Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Bunburryist]

There are two ideas here:

1) The brain is solely responsible for consciousness and intelligence.
2) Consciousness and intelligence are a product of something non-material.

The first hypothesis is scientific. It is testable. It is falsifiable. It is reproducible. Above all, it is useful.

The second is none of these. It is not testable. It is not falsifiable. It is not reproducible and it absolutely is in no way useful. It is not science.

As an AI researcher myself, the first is useful. I want to try and create intelligence in a computer or a robot. Or consciousness. I can look at a real brain, real animals in environments, real data on how consciousness is affected by lesions, drugs etc. I can come up with hypotheses and test them out and see if they work in practise. And after all that, I can create models of consciousness or intelligence that do something in the real world. The same if I was a neuroscientist trying to find cures to a neurodegenerative disease or a psychiatrist trying to solve mental illness.

How would you even start doing any of the above if you start from the premise that something non-material produces consciousness, our identity, intelligence and who we are? You can't. It is not helpful in the slightest. You can have a belief in some kind of soul or whatever to give you personal comfort, but that's all you can do with it. It has no other relevance to reality. It is also wrong. Because if you start from that premise, you first have to explain what science already knows.

For example, why and how anesthetic works, or alcohol, or drugs, or the effect of brain damage on different parts of the brain, or neurodegenerative diseases. It is also consistent with what we understand about evolution and biology. You would have to explain away hundreds of thousands of papers in the scientific literature from many generations of scientists working across the globe. All this scientific data that is reproducible and falsifiable, tells us that materialism is the correct approach.

Furthermore, there is absolutely no reason to believe that it isn't. There is no reason to believe that the material brain is not entirely responsible for who we are and how we function.

Let me start by saying that I don't start with the premise that something non-material produces consciousness.  (I don't even know what consciousness is, much less how, or even that it is "produced" by anything.)  I start with two things - my self-evident experience (that I call "This Experience") and the fact that the scientific approach allows us to make many useful models of This Experience.  What I have come to understand is that there is a third thing that is neither This Experience, nor is it a scientific idea - it is the conception of This Experience as being a "world" in which my nature is that of a "thing" that exists in space.  We learn to believe this as children, and stick a label on it that says "material world."  Our conception of ourselves as "living things in a world" is not a scientific idea, but the worldview implicit in our thinking that we come to have as we learn to think in terms of language.  I call this Siimple Realism.  It is not a philosophy, but rather the worldview implicit in human language.  "I am my body.  That ball is red."  We learn to believe that scientific ideas which are derived from This Experience describe a material world.  We learn to believe that This Experience is "the material world," and "the physical world."  That is, we confuse science - a system of investigation, etc. with  non-scientific worldview.  We learn to believe a bunch of beliefs without realizing there are a lot of contradictions involved.

That is where the problem comes up - a problem that the scientific community simply refuses to acknowledge and work into scientific thinking, and which you yourself demonstrate in your post.  You do this yourself when you say you " I can look at a real brain, real animals in environments, real data on how consciousness is affected by lesions, drugs etc."  Is a "real" brain a material object or an experience somehow happening in a material brain?  They are not the same thing; they exist/happen at objectively different places in "the" material world and hence should not be conflated into the same thing, any more than we'd conflate a material cow in a field with an image of that cow on a TV.  They not the same thing, so let's stop pretending and talking like they are.

This Experience cannot be a material world.  Even the materialist sense story tell us it isn't.  It tells us that it is something happening, somehow, in a material brain.  This puts us in the position of needing a system of labels which science refuses to give us.  If the "things" in This Experience are something happening in a brain, then those "things" are neither material nor made of atoms.  So when you say "look at a real brain" there are actually two "things" involved - things which exist at objectively different places in "the" objective material world.  There is the material brain which photons are reflecting off of (and which has no color as an aspect), and there is the colorful experience you call "a real brain" happening in your material brain.  They are objectively separated in objective time and space in the material world.  And yet science, by not label-ing out it's own theory, refuses to deal with this problem, conveniently leaving it to "philosophers" to deal with, and leaving the vast majority of otherwise well-meaning, logical people to use ambiguous phrases like "the brain," "the material world," etc.

We are so used to thinking that this is somehow a "philosophical" problem (we have all kinds of fancy labels like "Representative Realism") that it doesn't occur to us to turn to the scientific community and say, "Hey, YOU'RE the guys telling us our experience happens in material brains.  So flush it out logically and NAME everything.   If it's something existing in a material world (which would be made of atoms and so wouldn't "look" like anything since atoms don't have color as an aspect), give us a word that conveys that idea.  If it's an experience happening in a material world (which can't be "made of atoms"), then we need a different label.  But to go on, and on, and on with ambiguous phrases like "the brain," "the material world," "the universe," "my body," etc. is simply refusing to acknowledge their own theory of "the senses" and disguising this important problem.

Once a person is able to really understand that This Experience is not a material world (even in the context of the materialist sense story), one is, for the first time, in the position to really examine the materialist worldview.  I am not anti-science.  I have simply learned to be able to tease out physical science from the material worldview and to understand that it is not a scientific idea, and that we don't need to think in it to do physical science.

I don't subscribe to some vague, new-age "philosophy."  I've simply come to realize that I don't know what I am. I don't know what "mind" is.  I don't know what "consciousness" is.  But I don't know what I, as a being am, and I don't understand the reality underlying it.   (It's easier to understand this when you also understand that we don't know what space is, what photons are, what leptons are, etc..)  That's where I'm coming from.  Is there a relationship between the brains we find as aspects of This Experience (which cannot be a material world) and the experience as a whole.  Clearly.  But that doesn't mean it has to be one that is conceived in the non- and pre-scientific materialist worldview.

Another issue you brought up is the usefulness of theories.  Lots of mistake theories are useful.  Newtonian physics was, and still is useful.  But that doesn't mean it's an accurate description of reality.  On the other hand, if the only way you can do useful research is to think in materialist terms, then go for it.  Engineers use Newtonian ideas all the time.  But I think we have to separate two different realms of thought - goal oriented research, and questions about what we are.  I remember a few years ago I traded emails with a guy who ran a memory research lab somewhere, and I remember he said he won't even hire anyone who's primary interest is in something vague like "what is memory."  He wanted people interested in doing hard research and solving problems with real patients.  And for his goals, that's fine.  But that's not my goal.  My goal is trying to have as clear as understanding about what I am as I can.  

I know I'm not going to change many people's minds about this.  I know many, if not most people think my ideas are kooky.  I know I'm not going to convince the scientific establishment of anything.  I find these things interesting to think about.  I'm glad to try and explain it.  I hope people will, at the very lease, give me credit for trying to make sense of something that none of us really understands.  (I know I started the last six sentences with "I".)  Most of the ideas I'm trying to explain are actually about understanding the materialist worldview itself - not to prove that it's "wrong."  You can't understand my reasons for understanding the materialist worldview is mistaken until you understand the materialist world-view itself, accurately, inside and out.