I have identified a possible flaw in a thought-experiment-based argument I posted here ('Kirk dies') some time ago. I wrote:
"We willingly go to sleep at night. We willingly get anesthetized for an operation. We might also be happy to go into 'cold storage' for a long space journey or to survive a devastating catastrophe on earth (a 'nuclear winter', for example).
But, what if, though we could be certain the hibernation device would not fail to keep our body alive and in a resuscitatable state, we just did not know whether or not it would ever get around to waking us up?
Going into such a device becomes exactly equivalent to a game of Russian roulette. Death (as in the death of the body) is functionally equivalent to not waking up, ever. All the death of the body does is make it impossible ever to wake up. It takes away hope.
But, from the point of view of the unconscious person, hope – or any kind of expectation – is irrelevant. So the experience of death is equivalent to the experience of going into a state of unconsciousness – nothing more."
The problem (as I now see it) is that I was overlooking the fact that a body which is revivable must, like any living thing, be in some sense sentient.*
A person requires consciousness as well as a social context, etc., and so is much more than a sentient body or body components. But the latter is the basis and sine qua non of the former and – crucially – is what makes me me and not you.**
The higher functions of my brain (or my 'mind') fade in and out, and may go permanently before my body fails. Once they are gone, I (as a functioning person) am gone. But in another sense I live on in my separateness until the death of the body.
In a fundamental sense, basic sentience is a far more interesting phenomenon than consciousness or self-consciousness, as it is the root of the latter. If there is a deep mystery in the universe, sentience is it. The primitive organism in a rock pool attracted to the warmth of the sun: this is what is most remarkable.
A human body, then, in some imagined technology-induced kind of super-hibernation would be unconscious but sentient (probably in many ways). And such a 'sleep' – even if extended indefinitely – is not at all equivalent to death.
I thought I had demonstrated (assuming that a functioning human body is entirely physical, i.e. soulless) that there can be no afterlife, no waking up (as it were) after death.*** But my little thought experiment was, I think, fatally flawed.
All sorts of possibilities – especially in an infinite universe (or multiverse) with multiple copies and so on – remain in place (faint though these possibilities may be).
* I am assuming here that any process which completely shuts down the functioning of organs, cells etc. would not be reversible: it would in effect kill the body.
** I know there are difficult questions about what it is exactly that confers identity on an individual or what identity consists of or in which I'm skirting here, but (if one rejects a Cartesian view) the living body is clearly basic.
*** Looking at things from a first-person perspective helps to keep these sorts of discussions grounded. Look, for example, at the sort of question that a dying person might ask him/herself. Something like: "Is this the end, the end of all experience (for me)?" I put the 'for me' in brackets because the burden of the question lies elsewhere. The dying person is not interested in me-ness but in whether or not there are going to be any more experiences. One can imagine – looking forward – waking up as oneself at another (say, earlier) stage of life, as someone else entirely or even as a giant cockroach – and I think these imaginings are at least coherent. (Kafka's giant bug had psychological continuity with the man who suffered the transformation. My cockroach doesn't (necessarily), and nor does my someone else. Thus the inserted clause, 'looking forward'.)
Showing posts with label sentience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sentience. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Where the mystery lies
If I appear to have a bit of an obsession with David Berlinski's writings, it may be because I share one or two of his obsessions (don't ask); or just that I have been charmed by his politically incorrect persona. But let me make it clear that I disagree utterly with his ultimate conclusions about human life and science – with his basic view of the world, in fact.
In a way, he is my ideal interlocutor, a deft articulator of a point of view I respect but reject.
He sees the scientific view of the world (which most of us implicitly accept) as being essentially ideological, as a set of commitments
… conceived without justification, the commitments determining the evidence rather than the reverse, and this by means of a psychological process as difficult to discern as it is to deny. The largest of these commitments, and the one least examined because most tenaciously held, is that the universe is nothing more than a system of material objects. Beyond this system – nothing. A universe of this sort might seem repugnant to most men and women, but many physical scientists have proclaimed themselves satisfied by a world in which there is nothing but atoms and the void, and they look forward to their forthcoming dissolution into material constituents with cheerful nihilism.
An uneasy sense nonetheless prevails – it has long prevailed – that the vision of a purely physical or material universe is somehow incomplete; it cannot encompasses the familiar but inescapable facts of ordinary life. A man speaks, sending waves into the air. A woman listens, the tiny and exquisite bones in her inner ear vibrating sympathetically to the splashes of his voice. The purely physical exchange having been made, what has been sound becomes what has been said; heated by the urgency of communication, the sounds begin to glow with meaning so that an undulating current in the air can convey a lyric poem, issue a declaration of war, or say with terrible finality that it's over. Making sense of sounds is something every human being does and that nothing else can do. More than three generations of mathematical physicists grew old before their successors understood black-body radiation; the association between sound and meaning is more mysterious than anything found in physics. And we, too, are waiting for our successors.*
Part of his method, evidently, is to exhaust (exasperate?) us with his rhetoric. But here are a few unrhetorical points in reply.
Firstly, let's accept that old fashioned, commonsense materialism is, in the light of quantum mechanics and a computational perspective on the world, no longer viable. Even so, the world can still be seen as a physical, if not a 'material', system. The 'atoms' of this world can be seen as (physical) events or processes rather than as little bits of stuff.
Is such a view incomplete? Of course. It is concerned only with what underlies and ultimately generates and powers the pageant, not with the pageant itself. The pageant of life needs to be suffered or enjoyed or analysed or interpreted in its own terms.
Berlinski is right to suggest that human language is wondrous and unique, but wrong to see deep mystery in the meaning of sentences. If there is a deep mystery of meaning, it resides also in animal communication systems, surely. And those more primitive systems would lie closer to the mystery's source.
In fact, in my view, the mystery lies – if it lies anywhere – with subjective experience rather than with communication; and, of course, in the broader question of why there is anything at all.**
* The Advent of the Algorithm (Harcourt 2001), pp. 249-250.
** By the way, the latter question is connected to the first, because, in a sense, a world of inanimate objects, objects without a subjective sense (in other words a world with no one to see it, even to observe its traces as we do the early universe) is equivalent to nothingness, is it not?
In a way, he is my ideal interlocutor, a deft articulator of a point of view I respect but reject.
He sees the scientific view of the world (which most of us implicitly accept) as being essentially ideological, as a set of commitments
… conceived without justification, the commitments determining the evidence rather than the reverse, and this by means of a psychological process as difficult to discern as it is to deny. The largest of these commitments, and the one least examined because most tenaciously held, is that the universe is nothing more than a system of material objects. Beyond this system – nothing. A universe of this sort might seem repugnant to most men and women, but many physical scientists have proclaimed themselves satisfied by a world in which there is nothing but atoms and the void, and they look forward to their forthcoming dissolution into material constituents with cheerful nihilism.
An uneasy sense nonetheless prevails – it has long prevailed – that the vision of a purely physical or material universe is somehow incomplete; it cannot encompasses the familiar but inescapable facts of ordinary life. A man speaks, sending waves into the air. A woman listens, the tiny and exquisite bones in her inner ear vibrating sympathetically to the splashes of his voice. The purely physical exchange having been made, what has been sound becomes what has been said; heated by the urgency of communication, the sounds begin to glow with meaning so that an undulating current in the air can convey a lyric poem, issue a declaration of war, or say with terrible finality that it's over. Making sense of sounds is something every human being does and that nothing else can do. More than three generations of mathematical physicists grew old before their successors understood black-body radiation; the association between sound and meaning is more mysterious than anything found in physics. And we, too, are waiting for our successors.*
Part of his method, evidently, is to exhaust (exasperate?) us with his rhetoric. But here are a few unrhetorical points in reply.
Firstly, let's accept that old fashioned, commonsense materialism is, in the light of quantum mechanics and a computational perspective on the world, no longer viable. Even so, the world can still be seen as a physical, if not a 'material', system. The 'atoms' of this world can be seen as (physical) events or processes rather than as little bits of stuff.
Is such a view incomplete? Of course. It is concerned only with what underlies and ultimately generates and powers the pageant, not with the pageant itself. The pageant of life needs to be suffered or enjoyed or analysed or interpreted in its own terms.
Berlinski is right to suggest that human language is wondrous and unique, but wrong to see deep mystery in the meaning of sentences. If there is a deep mystery of meaning, it resides also in animal communication systems, surely. And those more primitive systems would lie closer to the mystery's source.
In fact, in my view, the mystery lies – if it lies anywhere – with subjective experience rather than with communication; and, of course, in the broader question of why there is anything at all.**
* The Advent of the Algorithm (Harcourt 2001), pp. 249-250.
** By the way, the latter question is connected to the first, because, in a sense, a world of inanimate objects, objects without a subjective sense (in other words a world with no one to see it, even to observe its traces as we do the early universe) is equivalent to nothingness, is it not?
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