Thread: The False Dichotomy of Natural vs. Unnatural

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

It is my opinion that this world view marks a critical separation between scientific exploration and reality as we experience it. What this position essentially does is place a certain paradigm in an authoritative position above the individuals own experiential evidence of their own existence.

So what else is new? My personal, experiential evidence tells me that the Earth is flat. It sure as hell looks flat. But the systematic empirical data tell us otherwise. Experience is data, but it's not the only data, and if it flies in the face of a larger body of evidence, we are obligated to discount it and then explain the discrepancy.

I think we should clarify that consciousness and free will are not the same thing. The mere existence of consciousness is an uncontroversial proposition according to almost anyone (including almost any scientist). The very idea that we can have personal, experiential evidence in the first place requires that we have a subjective, phenomenal experience from which to draw the evidence!

Free will is a more controversial proposition, and its existence neither requires nor is required by consciousness. It is relatively easy to imagine an entity which has one but not the other--we could think of a philosophical zombie with no consciousness or of the poor soul in Being John Malkovich who was deprived of his free will--this doesn't mean that such an entity exists, it only means that the possibility of such an entity would not be a logical contradiction. Free will is most commonly defined as the extraordinary ability to be an original cause, an uncaused causer. There are other possible ways in which we might define free will, but these other definitions are not what scientists are skeptical of; it's the classic concept of free will that they doubt.

For an example of someone attempting to explain the discrepancy between our experiential evidence for free will and the opposing negative evidence, see Dan Wegner's work (2003, 2008).

Consciousness is a free agent. The unconsciousness can be seen as the exertion of influence from your genetics. The purpose of all individuals is to preserve their DNA. Humans are unique animals, we are possibly the first living organisms to experience genuine free will. The difference between us and a monkey is that our genetic material has evolved to say to our brains 'Here's a body, and some guidelines. You figure out the rest'.

Dub, I agree with most of your post which is why I have hesitated so long to respond. I've been trying to figure out how to accurately express myself. I feel like most of your post hinges on my mentioning 'conscious free will' which may have been a poor choice of words. I think I am going to strike out the free will bit because it is not really what I am talking about here. I am talking about the older opinion of science (and many religions) that humans were the only conscious beings, and the current opinion held by many with a scientific bent that consciousness is a sort of illusion, or even an "emergent property" that is dependent on a very specific system (e.g. a brain). What I am suggesting is that if we as human beings are essentially the same (the same chain of cause and effect leading to our existence, the same basic components, etc.) as everything else, then it would be more logical to assume that everything else also has a conscious component and not that we do not despite the fact that each of us can be so sure of our own consciousness.

In fact, everything you said about the negative evidence for free will almost bolsters this point. If we can be conscious without having free will, then consciousness need not even be tied to awareness at all. From our understanding of how the human body works we have come to realize that our actions are as determined as the actions of an inanimate mineral. Although we may not be able to imagine what consciousness would be like devoid of awareness and animation, it does not mean that it is necessarily non-existent.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

I feel like most of your post hinges on my mentioning 'conscious free will' which may have been a poor choice of words. I think I am going to strike out the free will bit because it is not really what I am talking about here.

Ah yes, I was a little confused about what seemed like the assumed equivalence between the two. Given that we talk about free will all the time, consciousness is probably a more interesting topic anyway.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

I am talking about the older opinion of science (and many religions) that humans were the only conscious beings, and the current opinion held by many with a scientific bent that consciousness is a sort of illusion, or even an "emergent property" that is dependent on a very specific system (e.g. a brain). What I am suggesting is that if we as human beings are essentially the same (the same chain of cause and effect leading to our existence, the same basic components, etc.) as everything else, then it would be more logical to assume that everything else also has a conscious component and not that we do not despite the fact that each of us can be so sure of our own consciousness.

Well this seems to be two separate points here: that consciousness is an "illusion," and that conscious experience is not unique to humans.

The first point, if I'm understanding it correctly, doesn't really make sense. If consciousness is an illusion, then it's something that we erroneously perceive despite the fact that it doesn't actually exist. However, given that consciousness is literally that very perception process itself, perceiving the "illusion of consciousness" would require bona fide consciousness. For something to be an illusion requires that there be a conscious perceiver to be fooled by it.

Edit: I just noticed a recent post of yours in another thread that says basically this exact same thing. I'm confused then: in what other sense can consciousness be thought to be an "illusion"?

The second point is a very intriguing one. It's essentially the argument put forth by David Chalmers in his influential paper on the "hard problem of consciousness." He calls his position naturalistic dualism. I don't know that I've committed myself to believing in this position, but I take the argument for it very seriously. It feels so incredibly unintuitive, but I have been unable to muster any good counterarguments.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

If we can be conscious without having free will, then consciousness need not even be tied to awareness at all. [...] Although we may not be able to imagine what consciousness would be like devoid of awareness and animation, it does not mean that it is necessarily non-existent.

What is consciousness if not awareness? The point I was making with the distinction between consciousness and free will was that if we are able to conceive of an entity with one property but not the other without encountering a logical contradiction, then this means that the two must be separable constructs (if only in principle). I don't think that this is true for consciousness and awareness. Just as it's impossible to coherently conceive of a spaceship that can travel at 100 trillion miles/hour while not moving at all, I think that it's impossible to coherently conceive of a being with consciousness but not awareness, or vice versa, unless we adopt an unconventional definition of one or the other. How are you defining these terms?

/me 's head explodes

Sorry, I should have made it clear that I was contrasting those two points, and not presenting them both together. The first is not what I am arguing, but what I am arguing against with the second point. I believe the modern rational materialist point of view marginalizes consciousness as either an illusion or at the very least, some sort of byproduct. Since our consciousness is the very thing that experiences, there would be nothing to experience illusion if it was itself the illusion, just as you said.

I don't believe consciousness and awareness are mutually exclusive, and we can separate the two using similar examples as the ones you used for free will.

If a person loses all sensory input in an accident, are they still conscious, even though they no longer have awareness of the outside world? What if they are born without awareness? Maybe you would say that there is still a sort of awareness of the self even without awareness of the outside world. Then what of the people who say they lose self awareness during breakthrough meditation or drug experiences? Are these people still conscious during those experiences, or is it just dependent on being aware of something, anything?

We've also come to learn that the very basic process of our awareness is purely reactionary and the mechanisms are not very different from say, what causes flowers to track the progress of the sun across the sky. Would you agree, then, that at least all life is conscious since even flowers share the same mechanisms of awareness that we do?

How about this, are your parent's conscious? Their parents? How about your ancestors 50,000 years ago, were they conscious? Assuming you believe in evolution, what about the simple organisms that were your ancestors 50 or 100 million years ago? When it comes to awareness, those ancestors arguably bare more resemblance to lifeless chemicals and minerals than to you. At what point do you draw the line?

I am reading that essay now. The title is strangely similar to my own, but I'll have to finish it to find out if they really have similar meanings.

I see, so in this case we're defining awareness as something like, "being conscious of the external world." That seems a perfectly reasonable definition to take, even if it's not necessarily my first choice (although I should have seen it as an obvious candidate).

But I'm afraid that I'm still a bit lost on one point: given that we both agree that it defies coherence for conscious experience itself to be illusory, in what other sense could consciousness be an "illusion"? You mention that consciousness is sometimes "marginalized" or viewed as "a byproduct," but these seem like vague straw men to me. Marginalized in what way? Marginalized as in not given the empirical examination that you think it deserves, or marginalized in some other way? And what exactly do you mean by byproduct? If you mean a causal byproduct--as in asserting that consciousness is an epiphenomenon--isn't this just implicitly bringing free will back into the discussion? And if we take it in anything other than causal terms, the claim that consciousness is a "byproduct" seems self-evident; physical systems potentially give rise to consciousness, but it's rather difficult to entertain the idea that consciousness gives rise to physical systems. What is consciousness a byproduct of, and in what way?

I see your point about where to draw the line when it comes to which entities have conscious experience, but I actually don't think you take it far enough. While the idea is certainly nothing like universally accepted, in relative terms it seems rather uncontroversial to view non-human animals--even non-human organisms more generally, outside the kingdom Animalia--as having some form of consciousness, however primitive. Indeed, I would say that on an implicit level at least, everyone believes this to a certain extent. A good illustration of this point that I recently heard was that of giving dogs anesthesia when performing medical operations on them. If we really, truly believed that dogs did not have consciousness, why on earth would we bother to minimize their suffering?

Where things really get interesting is when we consider the possibility of consciousness outside of living organisms. The famous example given by Chalmers is that of a thermostat. Does a thermostat have some form of consciousness? Why not? What is it missing that we have? And whatever those missing things are, why should it be those things that give rise to conscious experience? There are simply no satisfying answers to these questions. (The full argument is considerably more involved than this--it's explicated in the paper linked above--but this is a fair portrayal of at least a portion of it.)

As I wrote earlier, I take Chalmers's argument very seriously. Too many people are reflexively put off by the "dualist" label which he self applies, and they tend to engage in a motivated search for minimally sufficient reasons to discount the argument rather than giving it the full consideration that it deserves. I agree with Chalmers's assessment that his position is "an innocent version" of dualism, and would even assert that while the label he chose is probably the most fitting in the strictest sense, he might have gotten away with labeling it as a variant of monism. Indeed, given our current state of scientific knowledge, physicalism (a.k.a., materialism) is only a form of monism as a matter of faith. Our current, most basic physical knowledge divides reality into four distinct, irreducible "fundamental forces" (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces) which are not inherently different from Descartes's mind- and body-substances. Ironically, this leaves physicalism twice as pluralistic as dualism! The only real justification that we have to label the current view of physicalism as a form of monism is that we believe that there is an underlying "substance" (often called a "unifying theory") which constitutes and explains all of the four fundamental forces, but that we simply haven't discovered it yet. What Chalmers essentially proposes is that we add a fifth fundamental force: conscious experience. The only way that this qualifies his position as a form of dualism at all is if we allow that physicalism will eventually discover a unifying, monist "substance" (unifying theory). Otherwise, all it's doing is making the dominant form of pluralism a bit more pluralist. And anyway, it seems plausible that this unifying substance would also include conscious experience within its explanatory reach. In that case, endorsing Chalmers's position would be no more dualist than acknowledging the existence of gravity!

Yes. I think we are in almost complete agreement, DuB. Everything you said in your post is what I am getting at. I read the article and it is sort of flabbergasting because although I hadn't heard of it before; it is basically exactly what I was trying to say, but more intelligent and better researched.

When I say marginalized, I am referring either to

A: What Chalmers labeled Deny the Phenomenon. This is the reductionist rational materialist (or at least that is where I see the argument coming from) attempt to claim that there really is no such thing as conscious experience.

or

B: the claim that consciousness is an "emergent property" of the physical system known as "the brain". You said that conscious arises from physical systems. This is not true, and yet I also don't believe that the opposite is true; that consciousness gives rise to physical systems. Consciousness and the material associated with it arise in concert and there is no chain of cause and effect that can be pointed to in order to say, "this came first". One does not exist without the other.

Where you say I don't take it far enough, I took it much farther in my first post but I am realizing now just how poorly I explained myself. Because of our misunderstanding, I was under the impression that I would have to lead you to contemplate what I was suggesting slowly, so I first started by suggesting just that your own ancestry was conscious back to the point of single celled organisms.

The crux of my position is this; through science, we have come to realize that every process of the human body is part of a reactionary chain of cause and effect that can be reduced to inanimate chemicals and minerals interacting with each other. Cells are nothing more than a ball of chemicals that behave very uniformly and deterministically when confronted with other chemicals. There is literally no process in the human body that is not similar to a non living process happening somewhere else in nature.

If this is the case though, what is the difference, really, between life and non-life? Why is the oxidation of molecules in a fire pit not a living process but the oxidation of molecules within a cell is a living process?

If I am merely a system of chemical and electrical reactions, and I am conscious, then the logical assumption would be that all other systems of chemical and electrical reactions could be conscious as well. This would make consciousness not a special property of brains or even living things, but as Chalmers says, a fundamental quality of physical systems. If I can imagine myself remaining conscious after all of my faculties of awareness have been removed, then it is not difficult at all to imagine a lowly carbon molecule as being conscious in some form.

The extension of this argument is that it seems as though the ability for our consciousness to exert will depends upon the complexity of the system. For most of human history, we have assumed that either we are the only conscious things, or that we are the most conscious, but with this argument in mind we can see that there are much more complex physical systems than the relatively simple human body.

I have written a couple threads that extend this reasoning to address larger issues.

Collective Consciousness

On the Nature of Reality and Intelligence

By the way, thanks so much for that article. It is comforting to know that if I need to, I can argue from authority