One of the greatest boons of anti-religious propaganda was successfully selling the belief that people's ideas about their own experience was unreliable, at best, unbelievable, most likely, a total delusion except within the narrowest of ranges of conventional materialist thinking. And they weren't going to admit that last one is what they were doing. As noted by Eddington, Weizenbaum, Robinson and many others, materialists have to hold their own ideologies outside of their framework of debunkery. I agree and go further, observing that those ideologies are not separate from the minds that hold them so they have to exempt their own minds from their, otherwise, totalitarian systems*.
The use of psychology, especially that of the mentally ill and the irrational, was the primary vehicle to destroy peoples' confidence in their own knowledge of their own experience. If those guys could be so deluded about their thinking, well, why not you? No one seemed to be considered to have such a rational and well observed normal life that they were not a good candidate to be accused of harboring a hidden monster unknown even to themselves. In a few cases I've read about, people have been convinced to consider the possibility that they'd committed horrible crimes that they, then, didn't recall. I remember one such case when a woman accused of the most bizarre and far fetched of child abuse accusations - with no supporting physical evidence that such crimes occurred - had to be convinced that her memory of Not having done the unthinkable was reliable.
As an aside, that people who spend their professional lives reading about, writing about, brooding over and, even, on rare occasions, interacting with irrational and diseased minds can relalistically conclude about minds that are not demonstrably diseased and disabled is something that should be questioned a lot more than it is. I'd guess they'd start looking for pathologies that just aren't there. Shouldn't we be at least as suspicious about people evaluating our minds as we would be of contractors wanting to sell us new plumbing or a Kirby vacuum cleaner? Doesn't every roof tend to look like it might harbor rot under the shingles to a roofer with payments?
No, in order to destroy consciousness and the mind we must not be allowed to know that we are what we are, in fact, the only possible experts on what our minds are like. No one else experiences our mind, no one else experiences our experience. While someone can look at our actions and speculate on what that means about what is happening in our minds, that's secondary, at best. The observer's conclusions inevitably will be based on a consultation of their own experience to interpret other peoples' behavior and any thing said about it will have come through that double filter. What they interpret to be the content of the mind which they cannot observe or experience is inescapably a product of that process. When an additional layer of psychological or cognitive ideology is introduced into the observer's process - as it will be in every case of professional "scientific" observation and evaluation - that makes the address of the actual mind of the observed person even more remote.
I've been having a fight with a rather conventional seeming atheist-materialist-"skeptic" about whether or not in some future there will be machines with the ability to "download" the contents of our minds. He's entirely convinced that it is an inevitability that such a machine will come and with it the behavioral,cognitive and psycho-social "sciences" will achieve the same scientific status as physics. Given that the guy is a "skeptic" his precognition of a 100% guarantee of mind-reading machines is pretty funny on that ground alone.
He has such total faith in the promissory notes issued by materialism in this area that it overcomes his "skeptical" scruples against precognition and telepathy, when it's an actual mind that is purported to do it, while granting predictive powers to a sort of informally stated ideological I Ching and telepathic potential to an imaginary machine to be produced later. And, here's the coup de grace he claims the machine will be right with no need to consult the person whose mind is to be read for confirmation of its findings. A major point of contention is my assertion that no matter what machine is proposed to do this mind-reading trick, the accuracy of its results couldn't even be guessed at without consulting the person whose mind is allegedly being read. I would assume he wouldn't grant that power to a human mind-reader, only, if he did then it would make the job of mind reading humans a lot easier.
Of course, what can be said about the callow faith this kid has in his future mind reading machine can be said now about the entire practice of generalizing about experience in people by the behavioral and cognitive sciences, especially in assigning unknown thoughts to an individual. The predictive ability of these "sciences" are based on a human implementation of an program. An ideological program written in prose and mathematics instead of code. It purports that there is some professionally reliable way to say what's "really" going on in someone's mind on the basis of theories of what will be there. Whether the mind-reading is done by a programmed machine or a programmed person, it's still a mind-reading program, alleged to tell us things about our and other peoples' minds on the basis of something far less than the direct observation of it, because there is no direct observation of anyone's mind except by the person who experiences that mind. And, according to much of psychology and, increasingly other branches of thinkology, the one and only expert on what is happening in that mind is not to be believed. At least when it is decided to not believe the person, not necessarily on the basis of their behavior.
I'm tempted to go into what kinds of thinking which both risk and cause the deaths of large numbers of people to entire habitats and their residents are considered to be quite undiseased, even, supported by modern economic "science'. Economics is a behavioral "science" as well. It seems like everyone's agreed that such behaviors aren't pathological. Makes you wonder what this marvelous mind-reading machine will tell us about it.
* I greatly annoyed the renowned intellectual Richard Seymore of Lenin's Tomb blog by pointing this out about his assertion that ideology was a manifestation of materialistic entities. He was denying the possibility of transcendence, and so truth, to his own ideological system. He didn't take it well. Nevertheless, I would recommend his book on Christopher Hitchens, "Unhitched" which I've seriously skimmed at the book store but haven't bought yet. Waiting for lefty books to go into remainders takes longer. That doesn't mean that I don't think his ideological system isn't obviously self-refuting, because it is.
UPDATE: Just because I want to drive my most persistent troll nuts:
Some people claim there are ghosts they've seen here and now, you can't claim that your mind-reading computers exist now, you can't point to anyone who has seen one. There's testimonial evidence of ghosts but there is no testimonial evidence of your imaginary mind-reading computers. There is less evidence, today, that computers will ever read anyone's mind than there is of ghosts. That's slightly complicated for a "skeptical" audience but it's a rational argument. It is more irrational to believe in mind-reading computers than it is to believe that people have seen ghosts.
What is "Mind" and how would any set of electronics contain it?
ReplyDeleteThere is a great deal of failure of skepticism in the assumption that "mind" is material and it can be converted into a computer program. Through what medium? Magic?
These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand.....
He hasn't said it yet but I think this guy might be a disciple of Ray Kurtzweil, the guy who seems to believe that human immortality is inevitable when we "download" our minds into computers. I have a strong feeling that he is not generally seen as being nuts.
ReplyDeleteI'm becoming more interested in how thinking that can lead to the deaths of large numbers of people, animals, habitats and enormous misery, thinking that is quite irrational IF life is considered to be above the scheme of economic valuation, is turned into a simulation of being reasonable when it is put into programatic language. The basic assumptions, despite their depravity, granting that kind of thinking acceptance through the habit of believing that any thinking that has the form of reason is reasonable.
I might not be expressing it very well because it's been a long day. I'd meant to hold this till tonight but it got posted early, somehow. I seem to be getting worse at using blogger instead of better.
Kurzweil is chasing immortality; the old, old story; older than Beowulf, or Achilles, or Gilgamesh.
ReplyDeleteFunny how putting a technological gloss on it makes it acceptable.
Clarke is wrong to think a sufficiently complex technology would seem like magic to a society unaccustomed to it. We already think our technology has magical properties.
And that's from the "rational" people.
One of the things I've learned from my brawls with the crusaders of scientism is that, for them, science seems like a magical entity. I can't remember which author it was, I think it might have been Whitehead, who pointed out that the acceptance of science without understanding it was what would come to be called magical thinking. Weizenbaum noted in the introduction to his book, that in order to do science even a scientist had to use large amounts of things s/he hadn't checked out or, I'd guess in many cases, even read the papers on, taking its reliability on faith. That he noted that the very act of science, taken as the polar opposite of faith, relied on many acts of faith, was the thing that first astonished me about his book and, in subsequent reading, the man.
ReplyDeleteYou can imagine that this is not the good news that gladdens the heart of the devotee of scientism. In these posts over the past couple of months, I've tried to point out exactly how much they are willing to sacrifice to their materialistic religion, up to and, I'm convinced, the very identity of science. I suppose, since its obvious that they will sacrifice consciousness, that's not that great a price to be able to say there isn't any "ghost in the machine". Only, as shown in the brawl described in the post, they think their machines and ideologies have quite supernatural powers.
In the 14th century, semi-literate and illiterate persons had to take on faith the claims of Aquinas, both about what Aristotle said, and about how Aristotle could be used to reason one's way to a "summa theologica." To this day scholars of Aquinas still struggle to fully understand what he left behind.
ReplyDeleteToday, anyone not conversant in mathematics and physics has to simply accept the power of E=mc2, or any other claim of physics (quantum especially) or cosmology, because who can fully understand such claims without being conversant in the language of the science asserting them? And "anyone" clearly means physicists and all manner of non-physicists alike. We are told the results conform to understandings of science, except in the case of quanta; or sociobiology, or any other controversy in any field; where maybe our understandings of science need to change, and then enters Kuhn, and everybody starts arguing about what his theory really means (even Kuhn).
But Aquinas' arguments did (and still do) conform to the understandings of the faithful; and everyone in that realm did (and still does) argue about that Aquinas really means.
One is wrong, and one is right? How do you determine that, except by asserting sola fide that your claim is superior?
We come back to a version of Wittgenstein's concern with language, and with the concepts of "faith" (which simply means "trust," not "blind adherence to what you know isn't true," as James more or less said) and "belief" (which is involved in every human endeavor, because if we worked from the purest ideal of reason alone we'd never know anything and never accomplish anything except the blindest sort of trial and error functions. We'd certainly never learn anything, which puts a brutal lie to the idea of "artificial intelligence" that is pure reason alone.)
And we don't even get to the question of "mind," which is after all either a mere concept, or one the one hand a metaphor for something ineffable, on the other a metaphysical reality. Since we can't allow metaphysics into our empiricism, the question becomes: how do we "download" a metaphor?