On the Nature of Good and Evil · 10:18pm Jul 27th, 2014
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Magical girls are good!
The Well Dressed Ninja, a man who suffers the tragedy of wearing dapper clothes that nobody ever sees, has asked me a question I always like to answer, since it touches on ethics, a branch of philosophy in which I am always interested:
I got a question that was (in a circuitous manner) inspired by your "In Reply" blog post.
Is Evil the opposite of Good? Or is it the absence of Good? If Evil is 0 on the (imaginary) Good scale, then what would (the imaginary) -1 stand for?
I consider myself a member of the Aristotelian-Thomist school of philosophy, so my answer, which I can only give coherently after I have quaffed sufficient quantities of German beer, and after I have posted a sufficient number of gratuitous magical girl pictures—
—goes like this:
The word good can be considered in three ways: ontologically, naturally, and morally.
Ontologically, good is one of the five transcendental properties of being. The five transcendental properties are: one, something, true, good, and beautiful. These are "transcendental" because every being, everything that is, has these properties in some sense. To demonstrate why all of these are synonymous with being would take a lot of space, so suffice to say that good describes being in relation to the will, which is the appetite of the intellect, and which desires good necessarily: all beings are in some sense desirable, and are therefore good.
Naturally, goodness is identifiable by the natural end of a thing. I am using natural here in its philosophical sense; I need to make that clear because I have had more than a few conversations in which I have used the word in this sense and my interlocutors, never bothering to ask for clarifications or definitions, have run off at the mouth about whatever the word happens to remind them of. Entire books, in fact, have been written from a misunderstanding of this word as a philosophical term of art. It means, "According to the essence of a thing" or "Belonging to all members of a set." It absolutely does not mean, "Whatever I saw in the zoo or out my window." A natural evil is a deprivation of some natural good that frustrates a thing's natural end; the classic example is blindness in an eye. The eye's end is known from its essence: the eye is an organ that sees, and thus seeing is its natural end; if an eye cannot see, it fails to fulfill the function (end) of an eye, and is therefore a "bad" eye.
Now, if all beings are good, evil can have no being. Evil is the corruption or distortion of good, and thus depends on good for its existence. If all goods went out of existence, evil would not exist either, since there would be no beings to distort. In regards to the number line, therefore, I do not think it works as an analogy: good and evil do not possess the Archimedean characteristic; that is, they cannot be quantified in units equal to each other. I can say that something is better or nobler than something else, but I cannot say that it is five inches or six pounds nobler.
Goodness, then, is not measured on a scale, but is instead judged in relation to the final cause or natural end of the thing in question. I can say, for example, that a healthy oak tree is better than a sickly one, but I am not measuring the trees on any Archimedean scale; rather, I am weighing the trees against the natural end of a tree, which is to grow and flourish. One of the trees approaches that end more than the other tree does. Now, the bad tree may be bad because of a fungus or other disease, but we are speaking here about the end of the tree; the fungus that is making it a bad tree may be a very good fungus, one that is flourishing in accordance with its own natural end at the tree's expense. The tree fails to approach its natural end because it lacks health, whereas the healthy fungus does approach its own natural end by taking nutrition from the tree.
Morally, acts are judged in accordance with the natural end of moral agents. Moral good differs from natural good in that it involves freely chosen actions; the tree does not decide to be good or bad, but simply is. A man, on the other hand, decides. Thus a man is called good or bad on account of his good or bad will.
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Magical girls have good wills.
The natural end of a moral agent, which all men will necessarily, is happiness. The specific habits and acts that tend to that end are obligatory to all; this is called Natural Law, a code of ethical conduct that exists on account of what it means to be a rational agent, and which exists independently of any individual's opinion about it. It is "Natural" because it is opposed to "positive," positive law being the edicts issued by the secular state in order to enjoin men to virtue and to maintain the social order. If Natural Law did not exist, it would be impossible to judge whether positive laws were just or unjust, because if we call a law "unjust," we are implicitly comparing it against some standard of law to which it does not conform. Positive laws are just when they accord with Natural Law and unjust when they conflict with it: because everyone is by virtue of being a rational agent beholden to obey the Natural Law, an unjust law is no law at all, and a moral man may be compelled by conscience to violate positive law in order to obey Natural Law.
Natural Law encompasses both what is commonly called virtue ethics and what is commonly called deontology. These two theories of ethics are, in academia, usually pitted against each other, but the common man who has no patience for philosophical hairsplitting can easily see that they in fact complement each other: the virtue ethicist says a man should be honest, and the deontologist says a man should tell the truth. Since the honest man is one who habitually tells the truth, the common man rolls his eyes at the arguments of the philosophers, and thus philosophy is thrown into disrepute by its contrived debates.
The most basic precepts of Natural Law are known to every man. This is why, for example, when a silly cartoon show praises virtues like honesty, generosity, kindness, and the like, nobody except somebody being deliberately cussed would object that these are not in fact moral virtues. Everyone, even someone as morally stunted as the average man of the Postmodern West, is able to recognize these virtues and assent to them.
The intellect knowing the Natural Law is called the conscience. The conscience condemning or praising specific acts of a moral agent is called synderesis. In common speech today, conscience is usually used to mean synderesis specifically. Because the conscience is a man's moral judgment, a man has an absolute duty to obey it. This requires some clarification, because certain know-nothings and politicians like to use the word conscience as a code-word for "whatever the hell I want." That is not what conscience means. That is almost the opposite of what it means. The conscience is the part of your intellect you don't like to examine, the part that never makes you feel comfortable, the part that stings and harasses and harries you, at least if you are evil, giving you no rest.
This is not to say that the conscience is infallible. A man has a duty not only to obey his conscience, but to train it by learning what is really right and what is really wrong, a refinement achieved by extrapolating logically from the most basic and general principles to the more specific. This is where genuine disagreements over ethics arise (I say "genuine" to distinguish honest debate from contrived debate, and to distinguish sincere exploration of ethics from sophistry); the general principles are agreed upon, but not everyone agrees on how to put them in words or on how to extrapolate from them. Thus, for example, you have the so-called Golden Rule or Categorical Imperative, which has been independently formulated in various places by various sages: the Christian says it as, "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you," or, better, "Love your neighbor as yourself." The Confucian says it as, "I will place no burden upon others that I would not take upon myself." The Confucian and Christian could have an honest debate over whether the Christian formulation goes too far or the Confucian does not go far enough, but neither of them could have an honest debate with the sophist who says the Categorical Imperative is no imperative at all, because said hypothetical sophist actually knows better and is merely being a jerk.
The Golden Rule, although it is not the fundamental rule of ethics, is nonetheless a very important one because it is the principle by which ethics moves from the purely personal sphere to the relational: it is an expression of the conscience's recognition that other men are rational agents like oneself, and that what applies ethically to me applies also to thee. Thus I cannot fixate only on my own end, which is happiness, but must consider your happiness also.
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THE GOLDEN RULE, ARTIST'S CONCEPTION! ...I guess.
In regards to the fallibility of conscience, two identified disorders of conscience are the lax and the scrupulous conscience. The lax conscience does not condemn when it ought, and the scrupulous conscience condemns when it ought not. In their most extreme forms, these two disorders of conscience appear to be more-or-less synonymous with what psychologists call psychopathia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, respectively. The disorders are identifiable by weighing the malfunctioning synderesis against the actual precepts of Natural Law. Oddly enough, these disorders may not actually affect a person's ability to understand morality: last I checked, there was an ongoing debate amongst psychologists over whether psychopaths really lack a conscience, or whether they simply have an unusual ability to ignore its promptings; similarly, the scrupulous, although they suffer from constant harassment by the conscience, may be perfectly able to discuss morality in the abstract—St. Alphonsus Liguori, for example, suffered a severe scrupulosity, yet is considered in the Western Church the Doctor of Moral Theology. His disorder does not appear to have harmed his ability to write on the subject of ethics, and in fact gave him some insight about the proper way to deal with the condition of scrupulosity.
Now, an act may be deemed objectively wrong in and of itself, but only a moral agent can be censured for committing it. This is reflected in positive law: we do not try children as adults because we do not expect them to have the fully developed moral faculties of adults, and we do not find the insane guilty of their crimes, because they are presumed not to be in control of their actions. In any case, the rightness or wrongness of any act can be judged objectively as in accordance with the moral order or not, but the moral culpability of any moral agent cannot be perfectly determined: this is what the maxim, "Judge not lest you be judged" actually means; it does not mean it is wrong to condemn sin for what it is, but that it is wrong to pretend to be able to read others' hearts and minds.
Now, I have said that the will is the intellective appetite that desires good necessarily, and that everyone necessarily wills his own happiness. If this is the case, how is it possible to do evil? Free choice of the will exists on account of the imperfection of the intellect and the unruliness of the appetites. It is possible to will what is not in fact the truest and highest good, but only a lesser good that a man mistakenly identifies as the highest good; lesser goods, when freely chosen for their own sake, frustrate a man's natural end. An easy example is gluttony, which is the elevation of the good of the pleasure of eating over the good of nutrition. A man who eats excessively for the sake of pleasure can thereby frustrate the end of nutrition and damage his health or even kill himself. That is not to say that pleasure is not itself good, but it is a good in service to other goods: the good of the pleasure of eating is ordered toward the higher good of nutrition, and the moral man will recognize that hierarchy of goods and train his appetite accordingly, eating to live rather than living to eat.
Furthermore, any desire for a thing that cannot exist is illogical, and because it cannot be achieved, must necessarily lead to frustration if pursued. Such a desire reaches not for an actual good, but for an "apparent good." This desire is objectively disordered. To use an embarrassing personal example, I desire to have a magical girlfriend.
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Hey, baby.
Um . . . maybe I should have picked a different example. Well, anyway, my point is that this isn't a desire to indulge, since it has no real object. Apparent goods are not goods in fact, not things that are actually good for me. They do of course appear good to me because I want them badly, but that is why it is the conscience to which a man must go to determine what is really good, and not to his appetites, which are ready to deceive him. The moral response to an illogical desire is to resist it.
Now, to make this clearer, let's define happiness, which I have called man's natural end. Again, this is a philosophical term of art that leads to confusion because the word's meaning has changed over time in common speech. Thus, many virtue ethicists today prefer the word flourishing instead. Happiness means the sum total of goods, all that is right and proper to a man qua man. If man is mortal, it would mean moral virtue; intellective virtue; bodily health; and a moderate amount of justly earned wealth, honor, and prestige in keeping with his station. If man is mortal, he can hope for nothing more than this, and his desire for immortality, a desire all men possess, would be illogical, and thus something to shun. This is the view of the Stoics, who hold that a man should learn to face any pain or deprivation fearlessly and without complaint, most especially the ultimate deprivation that is death.
If, on the other hand, man is immortal, then his end is something higher, perhaps possession of some ultimate good that answers all his appetites and desires, at least if desires actually have a real, existent end. That's the Christian view. If desires are fundamentally illogical and cannot be finally and fully answered, then man can only reach for the cessation of desire and perhaps, with them, his own cessation. That's the Buddhist view. The former is based on hope; the latter, on despair.
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It is possible for a society to suffer moral breakdown over time through inertia, lack of moral training, moral cowardice, or the elevation of appetite over intellect.
2321125
What? I thought we were going to debate magical girls.
I would like a home computer that is fully open to hack, can be programmed and abused anyway you wish, expanded anyway you want, and is capable of handling anything you can throw at it. Such as manned space flight.
Oh wait.
Alien Tech exists.
I can't even handle how scholastic this is
So, judging by the Golden Law's personification, it is best summarized as "Do unto entropy-defying alien bunnycats as you would have them do unto you." Good to know.
2321201
I'm going to have to add my own skeptical look at this one. I think it would be better to say that a desire for a thing that can not exist is illogical and doomed to frustration. On the other hand, that which does not presently exist can still be pursued and realized, whether that means lighting a fire, inventing a telephonic means of communication, or writing a story that unites some thirty years of pastel ponies.
If that was implied, well, blame my imperfect understanding of philosophy.
2321262
I'm mulling this over in an attempt to determine if it needs some additional work, but at present I'm inclined to say it's an excellent clarification. I may alter the wording in the essay.
Well, at the risk of giving spoilers, since she sacrificed herself to save the world and restructure the universe, I'd say she makes a pretty good personification of heroic virtue.
Someone once flattered me by saying that Madoka looked like what would happen if I, John C. Wright, and another author I can't remember were locked in a room together and forced to come up with a magical girl story. I assume Wright would have been responsible for the kick-awesome time travel plot twist, and I assume I would have been responsible for the violence and gratuitous nudity.
Interesting.
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Full disclosure: this essay was powered by rum and Coke rather than German beer. I find I pontificate on different subjects depending on which chemical I am under the influence of. Rum causes me to discourse on transcendental properties of being. Coffee causes me to discourse on revealed theology. Sake causes me to discourse on anime.
So is it a moral duty to resist a desire one knows to be impossible? Even if that desire WOULDN'T be immoral if it were possible? Is the immorality the wasted time?
I certainly admire your attempt to summarize Thomistic moral philosophy for an unfamiliar audience, Doug, even if I'd wager most folks here aren't even in a position to begin comprehending the Aristotelian metaphysical background of that moral philosophy...
Wait, what about consequentialism/ utilitarianism?
Is that not a moral system also?
(Which derives the golden rule more through extrapolation of iterated prisoner's dilemma, but still)
2322870
Utilitarianism is a truncated moral philosophy that considers no good except pleasure. Utilitarians rank some pleasures as higher than others, however, and in order to do so, they have to sneak in through the back door a broader concept of goods that they pretend to be repudiating.
Consequentialism is anti-ethics. Its purpose is to justify fashionable vices by pretending they are not harmful and ignoring all evidence to the contrary even when obvious. It is also useless, since "harm," unless it is already well-known or obvious, cannot be accurately predicted by anybody except a time-traveler or prophet. It is also weaksauce, since it reduces the purpose of ethics from being a good and virtuous man to being a man who produces a minimum negative impact.
A man who wishes to be ethical cannot take pleasure as his end, because pleasure is exactly the thing he cannot trust and of which he must be suspicious. When I am in the grip of some temptation promising me pleasure, my ethics is useless if my ethics tells me to maximize pleasure. I must instead go back to principles and consider whether what I am contemplating is right, good, noble, and just. A utilitarian cannot help but justify adultery if he's sure he can get away with it, and a consequentialist actually wants to justify adultery, because that is the whole purpose of consequentialism.
2323678
Goddammit Davidson, it's not nice to insult people just because they think differently from you. Seriously, can't you assume other people have their own reasons for believing things, and that calling names might not actually help?
Also, apologies for not replying earlier, flight, travel, etc.
That's...like...that's a straight up lie, as far as I know.
Seriously; the way I saw it explain is as a way of treating objectives and moral preferences; that is, by saying that everyone has an utility function, and that a moral action would be one that gives the most utility.
As an aside, this neatly solves the "trolley problem" something on which (again, as far as I know) the official catholic church position, using deontology is to fucking do nothing.
Seriously, choosing to do nothing (and thus ending with nine corpses) is equated to changing tracks (and thus winding up with one corpse).
Of course, utilitarianism has a couple of huge weak points: what is, exactly, this fantomatic "utility function"? Does this mean every waking moment I don't spend earning money to send to starving kids to Africa, I'm being immoral?
Except that you didn't even bring that up.
I'm disappointed. Yes, really.
To use this logic: what about, you know, considering what its CONSEQUENCES are? If I do something that is good, noble, and just, which kills hundreds of people, if I'm acting under my own moral framework, why should the relatives of those people complain? Like, you know, what's happening right now in Gaza etc etc?
Wouldn't it be better to actually try and derive universal values (alive good, dead bad) and apply those, instead of trusting people to follow their own weak moral intuition?
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Devas, 100% agreed on the first paragraph - Utilitarianism is NOT about pleasure. It's about preference. Simply saying that someone is utilitarian says very little about their morality beyond its ground rules - its content could be just about anything.
I do have one significant difference with what you said, though.
Utilitarianism doesn't claim that everyone HAS a utility function. A proper utility function is impossible to realize, after all. But if you do your moral reasoning in a utilitarian framework, you try to approximate having one. If you are some form of aggregate utilitarian, then for moral purposes you attempt to approximate others as having them. You might approximate a deontologist who thinks murder is bad as assigning a very low utility to the occurrence of murder.
How do you approximate having a utility function? Base your moral reasoning on the future histories of the universe that would result from various actions, and scoring them by degrees of preference. The reasons that this can't be perfectly realized should be clear (it's too complicated), but the cases it can't be reasonably approximated are the cases where it's not clear what might happen, so one can be forgiven for not knowing what to do. Simple approximations drastically simplify the solution
Note, if your preferences cannot be approximated as a utility function, then you have cyclic preferences. These are a bug, and this is a problem whether or not you are utilitarian.
Deontology is compatible with Utilitarianism in that you might hold that there is one proper utility function, and others are immoral.
2329122
Utilitarianism is the view that ethics is about maximizing pleasure for the greatest number of people and minimizing pain. John Stuart Mill holds some pleasures as higher than others, but he hold only pleasures to be goods. There may indeed be variations more nuanced.
The problem that Utilitarianism would allow adultery in some circumstances is a traditional quandary for Utilitarians; I did not make it up.
I believe I just wrote a lengthy post on universal values. Your other criticism holds no water, as moral acts do not kill people at random.
2329122
FYI, you are also in error regarding the trolley problem, and you are invited to keep your foul language, and your religious bigotry, off my blog.
We have a concept called double effect: sometimes a good action has foreseeable but unintended negative consequences that are not the cause of the good effect intended, but incidental. In flipping the switch, the people in the trolley are saved; the one on the track is killed incidentally and unavoidably in the process.
2333127
That's hedonic utilitarianism, a discredited subvariant.
2336011
"Subvariant"? That's John Stuart Mill, the most influential Utilitarian philosopher. I have read many works by Utilitarians, all of which defined pleasure as happiness. I frankly don't care what variations or innovations you have discovered on the Internet. I'm talking about the actual philosophy.
2355321
And the original variant is now discredited. What's so surprising about that?
Why do you insist on engaging only on dusty old precursors to peoples' actual beliefs? Arguments and systems are here-and-now, they don't need to be given authority by publication and age.
You insisted, for example, that materialism implied the Television Chocolate model of cognition despite my presenting a vastly superior alternative right there.
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Your "alternative" is unintelligible. You do not understand what "material" and "immaterial" mean. Material things are limited by location and extension. Mental objects are necessarily immaterial because they are not so limited.
That was my entire point, that Materialism is fundamentally unintelligible. A Materialist has to slip Realism in through the back door in order to speak coherently, such as by appealing to abstractions like "code" or "representation" or "pattern," or the favorite of computer scientists who do not know philosophy and cannot tell the difference between a machine and a mathematical formula that describes a machine, "algorithm."
Utilitarianism is the philosophy that happiness is pleasure and that people should seek to bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number. That is not a "subviariant." That is Utilitarianism. If you have some philosophy that teaches something else, it's not Utilitarianism anymore. Quite frankly, you have not even explained what it is you think Utilitarians teach nowadays, so I'm not even convinced we are actually in disagreement. Taking out a clear term like "pleasure" and popping in obscure economical jargon like "utility function" does not appear to me to change anything substantial, since utility function refers to a thing's ability to provide some satisfaction or contentment.
2358765
Materialism doesn't mean that abstraction doesn't exist. And it doesn't mean that abstractions' referents need to be material. It means that abstractions' encodings are made of matter, and that is all there is to the abstraction - they have no reality independent of matter.
Suppose I say 'all of time and space'. This statement is bounded in time and space, but its referent is not. What you see on your screen or hear from your screenreader is a physical encoding, and it is connected to a bunch more by causal chains: neuron patterns inside my brain, sound waves if I say it out loud, ASCII encodings at various points inside the computer, compressed ASCII while being transmitted over the network, a pattern of dots on a screen, and different neuron patterns inside your brain. Some of these conversions are lossy.
And yes, there is some set of spacetime events constituting all of time and space. Just, in materialism, that abstraction is in my head, and you have a very similar abstraction in your head with the same name - probably so similar that for most purposes we can say they're the same abstraction. But they're the same as in 'we have the same car [both 1998 black VW Jetta GL]' not 'we are in the same car [we are sitting next to each other]'. The referent of these abstractions spans all of time and space. Our abstractions of all of time and space do not themselves do so.
But none of that needs to actually extend over time and space to refer to all of time and space.
2364182
Encoding is not a material property. Material properties are those that can be measured with the seven SI units. Codes are mental objects. Take the words on your screen, for example: their meaning is not inherent in the glowing pixels of the screen, nor in the shapes thereof, but in the mental connexion between the shapes and the words they represent, and by knowing the meaning of the words themselves, which are purely mental objects. You could not derive the meaning of my words by measuring the atoms in your computer monitor, nor by measuring the atoms in my brain. You understand my meaning not by measuring length, mass, or candlepower, but by knowing the language I use.
Communication would be impossible if there were not a one-to-one correspondence between word, thought, and object. "Correspondence," like "code," is not a physical property, not something that can be measured with the seven SI units.
The study of the material world deals with efficient and material causes, but understanding the meaning of someone talking to you has to do with final cause, his purpose or intent. Final cause cannot be reduced to material or efficient cause.
Abstractions are by definition immaterial, exactly because they are abstract. When I think about humanity, I am not thinking about any particular human being, but human-ness as such. When I think about the Pythagorean theorem, I am not thinking about any roughly triangle-shaped object, but triangularity as such. Abstractions cannot be material. The very idea is as inconceivable as a round square.
When you and I are both thinking about the same thing, it is necessarily the case that it is the same thing that our minds are presenting to us, or else we would not be able to understand each other. When you say, "1998 black VW Jetta GL," if I am to understand you, then my mind must apprehend what a 1998 black VW Jetta GL is, and it must also apprehend that every concrete instance of a 1998 black VW Jetta GL has something in common with every other concrete instance. What they have in common cannot be material, because the material is limited by location and extension. Yet every black VW Jetta has something in common with every other; what they have in common is their form, and it is that form that my idea of a VW Jetta presents to my mind. Your idea presents to you the same form, and thus we are able to communicate meaningfully about the car. If I had my own private miniature VW Jetta in my head, and you had a separate private miniature in your head, we could not communicate with each other, because there would be no possibility of our speaking about the same thing, since we would not have access to the same thing.
Because the same form is present in every instance of the car, and also in your mind and in my mind, the form is immaterial, not being limited by location and extension as material things are.
What you are doing is sometimes called the fallacy of the stolen concept; that is, you are explicitly rejecting an idea while implicitly smuggling it in again through the back door. That is why Mr. Logic, on the other thread, in which he for some reason I cannot fathom graciously tries to defend Materialism by defining it as something other than Materialism, argues that LessWrongers are really a type of hylomorphist, or maybe a Platonist (he wasn't terribly clear on the point): because Materialism is incoherent, the Materialist always winds up a functional hylomorphist or Platonist no matter how hard he tries to avoid it.
I'm afraid I cannot help you. I am a student, and I have already exhausted my store of explanations and illustrations. What you need is a master who can go through the issues step-by-step and explain them to you at length. I fear that even that might not help you, however, because it is my experience with LessWrongers that they will not be taught, that they disdain certain branches of learning while, paradoxically, being unable to shut up about them.
You have already illustrated this yourself. You do not understand the problems or principles or methods of metaphysics or epistemology. I already told you what you needed to look into to begin to grasp these subjects, and your response was a sarcastic emoticon.
To put that another way, you cannot learn philosophy unless you first learn humility.
2368753
A challenger appears!
Ahem. I hope it's not too late for me to jump into the discussion and bury you under a wall of text.
What about the genetic code? Is it a code in name only, or is it a mental object that does not require any "mental entity" to be deciphered, instead letting biochemistry do the dirty work? If it's a code, then surely its meaning could be derived by measuring the atoms in a cell over a period of time, i.e., by physical means. If it's not a code, what is it and what’s a code?
Let me say that I fully agree with you here, but also that it leads to a question you have not, to my mediocre knowledge, yet addressed: how did the situation "you know the language I use" arise in the first place?
Let me, for once, answer a question I pose. For that, let me pretend that I know a lot about neuroscience.
Provided that the language in question was your first language, you knew none before you learned it. You learned it by association: you saw a ball, heard the word "ball", and hence you knew what it is called. Simultaneously, you experienced a sensory input. A combination of the ball's shape, sound, surface, and depending on how curious you were as a child, its smell and taste were now associated with the word "ball". This is, of course, a simplified account: some of us may have needed more than one explanation and/or lick to understand what a ball is and what attributes (I don’t want to say universals) it possesses. But in the end, we all gained the information. Not necessarily the same information, but more on that (and on the fact that the ball doesn’t actually possess any attributes) later. How was this information stored? Again, simplifying things, it was stored by your neurons. When you experienced the input, either from the ball or your parents saying "ball", those neurons were assigned (for the purpose of these ramblings, let’s say they were assigned at random) to the different kinds of input (provided that you have never experienced something ball-like previously), e.g., visual cues, audio cues, etc. As these kinds were more or less simultaneous, the freshly assigned neurons signaled to each other, thus strengthening the connection between them. Later, when you hear the word “ball”, the neuron responsible for the word "ball" is activated and fires at random in all directions to alert all whom it may concern. Depending on the strength of the connection, the signal either arrives and activates another neuron, thus reminding you that balls are round or taste yucky, or dies halfway, thus not reminding you that balls, for example, can fly. Even later, when you're introduced to a cylinder (your parents are math teachers, okay?), the sensory input for "round" doesn't get a new neuron assigned to it but instead uses the one already there. As you grow up, neurons are assigned to more "complex" inputs, like history dates, quotations, nonverbal cues, ideas like justice or freedom, etc. You have more than enough of them, so if an input is rather vague, a hundred or so may be assigned to it to cover all nuances that the idea consists of. The information is thus stored and can be retrieved, e.g., by direct sensory input.
TL;DR: A pseudoscientific model of the learning process that reduces the decrypting of code to biochemical and biophysical reactions is possible and needs no immaterial entity. I am not saying no mental entity exists: my delusions of expertise are not enough to design a model that reduces volition, choice, and desire to physical reactions without completely eliminating them. I am also not saying such a model is impossible (for example, the most basic desires, the four Fs – fighting, fleeing, feeding, and reproducing – are comparably easy to explain). All I’m saying is that understanding a meaning, whether new or already known, is a passive physical process that works by association.
If you're about to say "get your pseudoscience out of my metaphysics", you're completely right. Science studies material things. Metaphysics focuses on the immaterial. I wonder then, what happens if a metaphysical theory ascribes a function (meaning a task, not necessarily a purpose) to an immaterial entity and a scientific theory proves that this very function is being fulfilled by a material entity? I'm not saying this has already happened, I'm merely asking whether one of those two standpoints would have to be conceded or both of them could still be compatible.
Frankly, this reminds me a bit of the shift that some religious people (or so I've heard) have performed during the last several decades: from "God created the Earth" to "God caused the Big Bang". In a similar way, neuroscientific development pushes the immaterial mind back to "controlling that which we cannot yet explain fully, and maybe never will".
You sure do mention SI units a lot. What if a bit was accepted into their clique? Information can be measured, stored, changed, and transmitted by physical means. Any correspondence consists of information. Deriving meaning from this physical correspondence may be a mental process, but, as demonstrated above, it doesn't have to be. Speaking of bits, that's not a one-to-one correspondence we have here since "bit" has several meanings, several thoughts and objects all sharing the same word. How come communication is still possible?
It's possible to understand what others say without knowing their intent. If someone says "Trust me" then I can understand the meaning of their sentence without knowing they intend to backstab me. Vice versa, I can know their intent but still don't understand them because they're talking gibberish.
Then again, I still don't believe in the existence of final causes of most things, so what do I know?
I'm not going to quote the paragraph with the car because I'm sure you could recite the problem of universals and the theory of forms in your sleep. Realism may be a valid approach, but it's not the only one. Personally, I prefer coming up with own ideas to following an established school of thought (which often leads to my realizing I've rediscovered another wheel) because I don't like to be labeled. Hence, my ridiculously naive take on universals:
When I saw a second ball for the first time in my life, I was told this was still a ball despite possessing different attributes, like color or taste. I asked bewildered, "What madness is this? Wherefore doth one name apply to two distinct entities?" and threw a temper tantrum. Later I learned that some attributes, like the round shape, are very likely to apply to a ball; some may or may not apply, like the color red, and some never apply, like the ability to talk.
What you call tree-ness, dog-ness, ball-ness, or human-ness, are the sums of the attributes (I guess any sum of attributes can be viewed as another attribute) that are applied to the particulars. The attributes are weighted with a probability function, i.e., you learned that a tree is likely to have green leaves and be larger than you, but also that some trees have yellow leaves or are very small. Every new tree you experience alters the probability function, i.e., your expectation (hence seeing a tree with yellow leaves does not intrigue you as much in autumn as in spring). Every tree you experience that appears not very tree-like to you, you would call odd, or not a tree at all.
The reason I'm using "attribute" instead of "universal" is that the former aren't universal(s). Attributes without an entity to assign and comprehend them would be pointless. The entities in question are humans, and since every human possesses own notions and ideas, they may assign the attributes differently. Some attributes, like "2 meters tall", are rather precise and don't allow much freedom. Others, like "tall", could be used as one pleases. The attributes are not innate to the objects they're assigned to: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. They do not even describe the object, but the information we receive from it. One might go out on a limb and say they actually describe our classifications of this information (as we classify things as tall or tree-like to compare them to other things we have already classified), but that would make things needlessly complicated. The important part is that attributes are created and assigned by humans and are stored as information in our brains. I conclude that, being highly subjective and dependent on a human's knowledge instead of the object they're assigned to, attributes are not universals in any sense.
A person who sees a conifer for the first time would not believe it is a tree upon examining its "leaves", for these plants possess attributes that differ greatly from the attributes of the trees known to this person. People brought up in different cultures may find it difficult to understand each other even if they speak the same language: even if both cultures share the same definition of "tree", i.e., they apply very similar attributes with very similar weights to all object they call trees, they may disagree on the attributes of things like marriage, holiday, or crime. When you think about magical-girl-ness and I think about magical-girl-ness, the images in our minds are different because our knowledge about the subject (i.e., the weighted attributes we assigned and apply to the concept of magical girls) is different. If the immaterial forms did exist in our minds, and if the form in my mind was identical to the form in your mind, then we would not be able to disagree on that form. As you will certainly disagree with me on most of what I have written above and am yet to write below, I conclude that our forms of at least one thing are different, hence those forms need not be immaterial and cannot be the same for all humans. I would like to postulate that forms don't exist at all, but I will have to abstain from that since I just realized that forms exist as sums of weighted attributes.
What about the mind? The most intuitive approach is to put it into the brain, where it would be limited by location and extension in space and time, occupying ≤ the place the brain occupies. If the approach is correct, the mind is material. If it’s wrong, why?
Emphasis added for emphasis.
Pardon my bluntness, but that sounds slightly hypocritical to my ears. Exasperation is no excuse for hypocrisy.
No quote here because, to my bewilderment, nobody dared to mention this point. Humans are not the only animals capable of obtaining and evaluating information. Do other animals possess minds, as primitive as they may be? If no, how can you be sure? If yes, how do you determine which do and which don't? If either yes or no, at what point in evolution did the ancestors of Homo Sapiens obtain a mind, and how?
Fun fact: Before I started to write this comment, the idea of an immaterial entity, be it a mind or a form or whatever, seemed ridiculous to me. Now it doesn’t, and frankly, I do feel a bit smarter. Thank you.
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I was waiting for someone to make this objection, as it allows me to better illustrate the point I am making, and to define a term.
DNA is a chemical that interacts with other chemicals, resulting in proteins. Although science fiction writers and some alleged real scientists have imbued it with mystical powers, that is all DNA is.
The "code" of DNA is a mental object, an abstraction used to describe the DNA. In the same way, all mathematical formulae used to describe physical processes are abstractions. The code of the DNA is not in the DNA, but in the mind. But the mental object corresponds to the physical one.
In the same way, an algorithm is not in the computer. It is a mental object describing the operations of the computer. That is all an algorithm is, even though some alleged scientists have imbued algorithms with mystical properties and claimed absurdly that minds are really just algorithms that an inexplicable consciousness is somehow inside of.
This is a good question, and there are many other important questions behind it. Mortimer J. Adler has an excellent breakdown of the problems with modern theories of language in his Ten Philosophical Mistakes. To try to describe it very briefly, the mistakes are twofold: first, the error (from John Locke) of thinking that we are directly aware of only our own ideas, rather than of the object those ideas present to our consciousness. The second (from Locke again) is the error of holding that we can know nothing except what we directly apprehend by our senses. Obviously, we have words in our working vocabularies that denote things we have never directly perceived. Some of those words are parts of speech that refer to no perceptible object, such as any of the words in this sentence.
The shortest of answers is that we can use words to refer to all objects that our ideas can present to our consciousness, including not only perceptible objects or memories but also images and concepts.
This cannot be the case, because when I abstract, I strip away the particulars. I am not talking about this tree, but tree-ness as such.
To be perfectly blunt, the talk of probability functions appears to me to be a bit of hokum to dodge, rather than address, the actual issues involved. You have direct experience of your mind's ability to conceptualize. You do it all the time. But nobody has experienced this probability function. Even if something that could be described with a probability function is happening in the brain (which I doubt), it is certainly not what is going on in the mind.
Regardless of what is going on in your physical brain, this is not what is going on in your mind. You have direct experience of thought and of the immateriality of thought. You do not have experience of firing neurons. Of course neurons code for your thoughts; I never said otherwise. But "code" is not a physical property of neurons, or of anything, because codes are mental. Codes cannot be described or measured with the seven SI units.
The relationship of mind and brain is the relationship of form to matter. Think of a basketball, which is spherical in shape. The ball is "informed" by the sphere. You don't ask where sphere comes from or where it is located, and if the ball is deflated, you don't ask where it went.
I don't even know what this would mean. That which is not physical cannot be physically "put" anywhere. Your mind informs your brain, but it is not physically located in your brain, because it is not physically located.
I am not even sure how this could happen, and in fact I don't think it could, simply because metaphysics and physics are two different branches of philosophy. I have occasionally seen Materialists try to argue that this has happened; the last example I saw was phlogiston, but here the Materialist was mistaken, because phlogiston was a hypothesis of physics. Or geocentrism gets brought up, with was a theory of astronomy and a geometrical model, and a bewilderingly complex and sophisticated one at that. Metaphysics, however, deals with first principles. I cannot conceive of how any discovery of physics could challenge it.
Yes, of course. A horse, for example, clearly has mental powers of sense, appetite, memory, and imagination.
Living organisms are not machines. They differ from machines in that they are alive and machines are not. This is an easy and obvious distinction, and it is why I do not have much patience for those who want to reduce men to machines, or make machines men, or do whatever it is that is fashionable amongst the Materialists at the moment.
I apologize for my exasperation, but whenever I wind up in a philosophical discussion, my interlocutors are almost always unbearably rude. That particular chastisement was directed at someone else, not yourself, who in another thread responded to my arguments with sarcasm. Such attitudes tend to make these discussions laborious, but I am quite happy to debate with someone well-mannered like yourself.
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I think I begin to understand what you mean by "code". If I am not mistaken, at a point in Earth's history, let's say around the time the first algae appeared, the mental object "code" did not exist, for there were no minds around to house mental objects, yet the genetic code still existed. By "genetic code", I mean the causal connection between the structure of the DNA (information input) and the structure of the resulting protein (information output). If that physical connection did not exist back then, life would be impossible. If that connection and a mind to observe it and both inputs had existed, only then I could say that a code in the metaphysical sense existed, too, because every mental object requires a mind. The genetic code is thus not a code in the metaphysical sense. Am I correct?
Both examples of abstractions you gave are used to describe something. For some reason, I can’t think of an abstraction that is not being used to describe anything. Numbers describe relations of several sets of objects. Concepts like justice, freedom, safety etc. describe sets of causal processes. Memory, power, stamina etc. describe abilities, which are, again, sets of causal processes. The concept of chaos describes sets of un-causal processes, if I may word it that way. Is every abstraction used to describe something?
This is true, but this does not contradict anything I said before. Or at least, anything I meant. I believe words do not have to refer directly to perceptible objects; they have to refer to the attributes of sets of perceptible objects. If you applied this attribute to an imperceptible object, you might get something meaningful, like your sentence, or something paradoxical, like an invisible pink unicorn.
Let me clarify my point of view: the basic knowledge is empirical. It is the knowledge of the perceptible, the knowledge we receive through our senses. However, we can do with this knowledge as we please. What we do is: recombination and extrapolation (which can be reduced to recombination). We have seen a red ball and a blue wall. We can now recombine the attributes we have perceived to get a blue wall and a red ball. Thus, we can gain knowledge about things we have never experienced by our senses. Extrapolation works similarly: having seen a ball and two walls, we can imagine any number of balls and walls that we want to. As soon as we start observing and naming processes and relations, we gain even more empirical knowledge, i.e., more attributes to play with, that we can use to design and comprehend imperceptible objects. The knowledge of the perceptible is limited because only physical things are perceptible and the physical world, especially the tiny part of it that we can perceive, is limited. The knowledge of the imperceptible is theoretically unlimited, but since we have no way to perceive another’s thoughts (otherwise they would become perceptible), anything imperceptible whose attributes can not be applied to perceptible objects would not be able to be communicated from one human to another (compare trying to explain to a person who has been blind for all their life what green is), hence there can be no word for it. An exception: if the attributes are sufficiently similar to those that can be applied to perceptible objects or if the other human already possesses (for example, due to a successful recombination) the knowledge of an imperceptible object with the same or sufficiently similar attributes, than meaningful communication and word definition is still possible. As a bonus, this theory explains why metaphysics is so difficult to understand for beginners as you are very unlikely to understand something before experiencing it. Yes, experiencing metaphysics and philosophy is possible. It is made possible by all the provided examples, be they balls, walls, trees, or humans, as long as the listener/reader is already familiar with them.
I think there has been a misunderstanding. Of course tree-ness means no tree. Of course you strip away the particulars. But when you do so, what remains are the attributes of the particulars, more precisely, of all the particulars you have encountered so far. If I have never seen a palm tree in my life and I talk about tree-ness, I will mention the attributes of the trees I have encountered but not any attributes of palm trees that do not apply to the trees I know. If you talk about palm-tree-ness, you will only mention the attributes of palm trees, not of trees. And of course you will not mention any particulars. If you also don’t mention any attributes, then what will you talk about?
Must have been unfortunate wording on my part. What I mean by “probability function” (I guess I should have simply called it probability) is the weight you assign to an attribute. The degree to which it is expected. The degree to which its absence would strike you as odd. How probable it is, given a particular, that it possesses this very attribute. It’s “calculated” or estimated by dividing the number of particulars with it by the total number. More precisely, the total number of particulars that share at least one attribute: their name. If you encounter a tree, you are expecting it to be called a tree because all trees you have encountered before were called trees. If you encounter a human, you expect they are either male or female. You would find it odd if they turned out to be neither. If you encounter a pony, you would expect it not to be able to talk. If it does, you would find that odd. If you encounter another talking pony afterwards, you would not find that as odd as the first time, proving that the probability function, i.e., your expectation, has changed. If you know what the word “odd” (or strange, bizarre, peculiar…) means, you have experienced your own expectation. In general, people expect things to adhere to the norm, which may also be the average. This norm is subjective because different people may have different expectations of the same particular. This norm may also be called a form, or a sum of weighted attributes. It can not be a sum of unweighted attributes because many attributes, like colors, are mutually exclusive. If all the balls you have seen were completely red or completely blue, you would not expect to see a green, purple, or red-blue (dual-colored) ball. A ball that is completely red and completely blue at the same time can’t exist. And when you think of ball-ness, you would not think of green, red, or blue, but of maybe red, maybe blue, definitely round. And not of any particular ball.
(I might want to visit a psychologist. I sure do seem to have a strange fascination with balls.)
If I may ask a silly question: what is going on in my mind?
To draw some parallels: I have the experience of the color red, but I do not have the experience of electromagnetic waves giving their energy to an atom or molecule that in turn gives this energy off as another electromagnetic wave. I have the experience of a shout, but I do not have the experience of the particles of a medium being compressed by a sound wave travelling forward. I have the experience of sweetness, but I do not have the experience of chemicals binding to receptors that change their conformation, thus allowing a previously disallowed reaction. Does this mean that senses can sense (pardon my syntax) immaterial things, like colors or thoughts, but not material things? It is a question of the point of view, nothing more. From a macroscopic point of view, we see that which is immaterial, we see the big picture. We see thoughts and concepts, feelings and sensations. From the microscopic point of view, we see molecules, atoms, electrons etc. interacting with each other. Why, then, should we need a code to switch the points of view? This is not quantum physics where observation changes outcome. What we see remains the same no matter how we look at it and thus, the big picture can be reduced to physical processes.
I think the most obvious counterargument is this: I have confused cause and effect for the same thing. The immaterial is actually not the physical, but its effect. The code is therefore needed to connect cause and effect. Then the only question that remains is “Where did this code come from?”
So the mind is an attribute of the brain in the same way the spherical shape is an attribute of a basketball. Hm. That certainly is an elegant solution, and a simple one at that. Unfortunately, too simple to work, i.e., to be compatible with my attribute theory. If we assume that only brains may have the attribute “mind” assigned to them, i.e., that there is nothing which has the form of a mind and at the same time is not a brain, then we find that the comparison falls flat because there are a lot of spherical things that are not basketballs. Thus, the relation between brain and mind can not be the same as the relation between basketball and sphere.
“Informs your brain” is rather vague, methinks. In fact, if the mind is a mental object, then how is it possible for it to influence or be influenced by a physical object? I’m trying to understand the foundations of your logic, but I can’t think of an answer.
Sense and memory do not necessarily need a mind. I can’t say the same about imagination (on the other hand, I’m not absolutely sure horses actually do possess imagination), and I have to admit I only have a very blurry conception of what you mean by appetite. But what about my other questions? How primitive does an animal have to be for us to say “it clearly has no mind”? I assume the only way to determine this is by observation of the animal’s behavior in various situations. Still, I doubt there is a definite limit beyond which the animals do not possess any trace of intellect. It’s more likely that the observations will yield a “slope” on which the animals can be placed according to their degree of intellect, i.e., the development of their minds. In this case, some animals would clearly possess minds, some would clearly not, and some would be in-between. My last question is then, what physical process caused animals to “evolve” minds and when?
Thanks again. Once, I’ve found that I am more likely to be rude whenever I am positively certain about something. Since then, I attempt to enter discussions with a doubting mindset and openness to disagreement. Generally speaking, I think the world would be a better place if people stopped trying to lecture each other and started trying to learn from each other.
(Sorry, I just wanted to end the comment on the cheesiest note possible.)
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It's a rather thorny question, and I doubt I'm well-versed enough to give you the best answer. Every existent thing, or at least every existent thing that is material, has the metaphysical co-principles of act and potency, form and matter. DNA considered in itself has a form, the form of DNA, and forms are not material. Whether forms can exist without a mind to contain them is a reasonable question, one philosophers have addressed, but for which I do not have a good answer at the moment. At any rate, everything that exists has a form, but not all existent things are known to the human intellect; but the forms are known to the mind of God.
When we are describing DNA as a "code," we are abstracting from the DNA and describing it in the abstract, much as we do when we describe a physical process with mathematics. Mathematics is not physics, but deals with abstractions; nonetheless, mathematics can describe the things of physics, because there is a correspondence between the physical and the mental.
I chose my words poorly and was unclear in what I said. What I meant is this: if it is true that words can refer only to perceptible objects and their attributes, then language could consist of nothing but nouns and adjectives. Words like "the" or "is" or "in" or "of" or "or" refer to no perceptible objects, but to abstract concepts. Only one part of speech, the noun, can refer to perceptible objects, and it too can refer to objects that are not perceptible, including abstractions or imaginary beings.
I agree that one can learn some nouns by association of word and perceptible object. However, "association," again, is not itself a physical object or a physical relationship, but a mental one. Furthermore, only some nouns can be learned this way. The rest of language cannot be. Even adjectives cannot be learned except by abstraction: if you hold up a green tile and say "green," I can understand you to mean the color and not the tile only if I perform a mental act of abstraction, abstracting the color from the physical object and leaving the tile itself behind. Similarly with verbs: if you pantomime running and say "run," I can understand you to mean the motion and not you yourself only if I abstract the motion and leave you behind.
I do not think we are much in disagreement on this point. It is an axiom of my school that all knowledge begins in the senses. What you are calling "extrapolation" I am calling abstraction. But later on in your paragraph, you become loose in your language: you are describing as empirical things that are not empirical.
The empirical is that which is directly perceived by my senses. I have a box on my desk: I see the side of it that faces me. I apprehend that side empirically; the rest of the box I do not seen, and my knowledge of it is not empirical. I know, however, that the box has a backside, not by empirical knowledge, but by principle: I know that objects that extend in three dimensions cannot fail to have backsides. I "intend" (am conscious of) the box as a unity, but I empirically observe only one side of it.
If I perceive a red ball, that is a particular mental act, a particular idea, a percept. If I put the ball away physically but bring it before my mind's eye, that is another idea, an image. If I abstract the redness from the ball, that is another act, a concept, redness as such. If I then apply blueness to the image of the ball (having abstracted blueness from the wall I empirically observed earlier), I have created a new image, a concrete particular that I have never observed and that may not exist, but is in my mind as imaginary object.
In all this process, only the perception of the ball and wall are rightly called empirical. My knowledge started with empirical observation, but I built from there by means of the powers of my mind.
The illustration of the difficulty of describing color to someone blind does not work as an analogy, because you are there trying to describe a sense impression to someone who lacks the sense. But we have many words for, and say many things about, things that are not approachable with the senses. Justice is an intelligible concept, but I have never seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted justice. I cannot describe it in terms of its length, mass, or candlepower, as I could if it were a material object. Justice is not material; it is a concept.
No, on the contrary, it is the particulars I am eliminating and the essence I am abstracting in this case. Any definition of a thing consists of a genus and a specific difference. If your definition of "tree" does not include palm trees, it is only because you lack knowledge. The idea in your head is false.
But I honestly have a hard time imagining anyone having this trouble; it does not sound like real human experience. Someone who has never seen a palm tree before is not dumbfounded by it; he considers it a bizarre or exotic tree, not an object he doesn't know how to classify.
This brings us, I think, to the source of my exasperation and admitted lack of patience: the obvious deficiency of an epistemology based on computer science. This may indeed be a correct abstract description of a computer program designed to "recognize" (of course no computer or program actually recognizes anything, since it is not conscious) various objects, but it does not describe the powers of mind, as anyone will find who simply sits down and reflects on his own consciousness and its acts. You are here proposing that a man's mind is secretly performing awesome mathematical calculations behind his back and without his knowledge. That is preposterous. If this were so, I should be a lot better at math, having this powerhouse calculator in my head.
In any case, this epistemology, though plainly false to facts, actually defeats the Reductive Materialist position that the LessWrongers espouse, because mathematical calculations are themselves abstractions. If the mind is really performing this awesome math, then the mind is necessarily immaterial, just as it is necessarily immaterial if it is to perform any other abstraction.
Since I only set out to defeat the Materialism of the LessWrongers, my argument could rest here: it is impossible to describe the mind as if it were material, because one must inevitably appeal to abstract and therefore immaterial things, such as mathematical calculations. All these attempts to describe the mind as a calculator in order to evade the conclusion that the immaterial exists are ultimately self-defeating.
A form is not a sum of weighed attributes, but the essence or identity of the thing. If I met a talking pony, I would indeed call that odd, but I would not call it not-a-pony, because the speech is accidental, not essential.
That's not a silly question. That question is the basic question of epistemology or psychology. All the great philosophical questions are the ones asked by children.
To be very brief, you have powers of sense, appetite, memory, imagination, intellect, and will. There may be others that are not occurring to me off the top of my head. By the senses you perceive sensible objects. By the concupiscible appetite you move toward that you consider good and avoid that you consider bad. By the irascible appetite you fight or flee danger. By memory you recall what you have perceived by the senses. By the imagination you apprehend concrete particulars not present to the senses. By the abstract intellect you abstract, as I've discussed at length. The will is the rational appetite, which is ordered toward good generally.
I'm afraid your conclusion here is invalid. Your second sentence in the quote is a non sequitur, unrelated to the first sentence.
What you are hinting at here is sometimes framed as the "two desks problem." Normally, it is set up thusly: I am sitting at a desk that appears to be solid, but physics tells me it is mostly empty space and what I am actually encountering when I contact its surface is not a solid object but an electron cloud, etc.
My answer is that the two desks problem is not, in fact, a problem. Physics does not tell us that the desk is not solid; rather, what physics describes is the very phenomenon of solidity. Similarly, physics does not tell us that there is no color; rather, it describes the very phenomenon of color. The physicist does not tell us our senses are illusions; rather, he tells us what it is we are sensing.
Your senses perceive only the perceptible, only material objects. Your senses do not perceive thoughts, of you or of others.
An inanimate object moved by external forces, such as a motion detector, is not "sensing" in the sense of a horse sensing. A disc with bumps on it that can react with a needle or other object in such a way as to produce via a machine lights or sounds that a man perceives and interprets as information does not have a "memory" in the sense that a mind has a memory.
The difference is that the horse is alive and has a mind. The motion detector and disc are inanimate and have no powers of mind, including sense and memory. They are moved only by external forces.
This comes back to the basic error of which I have accused LessWrongers, that of treating metaphors literally: a computer is not literally an electronic brain, nor does it literally think. A motion sensor does not literally sense, nor does a memory card literally contain memories.
I do not know if it can really be said that any animal has no mind at all. I think probably any animal has some kind of sense and appetite, at least.
I do not think the abstract human intellect could come about by secondary causes, and I seriously doubt if the minds of lower animals could, either. The answer, then, would be that they are produced by the primary cause; they are the direct creations of God. Regarding human minds, I hold this as a matter of faith; regarding other minds, I hold it as a matter of opinion. This, incidentally, is not a denial of biological evolution, only a denial that all that is observed of biological organisms could come about purely by secondary causes.
This is why I call LessWrong a cargo cult: it is the belief that if all the parts are put in place, a miracle will happen and an intellect will appear, or else (depending on which LessWronger I'm talking to at the moment), the parts will act as if they have an intellect without possessing one, which is even more absurd.
The difficulty is understandable and one I used to have myself before, after two years of study, things began to click, though I don't think I was ever able to formulate the problem as plainly as you just did. This goes back to the "gravy over a potato" parody I quoted before: the Materialist always wants to know the immaterial mind's material properties.
The answer is this: physical things are described in terms of efficient and material causes, whereas mental things are described in terms of formal and final causes. The one is not reducible to the other. The mind does not "move" the body in the sense of an efficient cause. Rather, the mind is the form of the body in the sense of a formal cause, and it "moves" the body in the sense of a final cause: that is, the body moves toward an end (an intent, a purpose, a final cause) of the mind. The efficient causes of the body's movement can be described in terms of muscular contractions and electrical signals and whatnot, but the final cause is the purpose for which it moves, and the purpose is determined by the will. I am of course speaking of voluntary movements; twitches and such are not purposeful, at least in the sense of having conscious intent.
I much appreciate it and I am enjoying the discussion. Too often, I encounter snidery, and I have a very bad habit of meeting it with umbrage and boasting, as I did here and on the earlier thread, and for which I am now abashed. Also, I will not deny that I consider the contents of the LessWrong website to be nakedly evil, so I often respond to it with more passion than is seemly. I also tend, in so doing, to overstate my credentials: I am a humble student with much to learn.
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Material properties are not limited to the seven SI units. Sweet Celestia, why do you make these things up? You can make statements about material that involve no units at all. Topological statements spring to mind. But also, things you don't know how to express in terms of the units, even if they could in principle - "This is a USB-A connector" is a valid statement about a material object, and one that someone can validly make without knowing the specification of a USB-A connector!
'X encodes Y' is not a complete statement on its own. 'X is the Z-encoding of Y' is. Also, 'A is capable of Z-encoding' and 'B is capable of Z-decoding' are also - and those ARE physical properties, not reliant on any particular physical thing.
IOW: stop focusing so much on the coded content. Focus on the coding and decoding mechanisms.
>> You could not derive the meaning of my words by measuring the atoms in your computer monitor, nor by measuring the atoms in my brain.
This claim? False in principle (though in practice we lack the measurement precision to even provide data to the beyond-our-capabilities computations we'd need to do)
The atoms in your brain, following the rules of matter, are the cause of your reactions to the words on the screen (you should accept this unless you think that your mind is going out and pushing on the atoms in your brain, to which my response would be that that makes your mind another material thing). In some cases, like this series of comments, the effects would be hard to find because they would go into another encoding.
But often it wouldn't. Do you ever do something not encoded in response to something encoded? Or form an abstraction in response to a non-encoded input? Associating words and things is how people with no common language teach each other - and these hypothetical brain- (and environment)-simulating folks would be able to do just that. So, you don't even need to decode the brain (which btw is encoded in respect to the inputs and outputs of the brain, which convert the brain signals into readily-measured action) to figure out the meanings of words. Babies couldn't learn to talk if that were impossible.
Example: Stop signs in Cuba don't look at all like our stop signs. If one were to examine a bunch of intersections in Cuba without knowing what their stop signs look like, one could eventually figure out what they are. It would take longer if you didn't have the notion of stop sign. You can definitely firm that up if you have the ability to move stop signs around (as one would be able to if one were simulating your brain and environment).
Even if the responses remained entirely within code and you haven't even begun to crack the internal representation, you can figure out what some messages are with only the extremely limited information that what you're seeing is indeed a message (which, as noted above, is something you can deduce even without knowing the code) (and if something is sufficiently out of place and has enough structure, it might be a reasonable guess that it is a message). You can't do that with arbitrary messages, of course, only 'primer strings'.
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I'll ask right away: what is a form and why? It is surely not identical to "shape", for air is material but has no shape. How do we know in the first place that forms exist? I was under the assumption that the proof of forms lies in Realism, i.e., that if I didn't accept Realism as valid, I would have no reason to believe in the existence of forms. Moreover, why shouldn't immaterial things have a form? If we take two numbers that are different and yet both numbers, is it not their number-ness that they share?
First of all, I may not be a native speaker, but I refuse to accept that the word "the" refers to anything at all. As for other words, they can refer to imperceptible objects, and they do. My claim, however, is that every word can refer to an attribute of a perceptible object (or sets thereof, or sets of sets, etc.), which is where this word derives its meaning from. Imagine you're explaining to a child what "is" means. You would show them a big house, make sure they know the words "big" and "house", and say "The house is big." You would not tell them "The mind is mental" and expect them to learn the meaning of "is" from your sentence. Of course, "is" is such a basic word that it is unlikely any child would learn the words "big" and "house" before "is", but that is my fault and not a fault of the theory. For the word in, show them a man in a house. For the word of, several examples will be necessary because it has several different meanings. All prepositions, verbs, etc. can be used in a purely empirical context, which is how you would explain their meaning to a child. The core idea is thus: every word that can be successfully communicated and whose meaning can be validated (if not for these two conditions, consensus on the meaning of words and verbal discussions would be impossible) has to refer to attributes that can apply to perceptible objects. Of course, they can additionally apply to imperceptible objects.
Ironically, it's the nouns that give me the most headaches here. Many nouns refer to imperceptible objects on the far end of a long chain of recombinations or abstractions, which is why it might be extremely difficult if not outright impossible (realistically impossible due to limited knowledge, but still hypothetically possible) to find the exact attributes the noun refers to and reduce them to attributes that can apply to perceptible objects (i.e., it is very difficult to use those words in a purely empirical context, not least because you would need thousands of pages of context). This is why I still have no idea what you mean by "form" and would struggle to define "metaphysics".
If association, in the sense in which it is used in "learning by association", can be reduced to "simultaneity", which I postulate, then it is a physical relationship as the degree of simultaneity can be measured physically.
My previous examples on learning were shortened. Of course, a single green tile does not tell you whether it is its color, shape, or temperature that is green. The proper learning occurs after I show you a green ball, a green horse, a green tree, a green human, a lot of green objects with varying attributes. Only if the only attribute they have in common is their color (of course, any attributes that are necessarily for an object being green will be also present, like opaqueness), then you will be able to understand what green means. If I show you a green cat, a green dog, and a green horse, you might be left wondering whether green (a word which I say every time I show you something) refers to their color or the number of legs, provided all of them had the same number of legs.
If I may mention neurons again, after you have seen a lot of green objects, you will have a strong connection between the neurons for the sensory input of the color green and the word green. You will have a weak connection between the neurons for the word green and the sensory input of a tile's shape because the "tile neuron" has only been activated once simultaneously to the "word green neuron". Whether you call it abstraction or learning by simultaneity does not change the fact that no mental objects or acts are required to gain the information about the meaning of “green”.
Could you please point me to my mistake? I can't find any instance of wrong terminology in that paragraph.
Where do you derive this principle from? Obviously, from the countless objects that you have observed that possessed the attributes of the box that you know (extends in three dimension, for example). All of them also possessed the attribute in question (has a backside), therefore you expect the box to have a backside. If you meet a pony, you expect it not to talk. You can’t say you know it doesn’t talk. If all boxes you have seen had a red backside, and you see a new box without seeing its backside, would you know its backside is red (despite it being blue), or would you only expect it? Even if you use essential and accidental attributes (something which I expect you to do; surely I can’t know you will do so) to make a distinction between “has a backside” and “is red”, you still cannot deny that for a person who only saw red boxes in their life, the red color would be as essential to a box as its backside. Of course, the reason is that the idea of a box this person has is false, i.e., not identical to the idea of a box that a majority of people have (I expect you to give me a better definition of false), but that only supports my previous point that such ideas are highly subjective. Until that person sees a non-red box, they will not doubt their idea of a box is true.
I might be under the wrong impression, but every principle is based on empirical observation. Without it, no principle would be possible. Why is then a principle not empirical, if empirical observation is the only way to create and validate it?
The parenthesis illustrates the very idea I am trying to formulate. For a successful abstraction, knowledge is required. This knowledge must be empirical, i.e., stem from observations of the material. No matter how much you abstract, you cannot “create” knowledge, you can only recombine it. You can abstract blue and yellow, but you will not know green until you see it empirically. Your senses give you attributes. Your abstractions give you sums of attributes (which are attributes themselves), but all attributes present in an abstraction had to come from somewhere. This somewhere can be either a sense or another abstraction. Ultimately, all knowledge, all attributes can be “broken down” to attributes of perceptible objects that were acquired by senses. I’m not saying this analysis is humanly possible, but maybe a deity could do it in the same way it can know the form of every thing.
How would you then describe justice, preferably to somebody who lacks any idea of it?
I think I require an example. Earlier you wrote about thinking and talking about tree-ness. A paragraph written about tree-ness would greatly help me understand what you mean by "essence".
This is a question of the degree of bizarreness, i.e., the deviation from the subjective norm. Let us imagine somebody who has never seen anything frog-like but has encountered many chickens. This person may be dumbfounded by seeing a mountain chicken and learning what it's called because that surely doesn't look like a chicken. If you meet a talking horse, you would say it's a horse. A talking horse with a horn, or a pair of wings, or an unusual color, well... I could pile up un-horse-like attributes (two heads, digits, carnivore, fire breath etc.) until you're sure that whatever it is, it's not a horse. Not a bizarre or exotic horse, but not a horse at all. Provided you have never seen something similar, you would not be able to classify this being (unless you make a new class for it).
Also, of course hypothetical scenarios do not sound like real human experience: their point is to examine a subset of reality by removing a majority of it. Real human experience is far too complicated to examine while keeping all the innumerable influences intact. Hence you get people with unrealistic sets of information.
First, dividing two numbers is not an awesome calculation. It's a fairly simple one. Your brain could be viewed as a powerhouse calculator (as far as I know, a computer that could match the brain's abilities still hasn't been built; no, comparing a brain to a computer does not mean one is a subset of the other), but not because it is capable of basic arithmetic operations. Also, what I'm saying is not preposterous and it doesn't become preposterous only because it sounds like something a LWer might say.
Second, one of the reasons exaggerations should be kept out of serious discussions is their side-effect of sacrificing one’s own viewpoint for showiness. Your quote pretends to assume the mind is like a calculator and proceeds to place the mind in your head despite your previous insistence it can not be placed or located anywhere.
With that out of the way, take an item and throw it upwards. While it's around its peak, guess when it will land. You will find your guess was not off by orders of magnitude, as long as your guess was serious. If you see a moving object and attempt to predict its trajectory or when it will arrive at or near a certain point in space, you are using math. Without math, such a prediction would be impossible. With it, you can quickly determine whether you need to duck or not. The calculations are not even that secret: you get to learn the result, after all. You don't need to know the formula because knowing it doesn't increase your chances of dodging, but calculating a trajectory as fast as possible does.
On the subject of secrecy, you are only aware of a tiny amount of all the sensory input you receive. Most of what you sense, the brain considers "meh" and ignores for the sake of not overloading itself with too much information. Not to mention that you're not exactly aware of all sensory input while sleeping; the input is still there because you awake when you hear a loud noise. The brain (if you prefer, you may call it the mind, although since these are biological and not philosophical processes, brain ought to be the correct term) hides a lot from you, so why should it bother you with the calculations it performs to find out whether a talking horse is the norm or something to worry about?
You cannot have an expectation without probability (if you expect something, you presume it is probable), and you cannot have probability without math. If you know the meaning of odd, if you can dodge an item thrown your way, if you can hope to catch a soon-to-depart train by sprinting towards it, then you brain can, indeed, perform mathematical operations.
I can think of two alternatives you might prefer. Instead of using specific formulae or estimates thereof, let the brain merely compare current inputs with previous ones. In the case of oddity, neurons that fire simultaneously and have a weak connection tell you that you have discovered something new, a combination of attributes that you have not seen before. A strong but not activated connection is a sign of your expectations not having been met, therefore a lack of signal on one end of a strong connection would mean an oddity.
Another alternative requires you to accept that your brain can count. Not necessarily divide, but at least add. I mean, you are able to discern “a lot” from “few” even if you haven’t invented numbers yet. With the less-awesome-than-you-think power of addition, you can classify attributes into “things I’ve perceived on a lot of occasions” and “things I’ve perceived on few occasions”, which is just a primitive way to estimate probabilities.
Once again, it seems we are talking about the same thing but only disagree because I am not using the proper terminology. If you distinguish between accidental and essential attributes, you admit that some attributes are more important or more required than others for a proper definition, like "this is a pony," to take place. (See my example above, where I add more and more attributes to a horse until the poor thing becomes completely unrecognizable.) However, it is obvious that your "essential" (attribute must exist, provided the particular is of class X, because... why exactly?) does not mean my "100% expectation" (attribute must exist, provided the particular is of class X, because 100% of all particulars of class X possessed this attribute) because the "non-talking" attribute is accidental and 100% expected. If I meet a horse with a 0% expected attribute, like speech, I will compare other attributes, like number of limbs/heads, shape of the body, color of coat, behavior, diet etc. to find whether the attributes I applied to the horses I met before can be applied to this particular. If most of them can, I can call it a horse, otherwise it cannot be a horse. If it is a horse, then speech will not be a 0% expectation attribute any longer. But how do you determine which attributes are essential and which are accidental? If possible, I would like a more elaborate answer than "essential attributes are parts of the essence and accidental ones aren't". How do we gain the knowledge of a form (form and essence are the same thing, right?) of the objects we perceive? How do you sort accidental attributes? Surely the coat color is more accidental than the ability to speak.
Also, it may have been a typo, but pedantic as I am, I have to point out the word I used is weighted, not weighed.
I'm slightly baffled at your terminology. How can an imagined object be concrete instead of abstract?
Could you explain my mistake? You have claimed the relation between the brain and the mind is identical to the relation between a basketball and a sphere. My response was: the relation between the brain and the mind possesses the attribute "doubly implied". It possesses this attribute because there can be no brain without a mind and there can be no mind without a brain. The relation between a basketball and a sphere possesses the attribute "firstly implied". It possesses this attribute because there can be no basketball without a sphere but there can be a sphere without a basketball. (I would call an attribute of the relation between a sphere and a basketball "secondly implied".) As one relation possesses at least one attribute the other does not possess, the relations cannot be identical.
Regardless of the above, "spherical" refers to an object's geometrical shape, while "mind" certainly doesn't. "Spherical" also cannot refer to a form/essence, because there are other spherical objects apart from basketballs, hence a sphere does not resemble basketball-ness. Does “mind” resemble brain-ness?
Similarly, physics doesn’t tell us there are no thoughts but it describes the phenomenon of thoughts. Thoughts can’t be measured physically, firing neurons can. The wavelength can be measured physically, but redness can’t. A concentration is physical, a taste is not. Physics explains the connection between electron clouds and solidity, wavelength and color, concentration and taste, neurons and thoughts. You said that thoughts cannot be perceived by the senses, but you never showed your proof.
Quoting myself:
Your arguments refute the idea that unliving matter can possess sense or memory. I have never postulated such an idea. In fact, I couldn't agree with you more. Machines can react or store information on a medium in the way that they have been programmed, but that's all. What I meant, and what I described in my first comment, is the fact that sense and memory need a brain. Intellect, will, etc. may require a mind (as I can't come up with a model that could disprove that), but sense and memory do not. I am not saying these can't be the mind's tasks. I'm saying they don't have to.
If sense is a prerequisite to the ability to adapt one's actions to the surroundings (as without sense, you would not be able to perceive your surroundings in the first place, thus, you would not be able to adapt), then even bacteria would have a mind. After all, why should only those whom biologists have labeled "animals" have minds? Plants sense sunlight and move their organs towards it or hide them from it according to their appetite. If you're only going with animals (for a reason that I would love to know) then the idea that brains are required for minds is dismissed courtesy of sponges, who don't even have nervous tissue and thus can’t possess neurons, thoughts, or their nebulous middleman, the code. Or is that idea wrong anyway?
Minds could be seen as a proof of a deity's existence; that is certain. However, if your theory doesn’t present another explanation for the existence of an entity (a mind) whose existence it postulates, it is not compatible with the idea that a deity’s existence can not be proven or disproven, which I hold to be an axiom for every philosophy that isn’t supposed to end up as theology (or anti-theology) and a part of the very definition of “deity”.
Huh. I always thought all physical or mental objects had all four causes. Not to mention that if the mind is the body’s formal cause, then it is the body that is described by the formal cause and not the mind. But now I wonder: a formal cause is mental, thus it has its own formal cause, which can be repeated ad infinitum. Are causes supposed to lead to an infinite recursion?
The information I take from this is that there is an interaction between the mind and the body. I assume this interaction is mental, like those between thoughts or concepts. But if the existence of the mind influences the behavior of the body, then it is hypothetically (for we can’t realistically observe a normal and a “mind-less” human and compare them) possible to prove the mind’s existence by scientific observation, thus ripping it from the realm of metaphysics. Or am I just pouring gravy?
Don’t get me wrong: I definitely believe in the existence of abstract objects. I only find it hard to imagine an abstraction influencing a physical body in a way different from being available to that body as information (like a formula or a memory). Maybe I should just wait a couple of years.
What about reflexes? They may be not conscious, but they sure have a purpose: to get us out of danger faster than we realize we are in danger. If the final cause of the mind includes keeping the body healthy, unconscious, i.e., involuntary, movements are necessary. Or are reflexes for once actual physical actions without a mental component? Some of them are signals that don’t even enter the brain.
If you forgive me an attempt at a joke, it sure looks like you’ve got a real crusade going on.
As for myself, I’ve visited the site twice, and twice have I been thoroughly disappointed. I think their community and mindset could be best described by Caesar:
Apparently, once again you have left our discussion with nary a word. This is unfortunate, but not unexpected.
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I came back after 2 weeks hoping to find a brilliant reply, but nada.
Well, he hasn't got an obligation to respond.
> To put that another way, you cannot learn philosophy unless you first learn humility.
Get a mirror, Mr. Davidson.
You know less about reductive materialism than you think.
To both of you: I am sorry for the late reply. I felt bogged down and needed a breather.
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Material properties are measurable with the seven SI units. And this is most certainly not something I made up. Check your science textbook.
To say a thing is a USB-A connector is to describe its formal cause. "USB-A connector" is not a material property. Its length, its mass, its location, and the number of neutrons in the atoms of its substance are material properties, but its identity as an artifact is not.
Those are not physical properties. Physical properties are things such as mass, length, candlepower, moles of substance. Not "encoding." Encoding is not a physical property no matter how you state it. You cannot observe and measure a code, because it is mental, not physical.
A code is a description of a relationship between symbol and referent. The relationship between symbol and referent is not physical; the words on your screen do not have any physical connection to the ideas they express. If the relationship between the two were physical, there would need to be yet another relationship between the physical symbol, the physical relationship, and physical idea. And if that relationship were physical, there would need to be yet another relationship, and so on ad infinitum.
If this were correct, then you are not talking to a man at all, but to a meat machine moved by blind external forces. Why are you trying to argue with a machine?
You cannot behave consistently with the principles you express. You are reasoning with me as if I were capable of judgment and free choice and could assent to your propositions or reject them based on the soundness of your arguments, but what you are arguing is that I am an inanimate object moved by purposeless deterministic forces. If I assent to your argument, I assent to the impossibility of assent.
It is an argument, in other words, that eliminates both the arguer and the interlocutor. Since you have the direct personal experience of making judgments and choices every day, clearly any theory that does not allow for judgments and choices is a false theory. You should find a theory that fits reality instead of trying to cram reality into your theory. Real experience of real people does not allow for reductive, deterministic physicalism, a theory suitable only for a man who never gets up from behind his desk.
Nonetheless, you are getting closer to making a serious metaphysical argument. What you are trying to state is the metaphysical principle that only like moves like. That is, if something moves something else, the cause of the movement must share some property with the thing moved, so if a physical object is moved, the efficient cause of its movement must also be physical.
I do not dispute the principle. An analysis of the efficient causes of bodily movements would find nothing contrary to the laws of physics. But the mind does not move the body as efficient cause, but as final cause. Minds are described in terms of final and formal causes, which cannot be reduced to material and efficient causes. If a man gets up and walks across the room, you could describe his movements in terms of efficient causes. That would tell you how he moved. But to know why he moved, you would have to ask him; that is, you would have to know his mind.
What do you think this illustrates? The relationship between the stop sign and the concept of "stop" is mental, not physical. The stop sign is an arbitrary symbol.
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This is a good question. No, form is certainly not shape. The form, or formal cause, is the identity of the thing. It is impossible for a thing to be without being something.
You have direct experience of the existence of forms because you are able to identify things. But here is a proof of their existence:
Take two dogs. You are able to see that they are both dogs, and yet they are not the same dog. Both being dogs, they must have something in common that makes them dogs. Now, the thing they have in common cannot be something material, because material things are limited by location and extension. If it were a material object that they shared, each could have only a part of that object inside itself, but that is absurd, because each dog is a whole dog. So what they share that makes them dogs cannot be something physical; it must be immaterial. They share "dogginess," that is, the form of a dog.
Your own strained example shows your theory to be false. No, not all words refer to empirical objects. "The" is not meaningless; it is a definite article and has a very specific meaning in the English language, but it refers to no empirical object. The rules of grammar and the relationships of words are not empirical objects. Words themselves are not empirical objects, but mental ones. "Word" does not refer to an empirical object (because if it did, you could point to word, measure it, tell me its location), but to an abstract concept. Abstractions are by definition not empirical, because they can refer to more than one empirical object, or to no empirical object at all. You cannot even communicate without falsifying your premises.
Neither you nor anyone else has learned every word he knows by having a physical object presented to him along with the word. Even if you had, although the duration of the object's appearance to your senses and the duration of the pronunciation of the word are indeed measurable, the relationship between word and object is not. Empirically, you only hear a sound and observe an object. That is it. That is all that is going on in the realm of empirical observation. You make a mental association between the word and the object. The association is not a physical connection between the object and the word.
You want to reduce everything to the empirical, but you do not seem to understand what "empirical" means. It means directly apprehended by your senses, and that is all that it means. You cannot empirically observe a "relationship."
Quoting you: "As soon as we start observing and naming processes and relations, we gain even more empirical knowledge, i.e., more attributes to play with, that we can use to design and comprehend imperceptible objects."
Images in the mind are not empirical observations. When you abstract properties from objects you have observed with the senses and apply them to other objects (such as combining animal parts in your mind to make a chimera), what you are doing is not empirical observation, but abstraction and imagination. Empirical refers only to that which is directly apprehended by the senses.
Whether the knowledge of so basic a principle is really derived from observation or is something known intuitively is a nut probably too tough for either of us to crack, but I don't think that's relevant to our argument anyway. Even if this knowledge begins in the senses, I have made it a principle by abstracting from observation, and abstractions are immaterial by definition, and since the mind can apprehend abstractions, the mind is necessarily immaterial also.
Principles are not material objects. There is no material object sitting in a field or in a museum somewhere that we can point to and call "the Law of Gravity" or "a finite whole is larger than its parts," or "objects with extension have backsides." These are universal principles; they apply to everything, and are therefore not material objects, which are limited by location and extension.
I do not think we have any dispute on this point. Knowledge begins in the senses, but it develops through abstraction, reasoning, and judgment.
If you want a precise definition of a tree, ask a botanist. Or ask Webster: "a usually tall plant that has a thick, wooden stem and many large branches." The definition, like every definition, has a genus ("plant") and a specific difference ("usually tall . . . [with] thick, wooden stem and many large branches"). The definition is abstract because it refers to no specific tree, but to every tree.
By essence I mean formal cause, by which I mean what the thing is in itself.
The formal cause of a tree is tree-ness, that it is a tree.
The material cause of the tree is wood, sap, chlorophyll, etc.
The efficient cause of the tree is the seed from which it grew, the soil and air from which it took nutrition, the sunlight, and so forth and so on.
The final cause of the tree is to grow, to take nutrition, to be strong and healthy.
Formal cause (or essence) is what it is; material cause is what it's made of; efficient cause is what made it; final cause is what it's for.
You are playing a word game here. A mountain chicken is not a chicken. The name is deliberately whimsical. If a man really mistakes a frog for a chicken, he is in error. If he mistakes a palm tree for something other than a tree, he is in error. He can acquire knowledge by learning the truth of the case.
If I do not know the formula, then I am not doing math. Ducking a ball coming for my head does not require me to know any mathematics or perform any calculations. It only requires me to guess where the ball is going, which only requires me to observe where it has gone already. I would only need math if I wanted to give a precise abstract description of its trajectory.
Some people, such as pool sharks, do study mathematics in order to more accurately predict where objects will go, and they can learn to perform calculations quickly, or to develop rough rules of thumb, but this does not mean that a man's mind does math unconsciously. Especially since something that is unconscious is, by definition, not mental.
To say that I think something likely does not mean I have performed any kind of calculation. Some of what we call expectations or likelihood cannot involve mathematics at all because they are about things that are not quantifiable. When a jury concludes that a man is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, they do not mean he is 72% guilty or 85% likely to be guilty. They mean there is a preponderance of evidence indicating he is guilty, and that his being not guilty would require extraordinary circumstances given the facts in evidence. No numbers are involved in reaching this conclusion, and the reasoning that leads to the conclusion cannot be reduced to mathematics.
To say that I think something is "probable" is not the same as saying that I have performed a statistical operation and arrived at a mathematical probability. It means I have weighed arguments or evidence and reached a judgment. Again, you are claiming my mind is doing math behind my back. That is ridiculous.
I am making a distinction you probably don't hear very often, between imagination and intellect. The imagination deals with concrete particulars, and by concrete, I do not mean it is a physical object right in front of you that is actual (because we are talking about a mental object), but rather one that is potentially actual. If I look at a horse, the mental object is a percept; I am directly observing the horse. That is the power of perception. If I go away and think about the horse, that is an image; my mind is presenting the horse (a particular horse, a concrete particular) to me even though the horse is not physically present. That is the power of imagination (and in this case, also memory). If I abstract the bay color of the horse's coat and think about it apart from the horse, or if I think about horse-ness as such with no particular horse in mind, that is abstraction. That is the power of intellect. If I recombine abstracted attributes, such as by applying purple to the horse's coat in my mind and thereby creating a mental object that is a concrete particular with no real-world referent, that is imagination again.
Your claim that minds cannot exist without brains is not in evidence. Brains can certainly exist without minds; yours will, shortly after you die. A basketball can deflate, too, and leave a pile of rubber behind.
The relationship in both cases is of form to matter. Sphere, which is not a physical object, but a geometrical abstraction, informs the basketball; the basketball is round. Mind, which is not a physical object (as I have demonstrated more than once in this thread, though nobody wants to directly engage my proof) informs a living man. A man has the form of an intellective being; when he dies, his corpse no longer has that form.
A form is a metaphysical co-principle, not a being in itself. Every being is made of the appropriate matter. Trees are not made out of rock, because then they would not be trees. Rocks are not made out of paper, because then they would not be rocks. Every being has its form and also its appropriate material.
(There is also an argument that the mind is necessarily a substantial being in itself as well as the form of the body, but that's another quandary, and we have not reached a point where it would be worthwhile to get into that discussion.)
Basketballs are spherical objects by definition. If it is clearer to you to refer to the basketball's form as basketball-ness rather than sphere, be my guest, but you appear to have objected to such terminology earlier.
Your second sentence contradicts your first. If thoughts can't be measured physically, then physics does not describe them.
If it does not have a mind, then it does not have sense and memory. Memories and percepts are mental objects. An inanimate object has no internal powers, but is moved only by external forces. A plant has powers of growth and nutrition, and perhaps (as in sunflowers or Venus fly traps) some limited reflexive movement. Animals, all or for the most part, have powers of mind; some minds may be extremely primitive: a spider has powers of sense and movement and possibly no others.
Higher animals have additional powers. A horse has a good memory and also an imagination, which is why horses can make appetitive movements toward objects not directly apprehended by their senses (a horse turned toward home might run from eagerness, for example, because he can anticipate getting his saddle off or eating or whatever pleasure he expects when he arrives).
Humans have the additional power of intellect, which can abstract.
Some plants have limited reflexive movement, but not appetite or appetitive movements rightly so-called. There are of course "borderline" life forms for which it is difficult to discern exactly what their powers of life are, and whether they have minds or not. I do not know enough about sponges to make an informed comment, but from what I understand, though they are technically animals to the biologist, their powers of life resemble a plant's. Bacteria have powers of movement, but I suspect it is reflexive movement like that of a plant. They react to their environment, but I doubt they have senses strictly speaking.
Keep in mind here that philosophy is not biology; when I distinguish plants from animals, I am talking about powers of the soul, whereas the biologist is talking about cell structure or descent or comparative anatomy. And when I say "sense," I mean the ability to apprehend percepts, ideas that present objects in the environment to the mind. By this definition, a lifeform that reacts reflexively, such as a fern curling its leaves when touched, does not have sense, though it does respond to its environment.
Mind and body are metaphysical co-principles. The mind is the form of the body. You are arguing with a hylomorphist, not a Cartesian; I am not proposing that the mind is a ghostly entity connected to the body through the pineal gland, but that the mind is the body's form.
You can observe a mindless human. It's called a corpse.
Again, mind is described in terms of formal and final causes. The mind is the form of the body. Bodily movements can be described physically, but the reasons for bodily movements, their final causes, cannot be. As I type this, my fingers are moving over a keyboard, and they are moved by muscle contractions in response to electrical signals from my nerves, and the signals originate in my brain. But my fingers are moving the way they are because I have mental thoughts I wish to express, so I choose my words in accordance with my thoughts, and my hands move to tap the keys that will make the symbols appear that represent those thoughts. The expression of my thoughts is the final cause of my movements. The actions are deliberate and freely chosen. I could do otherwise if I wished, such as by leaving the conversation to read a book. No matter what I did, the efficient causes of my movements could be described by physics, but the final causes could not be.
Anything that is not in the mind is not in the mind, but a thing does not have to originate in the mind to have a final cause; every movement has a final cause and must have one necessarily, or movements would be completely random. If I jerk my hand from a hot stove, getting away from the heat is the final cause of my movement, though the movement is not willed.
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I have read your post and will reply within a week in the most recent philosophical thread.
Just found new thread, in which you addressed me directly. Moving response there.