Egnor Confounded
by rsbakker
Once again, in midst of all the ad hominem nonsense coming from the Trump-Newscorp-Combine, we find another theorist, this time neuroscientist (and creationist) Michael Egnor, embracing an ad hominem dismissal of eliminativism on the Mind Matters podcast, which has been partially transcribed and posted under the title, “Why Eliminative Materialism Cannot Be A Good Theory of Mind.”
Where Trump hews to what is called the ‘abusive ad hominem,’ Egnor espouses the tu quoque, the argument that intentional eliminativism is self-refuting because eliminativists themselves use intentional terms. This is essentially the same argument my old highschool girlfriend’s mother would use to refute my atheism: every time I uttered the word “God” she would cry, “See! You believe in Him!”
The same way God doesn’t have to exist for the term “God” to do a tremendous amount of work, terms like “beliefs” or “reasons” and so on don’t need referents to do a tremendous amount of work.
The story is a good deal more complicated than this when it comes to intentional idioms, of course: one needs to explain, among other things, why so many theorists run afoul this particular confound. But the tu quoque, as applied against eliminativism, at least, is every bit as bankrupt.
Enter Egnor:
[Identity Theory has] been discarded because its logical nonsense. Every attribute of the mind, reason, emotion, perception, all of those things are completely different from matter. That is, one describes matter as extensions in space; one describes perceptions and reason and emotions in completely different ways. There’s no overlap between them so mental states can’t be the same thing as physical states. They actually don’t share any properties in common. They’re clearly related to one another in important ways but they’re not the same thing.
Eliminative materialists go one step further. They actually say that there are no mental states, that there is only the brain. Which is kind of an odd thing to say because what eliminative materialists are saying is that their ideas are mindless.
How can you have a proposition that the mind doesn’t exist? That means propositions don’t exist and that means you don’t have a proposition.
Let’s go through this sentence by sentence…
[Identity Theory has] been discarded because its logical nonsense. Simply not true. Identity Theory has fallen out of favour because, like Egnor, it possesses no compelling account of intentional phenomena. As we shall see, the “logical nonsense” here belongs entirely to Egnor.
Every attribute of the mind, reason, emotion, perception, all of those things are completely different from matter. Because, Egnor thinks, these things are exceptional, somehow distinct from the natural world as we have come to understand it. It’s important to keep in mind who’s making the more extraordinary claim here: The eliminativist is saying intentional properties only seem exceptional, much the same way celestial properties once seemed exceptional, because we lack perspective. Egnor is say they really are exceptional.
That is, one describes matter as extensions in space; one describes perceptions and reason and emotions in completely different ways. Yes, heuristically, in source insensitive ways. How else are humans supposed to understand themselves and one another? Given the astronomically complicated nature of the systems involved, our ancestors had to rely on hacks to communicate facts pertaining to their brain states, which is to say, ways to report brain states absent any knowledge of brain states. Egnor, on the other hand, would have us ignore this rather obvious cognitive dilemma, and argue that in addition to brains, we also evolved this secondary, exceptional ontological order, the extension of our intentional vocabulary.
There’s no overlap between them so mental states can’t be the same thing as physical states. They actually don’t share any properties in common. There’s (almost) no overlap between them because intentional cognition is heuristic cognition, a system that neglects the high-dimensional facts of the systems involved, relying instead on cues systematically related to those systems. Those cues appear to possess an exceptional nature because we lack the metacognitive resources required to high-dimensionally source them, to intuit them as belonging to nature more generally. Given biocomplexity, its hard to imagine how it could be any other way.
They’re clearly related to one another in important ways but they’re not the same thing. And this, of course, is the million dollar question, the one that ecological eliminativism, at least, actually answers. Egnor would lead us into the exceptionalist labyrinth, and brick up all the exits with his fallacious tu quoque.
Eliminative materialists go one step further. They actually say that there are no mental states, that there is only the brain. Which is kind of an odd thing to say because what eliminative materialists are saying is that their ideas are mindless. Intentionalists are forever telling eliminativists what they “really mean.” Intentional cognition is mandatory: we simply have no way of reporting biological systems short its heuristic machinations. But one can agree that the hacks belonging to intentional cognition are mandatory without likewise asserting that intentional exceptionalism is mandatory. As with “God,” I can assert that “mind” is a useful hack in certain cognitive situations without automatically asserting that minds (as Egnor theorizes them) are real.
How can you have a proposition that the mind doesn’t exist? See above.
That means propositions don’t exist and that means you don’t have a proposition. No, that means I’m employing a hack that works quite well in certain problem-solving contexts. Cognitive neuroscience, unfortunately, isn’t one of them, as Egnor’s utter inability to solve any of the problems of consciousness and intentionality attest.
For me, the most egregious thing about the post lies with Mind Matters, not Egnor. They actually quote William Ramsey’s excellent SPEP article on eliminativism, but they remain utterly mum on the devastating critique Ramsey provides of tu quoque counter-arguments such as Egnor’s. If I argue that intentional terms have no extension, that only various metacognitive confounds make it seem that way, then arguing that my position is absurd because I use intentional terms clearly begs the question. It is, to use Egnor’s phrase, logical nonsense.
Lol!!! Nice rebuttal! These sorts of folks are really incorrigible…!
Looking forward to an even more devastating response even if it is in a fictionalized form – maybe as a successor to Neuropath!
Cheers Rob! We need to catch up sooner rather than later!
Best,
Manav
Glad you liked, manav
“But one can agree that the hacks belonging to intentional cognition are mandatory without likewise asserting that intentional exceptionalism is mandatory.”
What if intentional cognition, in order to pull off its trick, requires the user be persuaded that it is ontologically exceptional? In other words, taking-exceptionalism-for-granted is the sine qua non of effective intentional cognition. The trouble I see for the humble eliminativist is that the only defense he has for his particular use of an intentional idiom is that he is merely disposed toward it. This just offloads the task of source-insensitive cognition onto source-sensitive, in my view, bc if the dispute goes any further, it would be a genealogical (source-sensitive) account of the person’s disposition. Also, a person, by bearing in mind that source-insensitive cognition is exactly what it is and not revelation from God or whatever, is throwing a monkey wrench into the intentionality machine. It’s like telling an outfielder to use the gaze heuristic but also keep in mind that he could solve the problem more accurately with differential equations. It simply becomes too burdensome to expect most people to go along with it. So basically eliminativism could be entirely correct, but it could turn out that metacognitive neglect, being blind to our blindness (and by default taking the intentional to be exceptional), is an enabling feature of intentional cognition (i think you’ve already said this elsewhere). In that case, it’s hard to make out what stance the eliminativist should take on exceptionalism if he recognizes that intentional cognition is mandatory. Or if taking-a-stance-toward already undermines exceptionalism and thus intentional cognition altogether.
Or maybe we should just learn to love the semantic apocalypse….
Agreed. On the one hand, you have the reflexive application of intentional cognition to practical problems, and on the other you have the reflexive application of intentional cognition to the problem of the nature of intentional cognition. I think some people (and Egnor is a good candidate) simply lack the dispositional flexibility required to overcome the latter reflex, and so are doomed to be intentional apologists. Those who can suspend the reflex, however, need someway of squaring their source-insensitive (intentional) and source-sensitive (natural) intuitions. Since intentional cognition is a way to avoid the astronomical complexities pertaining to sources, this simply cannot be done. Source-sensitive cognition crashes intentional cognition. Sources have to be neglected. So the problem becomes: either you doubledown on blindness a la the tradition, or you live in perpetual cognitive dissonance.
There are nevertheless certain (apparent) exceptionalities. Brentano’s divide between physical and intentional systems still appears to stand. For example Chandrasakar was able to reason about the properties / existence of black holes decades before we had evidence of them. Dirac was able to reason about positions before we had any evidence of them. You are able to foresee the state of the light being turned on before you actually turn it on. Intentional systems can be about non present or non actual states of affairs. Physical systems on the other hand are purely determined through local informational correlations.
Hi Scott. I wonder if you intend on offering a systematic and sustained critique of Negarestani’s new tome anytime soon? I would read that with pleasure.
Normativism just feels like religion to me anymore. David Roden recently recommended I take a looksee, though, so maybe I will.
Isn’t it like 1000 pages? Asking someone else who already has other commitments both life wise and research / writing wise to take that on is asking a lot! I say we should instead have him look at Friston’s much shorter “Am I Self Conscious?”…
How can you have a proposition that the mind doesn’t exist? That means propositions don’t exist and that means you don’t have a proposition.
“If the great wizard of Oz says he is actually just a man behind a curtain then how can the proposition of the great wizard of Oz exist if the great wizard does not? The great wizard doesn’t exist to create the proposition that the great wizard does not exist. Therefore the great wizard exists!”
“If the great wizard of Oz says he is actually just a brain behind a curtain…”
Meant to italicize the quote at the start of my comment there, but messed up the closing tag.
Gary Marcus: Toward a Hybrid of Deep Learning and Symbolic AI
dmf, here’s one for ya
The Active Inference Approach to Ecological Perception: General Information Dynamics for Natural and Artificial Embodied Cognition
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2018.00021/full
thanks you might be interested in:
http://www.ensoseminars.com/
I’ve found that the historical (and, of course, continued) pervasiveness of self-refutation arguments such as Egnor’s baffles me more and more the longer I spend thinking about stuff like this. People have been patiently (or not so patiently) explaining how utterly toothless such arguments are for, like, thousands of years already. Yet when you confront a contemporary proponent of this sort of self-refutation argument with really quite powerful reasons to think it is fallacious, they just stamp their feet, plug their ears, and call you (to borrow a nice phrase from Wittgenstein) “a fool and heretic.”
It seems to me that the more we use intentional language to describe things like search algorithms, routers and switches and the like that are clearly mechanical the more it should be clear that the language we use to describe things can’t be used to make claims about what those things are. If the language we use to describe things provides actual insight into the nature of those things then either human beings are mere machines or machines are coming to have souls.
And is there a single stroke of magic, is there one charm which can still deceive us? (Cioran, A Short History of Decay)
We are abstracting our(selves) away.
In many ways it has always come down to tropes: literalism vs. figurallism… what I like in your rebuttal is the simple truth that such anti-thinkers as this Egnor is a literalist who confounds linguistics, language, and tropes as fact and literal, whereas for the elminativist it is heuristic (i.e., pragmatically language and tropes help us get on with our work till something better comes along to explain the explanandum). The literalist holds on to his truth as if it were an absolute (i.e., such thinkers are idealists at heart). While the elminiativist sees through the fictions and realizes they are only heuristic devices and machines not literal substance or eidos (essence). Natural language hinders rather than reveals, but then again until we have some better heuristic device it will serve us only as poetry has always done: a nice lie to keep us going. Ergon is as bad as a religionist who literalizes the absolute and anathematizes all who will not believe as he does…
You can’t have your stories and eat them, too.
Sure you can, if your stories eat you.
I will say in sideways defence of Egnor, when you are dismantling the very elements of social communication, what is supposed to be the draw for someone to socially engage in that? Oh yes were all very investigating the nihilisty stuff here, but that still has it’s social element in terms of communication even if it’s pretty sideways sociality. So you are killing the signal with Egnor, but then surprised he isn’t following the signal?
picture this
https://awastudios.net/comic/the-resistance-1/
Still no assurance that you haven’t shunted the ‘intentional’ to the background of the theory of consciousness in trying to eliminate it with a theory of the appearance of consciousness. Until then you have a nonreflexive cartoon claiming superiority to any reflexive cartoon. That may be how natural science has proceeded but to call ‘exceptionalism’ pointing out intractibilities in science-as-usual while admitting you have no theory of consciousness is not convincing.
This guy has been confounded for a long time now! Hope Scott and family (and all the other folks who turn up here to comment!) are good at the moment during this pandemic thing.
Thanks, Callan. Best to you and yours as well.
Yea, even people on groups in FB have been recently wondering about Scott. Has anyone heard anything of late?
It is more like 500 odd pages. Not asking or demanding at all. If you had looked at this work, I&S, you will have noticed that Scott, and BBT, is explicitly cited as an opponent. Negarestani charges Scott with making arguments in the nature of the Sophist. Given the fact that this seems to be an ongoing dialogue between the two of them, putting the question to Scott does not, to me, seem to be an unreasonable thing to do. Do keep up.
From a Facebook group on Scott’s work: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1378245525817971/user/1301377428/
That link is dead now, care to paraphrase what it said?
My memory of it is dead too.
deacon sounding
https://craghi.libsyn.com/website/terrence-deacon-on-the-emergent-process-of-thinking-as-reflected-in-language-processing
Over a year and no new posts, and seemingly no activity from Scott. You are sorely missed.
Any news? Is this the end or are you taking a break?
Posts I wrote months ago have suddenly appeared, suggesting someone is performing moderation. I’d love to hear from him again. For that matter, I’d love to see the Second Apocalypse Continue. We’ll see.
Wanted to recommend Kajsa Ekman’s Being and Being Bought, I think it digs into the feminist intentions you had regarding Esmi, Mimara, and Serwa
I hope all is okay Scott. We all miss you.
Nietzsche wiki has an entry for Insanity and Death. Just a little note would make a few of us feel better 😛
I have put so much of my life in to reading The Second Apocalypse. It quickly became my favorite series. To have no news regarding wether it will be finished or more important the Author in general is maddening. I hope he and his family made it through 2020 ok and hope he gifts his very loyal fans with some word, ANY word on the half finished masterpiece of a world he created in our brains..
We miss you Scott
And I’d like to have read his take on Mark’s Metaverse.
Yo, it’s been 666 days. Post for lulz if nothing else.
…And the link to his official website now goes to someplace horrible.
The denier of the magical belief lottery nonetheless supposes himself the loser of the magical temporal lottery, the end of humanity. What grandiosity. But, lotteries have been known to be won.