Block Head Argument
September 9, 2009
The Blockhead is a theoretical computer program that simulates intelligence by being programmed to respond to a vast but finite array of inputs (in the form of a conversation, in the case of the Turing Test) with an appropriate preprogrammed response. Any conversation must fall within a finite (although huge) possibility of logically, and grammatically formed sentences based on a finite number of words, thus the program has a complex look-up tree of responses to follow for any input it could possibly receive in an allotted time, simulating a seemingly intelligent conversation.
The purpose of the Blockhead thought-experiment is to show that the functionalist conception of intelligence being based on behavior is not plausible. That is, there is more to intelligence than merely acting intelligently. The Blockhead may pass the Turing Test for behavioral intelligence, but it has the intelligence of a toaster, argues Ned Block (albeit a very complex toaster). Although the Blockhead replies to input with seemingly intelligible responses, it lacks understanding, which appears to be a fundamental constituent of intelligence. The machine is merely computing its response by means of a complex response-tree that it has pre-programmed. Computation is not understanding. Therefore, the Blockhead neither understands the input nor its own output. This cannot be intelligence, or at least in the commonsensical way we use the term intelligence.
The basis of the Blockhead argument lies in the claim that intelligence does not supervene on behavior, behavioral disposition, or behavioral capacity. Therefore, two beings may behave exactly alike physically, yet intellectually dissimilar. One may be highly intelligent, while the other has no intelligence whatsoever. By programming a machine with the Blockhead program, a computer is designed only to behave intelligently, perhaps fooling onlookers into thinking there lays some genuine intelligence behind the behavior. However, the program is based on simple algorithms and lacks any genuine cognition. Some functionalists may argue that although the program and machine may not independently be intelligent or understand what it is doing, the system as a whole is intelligent, as exemplified through its seemingly intelligent behavior. However, being a mere conduit of information is in no way analogous to thinking. All of the Blockhead’s possible responses are preprogrammed, or thought out in advanced by computer programmers. So the system as a whole is never doing any real thinking, but merely retrieving preformed responses. It is crucial to understand that the Blockhead lacks any real cognitive capacity and is merely computing based on a simple input-output response tree.
The Blockhead thought-experiment confronts another issue with the behaviorist conception of intelligence, namely the overlooking of causality on the behaviorist’s part. Being intelligent depends on having thoughts that evolve or are caused in the right way, not simply behaving intelligently. Present thoughts should be caused by past thoughts, and should later cause future thoughts. However, the Blockhead merely processes each stimuli input independently, retrieving an appropriate output from its look-up tree of preformed responses. The Blockhead appears to be static, with no causal dependency on its earlier mental states (for it has none). It simply depends on a stock of responses that have been written down in advanced, to generate the appearance of intelligent behavior. Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson give a more complex version of the Blockhead scenario to illustrate this problem with causality. We are to imagine that a Blockhead clone of Jones is created – a physical duplicate – with a complex look-up tree based on Jones’s mental states necessitating all the output responses to the possible physical inputs one could receive in a lifetime (a larger but still finite number). Because the clone’s look-up tree is based off of Jones’s mentality, they behave exactly alike in every situation they find themselves in. (This intuition pump assumes that it is possible to create a look-up tree modeled perfectly after someone’s mental states.) Moreover, they also would respond exactly the same to every situation they could possibly find themselves in. So their behavior is identical, however, their intelligence is not. The Blockhead twin has no intelligence and is merely an automaton following a preset path based on computing input with the appropriate output on his look-up tree. While Jones’ behavior is based on earlier mental states, perhaps being caused by earlier physical events, the Blockhead is merely processing each input stimuli independently and retrieving its appropriate response with no mentality or choice in the matter. We could say Jones’s behavior is caused in the right way, while the Blockhead is merely caused by mindless computational algorithms. But genuine thinking is much different; what we think depends on previous thoughts in complex ways for it to count as rational thought.
Although it may not be physically possible to construct a Blockhead machine, this does not discount the practicality in conceiving what such a machine says about intelligence. The string of responses the Blockhead would have to choose from for output is too vast to exist, and of course could never be processed in real time. But such a machine is certainly logically possible. Because the argument is attacking a conception (namely the behaviorist conception) of what intelligence is; a conception of the Blockhead machine will suffice as a response. The Blockhead argument is merely a thought-experiment or intuition pump that serves to challenge the behaviorist conception of intelligence. It need not be manifested to be valid. In all practicality, it makes no difference whether such a machine exists insofar as it would not be intelligent even if it did. It would simply be like any other computer, just running an extremely expansive program. But the sheer volume of the response-tree, if the Blockhead somehow were constructed, would not be enough to generate real thinking. So what matters is that the thought experiment is logically feasible.
The relevance of the impossibility of a Blockhead machine being constructed perhaps even strengthens the premise that intelligence does not supervene on behavior. Human beings clearly behave intelligently without having all of their outputs preformed in response-trees. It is also physically impossible for a human to be implementing such a ‘program’. Yet somehow the human capacity does appear to be as seemingly infinite as the Blockhead would be. This is because humans go through logical cognition. That is, humans process stimulus input based on past thoughts and experiences, and then generate output that is causally determined from a complex network of these sources. Human intelligence then appears to be more than mere computation of input-output like the Blockhead. Therein lies the distinction between a behaviorist conception of thinking and what we generally think of when we use the word thinking. Behavior (output) cannot be analyzed independently with respect to its input and deemed intelligent. Intelligence lies in the ability to relate early input and mental states. The vast impossibility of creating a machine that can even come close to mimicking intelligent human behavior may be indicative of the infinitely vast impossibility of creating a machine that genuinely thinks in the right way.
I think most importantly, the Blockhead argument shows that a non-intelligent being can pass Turing’s Test. Thus it follows that Turing’s attempt to redefine intelligence in non-mentalistic terms was a failed project. This is not to say that mentality is necessary for intelligence, but rather that the attempt to separate the two by means of an imitation game was futile. There is more to intelligence than just observable behavior.
Sophisticated behavior is not necessarily indicative of a sophisticated mind. The Blockhead could clearly pass the Turing Test, but no one is willing to redefine intelligence based on a mere computational program. The thinking humans do is far more complex than just retrieving information from a look-up tree of preformed stimuli response. If we had previously intuited that this is what it is to think, there would have been no need for a Turing Test in the first place. If humans were thought to merely compute input/output responses, it would have been agreed that all computers are thinkers.
The Blockhead intuition pump also seems to indirectly say something about the importance of the internal mechanism of a thinking agent. A preprogrammed computer chip is not sufficient for thinking. A human brain is sufficient for thinking, however. It is not clear that a brain is necessary for a thinking being, but it will certainly suffice. A computer chip lacks the complex causal dependencies found in the brain. Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson define a node as the combination of input and output response at a given moment. The Blockhead, when stimulated with input responds with the one preformed response it has been programmed to respond with. Dealing with each input independently, machine only ever has one active node. This is what might be called a cheap trick, clearly not thinking. Humans, when stimulated with input, rely on various active nodes – past beliefs, thoughts, inclinations – all of which contribute to the output. Perhaps this causal dependency from complex nodal activity is precisely what gives rise to genuine thinking. So while we may just be a collection of tricks, the Blockhead is just one – and not a thinking one.
(NYU year 2 Minds and Machines)
In Defense of Dennett
September 9, 2009
Consciousness is perhaps the most perplexing phenomena left unexplained in the natural world. There is research being done across multiple disciplines – philosophy, psychology, neuroscience etc.– and yet no one theory of consciousness has been agreed upon. While many theoreticians think we are very close to understanding this puzzle, others think it will take a revolutionary shift in the scientific paradigm if we are to ever understand consciousness. Still, others believe we are not sufficiently ‘equipped’ to understand the workings of consciousness in the first place. Whoever is right, one thing is for certain – consciousness is a great mystery that if solved, would inevitably help humans understand their place in nature.
According to David Chalmers, if we are to come to solve this mystery of consciousness, either we must revise our conception of nature or we must revise our conception of consciousness. I propose it is our conceptual understanding of consciousness that needs revision. For the sake of this paper, I will be defending the eliminativist view of consciousness, namely that the phenomenon of consciousness (as it is commonly understood) is illusory and can be explained in terms of basic, physical, structural and functional processes. I will use Daniel Dennett’s functional analysis of qualia, from his paper “Quining Qualia”, to show that our understanding of the properties of consciousness are greatly misguided, resulting in a conception of consciousness that by its very nature, could never be understood.
In his paper “Consciousness and its Place in Nature”, Chalmers proposes there are two types of problems one faces in trying to understand consciousness. The so-called ‘easy’ problems of consciousness are the objective issues of consciousness that can be worked out in terms of the underlying physical structure and functional activity. An example of an easy problem of consciousness would be how the human visual system functions perceptually. Importantly, the easy questions can be studied empirically by examining brain activity and other relevant objective data. Science has made great progress in coming to understand many of these structural aspects of consciousness. However, the supposed ‘hard’ problem of consciousness has been largely overlooked or ignored by scientists, while philosophers find it to be the most puzzling. This hard problem of consciousness is how it is that physical matter, when arranged into a particular structure (namely the human brain) can come to have subjective experience. Another way of phrasing this puzzle is that somehow complex arrangements of physical simples can come to have qualitative or phenomenal experiences. It seems that science fails to give an explanation of why subjective experience (the “what it is like to be” something) exists in the natural world. However, the eliminativist holds that the apparent hard problem of consciousness really does not exist, or shall cease to exist once all the soft problems have been settled.
Another way of understanding this ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is in terms of what is known by philosophers as the explanatory gap. The explanatory gap states that no matter how far we get in terms of explaining the ‘easy’ questions – the structural and functional issues – there will still be something lacking in our explanation of consciousness, namely the phenomenal character of experience. There is an unexplainable chasm or gap between the physical or biological brain events and the conscious or qualitative experience. This explanatory gap is often used to argue that consciousness is beyond mere physical description and is rather ineffable and mysterious. The explanatory argument goes something like the following:
(1) Physical accounts explain only the structure and function of consciousness.
(2) Structure and function alone don’t explain the subjective or qualitative feeling.
(3) There is a gap between the physical accounts of consciousness and the subjective or qualitative properties of consciousness.
(4) Thus, consciousness must not be wholly physical.
The conclusion (4) pushes the epistemological gap to an ontological gap – that is, the limit of our understanding of consciousness necessarily implies consciousness is beyond physical description and thus non-physical. In other words, the explanatory argument concludes that because subjective experience isn’t explainable in physical terms, it must then be irreducible and non-physical. Because knowing all the physical facts of the world apparently isn’t sufficient for knowing subjective experience, experience itself must be fundamentally different than the rest of the physical world.
Reductive materialists or eliminativists, like Dennett, deny that there is an epistemic gap in the first place, however. Moreover, these materialists believe that the hard problem of consciousness is merely an illusion that will go away when all the soft problems are explained away. Someone like Dennett, who believes that all of the properties of consciousness can be explained physically or functionally, is going to have to deny premise (2) – that structure and function don’t explain qualitative experience. According to the reductionist, qualitative experience just is structure or function, so premise (2) is thus confused and invalid. According to eliminativism, there is nothing special about qualitative experience that moves it beyond the realm of the physical. Dennett thinks it is mistakes like this that lead to an speculative and unfounded view of consciousness as being some mysterious non-physical phenomenon. As a reductive materialist, he wants to show that our common-sense understanding of consciousness is actually an illusion and that the special features we attribute to consciousness can be either be reduced to fully physical terms or shown not to exist at all.
In his paper “Quining Qualia”, Daniel Dennett sets out to deny our intuitions about specifically about qualia as being a sort of “special property” of consciousness. Qualia are defined as the features of consciousness that are subjective and have a qualitative feeling – namely a feeling of “what it’s like to be like” – for example, what it is like to see red. Dennett does not intend to fully deny conscious experience outright (in this paper; at least); and insofar as everything real has properties – he does not want to deny that consciousness has properties. However, he does want to say that the qualitative features of consciousness – qualia – do not have the special properties philosophers normally attribute to them namely, being ineffable, private, intrinsic, and directly apprehensible through consciousness. Dennett believes that philosophers are intuitively misguided in these assumptions. Commonly, qualia are described as ineffable insofar as we tend to think of our experience as defying expression or description in language. It is largely due to ineffability that qualia are thought to be private. Because we are not able to fully express our phenomenal experience, it becomes impossible for interpersonal comparison. Moreover, it seems that each of us has privileged access to our qualia – a first person perspective that no one else can experience quite like we do. Qualia are believed to be directly apprehensible through consciousness in that we seem to have the power to reflect on our experience, and in doing so – amplify the qualia. And finally, are phenomenal experiences are thought to be intrinsic insofar as they are somehow “atomic”, “simple” or “homogeneous” and therefore unable to get a hold of without direct experience. Dennett wants to show that it isn’t clear that consciousness really has any of these four previous characteristics commonly associated with qualia.
He believes that many of the supposed mysteries of consciousness are created by dogmatically accepting these intuitions we have about qualia or the “ways things seem to us.” Dennett hopes to shift the burden of proof to those who so complacently appeal to private, subjective experiences as having these special properties. However, Dennett says that to try to eliminate these errors and extrapolate some “lowest common denominator” of qualia – eliminating its ‘special’ characteristics – would be to reify the concept into oblivion. What would be left is a meaningless notion that is “tactically obtuse” and far from what philosophers mean when they use the term qualia. Through a series of thought experiments, or ‘intuition pumps’ Dennett proposes to show that none of the four previously mentioned properties of qualia seem to hold up to scrutiny or analysis. Perhaps most importantly, Dennett wants to deny the existence of qualia because it is often seen as the biggest threat and last defense against functionalism, or more generally materialism, and as he says, any third person objective approach to the world. As a naturalist philosopher, Daniel Dennett wants to explain conscious entirely in terms of the physical and finds that talk of qualia inherently lends itself to unnecessary confusions. And if qualia do exist, then something will have been left out of the functionalist definition of consciousness, rendering it false.
Through the use of his cleverly constructed intuition pumps, Dennett wants to show that the four properties commonly attributed to qualia are confusions – and in that no such feature of consciousness has all of these properties, there must then be no qualia at all. Dennett attempts to show that upon reflecting on our actual experience, there really is nothing phenomenally concrete as to which we can accurately label qualia. As a functionalist, he wants to say that there are no qualia but rather just the functional roles our experiences play. Of this, he says that we falsely assume that beyond this causal system, there are some qualia to be isolated and compared. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on what seem to me to be the two most compelling intuition pumps, which illustrate that our common ideas of qualia are misguided.
The Sanborne-Chase thought experiment serves to illustrate just how little of a first-person understanding we actually have of qualia. Both Sanborne and Chase are coffee tasters who at one time loved the taste of a particular coffee, but now no longer enjoy the flavor of that same coffee. Sanborne says that the flavor is the same, but his judgment of it has changed. Chase says the opposite, namely the flavor has changed, but his judgment has remained the same. Clearly only one of the tasters is right, if the coffee itself has remained consistent. There then must be a forced choice, as to whether the quale has changed or the judgment has changed. Neither man can be sure of which is the actual case and insofar as he is unsure, it appears that the theoretical assumption of privileged-access is false. Both of these men, upon reflecting on their experience, seem to be analyzing it objectively rather than introspectively and at best guessing which shift has occurred within him. Dennett believes that at best, when we introspect we are only theorizing about what is going on in experientially. He also points out that often other people seem to have as good access to our own experiences as we do. For example, we are often fooled by our experience while others can ‘see what’s on our mind” by means of our emotions and behavior. Thus it appears there must be no privileged access property of qualia.
Dennett uses another intuition pump to show that the assumption that qualia are intrinsic is completely unfounded. People often talk about beer as if it were an acquired taste. However, Dennett points out that you don’t actually acquire a liking for the first sip of beer (for if every sip of beer tasted like the first sip, no one would drink beer), but rather the prolonged drinking of beer creates a later enjoyable experience. The very enjoyment of the experiment should guarantee the taste is no longer the same as the first sip, claims Dennett. So it seems that our very liking of the beer has changed its flavor from the first sip to the most recent sip. But insofar as our reaction or experience itself results in a change in quale of beer (namely the flavor), qualia must not be intrinsic, but rather relational. Therefore, there must be no qualia.
It turns out that upon reflecting on the subjective experience of beer, it is really just the beer itself we are attending to. That is, it is not the experience (being a property of consciousness) of the beer that we have access too, but rather the flavor property of the beer itself. In attempting to reflect on subjective experience of the beer, we end up failing and focusing on the beer itself. Thus the experience of beer is not mysterious and can be explained in terms of its causal roles. Dennett wants to just explain qualia functionally, in terms of the experience’s causal role. The functionalist says that if you reproduced the entire functional structure of the beer drinker’s cognitive system (including memories, beliefs, desires, innate aversions etc.), you would have effectively reproduced all the mental properties as well, including the enjoyment and pleasure the beer produces. Thus we can conclude that there is nothing to consciousness beyond structure and function as so the hard problem of consciousness must be illusory.
At this point, one (a qualia realist perhaps) might object that while Dennett might have proven that we don’t have the special understanding we may think privileged access provides us (as demonstrated by Chase and Sanborne); surely Dennett cannot deny that we still have some special or privileged access to our own experience that makes it our experience. We surely must have a special access to what it is like to be us. But Dennett points out that it at least does not seem clear that we have the access to our conscious states we commonly think we have. Dennett thinks that the knowledge of ‘what is like is’ in theory objectively accessible. That is, with the correct research and examination, we can understand what it is like to be anyone just as much as what its like to be ourselves. Dennett thinks we only circumstantially know what it is like to be ourselves because it happens we ‘spend the most time with our selves.’ However, people we are close to often know what it is like to be us (and correctly so) in ways we’ve never reflected upon.
Dennett argues that a large cause of the confusions about qualitative feelings being mysterious is that every person thinks he or she is an expert on consciousness. Insofar as everyone has conscious experience, each person believes to have some profound understanding of the phenomenon and how it works. However, upon genuine introspection and critical examination, it seems that none of the mysterious properties of consciousness hold up. Thus we are not the experts we think we are – but are merely wrapped up in our own experience, fooled by our own minds. By showing that subjective experiences or qualia are not as mysterious as commonly believe, Dennett hopes to show just how we are fooled about our experience. Reductive materialism is extremely controversial and many philosophers brush Dennett’s theory of consciousness off too quickly for being overly simplistic and counter intuitive. However, as Chalmers pointed out – if we are to ever understand such a complex phenomenon, it is going to take radical change in our current philosophical and scientific paradigm. Perhaps Dennett’s theory isn’t fully correct, but it should still serve as a model on how philosophy of consciousness should be done. It seems correct to revise our conception of consciousness rather than revise our concept of the natural world. Instead of simply waiting for some scientific revolution, Dennett has attempted to deny traditional intuitions and set forth a positive account of consciousness that preserves materialism.
(NYU year 2 Consciousness)
Bodily Ownership
September 9, 2009
In order to answer the question of whether the sense of body ownership is necessarily a conscious awareness or not, one must first distinguish between two bodily representations – namely body schema and body image. Body schema is the proprioceptive representation that accounts for the body’s action. Proprioception can best be understood as an unconscious feeling, from the inside, of the relative positions of the body parts. Thus, the schema accounts for postural information or body position, as well as sensations of the skin surface. While the schema is multimodal, that is, integrating information from multiple perceptual sources (including vision); it is most dependent on tactile and proprioceptive information, and therefore views the body egocentrically as an agent behind action. Body schema is largely responsible for non-conscious actions such as walking or postural adjustment. Because so much input is being received from proprioceptive and tactile sensors, consciousness could not possibly keep up with the schema. One would be overwhelmed with stimulation if the schema required conscious attendance to all of the body’s simultaneous actions.
Body image can best be understood as a visuospatial mapping of the body represented mostly by the visual system (although it is also multimodal). Body image accounts for the conscious awareness of the body and consequently views the body as an object (rather than the subject/agent of action). It is through body image that one understands body semantics, or knowledge about the body such as what is causing a localized pain or how to treat the body in response to the pain. Importantly, the schema can become taken over by body image if one puts conscious attention on bodily action (such as walking). However, the schema almost always is unconscious or on a sort of “auto-pilot” One way of understanding the body image is as the conscious representation of not just the schema, but all other information relating to the body.
Perhaps an analogy would be helpful for getting clear on these functional differences. Vision scientists have discovered that there are two visual pathways through which information is processed – the dorsal and ventral streams. The dorsal stream (comparable to the body schema) is believed to be unconscious and answers the HOW questions of motor action by quickly processing visual input, dealing mostly with distance and orientation of visual input. An example of the dorsal stream at work is in running on a rocky beach, one still manages to avoid stepping on dangerous rocks even without conscious awareness of the rocks. It seems that the runner somehow automatically avoids the rocks. This is because visuospatial information is processed much quicker in the dorsal stream than in the ventral stream. Like the runner avoiding rocks, most bodily action (controlled by the body schema) does not require conscious attention. The dorsal stream is heuristic while the ventral stream is conscious and algorithmic. Also, the dorsal stream is egocentric and generates no long-term memory. The ventral stream answers the WHAT questions of visual input, and like body image, is largely responsible for identification. The ventral stream is slower, conscious, and more precise than the dorsal stream and, like body image, is object-centered. That is, the ventral stream is responsible for object recognition and form representation.
Now that distinction between body image and body schema is clear, I will argue that the sense of body ownership is grounded in the body schema and is thus unconscious. Body ownership is the feeling of unity or cohesiveness one feels towards the extension of their body and accounts for recognition of bodily sensation as being in one’s body and not external to it. Ownership is a sort of identification with the body as being ‘me’ as opposed to other bodies. The phenomenology of body ownership is a direct result of bodily action, proprioception, and tactile information, and thus is related to body schema rather than the body image. It seems trivially impossible for body image to be the source of bodily ownership, because we can have visuospatial maps of others’ bodies yet we do not feel like the owners of those bodies. Body image is not sufficient for body ownership. The argument of ownership from schema goes something like this:
(1) The sense of ownership is grounded in spatial content and bodily sensation.
(2) The felt spatial content of bodily sensations is part of the body schema.
(3) Therefore, the sense of ownership must be grounded in body schema.
Those who want to disprove that schema accounts for body ownership will most likely attack premise (1), as premise (2) follows from (1) by definition of schema (established in the previous question).
Important to understand is that the spatial content and bodily sensation are predominantly unconscious phenomenon. Unlike visual perception, tactile perception does not require the agent to do something active to receive information. That is, while visual clues necessarily are required to be looked at to be perceived, our bodies are bombarded with a multitude of tactile perceptions without being actively sought after. For example, to gain visual information about the external environment, one must look around and perceive visual clues – the most salient of which are consciously experienced. However, at the same time, our body is unconsciously informed of many other environmental conditions through tactile perception – such as the temperature of the room, the feeling of the floor against our feet or clothing on our body. These bits of information need not be consciously experienced, yet I would argue are what give us a feeling of owning our body, which is separate from the rest of the external environment. Evidence that our sensation of body ownership is linked to this bodily sensation is in that our phenomenology of ownership is also mostly recessive. That is, we do not need to consciously consider every sensation to know whether or not it is our bodily sensation. In fact, it seems that we only aware of those tactile perecptions in extreme cases such as moments of intense pain or pleasure.
There is some rather compelling empirical evidence that the sense of body ownership is linked directly with proprioception and action. In the case of the modified rubber hand illusion, test subjects are fooled by a synchronicity between their hidden (actual) hand movement being simultaneously duplicated on the visible rubber hand. The subjects felt a proprioceptive drift toward the rubber hand, that is – they felt that their actual hand was actually located closer in space to the dummy hand than it actually was. It seems that the motor action of actively raising and lowering the first finger being duplicated simultaneously it what causes the illusion – further evidence that ownership is grounded in action. Researchers concluded that action influences the sense of body ownership by unifying the body as a whole and thus the representation of bodily movement plays a crucial role is ownership. The study of bodily integration of prosthesis and tool use also is evidential of ownership being grounded in body schema. Prosthetics can become so well integrated into the body schema that patients actually come to believe the artificial limbs are part of their bodies. By adopting a prosthetic limb into the body schema, patients begin to feel a sense of ownership towards these artificial body parts. There is similar neural evidence that the usage of tools over extended periods of times seems to incorporate them into the body schema. In both cases, it appears that it is through action or usage that the sense of bodily ownership is established.
One might object that it does not seem plausible that the phenomenological sense of ownership be based on an unconscious representation of the body. That is, it seems counterintuitive that a phenomenology of ownership (or anything, for that matter) to be below the level of consciousness. After all, phenomenology in all other senses requires conscious awareness for there to be phenomenal experience. So how then can the body schema account for a sense or experience of bodily ownership? However, the sense of ownership, as previously pointed out, is not necessarily a conscious experience. For example, we need not be aware of it being our body to feel pain. It seems to be an implicit assumption (based on the body schema) that the pain we feel is in our body. Bodily sensations themselves don’t need to have a first-person component to give a sense of ownership. For example, most of the time there is no phenomenological awareness of one’s legs. However, if one focuses or reflects upon the proprioceptive feeling of what his legs feel like, there is a “compellingness” towards self attribution. So the sense of ownership seems to be not a directly reflexive phenomenology of gazing at or introspecting on one’s body, but is a rather unconscious assumption one makes based on the coherence of mostly proprioceptive, tactile, and kinesthetic clues. As in the case of tactile pain; one need not be conscious or in a mental state of the pain being of his body to feel that the pain. However, the experience of pain implicitly lends itself to a unified and coherent sense of bodily ownership.
(NYU year 2 Minds and Machines)
Quining Qualia – Daniel Dennett
September 9, 2009
In his paper “Quining Qualia”, Daniel Dennett sets out to deny our intuitions about qualia as being a sort of “special property” of consciousness. Dennett does not intend to fully deny conscious experience outright; and insofar as everything real has properties – he does not want to deny that consciousness has properties. However, Dennett does want to say that qualia itself does not have the special properties philosophers normally attribute to it: namely, being ineffable, private, intrinsic, and directly apprehensible through consciousness. He believes that philosophers are intuitively misguided in these assumptions. Commonly, qualia are described as ineffable insofar as we tend to think of our experience as defying expression or description in language. It is largely due to ineffability that qualia are thought to be private. Because we are not able to fully express our phenomenal experience, it becomes impossible for interpersonal comparison. Moreover, it seems that each of us has privileged access to our qualia – a first person perspective that no one else can experience quite like we do. Qualia are believed to be directly apprehensible through consciousness in that we seem to have the power to reflect on our experience, and in doing so – amplify the qualia. And finally, are phenomenal experiences are thought to be intrinsic insofar as they are somehow “atomic”, “simple” or “homogeneous” and therefore unable to get a hold of without direct experience. Dennett wants to show that it isn’t clear that consciousness really has any of these four previous characteristics commonly associated with qualia.
He believes that many of the supposed mysteries of consciousness are created by dogmatically accepting these intuitions we have about qualia or the “ways things seem to us.” Dennett hopes to shift the burden of proof to those who so complacently appeal to private, subjective experiences as having these special properties. However, Dennett says that to try to eliminate these confusions and extrapolate some “lowest common denominator” of qualia – eliminating its ‘special’ characteristics – would be to reify the concept into oblivion. What would be left is a meaningless notion that is “tactically obtuse” and far from what philosophers mean when they use the term qualia. Through a series of thought experiments, or ‘intuition pumps’ Dennett proposes to show that none of the four previously mentioned properties of qualia seem to hold up to scrutiny or analysis. Perhaps most importantly, Dennett wants to deny the existence of qualia because it is often seen as the biggest threat and last defense against functionalism, or more generally materialism, and as he says, any third person objective approach to the world. As a naturalist philosopher, Daniel Dennett wants to explain conscious entirely in terms of the physical and finds that talk of qualia inherently lends itself to unnecessary confusions
Dennett uses a serious of intuition pumps in hopes to show that our theories about qualia are misguided. Specifically, he wants to show that the four properties he attributes to qualia are confusions – and in that no such feature of consciousness has all of these properties, there must then be no qualia at all. Dennett attempts to show that upon reflecting on our actual experience, there really is nothing phenomenally concrete as to which we can accurately label qualia. As a functionalist, he wants to say that there are no qualia but rather just the functional roles our experiences play. Of this, he says that we falsely assume that beyond this causal system, there are some qualia to be isolated and compared. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on what seems to me to be the two most compelling intuition pumps, which illustrate that our common ideas of qualia are confusions.
Dennett uses the Sanborne-Chase intuition pump to illustrate just how little first-person understanding we actually have of qualia. Both Sanborne and Chase are coffee tasters who at one time loved the taste of a particular coffee, but now no longer enjoy the flavor of that same coffee. Sanborne says that the flavor is the same, but his judgment of it has changed. Chase says the opposite, namely the flavor has changed, but his judgment has remained the same. Clearly only one of the tasters is right, if the coffee itself has remained consistent. There then must be a forced choice, as to whether the quale has changed or the judgment has changed. Neither man can be sure of which is the actual case and insofar as he is unsure, it appears that the theoretical assumption of privileged-access is false. Both of these men, upon reflecting on their experience, seem to be analyzing it objectively rather than introspectively and at best guessing which shift has occurred within him. Thus, there must be no qualia.
Dennett uses another intuition pump to show that the assumption that qualia are intrinsic is completely unfounded. People often talk about beer as if it were an acquired taste. However, Dennett points out that you don’t actually acquire a liking for the first sip of beer (for if every sip of beer tasted like the first sip, no one would drink beer), but rather the prolonged drinking of beer creates a later enjoyable experience. The very enjoyment of the experiment should guarantee the taste is no longer the same as the first sip, claims Dennett. So it seems that our very liking of the beer has changed its flavor from the first sip to the most recent sip. But insofar as our reaction or experience itself results in a change in quale of beer (namely the flavor), qualia must not be intrinsic, but rather relational. Therefore, there must be no qualia.
Dennett claims to appeal to gustatory experience because he says color-vision is extremely complex and delicate. Where color experience depends on hue, saturation, and brightness of the perceived object; taste is wholly dependent on an object’s basic chemistry. We are also more comfortable with interpersonal comparisons in flavor, where as it becomes more confusing in comparing our visual experiences. People often compare their likes or dislikes of foods with others, but rarely compare their color experiences. Also, we often notice intrapersonal shifts in our gustatory experience. That is, we can remember times we disliked food we now love, and vice versa (such as in the Sanborne-Chase example). If there are intrapersonal changes in our color experience, it is far more gradual and nearly imperceptible for most people.
Dennett, perhaps less explicitly, chooses to discuss flavor experience because it preserves his functional approach to qualia more intuitively than color. Dennett wants to say that there is no intrinsic property of qualia. Qualia, as it were, are merely experiences that play a particular functional role, generating some behavioral output as a response to some input. So if one reacts aversely to the taste of cauliflower he once enjoyed, the taste/qualia must be different insofar as it is playing a different functional role. Thus, cauliflower-quale have no intrinsic flavor. This point is not as easily demonstrated (if at all) with color experience – making flavor a better choice for Dennett. The question is whether the functionalist can then extend his claims about qualia based on taste to color experience.
Dennett claims that the evidential power of neurophysiology is vastly limited in examining subjective experience. We can imagine in the case of an inverted spectrum, that it is not clear whether the invert’s qualia are genuinely inverted or rather his reaction, or remembrances of qualia are inverted. Obviously the invert will not know which is the case. Dennett says that the physiological tests, despite of how well developed, will fail to distinguish on which side of memory the qualia lay. The brain does not function in a clearly linear way that makes it possible to pinpoint where any such inversion may take place. The neurophysiologists may have reason for preferring one alternative to the other (qualia inversion to memory inversion), but this will only be to support their own theoretical claims about qualia. Dennett should want to say that this confusion is due to conceiving qualia as having some special, intrinsic nature that can be isolated from our behavioral dispositions.
It seems to me that Dennett has made some philosophical progress, at least in showing that qualia do not pose a serious threat for the materialist advocates of consciousness. That is, he’s taken a phenomena that is thought to be mysterious and beyond physical explanation, and shown that this conception is merely an illusion based on misunderstanding. In actuality, there are no such qualia that have these “special” properties as Dennett calls them. However, while Dennett has defended functionalism, he has not succeeded in his second goal of proposing computational functionalism is valid. The biological functionalist, who approaches most of consciousness from functionalism, should not be convinced that functionalism is the correct approach to qualia. While Dennett has shown that qualia are not quite the special properties they were once thought to be, it still is not clear that qualia can be reduced entirely to their functional roles (and thus realized on any functionally similar system). The biological functionalist should want to say that conscious experience, namely the experience of qualia, is dependent on our biological structures (our brain system).
(NYU year 2 Minds and Machines)
Interactionism
September 8, 2009
Paper arguing for interactionist dualism.
Upon reflecting on our daily experience, it certainly feels we have a mental life that directly influences and causes events in the physical world. It seems when we make choices or mental decisions, they often become actualized in the physical world. Conversely, the physical world appears to influence our thoughts and choices. It is for these reasons that interactionism is the most reasonable position for the dualist to hold. The interactionist would like to preserve this common-sensical appearance of two-way causal interaction. The physicalists have many arguments against interactionism, often backing the interactionist into a more inane form of dualism such as epiphenomenalism. However, because interactionism is the ideal form of dualism, I will defend it by examining the most troublesome physicalist argument against interactionism: over-determinism. I will argue that the whole concept of over-determinism is fundamentally flawed and thus poses no real threat to the interactionist.
The physicalist claims the world is causally closed, because there is sound, empirical evidence that everything that happens in the observable world has an earlier physical cause. Take for example, a man tasting a cube of sugar. Asked what the man experiences, he would answer, “sweetness”. According to the physicalist, this response would have been causally determined first by placing the sugar in his mouth, followed by chemical reactions that take place in special receptor cells called ‘taste buds’, and finally by various complicated neural activities in the brain. The final result is the articulation of the man’s experience of sweetness. Even in complicated situations such as this one, the materialist appears to have no problem showing that all events are determined by earlier physical causes. However, the interactionist proposes that not only is there physical causation, but also non-physical causation. Mental activity becomes actualized in the physical world, thus causing physical events (and vise versa). In other words, the physical world is not causally closed. The dualist believes it is not just the chemical brain activity that causes the man to respond, “sweetly”, but also the mental experience of sweetness. We can conclude the man’s verbal response has two causes: the physical happenings in his brain, and the immaterial or mental experience of taste. However, in response to the introduction of mental causation, the physicalist claims that many events become consequently over-determined. Instead of events having the one necessary cause, happenings in the physical world thus have two sufficient causes, one physical and one non-physical. The physicalist further believes the mental causation to be superfluous insofar as the world can function merely by physical causation alone.
But what complications does over-determination cause insofar as the mental causation is always consistent with the physical? The dualist could argue that even if the physical world is causally determined, the mental world does not disrupt this ordering insofar as mental causation coincides with physical causes. So then what is so inherently problematic about events having multiple causes? It is not enough for the physicalist to say that world simply doesn’t need mental causation. Although it is generally good to eliminate unnecessary factors in trying to understand the metaphysical nature of reality, merely stating that mental causation is unnecessary and only complicates the world would not be a compelling argument against the dualist.
The physicalist might respond by pointing out the strangeness of the world being over-determined on a universally widespread and reoccurring nature. Almost every obscure happening on the human level (assuming humans are the only beings with mental life) would be over-determined if interactionism is true. Every human event that involves some sort of non-physical experience would be over-determined. Not only is widespread over-determination very strange, it is also highly improbable. If, as current physics proposes, the physical world is indeterministic and instead probababalistic, it seems highly unlikely that physical causation should remain perfectly parallel with mental causation for all of time. Further, what force keeps the mental causation parallel to the physical causation, and more importantly, what would happen something disrupted the synchronicity? If our example’s mental life became causally disconnected with his physical life, perhaps he would taste sugar bluely our loudly instead of sweetly? At first glance, objections such as these seem to pose a serious problem for the interactionist.
I will argue on behalf of the dualist that there is, in fact, no over-determination. Although the physicalists can raise some interesting questions about the over-determination of the world, it seems to me that this objection to dualism essentially misses the point. By intending to show that the world is over-determined, on the interactionist’s theory, the physicalist greatly misunderstands or misrepresents the dualist view. I would argue that by accepting the scientific dogma that the world is causally closed to be truth, the materialists attack on interactionism falsely presupposes the dualist will agree with this premise. In showing the world to be causally closed, the physicalist hopes to convince the dualist there is no room for mental causation. The dualist, however, should defend his view by pointing out that appearance is not necessarily reality. Although it appears the observable world is causally closed, the interactionists claim it is not. Unless the materialist can convince the dualist that the man’s response of sweetness is directly caused only by some chemical happening in his brain (and not the actual experience of sweetness), he fails in proving the world is over-determined. The dualist believes that there must be a soul for experience because there is no substantial evidence that the physical can consciously experience anything, including sweetness. The physicalist’s argument of over-causation ultimately becomes an argument over what it is to experience, and insofar as he is unable to prove that the physical can somehow experience; he fails to convince the dualist of over-determinism. In direct response to the claim that the neural activity is what causes the man to speak, the dualist could simply propose that the brain state is merely the necessary condition for the immaterial soul to experience sweetness, which in turn causes the man’s response. Thus, the brain (physical) satisfies the necessary condition for the experience (mental), which then causes the man to articulate (physical) his experience. We could conclude that not only is interactionism feasible, but also necessary for the world to work. Therefore, the argument for over-determinsim is only compelling for those who accept the physical world to be causally closed, not the dualists.
(NYU year 2 Central Problems of Philosophy)
Shattering the Illusion
September 8, 2009
Essay I wrote on the history of religion and progression towards atheism.
Upon considering the institution of religion, certain universal criteria come to mind, namely: ritual, community, doctrine, various practices and perhaps the most important, faith. Without faith or a belief system, one cannot differentiate religion from secular philosophy. It is precisely a faith in God or the supernatural that is the underlying fundamental commonality of all religion. Although – like ritual and doctrine – the conception of God varies from religion to religion, it is undoubtedly this concern with divinity or the supernatural, which constitutes religiosity itself. And while the content of religious faith varies, I would argue that the function, mainly God’s function, remains basically unchanged. Interestingly, the conception of God is the most powerful and widely recognized symbol in human history. Yet, it is also the most difficult concept to define, agree upon, and therefore study. God has many roles, and functions in a number of ways as: the “one whom humans call in a time of desperate need”, “the creator of the world and of all that is in it”, “the protector and savior who provides for creaturely wants and who sustains women and men undergoing evil of all sorts” and of course “the central object of worship and the ultimate court of appeal in all major crises of life”.[i] So somehow it seems that God, although completely beyond the human sphere of understanding, functions primarily in serving humans’ practical needs. God makes us feel good. He provides comfort, security, answers, protection, and meaning in our lives. The question is not how God provides these luxuries (for we have already concluded that God is beyond our comprehension), but rather how human belief in God serves to better our lives. Understanding God is essential to studying any religious framework, which is why many great thinkers have set out to draw conclusions about human nature based on a proper analysis of God. By examining the progression of thought about God in the writings of these great thinkers, one can also better understand the bigger picture of what role religion plays in the world. I would argue that the ambiguity of God’s nature is a direct result of God being a manmade concept created to provide wish fulfillment and to make humans feel better about their existence.
In his Natural History of Religion, David Hume sets out to trace a natural or human, progression of religious belief. Hume is the first prominent philosopher to challenge the supposedly ‘revealed’ foundations of religion. He wrote his history of religion in 1779, a time in which challenging the validity of religion, especially the Christian church, was social suicide and being accused of atheism could result in severe penalty. Hume’s central argument is that religion does not arise out of a revelation from God, as commonly believed; but rather is the product of man’s fear and anxiety. As Hume says, “the primary religion of mankind arises chiefly from an anxious fear of future events.”[ii] This is a radically different view from what the bible says, namely that God revealed himself to man and offered him protection in a covenant exchange for worship. Hume studies the progression of the human belief in God in hopes to show that religion is manmade. In fact, if Hume succeeds in proving that religion is truly manmade, the idea of God is at risk for being determined manmade as well.
David Hume is an empiricist, believing that the source of all human knowledge and understanding lies in our experience. It is through an empiricist foundation that he examines and critiques the religious framework. In observing the history of religious belief, Hume points out that “mankind, in ancient times, appear universally to have been polytheists”[iii], believing in a vast pantheon of Gods. This multiplicity of gods arises out of the anthropomorphism of nature. Lacking a proper understanding of the natural world, early humans found nature to be both awesome and terrifying. For such primitive people, Hume believes, “the whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.” The natural world seemed so vast and beyond human comprehension that it came to be worshipped as above human nature. Thus each God comes to represent a specific natural force – wind gods, rain gods, etc. These are not the omnipotent creator Gods people believe in today, but rather a more limited and quasi-human (yet divine) representations of nature. To Hume it is logical that man first saw the Gods as limited beings. He points out, “it seems certain, that, according to the natural progress of human thought, the ignorant must first entertain some groveling and familiar notion of superior powers, before they stretch their conception to that perfect Being, who bestowed order to the whole frame of nature.”[iv] It is this lack of understanding or ignorance that creates the many gods of polytheism and it is not until later that the supreme deity is abstracted. These gods seemed to be directly modeled after human beings. Mythology is riddled with stories of petty gods engaging in human quarrels and trivial affairs. Hume asserts that it isn’t until centuries later that “the Deity appeared to them [humanity] a pure spirit, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, before he was apprehended to be a powerful, thought limited being, with human passions and appetites, limbs and organs.” [v]Most important to Hume’s religious framework is the idea that these Gods are born out of fear and anxiety of nature. By anthropomorphizing nature, man hopes to gain control over these otherwise haphazard powers.
Hume sees polytheism as a primitive and barbaric worldview and thinks the shift to monotheism represents forward progression in man’s logic and quest for perfection. He also sees this shift as a natural process that could not have happened any other way. In fact, Hume says, “if men were first led into the belief of one Supreme being…they could never possibly leave that belief, in order to embrace polytheism.”[vi] This, Hume thinks, would be a backwards step in the evolution of human intellect. As, “the mind rises gradually, from inferior to superior: by abstracting from what is imperfect, it forms an idea of perfection”[vii]. Although the content of religion has greatly changed since the days of polytheism, the God of monotheism still serves the same function as the many gods of ancient men. And this God is still born out of the “incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind.”
Hume seems to imply that it was competition among polytheism gave rise to monotheism. Groups of people come to worship and adore particular gods, and this naturally creates competition. Each god thus becomes more powerful in the eyes of its worshippers. About this, Hume asks, “How much more natural, therefore, is it, that a limited deity, who at first supposed only the immediate author of the particular goods and ills in life, should in the end be represented as sovereign maker and modifier of the universe.” [viii] The god is raised from a mere personification of a natural force to a God most high, and thus more promising to appease man’s struggles. Why pray to dozens of Gods when one will suffice?
Hume argues that the individual Gods of monotheism do not escape the same anthropomorphic features as those of the gods of polytheism, and thus are equally as manmade. Yahweh for example, infinitely more powerful than the nature gods, also seems to be modeled after a profanely human prototype. Hume says he is represented as “jealous and revengeful, capricious and partial, and, in short, a wicked and foolish man, in very respect but his superior power and authority.”[ix] What more evidence does one need than the Old Testament to conclude God is a manmade deity? The stories of Yahweh characterize him as having man-like qualities: misogyny, homophobia, jealousy, etc. In fact, the first four of the Ten Commandments – man’s supposed revealed moral code of law – concern themselves only with the necessity of man’s loyal relationship to their jealous God. Hume believes we ascribe these human qualities to the divine to “bring them nearer to a resemblance with ourselves.”[x] Man then becomes dependent on supposed or imaginary relationships with this divine being to receive protection and security in his darkest times. This dependency on the divine explains why men are “much oftener thrown on their knees by the melancholy than by the agreeable passions.”[xi]
Where as David Hume uses God primarily to analyze man’s religious progression, German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach seems to directly criticize the idea of God itself. Therefore, Feuerbach does not begin his analysis with polytheism but addresses monotheism and Christianity specifically. Although Feuerbach wrote nearly a century after Hume, he too describes the material basis for God residing in man; but he opposes man’s conception or idea of God and wants rather an actualized God. It precisely because of this opposition that he challenged “everything that has to do with religion” proposing that it is all “an outgrowth of the human mind that, unbeknownst to itself, has “projected” its own internal experiences onto the “blank screen” of the universe and made these images seem externally real by divining them in the hypostasis of a projected Godhead.”[xii] Consistent with Hume, Feuerbach was concerned with God’s function in describing man’s need for God. However, where Hume thought God primarily served to lessen mans fear and anxiety of future events, Feuerbach proposes God fills the gaps in man’s limited knowledge and understanding of the universe. God is able to answer man’s most profound questions, which is why “man in relation to God denies his own knowledge, his own thoughts, that he may place them in God.”[xiii] God appeals to mankind’s toughest questions, death, meaning, salvation etc. and offers an easy solution – believe in God and you will be saved. However, these securities come at a great price. Feuerbach seems to think that faith or belief in God is a detrimental quality of mankind and unless God becomes somehow manifested or actualized, we must discard faith entirely.
According to Feuerbach, in projecting their desires to onto God, humans create an oppressive dictator they cannot escape, and in his creation, degrade their own nature. Of this, he says, “man gives up his personality; but in return, God, the Almighty, infinite, unlimited being, is a person.”[xiv] In order to strengthen and uphold God’s personality, man must sacrifice part of his own, and then remain the subject of His power. Man denies his own egoism only to further God’s. Thus “God is the very luxury of egoism.”[xv] Unfortunately for his believers, such affirmation of his superior being necessarily degrades human existence. It seems that in nearly every monotheistic religious tradition, there is some inherent quality of man rendering him imperfect. Feuerbach supposes that this flaw is a direct product of man’s belief in God. God is inherently good and so therefore man is naturally less than good. To Feuerbach, belief in God “denies goodness as a quality of human nature; man is wicked, corrupt, incapable of good; but, on the other hand, God is only good – the Good Being.”[xvi] Interestingly. Feuerbach makes the point that if God is supremely good and man is inherently wicked, then how then could humans have any conception of a deity so outside their nature. This incoherence in the God-human relationship further proves that He is a manmade idea, not an actualized being.
Feuerbach characterized man’s entire relationship with God as a cyclical process of giving and receiving pleasure. Man offers up himself to please God, and in return, God answers mans most difficult questions and provides safety and protection. Feuerbach claims that, “when man makes his moral improvement an aim to himself, he has divine resolutions, divine projects; but also, when God seeks the salvation of man, he has human ends and a human mode of activity corresponding to these ends.”[xvii]Put more simply, man lives his life for God, while God functions to improve man’s life. As Feuerbach says, “God acts, that man may be good and happy.”[xviii] The mystery of religion, according to Feuerbach, is in man projecting himself into objectivity. He projects himself to an image of God, creating a divine subject and thus objectifying himself in relation to God. But because God is merely a projection of the human mind, man thus becomes an object to himself. Man no longer attributes his greatest qualities to human nature, but rather to the realm of the divine. Feuerbach argues that when man attributes a quality to God, he is actually reaffirming the quality as being most valuable to human nature. For example, “to affirm that God is love, for example, is to affirm that love is divine.” But unfortunately for man, “by projecting these qualities onto an object other than the human species, one alienates the human species from itself.”[xix] So although Feuerbach concludes that man’s relationship with God is cyclical, it clearly is not equal relationship of mutual benefit. The idea of God alienates humanity from itself. So it seems there is more to be lost than gained in putting one’s faith in God.
Sigmund Freud wrote his work on religion, The Future of an Illusion, in the early twentieth century – a time when modern psychology was developing into the vast field it is today. Naturally, Freud is most interested in the role God plays in the psychology of man. In his work, he argues that religion is man’s most compelling illusion, born out of human desire. Freud differentiates between faith being an illusion rather than merely being an error in logic. He says, “what is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions.”[xx] Where Hume was more concerned with man’s fear and anxiety, Freud, perhaps elaborating on Feuerbach, bases his religious framework around wish fulfillment. But like Hume, Freud believes God originally was conceived out of anthropomorphizing of nature. He says that, “it is in fact natural to man to personify everything that he wants to understands in order later to control it.” However, Freud goes further by psychoanalyzing man’s relationship with God, concluding that is based on an infantile prototype.
In his essay, “Totem and Taboo”, Freud claims, “the psychoanalysis of individual human beings…teaches us…that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father…and that at the bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.” But where did this parental relationship begin? Freud suggests that primitive man comes to worship his father out of fear and guilt. He thinks that primitive man was organized similarly to the gorilla horde. Often, the alpha-male gorilla would be overthrown and killed by his sons out of jealousy of women and power. Freud believes that early human tribes were no different in their organization and that this Deed, as Freud calls it, of killing the father, later gives rise to father becoming God. The sons feel guilt for the Deed and later come to worship the father God out of fear, hoping for forgiveness.
Freud characterizes the human relationship to God as ambivalent. Man, like a child, is both scared and dependent on his father for protection. He comes to love his father because of the securities the father provides, but never ceases to fear him. Freud says, “as the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child forever…he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, who he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection.”[xxi] Man is incapable of being fully independent, so as he ages he transitions his trust from his earthly father to that of the heavenly father. Protecting man from the cruelties of nature is not enough; God must also fulfill man’s desires by reconciling “men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death” and also by compensating them for the “sufferings an privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”[xxii]Praying to this exalted father for answers and wish fulfillment and attributing the goodness of one’s life to God is all part of the illusion.
One might wonder what is so bad about giving into this illusion of God. It seems only to make people feel better about their existence. However, I would argue that the pleasure a certain belief generates does not justify the belief. If ones considers all the hours of productivity lost to prayer and worship done in the egoic hope of wish fulfillment or the like, it becomes clear why man must see past the illusion. If all the hours spent building churches or temples were used in attempt to eliminate suffering here and now, God would no longer have a place in the world. Although Hume, Freuerbach and Freud each have a different approach towards analyzing God, they all seem to agree that He is manmade and degrading to human nature. Feuerbach points out that man is reduced to mere filth in relation to God. He says, “ every tendency of man, however natural – even the impulse to cleanliness was conceived by the Israelites as a positive divine ordinance.”[xxiii] And as these profane human qualities like cleanliness are attributed to God, man detracts qualities from himself until he reaches a state of self-humiliation. Freud goes further by predicting that this “universal obsessional neurosis of humanity” will eventually bring about its self-destruction. He asserts that this illusion is dangerous and “civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.”[xxiv] We can only hope that in the twenty-first century, when we now have the technology destroy human civilization, those in power do not become too entangled in the illusion. Perhaps if Hume was right, that the natural progression of human thought was from polytheism to monotheism, the next evolutionary step (and only hope for mankind) would be to remove one more God and shatter the illusion forever.
[i] Taylor 137.
[ii] Hume 176.
[iii] Hume 135.
[iv] Hume 136.
[v] Hume 136.
[vi] Hume 137.
[vii] Hume 136.
[viii] Hume 155.
[ix] Hume 142.
[x] Hume 142.
[xi] Hume 143.
[xii] German Essays on Religion 86.
[xiii] Feuerbach
[xiv] Feuerbach 90.
[xv] Feuerbach 90.
[xvi] Feuerbach 90.
[xvii] Feuerbach 91.
[xviii] Feuerbach 91.
[xix] Taylor 147.
[xx] Freud 39.
[xxi] Freud 30.
[xxii] Freud 22.
[xxiii] Feuerbach 92.
[xxiv] Freud 45.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Taylor, Mark. Critical Terms for Religious Studies. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1998.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. Norton and Company Inc: New York, 1961.
Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Norton and Company: New York, 1961.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Continuum: New York. 1994.
Hume, David. The Natural of History of Religion. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2000.
(NYU year 2 Theories and Methods of Religious Studies)
