August 07, 2008
Getting Clear About Materialism
Edward Slingerland in The Immanent Frame:
[David] Brooks’s piece ["The Neural Buddhists" in the NYT] is also characterized by a confusion concerning what “materialism,” as an ontological claim about the world, might be. This seems to be the result of conflating the philosophical position of materialism, or physicalism, with the common use of the word “materialist” to refer to people or beliefs that are perceived to be selfish, unemotional, or unloving. For instance, emotions are not, as Brooks suggests, any more “squishy” than anything else: they are reactions subserved by an entirely material body-brain system. “Hard-core materialism,” like that of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, does not preclude the existence of emotions, love, or unselfishness—in fact, quite the opposite is true. Recent work on the apparently hard-wired nature of altruism and fairness are entirely compatible with, and indeed predicted by, the neo-Darwinan, physicalist model of the self. It is often in the interest of selfish genes to build selectively unselfish “hosts” to get them into the next generation, and these hosts work best when pre-loaded with a spectrum of fast, “emotional” responses to their environments, including the all-important environment of other people. Human beings, as well as other social primates, seem to be built by their genes to be guided primarily by reactions we would characterize as “emotional,” to have the capacity for deep familial and romantic love and attachment, and to perform great acts of apparently selfless altruism for kin or ersatz-kin (such as co-religionists and fellow soldiers). Similarly, there is no reason to think that because consciousness depends upon “idiosyncratic networks of neural firings,” the relationship between neurons and consciousness is “mysterious” or somehow non-physical: the collection of dust particles I see on the floor next to my desk is idiosyncratic, but not non-physical. Again, Brooks’s conclusion here seems to involve unexamined, and unjustified, folk beliefs: if my neural network is “idiosyncratic,” then it’s unique to me, and I am non-physical, something other than my brain or my body; therefore, idiosyncratic neural networks mean that hard-core materialism is wrong.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:56 PM | Permalink
Comments
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Why was this even worth posting?
Posted by: KG | Aug 7, 2008 1:08:17 PM
Worth obviously posting in order to press and question: Since his work embarrasses sponsors and causes cancellations by insulted subscribers to the newspaper, why is Brooks even employed?
Posted by: Meremark | Aug 7, 2008 1:36:17 PM
Here is a link to a related article on materialism.
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/showlink.aspx?bookmarkid=5Q4PCHWNDIR2&preview=article&linkid=383b9890-7123-4fcb-b2b8-5b353f2184d2&pdaffid=ZVFwBG5jk4Kvl9OaBJc5%2bg%3d%3d
Enjoy!
MediaMentions
Posted by: MediaMentions | Aug 7, 2008 1:38:33 PM
This piece is absolutely horrible.
1. Try to find a definition of materialism in it. No, really, go ahead and look. In lieu of such information, which one might consider crucial to an article called "Let's Get Clear on Materialism", you find references to Dawkins and Dennett, whose metaphysical views are actually distinct.
2. "There is no reason to think that because consciousness depends upon 'idiosyncratic networks of neural firings,' the relationship between neurons and consciousness is “mysterious” or somehow non-physical".
Uh, yeah there is. It's called the multiple-realizability argument, perhaps the most famous argument in 20th century philosophy of mind. The idea is that if the same mental states can be realized in different neural patterns, then it becomes very difficult say that the mental states are the neural patterns.
3."Intuitively, we think of ourselves as something other than our brains, even though this intuition appears to be empirically wrong"
What? Empirically wrong? Is he actually suggesting that the truth of materialism, a philosophical position, has been demonstrated via lab work? This is absurd: materialism is a working assumption of most science, not something science aims to demonstrate.
4. Slingerland claims that the target article understands "materialism" in the "selfish, unemotional, or unloving" sense. There is no textual evidence in the NYT article to support this assertion.
5. “Hard-core materialism, like that of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, does not preclude the existence of emotions, love, or unselfishness—in fact, quite the opposite is true... [insert cookie-cutter evo-psych about genes and emotions].
Dennett actually holds a very similar position, for he denies the existence of "qualia", or the subjective character of sensory experiences. So, while he believes in pain, for example, he does not feel that there is a peculiar subjective character to being in pain or to any other experience. This is a result of his materialism, and it is arguably no less absurd than the position the author references.
... and the evopsych blather isn't even worth getting into.
6. "Properly speaking, though, 'our' thinking about or experiencing X is, in fact, nothing more than activity in area Y of the brain (or, more likely, a network of regions)."
Ahh, reductionism. You've been dead for decades, but that doesn't stop untutored scientistic ideologues from espousing you at every opportunity.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Aug 7, 2008 3:05:17 PM
Nick - Wow. I loved this article (well, more precisely, the Brooks piece drove me apoplectic, and this was a response I was glad to read. In itself the article was nothing special) and am baffled by your response:
1. This is a bit cutesy. He's writing a popular article, not a philosophy paper. Such typically don't define their terms unless they're being used in unusual, confusing or unfamiliar ways. He also doesn't define "Confucianism", "neuroscience", or "evolution", you'll note, and doesn't link to a wikipedia biography of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(journalist)>David Brooks so we'll know who he is. He does need to clarify that by materialism he doesn't mean 'of or pertaining to such things as money' and this he does, effectively I think.
Also, vast and splendiferous as the differences between Dennett and Dawkins are, I suspect they'd each agree with this article against Brooks's.
2. I think his article is getting at nothing more than a rejection of substance dualism, and that it is rather strange to read it as suggesting that the author endorses identity theory. Unless you think he's completely missed all of cognitive science and hollywood over the past forty years, it's a safe bet he realizes that brains alien or silicon or whatnot might be conscious too. It would be a strange functionalist - which the man rather sounds like he is - who disapproved of multiple realizability.
3. He said appears to be empirically wrong. The mental does supervene upon the physical as far as we know. Certainly no-one's seen anything that'd suggest otherwise. It needn't have been that way.
4. Allow me to quote from Brooks: we're supposed to have learnt recently that "people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love" and that this is a challenge to the "cold machine" conception of mind favored by Dennett and Dawkins. Brooks goes so far as to suggest that one discovery we've made since Dawkins and which challenges his worldview is that:
"Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment."
I can't know for sure of course, but somehow I think the man inferred the contents of the Selfish Gene from the cover and didn't actually read it.
5. I've seen my share of bad evpsych, but if you think an account of emotions as allowing rapid responses to environment is simply "blather", I put it to you you're providing evidence for the hypothesis in question :) That idea goes all the way back to Darwin, and is at least somewhat plausible.
6. 'Ah holism. Though you've said nothing earth-shattering in centuries one must always pay lip-service to you or be thought of as unsophisticated' :)
Posted by: D | Aug 7, 2008 5:02:22 PM
Nick, if you follow Slingerland's thoughts on this topic (e.g. his talk at the Beyond Belief conference, avail. on Google video), he gets close to making a sensible argument. At one point he even notes that "Enlightenment 2.0" needs metaphysical underpinnings as much as any other stance, and that naturalists are often prickly about admitting this.
But then he almost immediately backtracks, stating that we are morally compelled to put naturalistic, factual statements before metaphysical ones, which makes about as much sense as moving into a house you haven't built yet. My guess is that he's intractably knotted up by a mild case of physics envy, enabling him to write:
I find that astonishing. Also note the double standard in perceptual reliability:
Yet, the ontological status of non-mystical items such as neurons is granted uncritically. (I recognize there is a difference in experimental confirmation of the proposition of "neurons" that may not be extended to mystical oceans, but this is an empirical, not ontological confirmation. Again Slingerland confuses his priors and posteriors.)
D,
I've got to agree with Nick that an article promising "clarity" on the doctrine of materialism should offer a definition, even if it must be in lay verbiage. Slingerland's treatment of the term is muddy, and, ironically, appeals to folk wisdom about "substance." I don't see anything in Brooks' piece (doofus though he be) that demonstrates a confusion between philosophical materialism and consumerism. So what does this clarity consist of?
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Aug 7, 2008 6:49:50 PM
Hi D, I'll try to answer your points numerically,
1. The article is published in The Immanent Frame. This is most certainly not a forum for "popular articles", in fact, I know of few blogs which aim less at a "popular" readership. I don't know where you got this impression, quite honestly.
In any case, I can't possibly see how an author whose stated purpose is to get clear on materialism can fail to define it or even characterize it. This would earn you an F in just about any journalism course, so the reference to "popular" writing doesn't really help him, here.
2. When someone writes that "thinking about or experiencing X is, in fact, nothing more than activity in area Y of the brain", I have to conclude that they endorse some form of identity theory. No functionalist qualifiers on this statement appear in his article, so I'm not sure why you think he's a functionalist.
I should be clear, though: I'm not complaining about his specific position in the philosophy of mind. I'm complaining about the odd assumptions sprinkled throughout the article: that multiple realizability (between members of the same species, not just between us and aliens) gives us no reason to think the concept of consciosness is mysterious, for example. I did not claim that such a reason is decisive, but the fact that many have taken it to be decisive shows just how blithe this dismissal is. Surely the idiosyncracy of brain-states is at least a reason to think that the mind might be mysterious.
3. He said "this [dualist] intuition appears to be empirically wrong". My complaint was that empirical investigation cannot make any metaphysical theory appear to be anything, because empirical investigation itself presupposes a metaphysical theory.
The mental supervenes on the physical, so far as we know.
Who are "we" who know this, so far? I must admit, this seems like a parallel case of assuming that a highly contentious debate has already been settled. It's very easy to make the supervenience claim, but it turns out to be tricky to defend it.
4.5., The evopsych thing isn't important here, but I will say that it is not surprising to see a person who is apparently mostly ignorant about the Philosophy of Mind using evopsychological explanations: the two traits often go hand in hand.
6. I suppose it's worth reiterating that I take no position in philosophy of mind, mainly because I don't feel that I've read and studied widely enough to make any final conclusions about the nature of consciousness. In other words, if I did take a position, it would behoove me to properly describe and defend it. Slingerland does take such a position in his attack on the target article, and instead of a defense, we get the usual confusions that surround uncritical scientism.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Aug 7, 2008 7:11:25 PM
The philosophical questions i am contemplating after reading some people here are Woody Allen-deep: How do you guys get dates? And: Do you ever shut up?… Just asking :-)
Posted by: jean-paul | Aug 7, 2008 8:33:32 PM
To answer your questions, JP:
1. I go to the grocery store and buy them.
2. No.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Aug 7, 2008 9:13:20 PM
500 years from now, I'll bet the 'evils' of reductionism will have done far more to advance nature's understanding of itself than the cheap purveyors of word tricks. Their efforts may even give me an opportunity to collect on the bet. Scandalous!
Posted by: MattInOz | Aug 8, 2008 1:34:42 AM
Am I the only one getting a significant portion of the comments hacked off on the right margin?
Posted by: Jesse | Aug 8, 2008 5:06:39 AM
I'm getting them clipped off too.
It's being caused by that really long URL on post three.
Posted by: Carlos | Aug 8, 2008 10:09:57 AM
Jesse,
The problem goes away when I switch from Firefox to IE.
MediaMentions,
TinyURL is your friend.
MattInOz,
If reductionism isn't a "word trick," I don't know what is.
There's a bait and switch in many conversations about so-called materialism, and I think this Slingerland article is an excellent example. It starts with the appeal to naturalism, which I think no one habituating this thread would quibble with, save maybe Carlos. The defining feature of naturalism is that there are no ontologically opposed categories, such as matter and spirit, or res extensa and res cogitans. Everything that "is the case" is natural, and no special status of impenetrability need be invoked for anything that exists.
This is not the same, however, as eliminative or reductionist materialism, which Nick rightly describes as philosophically moribund, though it is still popular among scientists whose work is made easier by it. Reductionism returns us to the opposition of ontological categories: real and illusory, where only the "physical" is truly real, and nonphysical phenomena, like symbol use, is just an illusory misconstrual of physical affairs (neural activity).
This kind of materialism has never been able to respond to the observation that there is no philosophical justification for this ontological division. It is, in essence, a form of superstition, which might be more tolerable if its practitioners didn't project this feature outward onto everyone else.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Aug 8, 2008 10:49:51 AM
This thread looks interesting, but I can't see the rightmost third of it, so...
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 8, 2008 3:25:14 PM
Elatia,
Are you using Firefox? The problem goes away for me when I use IE or Safari.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Aug 8, 2008 3:56:27 PM
Chris,
thanks, that solved it.
Posted by: Jesse | Aug 9, 2008 10:00:31 AM
First on the definition thing, then I’ll get to the rest...
- First, as far as I’m concerned, I still see a blog post. As such it doesn’t need to provide abstract, middle, discussion and conclusion, cite references, or provide footnotes. Or Define Every Important Word at above the the eighth grade level. Serious discussion within the blogosphere would essentially come to a halt were this standard to be followed (imagine rebutting this point in a blog post, but having first to define ‘serious discussion’, ‘blogosphere’ and ‘essence’)
- Cognitive, neuro and other scientists, as well as allied philosophers, obviously mean a broad range of views by materialism; there is much disagreement and debate. All the author cares about though is that this range of scientific opinion doesn’t overlap particularly substantially with the views expressed by Brooks, and that there is profound tension between his article and most viewpoints significantly maintained within the appropriate academic communities. You don’t need to too rigorously define / circumscribe common academic views, for example, to note that ‘made of neural nets => challenge to materialism’ is a view few neuroscientists would take seriously. Sticking with the fuzzier, broader discriptions facilitates the more generic critique.
- Definitions that are simultaneously rigorous, inclusive, sharp and useful - definitions especially of philosophical terms – are notoriously tricky, and demanding them as a prelude to any seriously criticism seems like a particularly sly trick.
- I still don’t see in concrete terms what the specific problem is – his usage may not be up to the standards of a term paper in journalism, but it is fairly clear what sort of animal he has in mind. It seems cleaner to get to the substance of his views instead of quibbling over points of order.
Anyhow, I can’t bring myself to care about the man not making like a dictionary or the philosophical lexicon, but Nick and Chris clearly disagree. I’ll let you guys have the last word on the subject.
Posted by: D | Aug 9, 2008 1:26:03 PM
I think context rescues that statement, and then some:
I really don’t see him as arguing that X is in fact unreal. Rather, what he’s getting is that most people - and Brooks - seem to regard it as bizarre, strange, even scary, that mental activity has physical correlates, and that no neuroscientist thinks this way. Which is to say, by "nothing more than" I think he means instead "nothing that contradicts" or "nothing inconsistent with." In any case, I don’t want to get all Clintonian here; I don’t care that much if Slingerland is indeed an identity theorist.
All the point that needs to survive here is that, with suitable "functionalist qualifier" added, no neuroscientist would be even slightly surprised to find physical activity correlated with any kind of mental activity. As such, enlisting neuroscientists to serve in the cause of 'Buddhist' dualism based on finding neural firings (however idiosyncratic) associated with mystical feelings is simply not on. Brooks thinks otherwise, and needs to be told, 'umm..no'
It’s an odd jump from 'consciousness is mysterious' to 'consciousness hints at the mediation of non-material influences.' The weather is mysterious too, or to be less facetious, so is quantum mechanics.
To say that X is mysterious is to provide no great support for the proposition that X might entail magic of a vaguely Buddhist form, except in the trivial sense that anything that is not understood might in principle implicate anything that you’d want it to. More sharply, while not all is known about the mind (to put it mildly) much is in fact known, and provides no positive support even for the claim that consciousness implicates some Chalmers style new principle, let alone for Brooks’ vastly stronger suggestion that religious claims are pointed to.
I can cede much to the idea that observation is theory laden, but this is a bit much. How about naturalism itself? Somewhere between the eleventh century and the nineteenth, a majority of scientists migrated from not being certain about the existance of univeral natural laws to taking their existance for granted to assuming provisionally that everything obeys such laws. Are you going to claim that no empirical investigation was involved in changing these metaphysical assumptions? You cannot be serious.
In this context, I suggest (for example) that the fact that no-one’s ever observed mental activity disconnected from physical events might lead one to suppose (provisionally, tentatively, though ever less so) that the mental isn’t a separate substance. I don’t think that settles the claim, but it has led the average cognitive scientist to make that assumption, not unjustifiably so. Surely you who so thoroughly understand the importance of recognizing scientists’ metaphysical suppositions will grant the importance of not misrepresenting them, as Brooks does.
I suppose it's worth reiterating that I take no position in philosophy of mind
Come, this is a bit precious :) You who call evolutionary psychology ‘blather’, suggest that its proponents possess no philosophical sophistication, and rail against ‘scientism’ must not fancy your opinions shrouded in such impenetrable mystery as that LOL
Why you’d elide the distinction between reductionism and eliminative materialism I don’t know. Most physicists manage to think thermodynamics reduces to statistical mechanics (we even manage to realize that the specific form of the microscopic laws might differ quite a lot while yet preserving something like thermodynamics) without thinking temperature (or global warming) an illusion. We don’t think knowing Schrodinger’s equation puts an end to chemistry or please ourselves that DDT is an illusion. I suppose it would be pretty cheeky to ask you to define reductionism, but you do think it eliminates all higher categories :)
Jean-Paul: and all this on a Saturday. I suppose my dating life isn't all that it might be :)
Posted by: D | Aug 9, 2008 2:34:54 PM
D,
It is so commonly the case as to suggest a cognitive law that when an interlocutor is pressed on reductionism the word "correlate" makes its timely appearance in the conversation.
Slingerland writes that "properly speaking" about Experience X should comprise a discussion of Brain Region Y. This is not a mere matter of correlation; it is a clear privileging of the "reality" of the neurological description over the experiential one. This is dualism; not substance dualism, but ontological dualism. It implies that the apparent world is an illusion provided by a hidden apparatus that no one can ever directly experience. Very Plato's Cave, wouldn't you say?
Mere "correlation" denotes something much different; a relationship between two forms of description in which neither is primary. But this position will not support the strict physicalism Slingerland explicitly endorses in the piece.
The kind of reductionism that describes temperature in terms of statistical mechanics without needing to denigrate the "reality" of our experience of climate is a different animal altogether. But then, physics has always been leagues ahead of biology and cog sci.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Aug 9, 2008 5:17:27 PM
I was going to leave the issue of definition alone here, but I think it's central to the whole theme of this debate: we're talking about rigor. I'm asking for more rigor in this piece, D seems to think that it is easily rigorous enough. However, D, I don't think you've directly addressed my arguments for my position on this. Here is one:
1. Materialism is a metaphysical thesis, and it is a working assumption of empirical study .
2. A field of study which simply assumes X to be true cannot in and of itself say anything about the actual truth or falsity of X.
C: Empirical study has nothing to say about the truth or falsity of materialism.
Now, the author makes the claim that an anti-materialist intuition (a metaphysical intuition) is "empirically wrong". He is in error to say this, as I have just shown. So which premise does he not understand, (1), (2) or both? We have no way of knowing. But since there's a decent chance that it's (1), it is perfectly reasonable to expect that even a characterization (if not even a definition) of materialism would have prevented him from making this error.
Finally, there is a difference between taking a position in a field and recognizing that every position in the field has serious problems. I have no problem with any scientist provisionally assuming any position in the philosophy of mind, in fact, it seems utterly important to do so.
I do have a problem with a person who engages with his or her philosophical opponents while operating under exactly the same uncritical assumption. You'll have to forgive a fledgling philosopher for being protective of his field, but if we're allowed to plough into philosophical debates without carefully defining our terms and prudently recognizing that even our favourite position may have serious flaws, then the whole enterprise is pointless, and might as well be decided by lottery.
I'm going to leave the rest alone, as I think this thread is dead. C'est la vie!
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Aug 13, 2008 1:05:57 PM
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