Is the case for socialism, one of morality, cold logic or long term survival of our species?

[Anonymous]

Stuart, I certainly wouldn't refer to them as 'cretins' but nor do I spend my days reading books that try to convince me that the earth was created by God And some very eminent academics have tried in the past .     

[stuartw2112]

If you haven't spent your days reading books by people trying to convince you of crazy things, then you haven't lived Vin. Give it a go before it's too late.Thanks for the video DJP. Such a refreshing change to see a philosopher who looks the part!

[robbo203]

Vin Maratty wrote:

RobinBecause a surgeon cannot see it then it doesn't exist, it has left it's physical body? Really? And I am being absurd? Do you intend to layout in a post your own position on the subject and in your own words?Or do you intend to simply resort to vitriol and sneering at other people's declared position?  In the meantime, does your assertion that ideas exist outside of the brain apply to animals and insects. A pack of wolves for example? 

 Vin, I didnt say thoughts exist outside the brain (I did in fact agree that they depend on a brain and so logically they cannot exist apart from it). I simply asserted that they are not, and cannot be, physical or material.  They do not possess physical or material properties, do they?.  They cannot be directly or sensually apprehended.Why do you think I was resorting to vitriol and sneering at other people's position.  I wasn't .  I was simply criticising your position. You are being a wee bit over-sensitive, I think

[Anonymous]

robbo203 wrote:

 You are being a wee bit over-sensitive, I think

Probably But, that aside.  it would appear that you agree with my post.  

robbo203 wrote:

I didnt say thoughts exist outside the brain 

[robbo203]

DJP wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

Or are you seriously suggesting that, in principle, a neurosurgeon might be able to extract a thought from a person's brain and place it alongside a piece of brain tissue?  

Category error. Thoughts are dynamic brain processes not static objects. 

If so that can easily be rectified by  changing the example of  brain tissue with another of some physical or material process.  The same basic objection would still apply: thoughts are not physical  or material in themselves even if they depend – or supervene – on physical or material processes

[robbo203]

DJP wrote:

Sorry Robbo the more I look into it the more I think there is no so called "hard problem" in philosophy of mind. Read the stuff by Dennett on Cartesian materialism."Emergence theory" just doesn't seem to cut it either

 I have understood Dennett to be an advocate of Emergence theory.  He is certainly opposed to Identity theory –  Reductive materialism  -and in philosophical debates on the question of free will, is a "compatibilist".  Here is Dennett's response to a question in an interview published in the a GuardianDD I haven't been angered but I have been frustrated by some neuroscientists who say we do not have free will and in some cases this position has implications in law and morality. They argue your mind is your brain, the brain is programmed, so there's no free will. I think science needs to be more circumspect and more creative. An economist might say, dollars don't exist, it's just a collective illusion, I think this is very bad advice and I also think it is bad, greedy reductionist advice to say free will is an illusion.http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/mar/22/daniel-dennett-theory-of-mind-interviewThe question of free will ties in nicely with the theme of this thread on morality 

Keith Frankish wrote:

Emergentism was popular in the early twentieth century – its best-known advocate being the Cambridge philosopher C.D. Broad (1887–1971) – and it still has defenders. It has, however, come under extreme pressure from empirical research. There are two aspects to this. First, physics has undermined the idea that complexity generates new causal powers. The general tendency of research since the mid-nineteenth century has been to show that all changes in physical systems, from the simplest to the most complex, can be explained as the product of a few fundamental forces, which operate universally. (Modern physics postulates just four of these – the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism and gravity, though it is widely believed that the first three of these are manifestations of a single, more fundamental force.) There is simply no room in this picture for the emergence of new causal powers in the brains of living creatures. The second source of pressure has come from physiology and, in particular, neurophysiology. If consciousness does exhibit a causal influence, then it is in the brain that we should expect to detect it. We should expect to find processes occurring there – brain cells firing or neurotransmitters being released – without adequate physical causes. And there is no evidence of this at all. It is true that we are still a long way from fully understanding how the brain works. However, scientists do understand its low-level functioning very well. They understand how brain cells work, what makes them fire and how their firing affects neighbouring cells. And, so far, there is absolutely no evidence of any non-physical interventions in these processes.

Im not too sure I would go along with this explanation.  "Emergentism" may have been around in the early 20th century – indeed even earlier – but emergence theory only really took off in the cognitive revolution of the 1960s.   That apart , Frankish does not seem to understand the argument in support of emergence theory.  The “non-reducibility” of higher-level properties – like mental states – fundamentally rests on the argument for “multi-realisability” (where a number of different lower-level properties – brain states, in this example –  can give rise to, or “realise”, the same higher-level property) and, more particularly, the argument for “wild disjunction”  (where there is no necessary or lawful connection between these different lower-level properties upon which the higher-level property is supervenient).More tellingly there is the question of downward causation. One commentators has put it thusWe can speculate whether the relationship of the mind to the brain represents an emergent quality. Individual brain-cells have no emotion, or memory, or self-consciousness. Consciousness arises through the interactions of billions of brain cells, and once it exists, there is a downward causation: the new structural level of consciousness begins to determine the behavior of the components, as the recently discovered brain functions that are summarized under the term “neuroplasticity” demonstrate. We now know that brain functions can be re-located to new areas of the brain in case of injuries. (Stroke victims learn how to speak again, re-learn motor skills, etc.) Learning a skill will create new synaptic connections, or even trigger the growth of new nerve cells. Consciousness exists within matter, but once it exists it is no longer determined by it. The physical brain is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for consciousness. The human mind, once created, acts according to a logic of motivations, emotions, and thought processes that is no longer determined by physical processes. Rather, it acts by ordering the causal chains of physical systems – The human mind begins to function as a cause in the physical world(http://braungardt.trialectics.com/sciences/physics/emergence) The case for downward casuation does seem to be quite a convincing one. With regard to the mind-brain relationship, there is considerable evidence to support this case in the form of psycho-somatic effects.  Perhaps the best known of these is the placebo effect where mere belief in a remedy, such as a particular drug, is sufficient to cause that “remedy” to be effective.  Researchers conducting double-blind studies on subjects have been able to verify that such an effect does exist.  Not only that, biofeedback studies and the like have shown that certain biological processes previously thought to be autonomous or involuntary (such as heart rate,  vascular responses and sympathetic discharges) are capable of being brought under conscious control. None of this , I repeat, is to deny that the mind is dependent on the brain; it is simply to assert that the mind cannot be reduced to the brain 

[robbo203]

DJP wrote:

Sorry Robbo the more I look into it the more I think there is no so called "hard problem" in philosophy of mind. Read the stuff by Dennett on Cartesian materialism."Emergence theory" just doesn't seem to cut it either

 Here's another quote from Dennett which you might find interesting DJP.  In one way it kinda – although not quite – bears out your point about there being no "hard problem" in the form of consciousness but in another way it reinforces what is pivotal to Emergence  theory – that is, its rejection of the reductionism that is part and parcel of Identity Theory (mental states being reduced to, or being explicable in terms of,  brain states);In an organism with genuine intentionality – such as yourself – there are, right now, many parts, and some of these parts exhibit a sort of semi-intentionality, or mere  'as if' intentionality, or pseudo-intentionality – call it what you like – and your genuine full- fledged intentionality is in fact the product (with no further miracle ingredients) of the activities of all the semi-minded and mindless bits that make you up….Thats is what a mind is – not a miracle machine, but a huge semi-designed, self-redesigning amalgam of smaller machines, each with its own design history, each playing its own role in the "economy of the soul"  (Daniel C Dennett, 1996,  Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life,  Allen Lane,  Penquin Press, p.206) In other words what emerges at the higher level is not to be found at the lower level – genuine intentionality.  The term  “emergence” incidentally  was coined in 1875 by the philosopher, G.H Lewes,  who had been much influenced by John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic(1843).  In that work, Mill spoke of “two modes of the joint action of causes, the mechanical and the chemical”.  By the former, he meant two or more causes providing a combined effect (which Mill called a "homopathic effect") that would be the same had each of these causes  acted alone.  In the chemical mode of joint action, on the other hand, the outcome of these different causes acting together is to produce a "heteropathic effect" which is different from what would have happened had each cause acted alone.In his critique of David Hume’s theory of causation, Lewes identified two different kinds of effects – “resultants” and “emergents” – which, respectively, resembled Mill’s “homopathic” and “heteropathic" effects.  The latter he defined as being “non-additive” in the sense that the different parts of a whole, considered separately or in isolation, do not have the same overall impact as when they are combined to form that whole. Something is missing from the equation which cannot captured by a process of merely “adding up”, one by one,  the input of each individual part  to the whole. In other words, emergents as a particular class of effects are linked to the holistic idea of the whole not being reducible to the parts.Whereas, in reductionist theory, the parts determine the whole in the sense that they add up to the whole, in holistic or systems theory, on the other hand, the converse is true: the whole determines the parts. This is what is meant by “downward causation”, a concept pioneered by Donald Campbell – except that, for Campbell, this determination of the parts by the whole need not be complete (as in extreme holistic theory) but could express itself, relativistically,  as a constraining influence on these parts

[DJP]

Sorry Robbo I still think you're off key here. Isn't he taking about supervience and not "emergence" here?Saying consciousness is an "emergent" property just doesn't explain anything at all. http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/I don't profess to be a expert on Dennett, though I have just spent the last 2 weeks writting an undergraduate essay on Dennetts rejection of  "real seemings" and the "Cartesian theatre"EDIT: I've just re-read that Dennett quote. I don't see even anything in that quote that is even an argument for non-reductive explanation of consciousness, after all it only those that subscribe to the "hard problem" that would claim that a reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible. Dennett's "theory of consciousness" is physicalist and reductionist, it's people like Chalmers that say the opposite.

[robbo203]

DJP wrote:

Sorry Robbo I still think you're off key here. Isn't he taking about supervience and not "emergence" here?Saying consciousness is an "emergent" property just doesn't explain anything at all. http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/I don't profess to be a expert on Dennett, though I have just spent the last 2 weeks writting an undergraduate essay on Dennetts rejection of  "real seemings" and the "Cartesian theatre"EDIT: I've just re-read that Dennett quote. I don't see even anything in that quote that is even an argument for non-reductive explanation of consciousness, after all it only those that subscribe to the "hard problem" that would claim that a reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible. Dennett's "theory of consciousness" is physicalist and reductionist, it's people like Chalmers that say the opposite.

 Hmmm. I dont think this is right although I could be wrong as I too am no expert on Dennett.  However, I have heard him described as an exponent of Emergence theory.  He is also known for his criticism of what he dubbed "greedy reductionism"  or strong reductionism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism) and in 1991 came out with his famous anti-reductionist statement in his essay "Real Patterns". He has also argued in favour of human consciousness being a cultural construction and considers that it is too recent an innovation to have been hardwired  innately Point is there is reductionism and there is reductionism.  The kind of reductionism that Dennett seems to be advocating – and here Im treading warily, conscious of the fact that Im not fully familiar with the subject –  is what is called "hierachical reductionism" which does not preclude emergentism or the appearance of properties at a higher order which are not apparent as a lower order upon which the former supervenes.  The quote from Dennett's book I gave you earlier is a good example of this.In an organism with genuine intentionality – such as yourself – there are, right now, many parts, and some of these parts exhibit a sort of semi-intentionality, or mere  'as if' intentionality, or pseudo-intentionality – call it what you like – and your genuine full- fledged intentionality is in fact the product (with no further miracle ingredients) of the activities of all the semi-minded and mindless bits that make you up….Thats is what a mind is – not a miracle machine, but a huge semi-designed, self-redesigning amalgam of smaller machines, each with its own design history, each playing its own role in the "economy of the soul"  (Daniel C Dennett, 1996,  Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life,  Allen Lane,  Penquin Press, p.206) Now you might say he is talking about supervention rather than emergence but is this a case of confusing form and substance? The capacity for human consciousness or fully fledged intentionality may be the product of activities of all the semi-minded and mindless bits that make you up  but what of  the stuff of that consciousness, the very thoughts we think.? The problem boils down to this.  Is the "whole" more than the sum of its parts (holism) or is it no more than the sum of its parts (atomism)?  In the former, the whole determines or  influences the parts through downward causation; in  the latter the part determines or explains the whole in a thoroughgoping reductionist sense. Because reductionisnm in this strong or  "greedy " sense, denies downward causation this means what happens at a higher level (eg a particular mental state) can be wholly explained by what what happens at a lower level – a particular brain state. In other wrods brains states and mental states are identiical . This is Identity theory or "reductionist physicalism" which is certainly not Dennett's view, as I understand it .  As I understand it, Identity Theory has been disproven by the direct evidence of neural plasticity  and by the evidence of downward causation itself (the placebo effect etc). But the main  problem with reductionism is that it collapses into a kind of absurdity.  If mental states are reducible to brain states then in principle  brain states must themsleves be reducible to something else?  What could that be?  The movement of atoms? And the movement of atoms would presumably have to be further reduced to the level of sub atomic particles? So how are we to explain the current crisis of capitalism?  Oh it must be a particularly quirkish alignment of sub atomic quarks that is creating the wrong energy vibes. It is is bad enough when bourgeois economists attempt to explain such crises in terms of entrepeneurial  misjudgements or the overzealousness and greed of individual capitalists (see http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/disproportionality-theory-crises) but this is going way beyond that towards a kind of literal atomism  (or sub atomism). That different levels of reality require different orders or explanation to make any sense at all seems to be a very strong reason for repudiating reductionism or at least what Dennett calls greedy reductionism.  Indeed, would subscribing to such a form of reductionism even be compatble with socialist thinking? I dont think so – though it might be more in line  with Mrs Thatcher idea that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families

[twc]

robbo203 wrote:

That different levels of reality require different orders or explanation to make any sense at all seems to be a very strong reason for repudiating reductionism or at least what Dennett calls greedy reductionism.  Indeed, would subscribing to such a form of reductionism even be compatible with socialist thinking?  I don’t think so.

Before jumping to such rash conclusions that our “levels of reality” are absolutely autonomous, and not partly relative to the necessary human practice of “divide and conquer”, and contrary assertion is absolutely incompatible with socialist thinking, you might first acknowledge that “levels of reality” are abstractions from experience.Abstractions from experience can only be turned into absolute barriers, if the world is actually disjointed like our theoretical apprehension of it.  If you are here staking a claim that the world is actually isolated into conceptual pockets of parallel universes, then you find yourself totally incompatible with a foundation socialist thinker, who called such “thought” that fetishizes necessary human practice as mechanical materialism.It is impossible to put two electrons in the same quantum state, but it is possible to put two photons in the same state.  But no-one today could claim with equal confidence that it is not possible to reduce chemistry to physics, because every chemist knows his science stands entirely upon the physics of atoms.I would urge caution.  Yours is the sort of silly conclusion one is driven to by bourgeois discussion of consciousness [which is of minor concern to socialists], while socialists are concerned with the content of that consciousness, which we agree can be understood materialistically.Your problem is that of the autonomy of things/processes.Our concept of autonomy arises out of ordered experience.  Like all concepts, it is neither wholly static [persistent] nor wholly dynamic [change] but is instead their conceptual union within an abstract theory.  Even the apparently trivial autonomy of experiencing the unity of a cuckoo call, is mediated by abstract theory.Contrary to your assertion, there is no abstract reason why our theoretical autonomies, such as explanatory levels, are not subservient to the overall autonomy of the world, and so are relative, and can become suitable candidates themselves for theoretical treatment.  [Engels gets roundly condemned for criticizing those who fetishize theoretical levels as absolute barriers, but he is correct.]In modern terms, we can readily conceive irreducibility-of-level as merely an apprehension of Thomas Kuhn’s incommensurability, which he devised for incompatibilities within theoretical paradigms.  Here it reveals itself across, or between, disparate systems of paradigms.Kuhn [unlike his contemporary, the baboon Feyerabend] never thought incommensurability was absolutely unbridgeable.  We made the chasm, and we can work out how to cross it.  If you don’t accept that, you really are a naive closet determinist, no different from your hated economic determinist.All of Marx’s Capital and especially his Theories of Surplus Value consists in bridging the divide between disparate “incommensurable” paradigms.For Marx, experience is ordered autonomously because the world is so ordered.  The theoretical autonomies we grasp are our idealizations of the concrete autonomies of the world.  We treat them as theoretically absolute, even though we know they are really relative.When we apply them back upon the world, the impure contingent world is not kind enough to let them act out their autonomy in pure isolation, free from contaminating interference.  In this practice of application, when we reconnect pure abstraction with its impure source, we are made forcibly aware that our theoretical sciences are themselves contingent.Thus, in practice, we are forced to compare the abstract deterministic content of theoretical abstract categories of thought against the measured experienced phenomenal concrete, and prove that our theory describes actuality.  [Engels’s “proof of the pudding”.]  Without transgressing from theory to practice, we remain trapped forever within the abstract.In other words, your assertion is not proved by our necessary mode of explanation.  It can only be proved in practice, and we already know that Marx was able to bridge the greatest chasm of them all by reducing human consciousness to our hungry belly and our compulsion to labour.I urge you not to jump to rash conclusions about refutation of socialism based on the contemplation of consciousness as such, and not from the only thing we can trust, the comprehension of its content.

[robbo203]

twc wrote:

Before jumping to such rash conclusions that our “levels of reality” are absolutely autonomous, and not partly relative to the necessary human practice of “divide and conquer”, and contrary assertion is absolutely incompatible with socialist thinking, you might first acknowledge that “levels of reality” are abstractions from experience…..In other words, your assertion is not proved by our necessary mode of explanation.  It can only be proved in practice, and we already know that Marx was able to bridge the greatest chasm of them all by reducing human consciousness to our hungry belly and our compulsion to labour. 

 I didnt say different levels of reality are absolutely autonomous with respect to each other. I was attacking the concept of "greedy reductionism", a term coined by Dennett himself.If you are going to be a full blooded reductionist why not go the whole hog and reduce human consciousness to an even more basic level of reality – like say, the sub atomic level, as I suggested – thus eliminating hunger as a superogatory explanation as to why people think what they think. As to your ridiculous claim that "Marx was able to bridge the greatest chasm of them all by reducing human consciousness to our hungry belly and our compulsion to labour", it will suffice to draw your attention to the quote from Engels  in a letter to a young student which appears in the SPGB pamphlet  "Historical Materialism":"According to the materialist conception of history, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor myself ever claimed. If now someone has distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above pro-position into an abstract, absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure – the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems, all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form.". In other words Engels is making a case for downward causation which flatly contradicts "greedy reductionism"

[robbo203]

twc wrote:

 Before jumping to such rash conclusions that our “levels of reality” are absolutely autonomous,

 One further thought – this claim makes no sense because it is central to Emergence Theory that a higher level of reality supervenes on a lower level and therefore cannot possibly be "absolutely autonomous".  In the cognitive sciences, Emergence Theory does not disavow physicalism or the fact that the mind depends on the brain.  It merely denies that brain states are identifical to mental states – a fact proven by the phenomenon of "neural plasticity" inter alia.  There is a process of interaction going on in other words, involving also downward causation, within a framework in which mental states supervene on brain states That is why the emergence parardigm in the cognitiuve sciences is called non-reductive physicalism.  Note the word "physicalism"

[twc]

Well, you did say “reductionism or at least … greedy reductionism”.According to Wikipedia: “Greedy reductionism is when ‘in their eagerness for a bargain, in their zeal to explain too much too fast, scientists and philosophers … underestimate the complexities, trying to skip whole layers or levels of theory in their rush to fasten everything securely and neatly to the foundation’.”Oh, is that all you meant.  I imagined you were dealing with something theoretically far more substantial.  If discussion on consciousness-as-such generates such explanation, it reveals how debased the “discussion” has become.But, if that’s all you meant, I agree with you.My substantive point remains, that all autonomy is relative to the autonomy of the world and is not absolute, and so irreducibility is not absolute [Marx and Hegel].I did overplay my hand by reducing the materialist conception of history to “belly and labour”, and was dumb to assume that it would be taken figuratively, and it clearly backfired.

[twc]

OK, since you acknowledge relative autonomy, you may now be able to see why determinism is not straight-jacketing providence in either Castoriadis’s, Stillman’s or your own sense.Scientific determinism is rendered relative when applied back upon the messy contingent world from which we abstracted it in order to explain it.Determinism parallels autonomy.  In scientific principle, within a paradigm, both are pure and absolute.  When applied to the contingent world, their wings are clipped, and they emerge impure and relative.  That is the way of all scientific explanation.

[twc]

The clearest instance of my point is Marx.Capital Volume 1 is pure theory abstracted from the capitalist production process, and is based upon the theoretical abstraction that “commodities exchange at their value”.Capital Volume 3 is the contingent application of the Volume 1 pure theory back upon the concrete capitalist production process it was abstracted from.  And all of a sudden “commodities exchange at their price of production”.  Consequently, Bohm-Bawerk gleefully crowed that Marx refutes himself.You have been making the same charge against me as Böhm-Bawerk made against Marx, in this case against my defence of the determinism of the materialist conception of history.And like all such “greedy reductionism”, which is a perfect analogy, you immediately assume that I must be wrong to defend what is clearly refuted by the contingent concrete world, whereas you want to “greedily reduce” pure abstract theory to impure concrete contingency.I am defending the materialist conception of history as an abstract scientific principle in opposition to these contrary “interpretations” that take the principle to be a description of the concrete contingency it was abstracted from, all of which ‘interpretations’ make the same categorical mistake, based as they are on the same anti-scientific misconception as Böhm-Bawerk.

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