Alternatively, Aesgil might be a gas giant and I-IV its satellites. That seems more likely.
Right now, this blog is focused on a few installments of a single future history series. However, our wider contexts remain:
the complete works of Poul Anderson;
all future history series;
in fact, all science fiction and imaginative literature;
the history, cosmology and philosophical issues that form the background of Anderson's works.
And here is one of those issues. Recently (here), we referred to the evolution of intelligence. Intelligence emerges when consciousness advances from sensation and perception to abstraction. An intelligent animal not only feels hot, and not only perceives sources of heat, but also applies the concepts of "hot" and "heat." I suggest that this advance from perception to abstraction is a qualitative transformation inside material brains and not an interaction between those brains and any specially created immaterial entities. We are part of "One Universe." In fact, we are its self-consciousness.
16 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I did send you a link to John Wright's arguments against materialism, a collection called, I think, "The Meat Robot Essays." Arguments which convinced me materialism is wrong. Did you ever read those essays? And how would you argue against them if you still believed in materialism?
Sean
Sean,
I did read some of it at the time but cannot respond from memory alone and am having difficulty searching for old emails. If given a summary, I can respond. Basically, I think that some anti-materialists assume that materialism has to be reductionist. If materialism were indeed the view that nothing exists but mechanically interacting particles with only the quantifiable properties of mass and volume, then, yes, materialism would be incompatible with the world of our experiences which comprises qualitative differences, changes and transformations, including consciousness and self-consciousness.
Paul.
Materialism is only the philosophical view that being (that which is), however it is currently described by scientists, preexisted consciousness and, indeed, by a process of qualitative transformations, became conscious of itself first in animals, then in human beings. Philosophical materialists are not committed to any particular scientific theory of the nature of being/mass/energy and, indeed, they expect such theories to continue to change and develop in future.
Kaor, Paul!
I do recall how long and massively detailed John Wright's essays were. If I find the link to the "Meat Robot" articles, I'll send it to you again. I'm not sure if Mr. Wright ever addressed the point of "materialism" is simply "being" that became aware of itself. It doesn't even SEEM like materialism.
Sean
Sean,
I began to write a reply and it disappeared !
If that keeps up, I will send in fragments.
Paul.
Thank you for re-sending the link to letters about determinism. I have argued on the blog that all events are either caused or random and that human freedom is absence of constraint, not philosophical/theological "free will."
If "being became conscious" does not sound like materialism, that is because you are only familiar with mechanical materialism, which is reductionist. If you argue that this "materialism" is untenable, then I agree!
Dialectical materialists recognize that sufficiently large quantitative changes become qualitative. Thus, there are levels of being with emergent qualities like a new color for mixing two other colors. The level of consciousness cannot be reduced to unconscious mechanical levels. At the level of physics, there are quantitative differences between wavelengths of radiation. At the conscious level, there are qualitative differences between red, blue etc.
An increase in complexity is a quantitative change but is insufficient to generate the qualitative change from unconsciousness to consciousness. That latter change results from an increase in organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations. Such sensitivity does require cerebral complexity to process sensory inputs, transforming them into conscious sensations, then into discrete perceptions.
The only issue here is whether consciousness preexisted or emerged. The evidence supports the latter. Where was consciousness in the pre-organic universe? Immediately after the Big Bang, with an expanding gas cloud and randomly moving particles, the laws of physics were sufficient to describe that level of being. There were wavelengths of radiation but not yet the sensation of seeing white light.
Kaor, Paul!
Many thanks for the trouble you took writing these comments. Yes, we both agree that the kind of materialism which is mechanical and reductionist is untenable. That type of materialism seems to be what most people mean by the word.
I agree that the kind of consciousness WE have only emerged after the Big Bang, as different kinds of life evolved. And, again, I have to say this kind of "materialism" you favor hardly even seems materialism! Also, I believe that the Eternal Consciousness called God pre-existed the Big Bang and created it. In fact, your views would not necessarily be incompatible with belief in God.
Sean
Sean,
However, I explain human intelligence by external interactions and internal transformations, not by the infusion of a soul.
Paul.
The fact of the matter is that we have very little grasp on how the electrochemical (or possibly quantum-mechanical) processes of the brain become the subjective experiences of consciousness.
Hence even if a computer faultlessly passed the Turing test, it would IMHO be no guarantee whatever that there was "someone in there". There might be; there might not be. A wheel and a leg can do similar things, but they are different in their nature and -how- they do them.
Evolution isn't a directed process, so in a sense consciousness "emerged" as a function of increasing complexity. But it isn't a random one either, so it must have served to increase the reproductive fitness of the organism.
I suspect but cannot prove that consciousness is essential to efficiently modeling both the environment and other living actors in it, particularly the latter.
Certainly humans have the most complex -type- of consciousness, but I think all mammals at least (and probably birds as well) show the same phenomenon in a more limited form.
Mr Stirling,
And reptiles?
If an entity passed the Turing test and yet could be shown to be a mere digital computer/calculator doing nothing more than manipulating symbols according to rules without understanding their meanings, then I would have a big philosophical problem.
Passing the Turing test is difficult. Think of all the possible human responses to an offensive joke (laughter, offense, "I don't get it," "here's another one," threats of violence/legal action etc). The entity would have to simulate one such response consistently over time.
Paul.
Gentlemen,
And it's this complexity and subtlety of the human mind which continues to make me skeptical of the kind of arguments offered by Paul.
Sean
Both,
Quantum mechanics might be counter-intuitive enough to provide a consciouness-unconsciousness interface. Scientists, philosophers and psychologists have at least progressed in clarifying the questions.
Paul.
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