HP:MOR and the Radio Fallacy

I kind of liked one of the HPMOR recursive fanfics which played with this since in the Methodsverse wizards continued to be able to think even when their brain was replaced with that of a cat.

If I remember right in that fic the blood-purists maintained that only wizards had souls and that the thing they used to prove it was by feeding polyjuice to a non-wizard who would lose their own personality in favor of the body they were copying for the duration of the potions effects. (not having a magical soul with which to maintain their thought patterns when their physical brain was changed)

SRI's Shakey would be justified in its dualism.

You're not likely to find a remotely reasonable hypothesis, even in the Methodsverse where magic abounds, by which the internal parts of a thinking computation can be damaged by damaging the brain, and yet removing the whole brain leaves the soul capable of internal thinking.

Has your hypothesis that thought remains possible after the whole brain has been removed, in fact, been tested?

EDIT: I read your post as meaning that the "fact" that thought remains possible after a brain has been removed [to be cryo-frozen, for instance] was evidence against a soul.

You're not likely to find a remotely reasonable hypothesis, even in the Methodsverse where magic abounds, by which the internal parts of a thinking computation can be damaged by damaging the brain, and yet removing the whole brain leaves the soul capable of internal thinking.

Why not? Letting a brain decompose kills the "thinking computation", while cryonizing it supposedly does not.

Similarly, damaging a living brain may damage the attached soul, while death of a reasonably intact brain could be interpreted as a detachment of a reasonably intact soul.

That doesn't seem at all similar. The brain is, in this analogy, more like an instrument where if you remove one string it still works for most things but will no longer let you play anything by Mozart, and if you remove another everything comes out syncopated, and if you remove another then you can still play everything but all rubato disappears so that rhythms become metronomic. See also my reply to billswift.

Well, the question is, do the specific effects of damage look more like the effects that the "radio receiver" hypothesis would predict, or the ones that the "electronic brain" hypothesis would predict?

There is a big difference between an audio distortion and a semantic distortion. The radio-receiver hypothesis predicts that we can introduce audio distortion, but not that we can make the voice stop talking about vegetables. If we can only get the former sort of effect, then we are messing with a device that didn't understand vegetables in the first place; it did not contain any circuitry whose patterns correlated with facts about vegetables, only with radio and audio signal processing; the knowledge of vegetables was elsewhere. If we can get the latter sort of effect, then the device did have some patterns that had to do with vegetables.

I don't understand. Did you read the rest of what I wrote, where I gave some specific examples of the kind of damage we're talking about? (Note: they weren't intended to be neurologically perfectly accurate.) Do you not agree that if you had a device that produced such effects when damaged, it would be grossly unreasonable to think it was a radio rather than an AI?

[EDITED to add: Of course I agree that there are situations, quite different from what we see in the real world, that could also -- just barely -- be described by saying "particular kinds of damage to the brain produce particular kinds of apparent damage to the mind", but where that would not be very strong evidence that the mind is implemented by the brain. For instance, you damage one bit of the brain and the person's voice goes squeaky; you damage another and all the consonants go away. What's different about the real world is that particular kinds of brain damage have particular semantic signatures; they are bound up with the content of what's being thought or said.

It's still consistent with all this that the mind isn't implemented only by the brain. If every aspect of human thought required cooperation between the brain and the soul, you could still get the sort of thing we actually observe. But let's distinguish between "there are some theories of souls that are consistent, at least in principle, with these observations" and "these observations do not constitute a good reason not to believe in souls". The former is probably true, the latter not.]

I disagree that Kaj_Sotala's post applies. Just because you label something a fallacy doesn't make it a fallacy. Googling the "radio fallacy" turns up this thread and nothing else related.

This 'radio fallacy argument' wants to place Harry's argument into the reference class of 'fallacies' and has nothing but a clever label and bad analogy as that basis.

Did these fundamentally arbitrary assertions get more stupid? That's an angel dancing on the head of a pin argument.

Notice that those weren't the assertions before we learned about brains. The mind was a spirit/soul mysteriously trapped in a physical body. Then we started poking around in brains, and finding that the mind didn't seem to work so well when bad things happened to the brain. So minds retreat to epiphenomenalism. Then they can retreat in time, and only actually do anything after you're no longer alive, and no one can see anything actually happening.

So, yes, the original theory of the soul got less likely after we learned about brains, but your new theory of the soul, specifically crafted to avoid contradiction with the new evidence, might not have.

God, souls, immaterial minds, elan vital, essences, etc., are all a bunch of cockroaches, always scurrying back into the darkness, retreating from the expanding light of evidence. How many retreats do we need to see before we're convinced they will never be able to stand their ground?

I anticipated the "functional swap at death" argument, as it was the logical next rampart to retreat behind, but thought it was pointless to say anything about it. I think we've learned by now that the chase never ends. I could just as well say that your mind will continue only if you had duck within a week of your death, and the Spirit of the Duck was within you to transfer the function of your mind to live out the rest of eternity in a lamp post. That's a spiritual lamp post, of course. We can't actually see the the lamp post, you silly goose. Or should I say, silly duck?

We really need a clear and concise statement for the rejection of the infinite class of arbitrary assertions consistent with all currently known data.

(2) The brain is only needed for physical expressions of mentality ("talking", etc.), and we revert to purely non-physical mental functioning in the afterlife.

These are silly views, of course, but I'm not yet convinced that the existence of brain damage makes them any more so than they were to begin with.

It seems the considerations in gjm's comment actively tear (2) to shreds.

Are you agreeing, then, that X=mind and Y=brain chunks? That's surprising to me. I would have thought that X was all of the relevant behaviors -- walking, talking, breathing, playing games, writing on internet forums, ... I didn't think you would want an identity thesis between Mind and Some Class of Behaviors. Maybe I'm thinking about this wrong, but I thought for soul-ish theories, the mind just was the soul. And then you get a causal picture (for interactionists, anyway) that looks like Soul --> Brain --> Intelligent Behaviors.

First, just the obvious "my simulation doesn't work" does not imply Soul or Astral Flubber exists or that it does something. The more reasonable interpretation is that your simulation sucks.

This only follows if the impact from the Soul and Astral Flubber.negligible.

No, it doesn't. Both could have great impact when combined with a brain, but take away the brain, and you have no function. Harry wanted the continued function of the mind after physical destruction of the body. Even if the mind dependency is Brain AND Astral Flubber, brain gone means mind gone. Astral Flubber has not shown the capability to replace the function of brain chunks, so why would we expect it to replace the function of all the chunks together?

It is among the most observation-based arguments we have and observation-based arguments are usually much stronger than a priori reasoning.

Well, yes, except that the observations being called on here don't actually differentiate between soul theories and non-soul theories. That was the whole point of my remark: both kinds of theory save the phenomena.

The problem with this (and related theories) is that the soul believers believe that the soul itself can live and think without the body. Much of thinking is mediated by language. I don't think a believer in soul would accept that their soul after death will be incapable of thought until God provides it a substitute pineal gland.

This just looks like a non sequitur to me. If the soul thinks on its own but only gets to communicate to other souls via a body, you get the same observational consequences. If souls have their own language of thought, then thinking might still be mediated by language and yet that mediation not require a body. (On a side note, medieval theologian-philosophers had a very serious argument about whether dis-embodied souls could sense anything. I don't think it's a huge stretch from "a soul requires a body in order to have sensations" to "a soul requires a body in order to think anything." One question you might want to ask here is whether you are interested in going after the best possible soul theory or going after the probably-confused beliefs of typical soul-believers.)

I agree with your last remark -- that soul theories are less probable a priori. But that wasn't the issue that Richard was raising. The question is how the evidence of specific functional losses due to specific, localized brain damage bears on soul theories (or dualism more generally). Evidence only comes in through the likelihood. Simplicity arguments are, I think, good arguments against souls: souls get shaved right off by Ockham's razor. But simplicity arguments are not arguments from evidence, they are arguments from method. That is, the evidence could be equally likely on two different hypotheses but one of them could still be preferred -- not because it fails to save the phenomena but because it requires extra machinery in order to do so.

The problem with this (and related theories) is that the soul believers believe that the soul itself can live and think without the body. Much of thinking is mediated by language. I don't think a believer in soul would accept that their soul after death will be incapable of thought until God provides it a substitute pineal gland.

Actually, the concept of soul without language makes more sense on its own and fits more religious traditions (especially if you abandon literal translations) than souls that have language.

Well... the existence of brain damage, in and of itself, is not evidence for this, I agree.

That is, if I lived in a world where (for example) brain damage existed but cognitive impairment didn't follow from it, in much the same sense that skeletal damage does not result in cognitive impairment in the actual world, the mere existence of brain damage would not tell us much that's relevant to the soul hypothesis one way or the other. (And, relatedly, in the real world I don't think the existence of skeletal damage is good evidence for or against the soul hypothesis.)

But I would also say that the facts that normal cognitive function reliably occurs in the presence of normal brain function and fails to occur in the absence of normal brain function, and that brain damage reliably predicts variations in cognitive function, and that there's no evidence that variations in the soul predict variations in cognitive function, constitute good evidence that souls are not causal to cognitive function.

If I've understood you correctly (which is by no means guaranteed) we disagree here.

That's a completely different concept of 'soul', one that I doubt anyone who says, "I believe in the existence of souls" actually has in mind. People who believe in souls believe they are their soul, not that they are their brain and that their brain implements soul-code.

It's generally a good idea to try to understand what people actually believe, rather than what you think they should believe.