What is the fundamental difference between information processed by a mechanical computer and a brain? How can there be a fundamental difference in what is happening if all we are is mechanistic?
What is the implication of this for the idea that computers are just too mechanical to be, conscious, to love, to generate or understand meaning, to have a self or to have free will? How would changing notions of consciousness, meaning, morality, free will and self to make them fit with bodies as mechanical as any robot change these psychologically important notions? — Restitutor

I wonder if many people really believe that. Many might believe they believe it, but humans are very prolific in anthropomorphizing. We ascribe inner lifes to everything from our house cats to the weather.

So I think in practical terms it won't require much of a psychological change at all to consider machines as human in everyday interactions, though that will not necessarily extend to treating them as human.

As for the philosophical perspective, we have precious little reason to assume other people who look like us have a consciousness like ours. It's mostly just a practical assumption. What reason do we really have to exclude this or that from consideration?

Physic is mechanistic to the point we can shoot rockets across the solar system and know with extreme accuracy where they will end up. Even clockwork isn't' so precise. — Restitutor

Physics is mechanistic because we constructed the framework for describing and measuring certain phenomena within geometric space-time grids. In other words, it’s not the physical world in itself that is mathematical or mechanistic, it is our template for interpreting it. We could have chosen a different way of modeling it , but so far this way is quite useful for us. It may not always be so. Meanwhile, this mechanistic form of causality is less useful in representing biological and psychological phenomena, so we apply a different descriptive vocabulary.

What is the implication of this for the idea that computers are just too mechanical to be, conscious, to love, to generate or understand meaning, to have a self or to have free will? How would changing notions of consciousness, meaning, morality, free will and self to make them fit with bodies as mechanical as any robot change these psychologically important notions? — Restitutor

In order to create our mechanistic framework for modeling physics or building machines, we have to pretend as though subjectivity does not play a part in how our machines work or our descriptions the physical world. In other words, our computers are already interactions between human subjects and what we create, so the workings of computers reflect this subjective aspect within themselves even when we call them purely mechanical.

What is the fundamental difference between information processed by a mechanical computer and a brain? How can there be a fundamental difference in what is happening if all we are is mechanistic? — Restitutor

I wouldn't have thought that there is much difference. A self-aware machine would have to have a feedback mechanism. Experts are looking to create this:

"The final step of AI development is to build systems that can form representations about themselves. Ultimately, we AI researchers will have to not only understand consciousness, but build machines that have it. This is, in a sense, an extension of the “theory of mind” possessed by Type III artificial intelligences. Consciousness is also called “self-awareness” for a reason. (“I want that item” is a very different statement from “I know I want that item.”) Conscious beings are aware of themselves, know about their internal states, and are able to predict feelings of others".

Physics is mechanistic because we constructed the framework for describing and measuring certain phenomena within geometric space-time grids. In other words, it’s not the physical world in itself that is mathematical or mechanistic, it is our template for interpreting it — Joshs

This is fine, and i agree with on the whole, it just make the question meta physical rather than answering it. Ye by

Meanwhile, this mechanistic form of causality is less useful in representing biological and psychological phenomena, so we apply a different descriptive vocabulary.
saying something is mechanistic we are just generating a representation of the ineffable like we do with every word we utter.
— Joshs

Meanwhile, this mechanistic form of causality is less useful in representing biological and psychological phenomena, so we apply a different descriptive vocabulary — Joshs

This statement is a really problem for me as it is just un-true. The difference between what i believe the "self is" and "free will is" and "consciousness is" compared to what most people believe isn't just different descriptive vocabulary. Science says humans are mechanisms and what we think and feel are products of that mechanism, most people do not believe this and vocabulary isn't the problem.

I don't think the rest of what you said answered the question i posed.

I don't have a problem with what you said.

Yes we don't know that anybody other than ourselves is conscious and i guess that relates somewhat.

I think that anything that refers to introspective experience + notions are fundamentally understood by people and the notions we have of them are fundamentally wrong. If we want to be correct we need to change them in a way that is naturalistic and fits with the fact they are generated by machines. Joscha Bach does a lot of this if you know the guy. If we are machines this has to be true and we are certainly machines. I just don't see why every atheist doesn't agree with me.

I just don't see why every atheist doesn't agree with me. — Restitutor

I'm an atheist. I don't agree with you. I don't know if we are machines. Atheism is whether on not you believe the proposition that gods exist. It says nothing about other beliefs. Some atheists I know believe in ghosts and astrology - they are not all Richard Dawkins acolytes. Some secular humanists and skeptics go further and deny anything they consider to be 'supernatural' but that's a separate belief system. I don't know what consciousness is, or how to account for emotion and subjectivity. Even if true, my lived experience of being a human is not enhanced by the machine metaphor.

What is the fundamental difference between information processed by a mechanical computer and a brain? — Restitutor

You have to realise that modern physics itself is a useful abstraction. It grew from the many thousand year old prior tradition, but made a unique breakthrough with the so-called scientific revolution pioneered by Newton, Galileo, and Descartes to mention several. By breaking with scholasticism and Aristotelian physics, Galileo arrived at the then-revolutionary conception of treating physical objects purely in terms of their measurable attributes, whilst Newton's laws, coupled to Cartesian algebraic geometery, promised to extend the scope of these laws universally.

Key to that was the division of the world - into primary and secondary attributes, first, which are the precisely measurable attributes of physical bodies and their perceived qualities, respectively. Then the Cartesian division of extended matter and immaterial mind. This is the underlying construction between much of the modern worldview. As Thomas Nagel put it:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Mind and Cosmos, p35

That is the implicit framework underlying your question, I would suggest. But it's an abstraction. The absolutely determinable objects of early modern physics have since dissolved into the excitations of fields whose attributes are described in terms of degrees of probability, and the discovery of which thrust the role of the observer back into the frame, as it were.

The human body with skin pulled back is obviously mechanical with muscle, bone and tendon obviously arrange to maximize the efficiency of mechanical tasks — Restitutor

But it's not. There are machine-like elements, to be sure, but at the basis, humans (and all other creatures) are organic and not mechanical. They don't operate solely according to the abstractions of physics, in addition there is a much more sophisticated level of activity that occurs even on the level of cell division and growth. The machine metaphor is just that - a metaphor - and you could argue that it's a metaphor that's gone rogue, that is, escaped from its enclosure and wrought havoc in culture at large.

Science says humans are mechanisms — Restitutor

Where? What science? Got any citations for that? Here's one for you, from Ersnt Mayr, one of the leading theoretical biologists of the 20thc

The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years! — The growth of biological thought, Ernst Mayr

The OP is a fallacy of false equivalence.

Nowhere it mentions the fact that humans have a sense of time, which is a subjective sense of duration.

Machines have built-in clocks -- they don't "judge" that something is taking an awfully long time to finish. The idle time, for example, in a computer is fed into the system. The user chooses 20 minutes, for example, to be long enough to be idle, the computer signs off. It's not that the computer got bored, or got tired of waiting, or got excited for the unexpected speed something has completed.

This is hypothetical right?

If you believe the analogy of brain to computer is literal there is nothing to discuss me thinks. Deterministic and Determinism are different. You are aware of this?

Otherwise, might be worth exploring some weird ideas.

:up: :up:

Our models (i.e. deterministic developmental – linear & nonlinear dynamical – mathematical systems) for describing and explaining aspects of the physical world are "mechanistic" but this in no way entails that the physical world itself (e.g. bodies, brains, weather systems, chemical processes, etc) is "mechanical" or a "machine". That paradigm is too simplistic – a reductive fallacy. "Physics" amounts to a provisional, best approximation (i.e. simulation) of phenomena and fundamental dynamic processes. For instance, that most 'brain processes' are computable does not make 'the whole brain' a "computer"; obviously it's more complex than that model (i.e. metaphor / simulation). IMO, "the philosophical consequences" begin with this reminder: don't confuse maps with the territory.

Science says humans are mechanisms and what we think and feel are products of that mechanism, most people do not believe this and vocabulary isn't the problem. I don't think the rest of what you said answered the question i posed.
— Restitutor

I think your question relies on confused assumptions.
Your split between ‘ineffable’ subjectivity and physical
mechanism harks back to older traditions in philosophy. There are newer ways of thinking about the relation between physical science and subjectivity which don’t get caught in this dualist trap of assuming subjectivity is something added onto or apart from the physical.

Evan Thompson writes:

We can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental).

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem, but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity of the human life-world.”

The human body with skin pulled back is obviously mechanical with muscle, bone and tendon obviously arrange to maximize the efficiency of mechanical tasks. This is however nothing compared to what we see at the molecular scale with molecular machines like Kinase, the myosin motors in muscles, ATP synthase and the bacterial flagellum. How neurons work is no less mechanical, with Ligand and voltage gated ion channels neurotransmitters. We know how neurons work individually and in groups like the 302 neurons of c-elegans. We know fare more than I am able to convey here.

Other than potential for quantum indeterminacy having an effect, science would suggest that even the brain is deterministic, even if know what it will do isn’t predictable. Even if you believe that the randomness of quantum indeterminacy can have a macro effect the effect would only be to inject some randomness into an otherwise deterministic system. Given this aren’t we as mechanistic, mechanical and as much a machine as any automaton, robot or computer?

I would note that in the first paragraph quoted you are looking at small parts of a person. I think most of our discomfort with "determinism" and "mechanism" comes from the fact that it is often wedded to smallism (the view that facts about big things are grounded in facts about little things) and reductionism. People tend to think that one implies the other, that you cannot have determinism without smallism. This isn't true.

Smallism and reductionism are in decline. I would say they are more popular in the general lay conception of "how science says the world works," then "how physicists and philosophers of science tend to think the world works."

If by "mechanistic," we simply mean "the world exhibits law-like regularities," then this is still a very popular take. However, this sort of determinism does not imply that every individual thing can be explained in reference its smaller (and thus presumably mindless) parts.

I personally don't like most conceptions of libertarian free will I have come across. If our decisions aren't "determined by" the way we are, and the way the world is, then it seems like they are arbitrary, random, and thus not free. Plato and Hegel seem to have the best popular definition of freedom I am aware of: freedom as (relative) self-determination.

That is, we are free when:
1. Our reason is able to unify our drives and desires such that we are a unified person, not at war with ourselves.
2. We understand why we are doing things and the consequences of our actions and choose them anyhow.
3. We want to have the desires that are effective in us.
4. We are not missing information that would make us act differently. We are not being manipulated.
5. We are our authentic selves, able to seek what we think is the highest good.

Determinism is not a barrier to free will in this sense. It is rather a prerequisite for it.

Many types of popular process metaphysics, e.g. pancomputationalism, aren't commensurate with smallism. Many theories in fundamental physics aren't smallist either. These are very popular with eminent physicists, and have the benefit of giving us new ways of looking at the metaphysics of free will.

The fatalism that comes with "natural determinism," then seems to be more an outcrop of the smallist and superveniance views of the world. E.g. "I am just the current molecules in by body and the rules for how these molecules work, (which is mindless), dictates everything about me."

I would agree that this is a depressing view. It also seems to be a hard view to support, for many reasons. To name just one, reductive substance metaphysics seems to deny the possibility of strong emergence (Jaegeon Kim, etc.). But then, where does first person experience come from? A view that seems to deny what is most empirically obvious to us seems critically damaged. Add in that there are many other reasons to adopt a process based metaphysics, to see wholes as sometimes more fundemental than parts, and to reject superveniance as a useful concept, and it seems easy (to me) to simply reject smallism, reductionism, etc., without rejecting the law-like nature of the universe.

But if we are hard to delineate processes nested in a larger universal process, I see no barrier to relative self-determination of the sort Plato, the Patristics, and Hegel are talking about. The bleak picture of determinism vanishes. It ends up just telling us that "we live in a world of regularities." It doesn't "disenchant" nature into a clock in the same way.

that's why I like what I call "middle emergence"

I personally don't like most conceptions of libertarian free will I have come across. If our decisions aren't "determined by" the way we are, and the way the world is, then it seems like they are arbitrary, random, and thus not free. Plato and Hegel seem to have the best popular definition of freedom I am aware of: freedom as (relative) self-determination. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In his essay, The Question of Technology, Heidegger distinguishes between two modes of revealing: the related Greek notions of techne and poesis vs instrumentality, which is common to mathematical physics and technology. The form of revealing of poesis is bringing-forth, which, unlike instrumentality, explicitly sees itself as making use of all four causes:

For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes: (1) the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the chalice required is determined as to its form and mat- ter; (4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith.

It is of utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. It is of utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. For what presences by means of physis has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossomn into bloom, in itself (en heautõi). In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g., the silver chalice, has the bursting open blonging to bringing- forth not in itself, but in another (en alloi), in the craftsman or artist.

By contrast, mathematical physics and technology reveal by taking into account only one of the four causes:

“What is the instrumental itself? Within what do such things as means and end belong? A means is that whereby something is effected and thus attained. Whatever has an effect as its consequence is called a cause. But not only that by means of which something else is effected is a cause. The end in keeping with which the kind of means to be used is determined is also considered a cause. Wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality… For a long time we have been accustomed to representing cause as that which brings something about. In this connection, to bring about means to obtain results, effects. The causa efficiens, but one among the four causes, sets the standard for all causality.

But we aren't mechanistic, this was proven to be false by Newton.

as intriguing as this claim is, it's not very Googleable. "Newton proved we aren't mechanistic" doesn't bring up any relevant results.

Well, there's a long thread that covers this topic, here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12417/chomskys-mysteries-of-nature-how-deeply-hidden-reading-group/p1

Especially the essay in the OP.

It would take a long time to elaborate. The gist is that, contrary to popular claim, Newton proved materialism wrong when he discovered gravity. Materialism was understood to be mechanistic. Hence his famous quote:

'It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact, as it must be, if gravitation in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it... [this] is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters [science] a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it."

(Bold added)

This is then expanded upon by Locke mostly, but also Hume and Priestley all the way up to Russell and Eddington.

But, there's a lot to it.

Seems less like a proof and more like an opinion to me. I think you're over-playing the hand there.

:up:

It seems to me like plenty in physics, the life sciences, and complexity sciences are willing to take a broader view. The strong hold of the old mechanistic, smallist account of the world seems to be more a combination of inertia and the fact that no single succinct, easy to present alternative has shown up.

It's all well and good to show that the dominant paradigm is shot through with error, but what do you teach if there is no one solid replacement? That's where it seems we are at.

I don't even think it's fair to say it's "shot through with error" just because it's failed to provide a clear answer to a very, very hard problem. If no other paradigm has answered the question either, you can't really fault one paradigm specifically - that seems unfair, and awfully like a double standard.

It seems to me like plenty in physics, the life sciences, and complexity sciences are willing to take a broader view… It's all well and good to show that the dominant paradigm is shot through with error, but what do you teach if there is no one solid replacement? That's where it seems we are at. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree that the various domains of the sciences are willing to take a broader view, but my own bias is that the willingness is not equal across domains . Physics needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into ways of thinking about such things as temporality that are already familiar ground for many biologists and social scientists.

That was Newton's interpretation of his own work as outlined in the Principia. Hume and Locke agreed that his conclusion was correct.

You can skim the essay I provided in that other thread, but the essay is long. It goes well beyond a mere opinion.

and yet as far as I can tell, today the majority of physicists, neuro scientists and cognitive scientists don't share his conviction (even the ones who share his belief would be unlikely to call it PROVEN).

I'm fully ready to believe it was his own interpretation of his own work. He was a very superstitious person who lived a long time ago. "Proof" is much too strong a word for what this is.

The vast majority of physicists think the world is a machine? What? That's news to me.

Sure, he was superstitious, but on gravity he was quite serious and celebrated for it. I wonder what physicists we are reading that are coming to opposite conclusions.

I didn't say "vast", you inexplicably decided to add that. When I Google the question, it's notable that even when I find articles arguing against materialism or physicalism, they do it from the perspective of an underdog, here to fight against the hegemony.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like there's any unambiguous polls about this, only people writing about their impression of the state of science. And NOBODY but you is saying that the state of science is that physicalism was disproven by Newton.

There is, however, a neat poll of modern philosophers, and physicalism/materialism is pretty dang popular there. Perhaps they didn't get the memo?

It just doesn't seem "proven" to me. "Prove" is an extremely strong word. If it were proven, I'd expect some kind of plurality of agreement at least among relevant experts - that's not what we see.

Apologies for the insertion.

I initially said that the mechanistic picture of the world was proven false by Newton, and I believe this is true, based on not only what Newton says, but also what Locke, Hume, Priestley, Russell and Chomsky say (among a few others).

I should've added for clarity's sake that it is this specific conception of materialism (as mechanistic) which was shown to be false, not the whole school of thought.

There are other kinds of materialism, presumably the kind you are finding in the Google articles. That materialism tends to be associated with the view that everything that exists is physical in the sense of what physics says there is. That's not mechanistic, our best theories of physics aren't mechanistic, they are probabilistic.

Newton's views are often misinterpreted, when this quote is given, they tend to say that Newton had trouble understanding gravity because it didn't make sense to him, but that the image he left was that of a mechanistic universe, but that's not what he says in that quote.

Of course, there are other materialisms which are defended, such as Galen Strawson's or Dennett's or even Sean Carroll's. These are very different in character.

Again, sorry for the misattribution. I am rather slow today...

OP? what's that

"Mechanism," was view that all phenomena reduces to stuff bumping into other stuff, a view popularized by Galileo.

It's true that Newton's findings re gravity were sort of a death blow to this conception of the world. Gravity, for Newton, was a force acting at a distance. The original "mechanism" didn't allow for this.

Then, after the discovery of gravity as such a force, we began to figure out electromagnetism. This lead to a huge proliferation of supposed suis generis "forces," e.g., a special "life force."

But advances in the 20th century actually seemed to make something like mechanism more plausible again, although with major modifications. Even reductive physicalism today is still pretty different from the more simplistic view the original mechanists hoped for though.

So, the type of mechanism Newton disproved isn't exactly what we think about today. It was a view very much based on billiard balls crashing into each other, etc., which turned out to have issues.

no problem about the "vast" thing.

In any case, I still don't see any consensus among the relevant experts that "we aren't mechanistic", quantum physics notwithstanding. If it was proven, it seems like huge portions of academic science and philosophy have missed the memo.

And even the deep truths about quantum physics are debated. Quantum physics is probabilistic, yes, but the function that determines those probabilities is deterministic (the Schrödinger equation). The exact nature of how quantum physics works under the hood is still a hot topic, and the second most popular interpretation is a kind of meta-determinism - many worlds. Is a deterministic view of quantum mechanics "mechanistic"?

I just don't think it's justifiable to say this idea is "proven" yet. Newton wrote about his educated opinion in the late 1600s - many of his ideas have stood the test of time but this one doesn't seem to have made a dent.