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| I'm leaving for a couple of days' mini-vacation, so a) I'll only be around sporadically and the next couple of blog entries could be short, delayed, or even *gasp* missed and b) of course my random numbers would give me the really heavy one from my pile: this philosophy question from The Conversation. Well, first, define "real." You can doubt just about anything. But there’s one thing you can know for sure: you are having thoughts right now. *Offer not available for a certain subset of humanity This idea came to characterise the philosophical thinking of 17th century philosopher René Descartes. For Descartes, that we have thoughts may be the only thing we can be certain about. I can agree with that. What I take issue with is the direction he took his logic: mind/body duality. But what exactly are thoughts? Epistemic phenomena resulting from permutations of classical and quantum physics, subject to entropy, qualified by neurological conditions, and dependent upon energy input. Okay, no, I just made that up. There are two main answers to the philosophical question of what thoughts are. As both of them require "thought," we might be in a bit of a pickle here. The first is that thoughts might be material things. Thoughts are just like atoms, particles, cats, clouds and raindrops: part and parcel of the physical universe. This position is known as physicalism or materialism. The problem with that approach is that we can verify the existence of all of those things, either through direct observation or scientific experiment; this isn't the case with "thought." If it were, there'd be no debate. The second view is that thoughts might stand apart from the physical world. They are not like atoms, but are an entirely distinct type of thing. This view is called dualism, because it takes the world to have a dual nature: mental and physical. The problem with that approach is that if something stands apart from the physical world, how can it interact with the physical world? Hell, we're pretty sure there's something called "dark matter;" we don't know its exact nature, but we do know that it interacts with the physical world in some way (primarily gravity) and, hence, it's material or physical. If thoughts are physical, what physical things are they? One plausible answer is they are brain states. I don't disagree, but it seems incomplete to me. Like, does a "hole" exist? Only in relation to what's around it. On the "dualism" side: We don’t have an explanation of how brain states – or any physical states for that matter – give rise to conscious thought. I've already given away which side I lean toward, but I'm trying to be fair, here. The thing we are most certain about – that we have thoughts – is still completely unexplained in physical terms. This seems a bit backwards to me. What need is there to explain that which we're actually certain about? But it gets worse: we may never be able to explain how thoughts arise from neural states. It's hard to accept, but some things really are impossible. The difficult part is knowing what's impossible. It's possible, sometimes, to know what's impossible (such as counting to infinity). Other things, you don't know they're impossible, so you keep trying, and either you give up or you just... keep trying. Settling the question of what thoughts are won’t completely settle the question of whether machines can think, but it would help. And we're back to me making cynical jokes about how we haven't settled the question of whether humans can think. Or do we only think we think? Never mind answering that question for other animals, plants, or fungi. I'm not here to answer these questions. All I'll say is what I've said before: philosophy guides science, and science informs philosophy. Best I can come up with is my working hypothesis, which is that consciousness, or thought, is an epiphenomenon that arose via evolution from sensory processing. But I'm willing to change my mind if new data arise. See? I think. Therefore, I am. |
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