Dawkins' Atheist Bus

[nomadthethird]

I think we have a great model for understanding human "agency" (if sentience or self-awareness is indeed "agency"), it's called neurology, and it's not unthinkable that eventually we'll be able to explain exactly how sentience and our sense of our own existence works. We've already made good strides toward doing so.

Of course, even if agency is an illusion it's often an important one. My favorite way to talk about agency is re feminism. I love how some people act as if women have no agency (and there's Irigaray with the whole there is no female subject thing) when it comes to sexuality. As if every sexual act on the part of a female is only for the male gaze, never for her own pleasure. A woman flashes people at a party? It was all for the boys, of course! A woman has promiscuous sex? She must have mental problems, normal/good women are all monogamy robots deep down!

Stupid.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Sorry, what position are we referring to specifically as not being inherently untenable and that I am apparently holding mainly because of an intuitive hunch?

You said:

However I would still say that in theory, pulsars, self-replicating entities, a class of things that daisies are a member of, and certainly earth type planets, could be and are quite readily predicted by mathematical models of the universe as we presently understand it.

I don't believe we could say the same of 'agency' or a thing of that type. And what is it? What else could we say is like 'agency'? Awareness? Will?

Still I think we can say that biological reproduction, daisies, pulsars and commemorative statuettes of liberty do not require additional explanation for their existence and could in type be predicted or explained by our models. 'Agency' and indeed sentience which is a similar kind of thing, can not. We don't even know what they are, except to say that agency might be an illusion.

OK, so would it be fair to say that you hold the position of 'weak emergence' when it comes to tangible systems (no matter how complex) and their physical properties, but not with regard to metaphysical phenomena like agency or sentience? What if someone were to say that commemorative statuettes of liberty could not exist were it not for the actions of sentient (well, kinda...) beings with agency? That they have been intelligently designed whereas a daisy has not? Or do you evade this by saying that agency is *probably* an illusion anyway so we don't need to worry about it - just as the bus ad says of God?

 

[jambo]

No, Mr. Tea, the reason we are talking about agency is with reference to an ostensibly atheistic position that holds that humans are the result of blind natural process and yet are capable of purposeful action and intelligent design. I think this conceals a kind of religious belief.

I'm not 'evading' anything.

 

[poetix]

The sort of thing I'm describing as purposiveness just happens to be the sort of thing that Dawkins and Dennett, amongst others, are talking about when they use that sort of language ("the gene for..."), "about those sorts of things (asentient causal processes with certain interesting self-governing characteristics). I'm trying to give an account of that usage, to show that it isn't totally inept and clueless and that there's a conceptual clarity behind it that you will miss if you spend all your time pointing and laughing at a few stray figures of speech.

Like I said, what are the alternatives? Pointless discussions about how magical purposefulness comes to exist in a purposeless non-magical universe, or attempts to define purposiveness out of existence (or treat it entirely as an artifact of language, which amounts to the same thing). But you can't give a satisfactory account of evolution without using cybernetic language - without discussing the ways in which representations (DNA) govern processes - because the random mutations which drive evolution take place in the representation space. The negative thesis of evolutionary theory is that no "higher" (or, heading in the opposite direction, "fundamental") purpose is required for speciation. But this thesis is established by identifying precisely the minimal purposiveness necessary for material self-organisation: it doesn't abolish purpose, it just radically localises and demystifies it.

 

[jambo]

Yeah. What is "agency" other than just any action on the part of a sentient being? Let's all remember that even rats are self-aware. Self-awareness is not a uniquely human characteristic.

I forgot we'd proven that rats are self-aware. How did you find out, by asking them?

 

[Mr. Tea]

No, Mr. Tea, the reason we are talking about agency is with reference to an ostensibly atheistic position that holds that humans are the result of blind natural process and yet are capable of purposeful action and intelligent design. I think this conceals a kind of religious belief.

I'm not 'evading' anything.

OK, I didn't mean 'evading' in any kind of dishonest or lazy way, I just meant that the problem vanishes if you believe we have no true agency but merely think we do. Right?

Also, I can't help but get the feeling we're going round in circles a bit here. I'm saying that I see no reason - assuming humans have true agency - to assume that this agency cannot have arisen, through a process of gradual evolution, as an emergent phenomenon due to purely mechanistic physical laws. You disagree, and argue that this position is theistic or crypto-theistic, and my response is that this is based on your hunch about how agency can and cannot arise and that you haven't provided a convincing (to me) argument for why this should be the case.

 

[poetix]

To put it another way: if what you desire is an absolutely blindly chaotic cosmos, evolutionary theory is - I suggest - not the theory for you. It may have no skyhooks in it, but it sure as hell has cranes.

 

[nomadthethird]

I forgot we'd proven that rats are self-aware. How did you find out, by asking them?

It's well-known and was proven through research. Rats are self-aware, they can make a mental picture of themselves and where they are spatially in order to avoid getting hurt, etc. They can introspect, assess the contents of what they know, and come to the conclusion that there are things they don't know. Some animals don't do this. Some simply make calculations that go like this "are there any predators around, and if there are, can I take them down or should I flee?"

Some animals don't see the way we do, especially not the super-predators, who it is generally believed see things in a sort of pixelled grid that makes detecting size of object and movement of object easier.

 

[nomadthethird]

To put it another way: if what you desire is an absolutely blindly chaotic cosmos, evolutionary theory is - I suggest - not the theory for you. It may have no skyhooks in it, but it sure as hell has cranes.

Uh what?

Of course there are forces that govern the way things happen, but these are built-in to the existence of matter itself. This doesn't mean these forces are thinking things like "hey, I think I want this to keep bodies from flying around wildly, I'm going to keep on exerting gravity on matter" or whatever. They just exist.

 

[nomadthethird]

Like I said, what are the alternatives? Pointless discussions about how magical purposefulness comes to exist in a purposeless non-magical universe, or attempts to define purposiveness out of existence (or treat it entirely as an artifact of language, which amounts to the same thing). But you can't give a satisfactory account of evolution without using cybernetic language - without discussing the ways in which representations (DNA) govern processes - because the random mutations which drive evolution take place in the representation space. The negative thesis of evolutionary theory is that no "higher" (or, heading in the opposite direction, "fundamental") purpose is required for speciation. But this thesis is established by identifying precisely the minimal purposiveness necessary for material self-organisation: it doesn't abolish purpose, it just radically localises and demystifies it.

There is nothing "magical" about people deciding to do things or not do them. There is nothing magical about the fact that there are laws that govern the movement of things, their energy states, etc.

Like I've said, calling these things a "purpose" is just semantic bending over backwards.

 

[poetix]

Oh for fuck's sake.

Purposiveness does not require awareness of purpose. Awareness of purpose is something that organisms that are aware and have purposes sometimes have with respect to some of their purposes. It's a pretty ropey arrangement, in practice. I sometimes have problems tying my shoelaces. You sometimes have problems understanding a fucking thing I'm trying to tell you. We're far from ideal organisms.

 

[nomadthethird]

Oh for fuck's sake.

Purposiveness does not require awareness of purpose. Awareness of purpose is something that organisms that are aware and have purposes sometimes have with respect to some of their purposes. It's a pretty ropey arrangement, in practice. I sometimes have problems tying my shoelaces. You sometimes have problems understanding a fucking thing I'm trying to tell you. We're far from ideal organisms.

Yeah, it's because "I don't understand" you that I disagree. Uh-huh. Good one.

And I agree, we're far from ideal organisms. So what?

"Purpose" is just a word people made up.

 

[poetix]

All words are words people made up. Got a better argument than that?

 

[nomadthethird]

Got a better argument than "there are seemingly self-directed processes that govern the universe, therefore evolution is far from a blind and accidental process"?

 

[jambo]

the problem vanishes if you believe we have no true agency but merely think we do. Right?

Yes, we are then no longer talking about purposeful action. I've said that at every opportunity.

And it's fairly easy to demonstrate that there might be no such thing as human agency.

Also, I can't help but get the feeling we're going round in circles a bit here. I'm saying that I see no reason - assuming humans have true agency - to assume that this agency cannot have arisen, through a process of gradual evolution, as an emergent phenomenon due to purely mechanistic physical laws. You disagree, and argue that this position is theistic or crypto-theistic, and my response is that this is based on your hunch about how agency can and cannot arise and that you haven't provided a convincing (to me) argument for why this should be the case.

Yes it's probably not worth going over again and again. At least not right now.

I do think that just calling it 'emergence' doesn't get you away from the fact that you don't know what it is and it still appears miraculous, especially and you don't know the mechanistic physical laws that would be involved in this evolutionary process. Sentience is obviously a prerequisite for human agency, and I think we can probably agree that the universe allows for sentience, but we don't know what this is either.

 

[Mr. Tea]

And I agree, we're far from ideal organisms. So what?

Come again? According to whose 'ideal' do we not measure up? Since we're the product of an evolutionary process governed by natural forces and interaction with our ecological environment, surely we're (almost by definition) the "best species for the job"? This is just what I was talking about the other day: to say evolution has "gone wrong" or "made a mistake" in producing humans is implicitly theistic, since it implies a Plan that we have unwittingly contravened. (Edit: ok, you were paraphrasing poetix, so this comment goes for him too)

"Purpose" is just a word people made up.

Unlike all our other words, which are graven on some big stone tablets somewhere...

 

[poetix]

Here is where you "did not understand", as opposed to "disagree". You think it's a cogent counter-argument to point out that massive bodies aren't generally aware of wanting to exert gravitational pull on other massive bodies. This is evidence that you haven't understood that I'm not talking about awareness; that awareness or non-awareness is entirely irrelevant to the concepts I'm trying to develop. "X in order that Y" is a statement about the purpose of X; "P plans to do X in order that Y" is a statement about an intentional agent's representation, to herself, of what she conceives of as her own purposes. The latter belongs to the domain of neurology, although there are valid suspicions in that domain about the utility of the language of propositional attitudes in describing what brains "really" do. The former has no essential ties with neurology, human or otherwise: it describes the material instantiation of a logical relation, and that's all.

 

[nomadthethird]

Here is where you "did not understand", as opposed to "disagree". You think it's a cogent counter-argument to point out that massive bodies aren't generally aware of wanting to exert gravitational pull on other massive bodies. This is evidence that you haven't understood that I'm not talking about awareness; that awareness or non-awareness is entirely irrelevant to the concepts I'm trying to develop. "X in order that Y" is a statement about the purpose of X; "P plans to do X in order that Y" is a statement about an intentional agent's representation, to herself, of what she conceives of as her own purposes. The latter belongs to the domain of neurology, although there are valid suspicions in that domain about the utility of the language of propositional attitudes in describing what brains "really" do. The former has no essential ties with neurology, human or otherwise: it describes the material instantiation of a logical relation, and that's all.

So simply stating that natural processes operate according to an "X in order that Y" logical relation makes it so? Or do you have some sort of proof that this is, in fact, the underlying relation or force behind how natural processes happen?

 

[nomadthethird]

Come again? According to whose 'ideal' do we not measure up? Since we're the product of an evolutionary process governed by natural forces and interaction with our ecological environment, surely we're (almost by definition) the "best species for the job"? This is just what I was talking about the other day: to say evolution has "gone wrong" or "made a mistake" in producing humans is implicitly theistic, since it implies a Plan that we have unwittingly contravened. (Edit: ok, you were paraphrasing poetix, so this comment goes for him too)



Unlike all our other words, which are graven on some big stone tablets somewhere...

According to my own ideals, of course.

Yes, all of our words are made up. Just like "cybernetics" is a word we made up. Its etymology has absolutely no bearing on the reality of how natural processes work. In fact, none of our words have any bearing on these things. They are merely descriptive.

 

[nomadthethird]

The hominid brain is an unhappy accident in my estimation because it is exactly the mechanism by which humans get bogged down in all sorts of affective white noise. It would be more fun to be a cyborg or something I think.