"Determinism, therefore, cannot be true, because if it was, we should not take the determinists' arguments as being really arguments, but as being only conditioned reflexes. Their statements should not be regarded as really claiming to be true, but only as seeking to cause us to respond in some way desired by them."
J.R. Lucas
There are two problems with Pinker's view that consciousness is solely a brain thing and that the soul does not exist. The first is a philosophical one. The second is an existential one.
Let's unpack the philosophical problem together in this this post.
What is self-refutation?
Some statements refer to themselves. That is, the statement is included in its own field of reference. When a statement fails to satisfy itself ( conform to its own criteria of validity or acceptability ), it is self-refuting. Self-refuting statements are necessarily false. So if I make a truth claim that "there is no such thing as truth", then it is necessarily false ... because if my truth claim were true, then my statement would be false. It is like asking a married bachelor to go find a one-ended stick and draw a square circle in the sand.
The view that the mind is 100 percent conditioned reflexes of the brain is self-refuting.
H.P. Owen states that,
Determinism is self-stultifying [aka self-refuting]. If my mental processes are totally determined, I am totally determined either to accept or to reject determinism. But, if the sole reason for my believing or not believing X is that I am causally determined to believe it, I have no ground for holding that my judgment is true or false.
Pinker's view of consciousness amounts to man being a machine. Machines are programmed. In other words, machines are deterministic. Inputs plus genetic algorithm determines outputs. It is genetic determinism.
This view is self-refuting in the way that the following statemet is self-refuting: "there is no knowledge". The statement is not self-refuting if someone uttered it and claimed to believe it but not know if it were true. But if someone claimed to know that there is no knowledge ... now we have a problem. Pinker's view of consciouness self-refutes in a similar way.
To believe that his view of the mind is a rational belief to be accepted based on evidence, then there must be necessary preconditions for there to be such a thing as rational belief. His view, however, seems to remove these preconditions.
As articulated by J.P. Moreland in his seminal book Scaling The Secular City, there need to be at least five factors present in order for there to be a genuine rational agent who can accurately reflect about the world.
One, minds must have intentionality; they must be capable of having thoughts about or of the world.
Two, reasons, propositions, thoughts, laws of logic and evidence, and truth must exist and be capable of being instanced in people's minds and influencing their thought processes.
Three, it is not enough for there to be propositions or reasons which stand in logical or evidential relations with one another. One must be able to "see" or have rational insight into the flow of the argument and be influenced by this act of perception into forming one's beliefs.
Four, in order to rationally think through a chain of reasoning such that one "sees" the inferential connections in the chain, one would have to be in the same self present at the beginning of the thought process as the one present at the end.
Five, the activity of rational thought seems to require an agent view of the self. This view requires the ability to deliberate, a free will, and an agent.
If these preconditions don't exist, then there is no reason to accept anyone's argument for truth on the basis of evidence. Since Pinker's view of the mind undercuts these preconditions, there is no rational basis for accepting it.
For the sake of readability, I have condensed an entire chapter into one blog post. For a thorough handling of how Pinker's view undercuts these propositions, I recommend you read chapter 3 [God and the Argument From The Mind] of Moreland's Scaling The Secular City.
"If my mental processes are totally determined, I am totally determined either to accept or to reject determinism."
This statement is false, and I'd suggest it undermines the rest of the argument you've made in this post.
Let's assume for a moment that mental processes are determined (i.e. for input X you will always get output Y). All that means is that if you apply stimulus X to my brain, you will get response Y. It says nothing about whether you will ever get stimulus X.
That's important, because we need to remember that X isn't a trivial thing, but a summation of everything that I have ever been aware of, plus a specific selection from everything that could possibly happen to me now. That's a little confusing, so let me give you an example.
It would be easy to think of 'X gives Y' for a car as pressing the gas pedal (X) speeds the car up (Y). Of course that's not really true - pressing the pedal (X) causes gas to flow into the combustion chamber, which in turn causes the car to accelerate (Y). But even that is only a small clarification, because we need to know all of the following and more:
*Have I started the engine? If not, X won't give Y
*Have I engaged a gear? If not, X won't give Y
*Have I fuelled the car? If not, X won't even give the intermediate step, let alone Y)
*Am I concurrently pressing the brake? If I am, then X will give the intermediate step but not Y
*Did I just ease up on the gas by more than I am now depressing it? If I did X won't give Y, it will just limit the deceleration of the car
I'm sure the list goes on. And that's the problem with the statement you quoted. Even if mental processes are totally determined, they are still dependent on inputs outside the mental system and outside the control of the mental system. A belief in determinism could conceivably be something that the brain is hard-wired with (though I'm not aware of evidence that it is), but even if it were that hard-wiring could be rewired based on inputs that cannot be predicted. And more likely it's not hard-wired, and a belief for or against it depends on what evidence and ideas are presented, when they are presented, and the state that everything that has ever happened to that brain before that point has left the brain in.
I should add that I'm not sure that the brain is deterministic in this manner; it's entirely possible that the brain operates to some extent at a quantum level, which is not known to be deterministic. I'd have to do a lot more reading to even be able to form a decent opinion on that.
Posted by: Paul | January 31, 2007 at 05:14
Paul,
You haven't dealt with the argument ... determinists claim that belief in determinism is a rational belief ... yet determinism undercuts rationality.
Owen's argument is a separate argument. His argument is that determinism ... by definition ... says that the mind is a series of conditioned reflexes. That means your beliefs are conditioned reflexes. This means you hold beliefs regardless of their truth value. This, of course, applies equally to those who believe or reject determinism. On what basis, therefore, can the determinist argue that determinism is true?
Discussing the mind-numbing amount of inputs is to miss the argument altogether.
Posted by: Mr. Dawntreader | January 31, 2007 at 19:09
What do you mean by 'conditioned' reflexes?
Posted by: Paul | February 01, 2007 at 00:29
"What do you mean by 'conditioned' reflexes?"
Automated responses.
Posted by: Mr. Dawntreader | February 01, 2007 at 05:13
Well a conditioned reflex isn't the same as an automated response - a conditioned reflex is essentially something you've been taught (or have taught yourself) to do, a la Pavlov's dogs. An automatic response is, I assume, outside the context of conditioned or unconditioned. So which is it that Owen really means?
I'm not trying to dodge the question, btw, but it's hard to answer such a moving target. While we're at it, could you define 'truth value' for me as well? I'm assuming you mean the rightness of an idea that is intrinsic in the idea itself, rather than an external perception of it?
Posted by: Paul | February 02, 2007 at 17:24
Oh, I should add that I do think our beliefs are conditioned reflexes, to a large extent at least. A great number of the things I believe are a result of the conditioning provided by my parents. Would you disagree? Or do you think that we work out our beliefs from first principles each generation?
Posted by: Paul | February 02, 2007 at 17:27
I am not sure I follow why the distinction between conditioned reflexes and automated responses is significant. Either way, you have no choice in your response ... whatsoever. That is the key distinction.
Truth is a relation in the same family as "greater than", "less than" and so forth. Truth is the relation between our belief and reality.
I believe our parents are heavily involved in our belief formation. But I would not characterize it as conditioned reflexes. Conditioned reflexes indicate no control. We all own and choose our beliefs ... we can't not do that. Many choose to believe what their parents believe ... some reject it ... but we all own that choice.
Posted by: Mr. Dawntreader | February 02, 2007 at 19:39
The more I try to formulate a response that you'll find useful, the tricky it gets to work with the parameters we have. This time the issue is "you have no choice in your response".
That got me to thinking what you mean by 'you'. It is, I think, perfectly consistent to think that the decisions kicked out at a neural level are what we perceive as choice. To say that they are not presupposes that there is a 'you' outside of you (!) that can exercise a different sort of choice. That may be true, but until you show that the choice I refer to is inferior to that level of choice you describe as an explanation for what we see, I'm not sure why we should accept that assumption.
Perhaps it would be useful for you to explain why choice has to be free. I don't mean as a semantic exercise (I think there's already been a debate here about whether a choice is a choice if it contains constraints), but why there must exist a 'free choice' that matches our perception of freedom in choice. A kind of platonic free choice, if you like. This would tie in with your assertion that truth exists in a reality that we interact with by perception, rather than being an artifact of that perception for example.
To be fair, I'll take the first step in answering your question using this idea - why isn't the ultimate, low-level deterministic action of the brain the way that we perceive truth? Perhaps we're actually flawless at perceiving truth somewhere in our deterministic brains, but other responses from elsewhere in the brain take that perception and bury it. I don't know if that's true, but I also don't know why it isn't.
On the tangent discussion - I think our beliefs start out very much as conditioned reflexes - certainly much of what I've believed has started out that way, and despite subsequent rationalizations after the fact it's amazing how much I believe is consistent with, or at least firmly rooted in, what I was first taught. I think the same is true of pretty much everyone. That doesn't mean that we can't change those beliefs (many if not most people do to some extent), but I think it's quite unusual for people to choose their beliefs as an active thing; instead they drag them around until something prompts them to question a belief.
Posted by: Paul | February 03, 2007 at 04:55