Thursday, December 16, 2010

Time for a subvention...

'Twas asked in a thread at Doc Feser's blog:

"How does the Aristotelian/Thomistic conception of the soul and the body and their relation to each other resolve the problem of free will and determinism? How does the Thomistic soul/'form' redirect certain neuroparticles and thus intervene in the otherwise completely deterministic neurological pathways in order to produce the desired response? If they don't, there's no free will. Additionally, if they do, then they violate the fundamental physical law of conservation of energy."

A few other readers engaged the question, but mostly on the front of challenging the notion of physical closure and determinism. I took a different tack by trying to address the apparent conflict head-on.

I take much of the 'point' of A-T anthropology vis-a-vis physical causation to be that, while there is no question of a non-physical cause for bodily motion, in secondary terms, there is the larger principle that no body is 'just' a material body. As in: action is a response to perception but perception is mediated by sensation, conation, imagination, and, in the case of rational animals, intellection. These perceptual filters generate varying degrees of deliberation in their bearers, i.e. a proper range of action potential for various organisms. Amoebae have a very narrow range of sensible deliberation which can modulate there perceptual being-in-the-world, and higher animals have a correspondingly broader range of action. n Rational animals such as ourselves, by virtue of the intellectual judgment of universals in particulars and the good per se in being per se, have a deliberative access to a range of potential which transcends the deterministic bounds of purely physical causation. When a perceptual experience is given a value in the larger intellectual noesis of a human, the response is something which transforms an otherwise strictly indeterminate action potential into a concrete action, which eo ipso modulates how the physical organism responds to the physical stimuli. We don't experience the world "raw", and therefore we can modulate the incoming data; conversely, we don't respond separately from the entire Gestalt of our own (social-physical) place in the world, an entirety which just as seamlessly modulates our inner physical 'world'.

The bottom line seems to be this: Physical motion is not rational. Human perception and action are, however, rational. Humans are also continuous with the world of physical motion, but the power of our rational nature makes it the case that otherwise irrational physical matter responds and acts rationally, which is pretty remarkable.

Imagine a child who grows up seeing and handling triangles in his house but is never instructed as to what "triangle" means. One day, though, he is told the meaning of these objects and his entire world changes. Nothing physical about him or the triangles changes--there is no Cartesian 'gap'--, but everything about his perception and action has been transformed. Otherwise meaningless matter has been "de-potentiated" and "in-formed" such that his entirely 'materialistic' existence goes on as before, yet his actual, proper existence is qualitatively different. Perhaps you all know Polanyi's metaphor of the scribbled line suddenly becoming intelligible words and then flowing back into random scribbles. From nonsense to sense back to nonsense without a single physical break.

The larger doctrine of habits/virtues point to this fact by saying that recurring de-potentiation of one's body and environment leads to qualitative changes in both of them, yet without corrupting their physical contiguity/history in an otherwise a-virtuous world.

I have already tried to explain how intelligible order 'subvenes' (as it were) physical closure without violating physical order. I would simply like rephrase the question in order to show how Aristhomistic makes sense in a, perhaps disappointingly, plain way.

"How does the 'form' of a number redirect certain microparticles and thus intervene in the otherwise completely deterministic physical pathways in order to produce the intelligible content?"

Two, as a pure intelligible, makes otherwise meaningless, but physically 'taut', matter into an intelligible reality. No violation of physics, nor a physicalist reduction either. I can't "explain how" intelligible form "does" what it does, but I can't deny that it does what it does, and that this achievement is an analogous primer for grasping how soul orders body.

Actually, one commenter's reply to the question was in the same spirit as mine, and led to an increasingly lengthy tangential discussion of numbers, definitions, form, descriptions, etc., about which I shall write in the near future.

12 comments:

Crude said...

Codg,

Human perception and action are, however, rational. Humans are also continuous with the world of physical motion, but the power of our rational nature makes it the case that otherwise irrational physical matter responds and acts rationally, which is pretty remarkable.

What if someone bit the bullet and asserted that all of "physical motion" is, in fact, rational after all? Granted, you couldn't bite that bullet hard enough to keep materialism's head from being blown clear off, but I'm wondering what that position would be called. Panpsychism? Idealism?

Ilíon said...

panentheism??

Codgitator (Cadgertator) said...

I must still be too Cartesian, since I can't really fathom what it would mean to say that *all* physical motion is rational. Rationality is about reasons, not merely about effects. If every single physical state in the cosmos were 'performing' a rational decision, the universe as a whole would be performing numerous rationally contradictory acts. If the 'panpsychic' cosmos lacks a regulative center of consciousness, it thereby lacks a faculty of integrated, coherent reasoning. I suppose the panpsychist could say all he means is that everything in the cosmos has its own quasi-rational ends (viz., everything works for its own goals based on the options available in its Umwelt). But then we're just in Aristotelianism, a conversion beautifully gilded by Dante's Thomism (viz. the Love that sets the spheres to turning). Hmmm... Needs pondering…

Codgitator (Cadgertator) said...

In Aristotelianism, or at least Leibinizianism, or then again Spinozism, at the very least. The latter option which is to say pantheism.

Ilíon said...

"I must still be too Cartesian ..."

Contra a certain A-T phulosopher, I see no shame in seeing "the universe" as a machine, made of a multitude of sub-machines. For, after all, it is.

Crude said...

I think that depends on what is meant by 'machine'. Intrinsic purposes and teleology seems apt to me, which puts me in the A-T camp. Then again, maybe your view of 'machine' allows for those things.

But panentheism may be a good description for the 'everything is rational' view. And I also agree that idea of 'quasi-rational ends' and Aristotileanism seems related.

Confusing stuff!

Codgitator (Cadgertator) said...

Just how robust "panentheism" is depends on one's view of the existence of the "divine ideas" in relation to God's self-knowledge. I have read this and that on the topic in the past months, but hope to read Aertsen's monograph in the near future.

Having said that…

Ilíon, I would like to ask you how you square the "machine" nature of the universe with the informational nature of the universe as espoused by ID. Fr Jaki's great The Relevance of Physics devotes the first three chapters, if memory serves, to the progress in human though from seeing nature as organism, as machine, as numbers. The latter conception seems to be a linchpin of ID, namely, that nature is rife with numerical information, ergo, etc. Machines don't seem to obey the same laws as information-processing entities, which is what I thought the entire gist of ID is.

Onward…

Ilíon said...

Codgitator: "Ilíon, I would like to ask you how you square the "machine" nature of the universe with the informational nature of the universe as espoused by ID."

Most people, possibly most IDists, and certainly most fervent anti-IDists and/or materialists, have a totally false understanding of 'information.' For instance, one can easily find persons claiming that, say, starlight, is 'information.' Starlight is not ‘information’ and it is not even 'data,' it is just starlight; at best it can be called a "brute fact."

Information’ is created by -- and exists only “within” -- a mind or minds. Thus, this post is not information, for it contains not a spec of information; rather, this post is comprised of inherently meaningless symbols which, by convention, together represent some certain information which I wish to recreate in your mind.

Ilíon said...

Ilíon: "... [there is] no shame in seeing "the universe" as a machine, made of a multitude of sub-machines. For, after all, it is"

Crude: "I think that depends on what is meant by 'machine'. Intrinsic purposes and teleology seems apt to me, which puts me in the A-T camp. Then again, maybe your view of 'machine' allows for those things."

Codgitator: "The latter conception seems to be a linchpin of ID, namely, that nature is rife with numerical information, ergo, etc. Machines don't seem to obey the same laws as information-processing entities, which is what I thought the entire gist of ID is."

Definitionally, all machines are conceived, designed and built by minds -- machines do not "arise:" they do not design, nor instantiate, themselves; they are not "designed" and instantiated by random events. Machines have one or more purposes: they have an end, a teleology; even if that purpose is simply to exist (for instance, perhaps the machine's instantiation amuses its creator) -- yet, the purpose of a machine is not intrinsic, certainly not in the way Aristotle seems to mean, to the machine or any instantiation of it, but is rather imposed by the mind(s) which conceived the machine: conception of purpose first, design second, instantiation (if at all) last.

Further, while most machines with which we are familiar are physical/material, machines may be wholly immaterial and non-physical. A computer program is a machine, and is nearly a perfect machine, yet it is wholly immaterial.

A machine is designed and built for a task or set of tasks. But, that alone does not make an entity a machine. For instance, both a shovel and a steam-shovel are designed and built for the same specific task, to extend a human's capacity for hole-digging; yet a shovel is simply a tool, while a steam-shovel is a machine.

Machines have some level of autonomy (so to speak) in the performance of their function(s). A shovel is a tool, rather than a machine, because the performance of its function is utterly dependent upon human action and physical effort. A steam-shovel, on the other hand, is a machine (even if just barely a machine, due to its need for continuous human monitoring and intervention), not merely because it extends a human's capacity for hole-digging, as a shovel does, but because it does so "under its own steam."

The machines with which we are most familiar tend to be complex, and we tend to associate increasing complexity with more nearly instantiating the concept "machine." Yet, this is actually incorrect, for the simpler a machine, given its intended function or functions, the more perfect it is. For example, a simple bi-metal thermostat is a very simple machine, yet it more nearly approaches being a perfect machine than does a steam-shovel. The steam-shovel, for all its size and complexity, is just barely a machine rather than a mere tool. But a simple thermostat never needs monitoring or intervention after being initially set.

Ilíon said...

Codgitator: "The latter conception seems to be a linchpin of ID, namely, that nature is rife with numerical information, ergo, etc. ..."

The world can be described -- by minds -- using numberical terms; that doesn't actually make the world informational. People have a nasty habit of conflating the information they create about things for those things themselves.


Codgitator: "... Machines don't seem to obey the same laws as information-processing entities, which is what I thought the entire gist of ID is."

The only "information-processing entities" which exist, or ever can exist, are minds. A computer program does not process information; strictly speaking, it doesn't even process data. Rather, it processes and manipulates inherently meaningless symbols which some mind has chosen to use to represent data.

To me, my yearly income is information; to an economist, it is data; to a computer program it is ... nothing, for a computer program understands nothing: rather, the econominst uses symbols to represent the data that my income (and yours) is to him, and these symbols are used as the "data" (the quotes are because I am now using the term 'data' in the specialized sense invented for "data processing") of the program he executes. The program manipulates the symbols which are its input "data" according to the symbol manipulation rules built into the program, and generates output "data." The economist reads the output of the program and then, from that output and the initial choice of what the symbols are to represent, creates -- in his mind -- the same information he could have created by manually "crunching the numbers" without aid of the immaterial machine (that is, the program).

Codgitator (Cadgertator) said...

Ilíon:

Thanks for that. I want to try to distill some key points, for my own comprehension.

1. Your conception of machines suggests that they are basically tools––artifacts with extrinsically imposed goals. This is actually a very Aristotelian idea, since the "parts" of an organism are its "tools" (Gk. organon). If, then, the world is a machine––an organon––, does it follow that it is an organism? I think it does, at least in analogous sense. As such, I would ask what you take the "soul" of the world to be.

2. You say that information is a strictly mental phenomenon. ID says that information is detectable in natural structures, the inference being that the information was/is put there by a Mind. Yet you also say that machines do not themselves process information: only minds can do that. So, it seems that either the world, insofar as it "contains" information, also has a mind, or the world does not actually contain information, and it is really just we who generate it. I suppose I am being a Devil's advocate, but I want to be clear on what you take ID to be saying.

3. If indeed information only really becomes manifest in our detection of it (in an otherwise dumb, mechanical cosmos), isn't ID just an elaborate argument for the immateriality of our minds? By modus ponens, if X instantiates information, it is a mental, non-mechanical entity; humans instantiate information; ergo. By modus tollens, if Y does not instantiate information it is not a non-mental, mechanical entity; the world does not instantiate information but humans do; ergo the world is mechanical but humans are not.

Thanks, best,

Crude said...

Codg,

Re: Your distillation, I've wondered about hylozoism before on thomistic/aristotilean grounds.

I find the question about 'information' interesting as well.