

Right you are Glenn. I guess that’s another reason why I have a hard time seeing what the motivation for nonreductive physicalism is supposed to be.

(Just putting myself on the notifications list for this post)

Thanks for that link Glenn.
It seems to me that top-down causation starts with an acknowledgement of the power of atoms (when combined into molecules, when combined into organisms) but then ignores this acknowledgement when investigating the thing they claim is acting on these organisms.

In your link an example is given of the ant’s jaw and how well suited it is to its task. The author gives credit to the power of purely physical interactions for the process of replication and the transfer of genes by way of DNA but then posits ‘natural selection’ as if it were an entity not made of atoms. Strange as it sounds, I think all the actors involved in natural selection are made of atoms too and obeys the same rules.

Have you ever seen that Conway’s Game of Life computer program? It starts with some very simple rules but our brains can’t avoid seeing ‘gliders’ and ‘guns’.

To me it seems that proponents of top-down causation are saying that “yes, Conway’s Game of Life is based on some very simple rules but those simple rules aren’t enough to explain why a Glider Gun will produce an endless stream of gliders”.

I would claim that ‘natural selection’ is a mental construct contained in physical brains (i.e. an arrangement of atoms) to describe the actions of other atoms writ large. This is what I mean by all the actors involved in natural selection.

I suspect that this is in conflict with the author’s claim.

(when I say ‘atoms’ here it’s short hand for atoms, energy, dark energy, dark matter, anything physical whether known or unknown.)

I encourage you to follow those links to get an understanding of how Conway’s Game of Life works and how we so easily abandon the concept of individual blocks bound by simple rules in favour of larger, spatial-temporal entities such as ‘gliders’ and ‘guns’. I believe that the same kind of economy of reasoning is being used when people posit top-down causation.

(Sorry for the delay: work intrudes)

No, you’ve misunderstood my position. I believe that there is an arbitrary collection of atoms that exists external to us that our brains store a representation of that we call ‘The Chrysler Building’.

The same with ‘natural selection’. It’s a mental representation of the actions of other atoms writ large. i.e. Atoms out there are doing what they do and this we build a mental representation of we call ‘natural selection’. What I don’t understand is how a proponent of top-down causation can go from acknowledging the power of clusters of atoms and yet think that a phenomenon such as natural selection is somehow independent of or more than the actions of clusters of atoms.

As I keep coming back to, this seems very much to me like an exaggerated version of someone understanding the simple rules of Conway’s Game of Life and yet going on to claim that the actions of these pixels can’t be accounted for by these simple rules alone because “how else could I account for that stream of gliders if not for the presence of that Glider Gun over there”. Have you taken the opportunity to look at and understand this Conway’s Game of Life analogy I’m referring to yet? If so, can you see what I’m talking about?

Yes, the missing word was ‘which’ but ‘what’ will do.

And yes, I think you’ve got the gist of what I was getting at: atoms, when combined, do things that are seemingly more complex their initial properties alone would suggest. In the same way, the pixels in Conway’s Game of Life when they interact do things that are also seemingly more complex than the four basic rules they obey. I think that the proponent of top-down causation is making the same jump in endowing a concept such as ‘natural selection’ with extra-physical properties as one would if they felt that the concept of ‘glider guns’ was endowed with properties above and beyond the four simple rules that govern the behaviour of the pixels.

Anyway, thanks for this series of podcasts. You did an excellent job of explaining the various positions and I find the topic fascinating.