The Long Awaited Materialism thread
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JUst run across this article:http://theconversation.com/chattering-brain-cells-hold-the-key-to-the-language-of-the-mind-24085
Quote:We can also determine the location of every single neuron and all of its connections and its chemical messengers. Having done this, though, we still will not understand how the brain works. To understand a code we need to anchor that code to the real world.We easily anchor Shakespeare’s code (we find out that “Juliet” refers to a specific young woman, “Romeo” to a specific young man) but can we do this for the brain? It seems we can. By recording the chatter of neurons while animals (and sometimes humans) perform the tasks of daily life, researchers have discovered that there are regions where the neural code relates to the real world in remarkably straightforward ways.If I'm reading that right, we can't isolate the brain states from the whole chain of environment and action that they are connected to their objects, intimately. That for me is a thoroughgoing account of how the meat-bots relate to the universe and pretend that they think to each other.
Young Master Smeet wrote:If I'm reading that right, we can't isolate the brain states from the whole chain of environment and action that they are connected to their objects, intimately. That for me is a thoroughgoing account of how the meat-bots relate to the universe and pretend that they think to each other.That still leaves the question, "What is it like to be a bat?"http://www.wnswz.strony.ug.edu.pl/nagel_bat.pdf
Nagel: “What it’s Like to Think Like a Bat”One should not indulge the philosophers by acknowledging any merit to their problems; it only encourages them. Nevertheless, I’ve nibbled the bait because the problem relates to socialism.As far as self consciousness is concerned, Hegel has written as much as can be said about it from an idealist point of view, and an idealist point of view might seem an appropriate starting point for comprehending the consciousness of another species. However, Nagel, by bringing biology into the problem, expands it into the realm of Darwin and the evolutionary biology of our sensory and conceptual apparatus.DarwinBiologically, Nagel’s question looks similar to our recent discussion of how to “conceive the quantum world”, except that Nagel considers cross-species consciousness instead of cross-worlds conceptualization with the same consciousness.Nagel’s problem may therefore be amenable to considerations along lines suggested by Karl Marx. But first, to Charles Darwin.Darwin, returned from his voyage on the Beagle, confided what he then considered socially-explosive thoughts on the biological evolution of consciousness to locked private notebooks “read monkeys for preexistence [Plato’s pre-existing ideas]”. “O, you materialist!”. Twenty years later, Darwin completely overturned our conception of biological inheritance.MarxMarx, on reading the Origin of Species, wrote:
Marx: Capital, Vol 1, Ch. 15 (1867) wrote:“Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life …“Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.Marx then immediately re-summarizes his materialism: “the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific” method, is to develop consciousness, deterministically, from “the actual relations of life”.[If only historians had adopted Marx’s precept. But the early adopters, like Kautsky and Plekhanov, have been so anathematized by vicious Leninist attack, that the whole Marxian materialist enterprise now seems irredeemably tainted by Lenin’s touch, just like socialism itself!]Marx would doubtless scorn Nagel’s bat problem as an artificial proof of what Hegel’s Encyclopedia amply demonstrates — that we conceive phenomena to have behaviours appropriate to the level of their existence; that the deterministic development of each conceptual science depends on the piece of the universe it investigates, and that each piece’s behaviour is not immediately reducible to behaviours appropriate to other pieces at other levels of existence, but may nevertheless be generated out of them.Marx and Hegel, despite fighting tooth and nail for conceiving the world at appropriate conceptual levels, also agreed on “mediated reduction of the immediately irreducible” at an over-arching level — like Hegel’s self-generating Idea or Marx’s more modest materialist conception of history which generatively “implements” different social formations, each with its own “irreducible” behaviours.It is therefore possible, even if not currently achievable, to “reduce conceptually irreducible” consciousness to some over-arching conceptual schema that may encompass Nagel’s bat. We could never sustain our ever-changing society, one of our own remaking, without the already conceptually mediated within our consciousness, upon closure, instantly becoming the new conceptually immediate for our consciousness, and relegating the immediately appropriate for the mighty past, upon such closure, to the mediated dustbin of expired concepts.This subversive over-arching process is no more than Hegel’s generative conceptual method, the irresistible drive our evolutionary heritage for abstracting from immediate experience the necessary mediated concepts we reflect back upon immediate experience to survive it.Insofar as animals, including bats, actually think, their actual thoughts are presumably compelled, as Marx says of ours, to comprehend their actual mode of production for sustaining life. That’s what evolution created their actual thinking for, just as it did ours.Their actual thinking, as perceived by observers of dogs and cats, is never immediate experience but is always abstractly mediated experience. Actual thinking, unlike instinct, is always a mediated response to experience, and that experience, being primarily experience of necessary production, like ours, has scope for contact with ours.Bats too, if they “think”, must mediate their experience “conceptually” to avoid falling down holes and bumping into closed doors, most of the time. Despite divergent evolutionary pathways, our conceptual apparatus evolved to handle much in common with theirs, just as has our sensory apparatus — our eyes, touch, smell, hearing — despite the fact that they echo-locate while we bump into closed doors in the dark.So a bat, if it could ever gather its thoughts together as we can, would “talk” [in indecipherable bat speak] about its immediate “social being”, about feeding, breeding, rearing, socializing and foraging, as immediately appropriate. More complexly social, a lion (in ignorance of Wittgenstein) might at least be more complexly articulate than a bat, and our common production needs may be the Rosetta Stone for deciphering its roar.[As Xenophanes mockingly observed about 500 BCE “if horses or lions had hands and could draw, then horses would draw their gods like horses, and each would shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own”.]As to animal self consciousness, in the sense of consciousness of self, thinking behaviour (as distinct from instinctive behaviour) must quickly learn to distinguish self from other in order to survive — which tail not to bite and which to bite [self and other], which child to feed, etc. the whole world of ethology.In other words, self consciousness is a pre-condition for thinking behaviour itself, and only becomes a “philosophical problem” when thinking people have removed, in thought alone, their own self-consciousness from self consciousness’s own necessary survival roots.
ALB wrote:LOL. Thought it was going to be that one before I clicked the link.
Great ScottRobert Falcon Scott hauled a 16 kg load of fossil plants on his fatal Polar expedition, realizing that plants found in Antarctica had to be of scientific importance. They were intended for an English paleobiologist who couldn’t accompany the expedition because of her sex. She was Marie Stopes.Glossopteris indica was a tall leafy fruit-bearing conifer that lived 300 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs. It was known to have flourished on the Indian subcontinent (hence the species name indica), but here it was once flourishing 13,000 km away, separated by ocean, in frozen Antarctica.Scott had stumbled on the indicator fossil for the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. If you find this fossil, you know that you are standing on ancient Gondwanan rocks. This species flourished throughout Australia, Africa and South America, as well as throughout India and Antarctica, but it flourished nowhere else in the world, not even in Asia just across the Himalayas.What are Scott’s Antarctic rocks telling us about India, Asia and the high Himalayas, about stable Australia and volcanic Indonesia, about the mutability of continents? Just what is this long-extinct Gondwanan tree saying?I raise these questions in the context of a determined anti-materialist barrage insisting, with a finality intended to resist any possible overturning, that rocks patently don’t speak. That rocks don’t tell us anything. That rocks don’t ask questions. That it is only we, idealistically, who ask the questions, and never the rocks, materialistically.Mute but MutableSure, a rock is mute, as non-committal as any other specific concrete phenomenon. That’s Hegel’s point: being is precisely nothing for our thought processes. Empiricism, as long as it clings to the concrete [to mere being] consigns itself to remaining conceptually contentless.But geological thought is a process that abstracts, from the concrete, the concepts it reflects back upon the concrete to comprehend it. Of course geology considers rocks concretely as immediately concrete objects, but it also comprehends them abstractly as contingent abstract instances of pure abstract deterministic processes.In so doing, geological abstraction discloses the enormity of time [just as astronomical thought discloses the enormity of space]. The rocks reveal the history of our planet.After all, it was the geologists, who scorned the physicists’ thermal-cooling age for the solar system as hundreds of times shallower than the deep time evident from paleontological processes. Only when the physicists discovered that rocks were radioactive could they begin to measure and so comprehend the Earth’s extraordinary age, and so understand why, though the Earth has cooled as expected, its interior is still kept hot by radioactive decay.For those who consider scientific irreducibility to be an absolute barrier to comprehension of processes at different levels of organisation, the tale told by the Earth’s rocks discounts the bogus claim that [detested bourgeois] scientists don’t see the world as history, or that [detested bourgeois] scientists always think reductively.Geophysicists can think quite adequately, reductively or irreductively, as appropriate to the occasion, thank you very much. It’s a pity some proclaimed “socialists”, presumably [admirable proletarian] scientists, can’t think so clearly as appropriate to the occasion.Zircons are ForeverZircon crystals, from the Jack Hills range of Western Australia, are four billion years older than Glossopteris. Radioactive geochronometry and atomic microscopy [atom-probe tomography] confirm one of them is 4·4 billion years old.The Earth was then only 150 million years old, and its surface must have cooled to allow zirconium silicate to crystallize out as zircon crystal, in apparent association with water, in our earliest prototype continental lands, or more likely, in our earliest sea floors. They have endured eons of subsequent heating, cooling, weathering, crushing and twisting, and still survive, while the less enduring continental rock they formed in has long since been recycled.And now rocks from those earliest continental lands have been found in Canada [as gneiss that is just a little younger than the Australian zircons]. If you stand on these rocks, you are standing on our earliest continental crust [lithosphere].Perhaps the process of plate tectonics was already underway — the 200-million year cyclic mechanism that would eventually create a future Gondwana, and then pull it apart, rifting a future India from a future Antarctica, to smash it into a future Asia, and deform the resulting collision zone into a future Himalayan range. And scientists don’t think historically? And rocks don’t tell us anything?Rocks Tell the Story of Life.I would love to recount the story of life on Earth, which includes us as a tiny coda, that is told by the rocks. But this is already too long. Perhaps that’s for another time.
twc wrote:Scott had stumbled on the indicator fossil for the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. If you find this fossil, you know that you are standing on ancient Gondwanan rocks.There are two possible methods being described, here. Either:a) 'material conditions' give humans ideas of what they are; or,b) humans create ideas and test those ideas against the 'material conditions' that humans actively select.The first is the method of positivist science, which claims to produce the 'Eternal Truth'.The second is the method of Marx, of 'theory and practice', which claims to socially-produce 'knowledge' which remains a social, cultural and historical product. Because it's a human product, it's possible that this 'truth' is wrong.If one believes that the fossil whispered 'I'm from Gondwana supercontinent' to Scott or Stopes, and thus that this is 'The Truth' for evermore, then one can be supremely confident in the method of 'science', and thus have complete, nay religious, faith in scientists and the authoritative knowledge that they produce. They remain an authority which cannot be challenged by democracy. The scientists claim to have an infallible method.Me? I'm with Marx. Humans, given thousands of years of previous cultural development, came up with the idea of the 'Gondwana supercontinent', and the evidence which humans have selected in practice seems to confirm this theory. But… it's not 'The Truth', but a human cultural and historical artifact which we now call 'true knowledge', and we're aware that, in the future, other theories and selection practices based upon those new theories might disprove the thesis of the 'Gondwana supercontinent'. And since this 'truth' is a human creation, it remains within the realms of human democratic controls. We know humans, including scientists, are all-too fallible.a) is a bourgeois method; andb) is a proletarian method.
My dear boy, can’t you see that plate tectonics explodes everything we ever thought fixed for all time about the Earth, its continents and oceans. There is nothing fixed for all time about the geological science that discovered this historical geological process. There is nothing fixed for all time about the dynamic historical process of plate tectonics itself, but it's hard to imagine us going back to fixed continents just because we suddenly, on a whim, refuse to read the rocks.I fail to see how anyone could miss the fact that our ancient lithosphere has been recycled almost beyond recognition. If that’s not history, of the rise and fall kind, what on Earth is!Did you ever imagine, in your wildest dreams, that our oceans had a lifetime of about 200 years, that the Pacific is old [and hence wide] and its sea floor is subducting under the Pacific rim continents, and hence the ring of fire. The Atlantic is young, and there’s no subduction zone, and no ring of fire. This unfixed for all time conception was forced upon us against our wills and, presumably, against our better judgement at the time. It's written in the rocks.Geology is essentially reading the rocks, but reading them dynamically. Why do you insist that this science is static, and fixed for all time by its practicioners? You calumniate them.For you, our comprehension of the Earth's dynamics are far from dynamic and so, for you, they cease to be subversively amazing. Yet this unfixed for all time history is also, for you, just as likely to be the perverse construction of an elite cabal, in their own superior interest [whatever that could mean in this testable context], and should instead have been decided on, democratically, [in total denial of rational social division of labour] by every human being on Earth.Why do you insist on democratic voting on scientific theory, on all things scientific — as you once said, on every last aspect of every scientist's work and thought? You must do so because of the non-deterministic idealist bent to your "philosophy", which consequently forces you to rely on determination of all truth by thought alone, as you fail to comprehend that abstraction reveals external determinism, which is largely independent of humans, or it could never work for us.By the way, your Bashkar agrees that “experimental activity gives us access to structures that exist independent of us.” That is one of the two cornerstones of his Realist Throry. And he is correct in this.But this implies that such independent-of-human structures are really that — independent of us. Well, of course, we misinterpret them willfully or in ignorance. But mostly they resist mere human whim, opinion, etc. to an extraordinary extent. If they didn't, there's no way scientists could agree, and that most subversive of activities, science, could never proceed.If there were no objectivity, independent of us humans, in science, we could never convince non-socialists of socialism through scientific argument.Marx's science gives us access to social structures that, although we individually function in their construction, in a social sense exist and develop independent of us. If Marx's science is mere ideology for you, then socialism remains entirely voluntaristic — entirely devoid of any determinism, entirely up to brow beating your opponent into submission.
twc wrote:Why do you insist on democratic voting on scientific theory, on all things scientific — as you once said, on every last aspect of every scientist's work and thought?Because I'm a Communist, unlike you!
twc wrote:You must do so because of the non-deterministic idealist bent to your "philosophy", which consequently forces you to rely on determination of all truth by thought alone, as you fail to comprehend that abstraction reveals external determinism, which is largely independent of humans, or it could never work for us.[my bold]You really should try reading, old bean, rather than making up 'fairy stories' about the philosophy of others.
twc wrote:If Marx's science is mere ideology for you, then socialism remains entirely voluntaristic…[my bold]This is becoming laughable, old chap! Embarrassing, even to children like me!You continue to avoid the issue of 'theory and practice'.Perhaps I should warn you… listening to rocks is a sign of senility…[ahhh… shame… the old buffer can't hear or think any more…]Yes, yes, I can hear the fossil… 'Gondwana supercontinent' it clearly says… most determinedly…Oh, fossil, can you tell twc that I am an idealist, and only have room for 'theory'…What, he's not even listening to you, now? Perhaps your words are all just in my mind, fossil?
I'm not sure this bourgeois/proletarian science thing holds. There are thousands of proletarian scientists, in unviersities up and down the land, on the treadmill of publish or perish, working without owning their ideas (in collaboration in massive projects of associated labour), most mainstream science and its outputs are prolatearian efforts. The day of the lone gentleman of leisure collating knowledge from correspondence is long over.
It seems to me, LBird, that the only 'meat' on your argument consists of insults, which is not impressing anyone.
Vin Maratty wrote:It seems to me, LBird, that the only 'meat' on your argument consists of insults, which is not impressing anyone.twc calls me 'boy', I call him 'old'. If the latter is an insult, so is the former. Have a word with twc, if you're so concerned about 'insults'.As for arguments, I see that you haven't ventured to engage in the discussion. I'm not impressed with you, either.As to 'meat', for god's sake, how much more can I do? I've tried explaining over several threads the need for 'theory and practice', and all I get is 'Why keep talking just about theory, LBird?'.I've tried discussing Marx, Engels, Pannekoek, Untermann, Dietzgen, Lenin, Korsch, and modern philosophers of science like Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Bhaskar, Archer, Schaff, Marks…How much more 'meat' is there? No, the real problem is the lack of willingness by the partisans of 'Engelsian science' to actually do much wider, and critical, reading.
Young Master Smeet wrote:I'm not sure this bourgeois/proletarian science thing holds. There are thousands of proletarian scientists, in unviersities up and down the land, on the treadmill of publish or perish, working without owning their ideas (in collaboration in massive projects of associated labour), most mainstream science and its outputs are prolatearian efforts. The day of the lone gentleman of leisure collating knowledge from correspondence is long over.What this has to do with anything I've written, I'm not sure, YMS.
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