Fri, 25 September 2009  Episode 30 of Books and Ideas is an interview with Tom Clark, author of Encountering Naturalism: A Worldview and Its Uses. We discuss the implications of naturalism as a world view, especially as it relates to questions like morality and free will. Our discussion includes a look at the recent book Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? by Warren Brown and Nancey Murphy.For show notes, links to related episodes, and a full episode transcript go to http://booksandideas.com. Send Dr. Campbell feedback at gincampbell at mac dot com. Comments[2] |
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Regarding Tom Clark Books and Ideas Podcast
I haven’t been able to reach the end of the Podcast but I am going to send this before it grows into a book.
My guard came up the moment Mr. Clark expressed admiration for the pigeon trainer. I thought Skinner was tragicomical even before his and Watson’s teachings went out of style, though his ideas are relevant to our robotic nature and we are no doubt continuously subjected to operant conditioning.
Mr. Clark practically affirms that matter is all there is, though he does make a passing reference to internal states. Maybe he does admit a few immaterial things after all, though he seems to deny what I call the abstract aspect of “matter.” Actually, in Einstein’s world, matter equals energy. Can anyone tell me what energy is? The dictionary says it is a capacity and a property. I don’t think these are material entities. In quantum mechanics matter is probability waves till an observation confers some kind of reality to it. Anything not considered substance by materialists falls into my definition of the abstract; for example, all the mathematical descriptions and relations that define and correlate with an object are part of its abstract aspect. Our internal states are correlated to brain states and once both have been established, our internal states affect the brain just as the brain states affect our internal subjective immaterial state. Space/time is stretched, twisted and compressed to produce gravity and particles. Is space/time classified as material? As there are too many incognitos, I declare myself a confirmed know nothing, a dogmatic Agnostic!
My automatic reaction upon learning I was a deterministic robot was to feel myself a prisoner of determinism and to desire escape. I thought this was a natural reaction, though I find it is not universal among my friends and relatives.
I theorize that the very knowledge of one’s constraint deterministically elicits the thought and creates the possibility of escaping necessity through feedback, reflexion, contemplation and whatever mental tricks one can conjure.
I have disposed of the god problem by defining anything that exists as natural, and postulating that if anybody proves god’s existence it can’t be supernatural by (my) definition; no more problem. Besides, one hundred billion plus galaxies with hundreds of billions of planets each must contain “more things than are dreamt of in Mr. Clark’s philosophy,” to paraphrase Shakespeare. Technologies and beings much more impressive to us than the Spaniards were to the Aztecs must exist within the trillions of possible habitats. (why limit life to planets?)
I suspect “levels of abstraction” correlated to each time/size level, (plank size, quarks, subatomic particles, atoms, etc) which might or might not be conscious and might or might not be ever higher as the time/size levels compound from the quark to the meta-galaxy. (and beyond) I’m not saying the milky-way is our all wise father in heaven, though it could be. It might just be a giant amoeba. I do say that if workers in artificial intelligence are already predicting runaway intelligence, and trillions of possible habitats for awareness exist, we can be fairly comfortable in extrapolating the existence of natural beings that make a piker out of Jehovah; another redundancy call for Mr. white beard in the sky.
Mr. Clark and Science in general maintain, as I understand it, that we just think we are whatever we think we are, but that in actuality we are just some kind of ephemeral epiphenomenon. A robot’s (Mr. Clark’s) statements to another robot (Ginger) commented upon by another robot (me) and read by yet another robot (you) makes the whole human interchange of ideas look rather ludicrous and futile; just a program executing itself. I do not deny this. In fact, my friend (not literarily) Mr. Gurdjieff anticipated this by describing sleeping authors writing books manufactured by sleeping printers to be read by sleeping readers, all operating as deterministic robots. He had an escape plan, but it was so difficult to carry out that he probably ended up as energy food for the growing moon, where he said most of our undeveloped souls would end up.
If everything is predetermined then the big bang’s original particle was pre-programmed with at least the necessary formulas and “laws of nature” that were eventually to develop and evolve or unfold into the universe and all its contents, including awareness and intelligence. If you are going to be deterministic, you might as well go all the way. Another alternative is the Anthropic principle which imagines an infinite variety of possible universes. We are here because this particular one popped out with the fortuitous combination of elements that produced our habitable universe. This favors string theory, which I’ve seen criticized for allowing an infinite variety of universes.
This might not have been the subject of the Podcast, but it is my predetermined will-less reaction to the first half of it. I try to keep my deterministic roots in mind so as to at least allow for the possibility of an original thought. If I were god I would give a party in honor any of my creations that came up with a truly original thought, though if I operated within the Jehovah tradition, I might impulsively smite him in a moment of pique or jealousy…
Determinism is identical to logic. Logically, we must be illogical (without randomness) in order to manifest something akin to free will. Let’s have at it!
I haven’t been able to reach the end of the Podcast but I am going to send this before it grows into a book.
My guard came up the moment Mr. Clark expressed admiration for the pigeon trainer. I thought Skinner was tragicomical even before his and Watson’s teachings went out of style, though his ideas are relevant to our robotic nature and we are no doubt continuously subjected to operant conditioning.
Mr. Clark practically affirms that matter is all there is, though he does make a passing reference to internal states. Maybe he does admit a few immaterial things after all, though he seems to deny what I call the abstract aspect of “matter.” Actually, in Einstein’s world, matter equals energy. Can anyone tell me what energy is? The dictionary says it is a capacity and a property. I don’t think these are material entities. In quantum mechanics matter is probability waves till an observation confers some kind of reality to it. Anything not considered substance by materialists falls into my definition of the abstract; for example, all the mathematical descriptions and relations that define and correlate with an object are part of its abstract aspect. Our internal states are correlated to brain states and once both have been established, our internal states affect the brain just as the brain states affect our internal subjective immaterial state. Space/time is stretched, twisted and compressed to produce gravity and particles. Is space/time classified as material? As there are too many incognitos, I declare myself a confirmed know nothing, a dogmatic Agnostic!
My automatic reaction upon learning I was a deterministic robot was to feel myself a prisoner of determinism and to desire escape. I thought this was a natural reaction, though I find it is not universal among my friends and relatives.
I theorize that the very knowledge of one’s constraint deterministically elicits the thought and creates the possibility of escaping necessity through feedback, reflexion, contemplation and whatever mental tricks one can conjure.
I have disposed of the god problem by defining anything that exists as natural, and postulating that if anybody proves god’s existence it can’t be supernatural by (my) definition; no more problem. Besides, one hundred billion plus galaxies with hundreds of billions of planets each must contain “more things than are dreamt of in Mr. Clark’s philosophy,” to paraphrase Shakespeare. Technologies and beings much more impressive to us than the Spaniards were to the Aztecs must exist within the trillions of possible habitats. (why limit life to planets?)
I suspect “levels of abstraction” correlated to each time/size level, (plank size, quarks, subatomic particles, atoms, etc) which might or might not be conscious and might or might not be ever higher as the time/size levels compound from the quark to the meta-galaxy. (and beyond) I’m not saying the milky-way is our all wise father in heaven, though it could be. It might just be a giant amoeba. I do say that if workers in artificial intelligence are already predicting runaway intelligence, and trillions of possible habitats for awareness exist, we can be fairly comfortable in extrapolating the existence of natural beings that make a piker out of Jehovah; another redundancy call for Mr. white beard in the sky.
Mr. Clark and Science in general maintain, as I understand it, that we just think we are whatever we think we are, but that in actuality we are just some kind of ephemeral epiphenomenon. A robot’s (Mr. Clark’s) statements to another robot (Ginger) commented upon by another robot (me) and read by yet another robot (you) makes the whole human interchange of ideas look rather ludicrous and futile; just a program executing itself. I do not deny this. In fact, my friend (not literarily) Mr. Gurdjieff anticipated this by describing sleeping authors writing books manufactured by sleeping printers to be read by sleeping readers, all operating as deterministic robots. He had an escape plan, but it was so difficult to carry out that he probably ended up as energy food for the growing moon, where he said most of our undeveloped souls would end up.
If everything is predetermined then the big bang’s original particle was pre-programmed with at least the necessary formulas and “laws of nature” that were eventually to develop and evolve or unfold into the universe and all its contents, including awareness and intelligence. If you are going to be deterministic, you might as well go all the way. Another alternative is the Anthropic principle which imagines an infinite variety of possible universes. We are here because this particular one popped out with the fortuitous combination of elements that produced our habitable universe. This favors string theory, which I’ve seen criticized for allowing an infinite variety of universes.
This might not have been the subject of the Podcast, but it is my predetermined will-less reaction to the first half of it. I try to keep my deterministic roots in mind so as to at least allow for the possibility of an original thought. If I were god I would give a party in honor any of my creations that came up with a truly original thought, though if I operated within the Jehovah tradition, I might impulsively smite him in a moment of pique or jealousy…
Determinism is identical to logic. Logically, we must be illogical (without randomness) in order to manifest something akin to free will. Let’s have at it!
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