Nathan in his Comment under “Know . . . Understand . . . Believe” asks the right question, namely, Does acknowledging that feelings of love or beauty may just be chemical reactions in the brain do anything to diminish their importance?” He doesn’t think so . . . but I am guessing that most people would say it does. Or at least they would if we put the word “meaning” in place of “importance.” Is that a fair substitution, Nathan?
The argument for God, or for a spiritual realm that is above/beyond the “mere” physical world of chemical reactions, often (always?) goes back to the question of “meaning.” If I were bright enough, and rich enough, I could build a pair of robots who, from the outside, appeared to be in love. But I as their creator would know better; I would know that they are doing only that which they have to do, by my direction, not theirs. And love, I want to believe, has something to do with – a lot to do with – free decision.
Using Barrett’s terms, I would know that my amorous pair are not “agents,” but “objects.” And objects, as judged by us agents (objects can’t judge on this, so we get the call) have less meaning in the scheme of things than agents. We agents don’t want to be considered objects, and it would seem that if everything I think, feel, imagine, long for, dream about, decide, do is reducible to complicated, yes, but still merely chemical reactions in my brain then I have become an object – and have lost all meaning. Or rather, have no more meaning – significance, purpose – than, say, a tree. So goes the argument from the theist side. Where does meaning come from apart from the properties we attribute to agents?
Nathan is exactly right when he says the question of importance – meaning, to use my word – is a separate question from whether or not consciousness is the result of (to use Sagan’s words) “the number and complexity of neuronal linkages.” The article he cites – very interesting, thanks for pointing that out – talks about the feeling of love being explained by the levels of oxytocin in the brain. We need to be careful that we don’t answer scientific questions with spiritual/religious answers – “If I say that this feeling of love I have is caused by oxytocin, I am in danger of making those feelings meaningless, and so I will, in order to rescue some meaning, deny the science.”
So a question is, if someday we could in fact describe every human spiritual feeling – love, beauty, morality, sacrifice, virtue, joy – in terms of chemical reactions in the brain, would that destroy all meaning for you? For me?
"Does acknowledging that feelings may just be chemical reactions in the brain do anything to diminish their [meaning]?"
ReplyDeleteLike I said: I don't think it has to, although I can understand it might for some people.
But first, on the robots: two robots simply appearing to be in love may not mean anything, but I don't think it's because they were mechanically constructed, it's because they are not conscious beings. What if--assuming brains are purely physical processes and we had enough technology--we could build an exact, conscious copy of two humans in love? Would this "robot" love have less meaning than what was based off of? I say no.
All this is a long long way off of course, but some recent relevant news:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64J5RY20100526
The main point I think is that consciousness is a whole different animal. If it is mechanical, it no doubt involves very complex machinery; but human beings are not just complicated Rube Goldberg machines, we're machines that know we exist.
I don't think acknowledging the brain and mind reside in the physical (and therefore are susceptible to things like oxytocin or optical illusions) automatically makes us objects rather than agents. I think the difference is consciousness.
Two other perspectives on consciousness:
From Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene):
"The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology. There is no reason to suppose that electronic computers are conscious when they simulate, although we have to admit that in the future they become so. Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself."
From Carl Sagan (The God Hypothesis):
"...we do not know the details in any but the very broadest brush about the evolution of consciousness. That is on the agenda of future neurological science. But we do know, for example, that an earthworm introduced into a Y-shaped glass tube with... an electric shock on the right-hand fork and food in the left-hand fork, rapidly learns to take the left fork. Does an earthworm have consciousness if it is able after a certain number of trials invariably to know where the food is and the shock isn’t? And if an earthworm has consciousness, could a protozoan have consciousness?
"Many phototropic microorganisms know to go to the light. They have some kind of internal perception of where the light is, and nobody taught them that it’s good to go to the light. They had that information in their hereditary material. It’s encoded into their genes and chromosomes. Well, did God put that information there, or might it have evolved through natural selection?
"It is clearly good for the survival of microorganisms to know where the light is, especially the ones that photosynthesize. It is certainly good for earthworms to know where the food is. Those earthworms that can’t figure out where the food is leave few offspring. After a while the ones that survive know where the food is. Those phototropic or phototactic offspring have encoded into their genetic material how to find the light. It is not apparent that God has entered into the process."
the whole text: http://tinyurl.com/godhypothesis
Another book I strongly recommend to anyone interested in the brain and consciousness and how it (mis)functions:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684853949/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1WFS5BJA5EHW03EXDRY4&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846