The Meddling Idiot! As Though DeLong's Ape Brain Could Contain the Wisdom of the Krell!

Berkeley Letters and Science Faculty Forum. January 22, 2007. I always have problems understanding what John Campbell http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0199243816/braddelong00 is saying. He says that he is saying:

• There is an important and unbridgeable gulf between our notions of physical causation and our notions of psychological causation.
• Martian physicists--intelligences vast, cool, and unsympathetic with no notions of human psychology or psychological causation--could not understand why, could not put their finger on physical variables and factors explaining why, the fifty or so of us assemble in the Seaborg Room Monday at lunch time during the spring semester.

He says that he is not saying any of:

• The universe has a dual nature, in which mind is different from not-mind.
• Reductionism is wrong because there are important emergent properties of complicated systems, and reductionist and holistic explanations are quantitatively different.
• There is an important and unbridgeable gulf between understanding based on physical laws and understanding based on human empathy. Instead, Campbell says, there is only one kind of understanding and explanation, but it is applied to different sets of causal factors in different circumstances.

The word "supervenience" was not mentioned by anybody.

I had two questions for him. I think I would have understood him if I could have understood the answers to either of them:

• If I were a member of a team of tentacled Martian physicists (don't get me started on the image of mollusc-like Martians living on an essentially desert planet), my physical-description model of Berkeley would include a model of Assistant Dean Chuck Stroup's brain at the subatomic level. I would then be able to say: "Aha! Suppose we were to decrease the levels of serotonin in the particular half-cubic-foot of space that is Chuck Stroup's brain; then the email messages containing the string "L&S Faculty Forum today" don't get sent, and we don't assemble here for lunch. Wouldn't that be a way for Martian physicists with no concept of human psychology to begin to understand why we are all here in the Seaborg Room right now?

• Let me roughly quote from a lecture from a course, Physics 140, that I took as a junior from Ed Purcell: "How about the lithium atom? We can't calculate the joint orbitals of all three electrons--that's too hard. But we can get an approximate solution for the valence electron. It wants to be in the ground state, but the Pauli Exclusion Principle forbids it. So we can model the orbital of the third, valence electron as a single electron moving in the field of the nucleus partially shielded by the other two electrons in the next stable energy level above the ground state. The Schrodinger equation is... [Purcell starts doing math.]" Here we have a mixture of physical and psychological causation. The physical causation--the math driven by the physical laws of quantum mechanics--comes at the end. Before that comes psychological causation: Purcell attributes human-like intelligence to the electron that has desires and needs and to the brooding overall universal presence that is the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and so reduces the physical-causation problem to a simpler one that is approximately right and that he can solve. The resort to psychological causation is a way to get an answer even though the math for the three-electron problem is beyond our grasp. What is the difference between Ed Purcell's use of psychological causation here and your use of psychological causation as a factor in addition to serotonin levels in understanding human psychological depression?

But alas! I did not understand his answers--although I have no doubt that he did.

I can't help but think that the rhetorical trope of "Martian physicists" is a problem here. I take it for granted that "Martian physicists" have models of human brains at a subatomic level and understand the dynamic evolution of brain states and the connection of brain states to human actions, and do so at a level that makes "psychology" needless save as a shorthand way of dividing brain states into categories. Philosophers' "Martian physicists" don't seem to be able to do that.

Comments

[RW]

I rather doubt I would understand most of what Campbell says either but I do not think he means reductionism is wrong as an epistemological or methodological stance (difficult to imagine how science could conduct business otherwise) but it is probably wrong as an ontological position; i.e., accepting materialism as the true state of the world does not also require accepting more restrictive corollaries such as mechanicism.

Note: Those who conflate materialism and mechanicism typically conflate prediction and control as well; beware the creatures of the Id!

[Maynard Handley]

The very premise of the piece seems to me misguided.

I don't know what it is like to be an insect or a flower, but I can put together an "explanation" of why insects fly into flowers and why flowers produce their nectar, petals, pollen etc. In what way is this not an "understanding"? I also don't have an "understanding" of what it is like to be black, to be a woman, or to be 80 yrs old, in the sense of direct experience, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone.

Before going any further with this, I think we have to clarify just what Campbell is after.
As a practical matter we can't get from QFT to consciousness in one step. We also can't get from QFT to the properties of DNA in one step or, hec, from QFT to water is wet in one step.

So we have the claims
* there is (or is not) some magic essence to consciousness beyond matter [we seem to agree there is not]
* there is (or is not) value to considering consciousness at a lower level than pure psychology. The fact that certain molecule affect the mind, as does internal body chemistry, would appear to show that there is value to this enterprise
* human motivations can, in practice, be understood directly from QFT. This is a stupid statement that no-one believes.
* human motivations can be understood in terms of a tower of concepts rooted in QFT. This most (all?) materialists agree with
* human motivations can, in principle, be understood directly from QFT. Here's where the previous two items clash. This seems to be saying the same thing as the previous statement, but also appears much less plausible. My interpretation of this is that it is nothing more than the fact that
- we haven't yet filled in all the missing pieces and
- our brains simply can't comprehend large enough patterns. Most people can't get from the behavior of individual cars to an accurate description of a traffic jam; even those that can do so through differential equations rather than intuition. Why would anyone expect intuition and such like to work on this VASTLY larger problem?

["Q" the Enchanter]

This just seems like an elaborate variant of Mary the Color Scientist. To wit: "Mary the Martian knows all the physical facts about assembling in the Seaborg Room on Monday. But then one day she joins the assembly, and she learns something knew: What it's *like* to assemble in the Seaborg Room on Monday."

[kripdydip]

Although I would have to read it, I wonder if there is a dollop of the "brain in a vat" theory in his argument? It sounds like it might have a very similar logical structure: vat-people cannot know what a "vat" is even if they know how to use "vat" in vat-language, because they have never had any experience of a vat and, as a trivial corollary, do not know what it means to be a "brain in a vat"; Martian scientists do not know what "the reason that the Dean sent the email" is, because they have never had any experience of reasons to send email, notwithstanding their ability to give a very good explanation (from the QED level on up) of the causal dynamics of the atoms that constitute the Dean.

I'm not sure if I endorse the argument (whenever I read Putnam's paper I am re-convinced), but it certainly could be the *same argument* in that the position of vat-people vis-a-vis vats is similar to the position of Martians vis-a-vis the human psyche

[john c. halasz]

To my way of thinking, there is not a dualism of "mind" and matter, but rather a "dualism" of meaning and causality. We pick out "psychological" attributes through communicative interaction in the medium of language. They are essentially attributive in "nature" and don't depend on any precise knowledge of the causality underlying them. The relevant criteria concern the further implications of such attributions and their accuracy in subsequent on-going interaction. "Meaning" is something generated by communicative interaction between organisms and is not reducible to intracranial processes. The inferential interrelations between symbolic tokens of "meaning" map on the the external, implicitly causal world between us and that world emerges into the inferential relations of our language through the communicative interaction across that world between such-like as us humans. Much of what we are wont to call "mind", in turn, is not an individual, intracranial matter, but rather an internalization of communicative interaction between such language-capable, minded-brained organisms. There is no question here of mindedness without embodiment, nor of any absence or discontinuity of physical causality. However, a complete physical description of causal brain processes would not do, since it is really a matter of understanding how such physical-causal processes generate and process information, which would involve a process interrelating the organization of organic causality with interaction with external environmental causal events. (Hint: brains are not at all like computers, digital processing devices; brains are primarily analog pattern matching and recognition devices- this for some good biological/evolutionary reasons). And again, even such an intracranial account would not do to explain "meaning", since the latter is not just a function of 'mindedness", but rather of the interactive communication of mindedness. But neither is "meaning" irreducibly or unconditionally intentional or teleological, since any explanation of meaning-generation requires bringing in the circumstantial "stage-setting" surrounding any intentional or purposive performance, the latter itself only attributatively identifiable. But the fact remains that our knowledge of the world, including its causal processes, is a product of our symbolic thinking, i.e. of our models of it. (We have no activity, experience or knowledge of and in the world without mediation by our concepts/meanings, which limits any claim to a purely "empirical" approach: a devolved Kantian position). Hence, there is never any "final" guarantee that our meaningful, symbolic knowledge of the world is "identical" with causal-physical reality, nor would such an "identity" be entirely conducive to the need by which we seek knowledge: that is rather always what is at issue. Nor would a "Martian physicist" be somehow better positioned, since the "perfected" physical knowledge would be counterbalanced by the loss of attributive identifications. Sooner or later, the intractable "mathematics" would give way to "psychological" heuristics. The idea of a "perfect" and continuous model of reality, which would simultaneously displace us from the world and guarantee our "place" within it is precisely a metaphysical pipe-dream,

[Jon Fernquest]

"I take it for granted that 'Martian physicists' have models of human brains at a subatomic level and understand the dynamic evolution of brain states and the connection of brain states to human actions, and do so at a level that makes 'psychology' needless save as a shorthand way of dividing brain states into categories. Philosophers' 'Martian physicists' don't seem to be able to do that."

"Martian Physicist" would describe the way I felt last night while reading an explanation of why the Mongol-Yuan court (c. 1270) in far away Beijing wanted to invade Burma half a continent away, likewise:

"Martian physicists--intelligences vast, cool, and unsympathetic with no notions of [Bushian] psychology or [Bushian] psychological causation--could not understand why, could not put their finger on physical variables and factors explaining why, [Bush would want to remain in Iraq or go there in the first place]

[krpydip]

Yes, Halasz's account sounds reasonable, but I think it weakens the conclusion. After all, on most accounts of meaning *I* do not understand what it means to participate in Social Practice X, although I could come to understand the meaning if I myself closely studied or participated in SPX. But the way Brad describes it, it seemeth that Campbell would want to say that even though I myself do not understand the meaning of SPX in that sense, there remains a sense in which I actually (not just potentially) might understand it and the Martian Physicist cannot.

[Robert Waldmann]

You mean Physics 143 not Physics 140 of course

[Touche. I do indeed.]

[Scott Martens]

Okay, I'm missing some part of the point here: I see quite clearly how reductionism can be wrong as an epistemological and methodological stance, but that may be because I'm a linguist and my field has gone for over two centuries with a very functional and effective macrotheory of language change which is completely divorced from actual speakers and their lives; and has only had a marginally not unacceptable, half-assed, monstrously incomplete and probably fundamentally misguided microtheory of language change for under a decade. Reductionism is wrong because it compels me to cover the working macrotheory in shame while praising microtheories that don't even sort-of work as the future of our science.

Let's say these Martian physicists, instead of thinking their model of Assistant Dean Chuck Stroup would have acted differently had it had adjusted seratonin levels, note that meetings of the older, hairless apes at Berkeley - the ones who stay more than four years - have a frequency that can be modeled by a Poisson process. They surmise that some emergent quality of the various biochemical bits of Berkeleans builds up over time at varying rates in different people, and must be expelled with some regularity, much like the more easily observed metabolic processes of digestion. Let's call this quality "glop". Glop can only be expelled - perhaps for social reasons, perhaps physiological ones - in the presence of other humans, usually the same ones over and over. Furthermore, the Martians note that the frequency of these meetings varies not in function of all the actual people who attend them, but only of certain people who attend them - Dean Stroup, for instance. They might, therefore, see this human as having the social function of organizing these excrementory sessions as a social good. If humans did not have meeting-callers, they could never relieve themselves of accumulated glop.

Try as they might, though, the Martians never positively identify any biochemical process with glop. There are a number of false starts, and great volumes in Martian are written about glop and its properties, but in the end no clear reductionist theory of glop comes into being. Despite near omniscience about the molecular processes of humans, Human Studies is never able to bridge the gap with biochemistry.

But it's a workable theory. Real results come of it. The structure of military organizations becomes obvious when one hypothesizes that wearing a uniform increases glop production levels. Elections become a kind of visceral mass-glop release session, where millions of people - practically without regard for social status - are able to release toxic glop build-ups together on a regular schedule as a generous social gesture. Indeed, we can deduce vast areas of political structure from the glop theory, down to very fine details. The organizers of top-level glop reduction are, in some organizations, herditary; in others, glop sessions are organized on a calendar; still others do so irregularly, as needed. Huge tensions build up when there is insufficient opportunity to rid yourself of glop - production breaks down, people fight, starve, live in misery...

Now, I would argue that the "glop" theory offers more insight into the faculty at Berkeley than theories about the effects of serotonin on the brain, and that even Martians with a practically god-like knowledge of the hard sciences might well be stuck with "glop". "Glop" does correlate, in part, to the human need for regular social reinforcement and planning when undertaking cooperative projects involving divided labour. There is a real insight there, even if in human terms it is totally misunderstood. And, explaining to Martians that their glop hypothesis was deeply misguided might well fall on deaf ears. They aren't human, and can never be human, and will never experience human life as humans do. So, they might come to the conclusion that given the obvious superiority of Martian science, there's no reason to treat human justifications for their behaviour as possessing any kind of scientific merit.

[Neil Bates]

Regarding free-will and choice, etc:

I gave a poster presentation at Tucson 2000 conference on consciousness about free will. I argued that we had to have some kind of unitary (to whatever extent) “agency,” because of how we could be involved in doing some activity for awhile and then stop ourselves immediately. Otherwise, (as with the sloppy “pandemonium" theory), we couldn't - there would be leakage, leftover influence, of the previously entrained neural patterns. Whatever influence in us wanted to stop would fight with other causal forces, and it would be a messy cool-down. (Such as, you are doing repetitive motion and then can't just halt, but show a “decay” of the previous activity.) Not being famous, it got some interest but no notoriety.

Also, the idea that causality is easily understood, even taking “chance” into account, is flawed. Chance can't really be rigorously defined, despite pretensions to the contrary. For example, probabilistic claims can’t be genuinely falsified. For example, try to falsify “This coin has 50/50 chance of heads/tails”. No experiment can do that, despite what you think. Any run has a chance of getting more or less than 50% (and where do you draw the line?) There is no *logical* boundary, just estimates we like such as “95% chance of not being due to chance” (!) Furthermore, an experiment using any number of trials eventually will eventually fail, and then what? If I did m experiments with n trials each of “genuinely” fair coins, then some fraction of m will fail any criterion I pick. So, those coins aren’t really “fair” after all? That contradicts the original stipulation.

As for things even being either determined or random, no: consider the sequence 2, 4, 6, 23, 10, 12, 14, … etc. The insertion of “23” was neither given by a rule such as the rest of the sequence used, nor is it part of any “probability” since it may never occur again. That is what choice is like – putting that 23 in there.

Note also that those stating whatever deterministic/mechanistic/partly probabilistic model of the brain/mind never have a working model construct that can actually perform anything approximating what we do. Yet they think we should take their pretensions for granted, even with a universe the causality conditions of which we don’t really understand. (And don’t even get me started on conscious experience, and the idiotic wedding of supposed scientific thinking with utterly incompatible pretensions of child-like naïve realism and ordinary language “philosophy” …)

http://tyrannogenius.blogspot.com

[Mooneyguy]

Let me be the first (to my surprise!) to say thank you for the reference to Forbidden Planet, one of the best SF movies ever. You are clearly a cultured individual...