harvey1 wrote:Rather, it is a "decision" happening at the neurological level of the cat, and the beliefs are anything but a reason for the cat to jump.
Not quite. According to me, the word "belief" simply means, "some configuration of atoms at the neurological level of the cat". It makes sense that this neurological configuration will lead to a "decision", which is a description of some neurological activity in the cat's body. Sounds pretty causally efficacious to me...
The mind exists only if it has causal powers. However, once you place the instruction set of humans beyond access to the self and down to the quantum level, then there is no causal role for the self.
Eh ? I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you saying, "a person can never know his own instruction set" ? Or, "a person's instruction set is unknowable, by anyone" ? Or what ?
We don't consciously choose our beliefs since there is no "us" to make the choices.
Strictly speaking, you're right: there's no self, only a certain configuration of atoms (or quantum particles or whatever). Also strictly speaking, there's no "rock", there are only atoms. However, speaking non-strictly, we can say things like, "this rock is gray", or "this person's self is mean".
The mistake you're making here is to assume that, just because the person's "self" (or a rock) is reducible to atoms, the person's "self"(or a rock) does not exist. This is clearly false (well, at least it's clear in the case of the rock), since the atoms that comprise the rock (or a person's "self") will exist regardless of what you're calling them at the moment.
You keep saying things like, "the self has no causal role in the decisions or beliefs that it forms...", but to me that statement sounds like, "this particular configuration of atoms has no causal role in the internal changes made to this particular configuration of atoms", which is false. Again, just look at a rock for a quick demonstration: the interactions between its atoms ensure that all the atoms move together when you throw the rock, they ensure that the rock will break up along some specific lines when you hit it very hard, etc. Similarly, the atoms of a paramecium have a very specific causal role in its reactions to acid. The atoms in our human bodies are no different.
Thus, you are wrong when you say,
If there is no "us" to make a choice, then a false belief is going to happen anyway (neuro-chemically speaking). Beliefs are just consequences of physical things that happen in the interiors of our skull.
Yes, and the paremecium's movements are also just consequences of physical things that happen in the interiors of its cellular membrane. But, nonetheless, the paramecium's choices are not arbitrary. All the paremecia that made arbitrary choices have died out long ago.
I think that, ultimately, your difficulty with grasping my worldview comes from your attachment to the idea of free will:
Beliefs would be analogous to watching a movie, we can certainly watch them like we watch characters on a screen have beliefs, but we cannot control what we do as a result of a belief anymore than we can control what the movie characters do after they form their beliefs.
In other words, you really want there to be something
more to humans than chemicals in their brains... But why ? Why is it so important for beliefs to be based on qualia, or souls, or whatever, as opposed to brain chemistry ? Ultimately, regardless of whether you have qualia or not, your beliefs are still shaped by the physical inputs to your brain (visual, aural, etc.). Thus, your will is not truly free, no matter what worldview you subscribe to. And thus, I think it makes sense to pick a worldview that does not breed extraneous entities, as Occam would put it.
I think true beliefs would have virtually no role whatsoever in our survival and reproduction.
Ok, I think I see what you're saying here. You're saying that my belief that fire is hot doesn't matter; all that matters is that I don't go around walking into fires. Evolutionary speaking, this is true. However, the capacity for abstract thought allows us to avoid walking into fires before we even know they're there ("hmm, I smell smoke from the west... smoke is made by fire... forest fires are hot... I am not going west today"); and the capacity for language allows us to disseminate this knowledge to our entire population, within a single generation. This greatly increases the number of individuals that survive to reproduction, which, again, is a clear evolutionary advantage.
I don't reject that abstract thought is a trait selectable by natural selection. However, mental properties (e.g., making a decision because you have a belief) are selectable because they have causal efficacy.
I think we both agree that humans possess
some evolutionary adaptation that makes them much more survivable than, say, paramecia or tigers. You call this adaptation "dualistic mental properties", and I call it "brain chemistry". So, both of us believe that it exists, we're just proposing different mechanisms for how it works.
The problem with your argument is that we actually have much better reason to believe that beliefs are merely adequate for survival and reproduction than we have reasons to think that our beliefs are approximately true of the world.
Not quite... As I said, I think that the capacity for creating true beliefs about the world is the evolutionary advantage, not the beliefs themselves. For example, most animals share the belief that "fire is hot"; however, not all of them can form true beliefs about fire (and whatever else they see) in real time. That's our real advantage.
