Heterophenomenologists Have Feelings Too

Tribesman: You ask many questions about Feenoman.

Anthropologist: Yes, I want to learn as much as I can about him.

Tribesman: So why should I answer your questions? Why don’t I just take you to meet him?

Anthropologist: You can take me to meet Feenoman?

Tribesman: Follow me.

Feenoman: Hello. You look like an anthropologist.

Anthropologist: And you’re Feenoman?

Feenoman: That’s me.

Anthropologist: Well, if you’ll excuse my impertinence, your tribesman here told me that Feenoman can split the sea. Can you split the sea?

Feenoman: Of course. Want to see?

Anthropologist: Actually, I do.

Feenoman: There. Split. How do you like them apples?

Anthropologist:

Emotional Energy: A Platonic Dialogue by MC Complete

Daniel: You know what I think, Clement?  I think interaction dualism is a scientific hypothesis.

Clement: A scientific hypothesis? You mean, like Intelligent Design?

Daniel: No, I mean like general relativity. When Einstein first dreamed up the theory of relativity, it was not very testable. In the past century, we’ve developed better and better tools to allow us to test the theory. Some aspects, like gravitational waves, are still untested.

Clement: What are you saying? What “tools” do we need to “test” the Theory of Dualism, tools that we don’t currently have?

Daniel: There’s a huge neuroscientific gap. If and when we know more about how the brain really works, we will have a much better idea of whether dualism or materialism is correct.

Clement: I see. Your dualistic mind is a Mind Of The Gaps. That’s exactly what I hate about dualism. The gap in scientific knowledge gives your dualistic mind a place to hide. The smaller the gap gets, the less room it will have. Your dualistic attitude helps to stifle scientific inquiry.

Daniel: Stifle scientific inquiry? I embrace scientific inquiry! I have nothing to be afraid of. I’m not committed to either dualism or materialism. I just want to know what scientific inquiry will reveal, if successful. It’s those who are committed to one side of the debate, like you, who should be afraid.

Clement: Um, sorry if I’m not quaking in my boots, but I’m not really expecting further inquiries into neuroscience to reveal the intervention of an immaterial soul.

Daniel: What makes you so sure?

Clement: Well, the conservation of energy, for one thing.

Daniel: I don’t understand why you seem to think that the Argument from Energy is so watertight. Haven’t you ever heard of emotional energy?

Clement: Emotional energy?

Daniel: Maybe the mind itself is a repository of energy -- maybe some mind/brain interactions transfer energy to the mind from the brain, and some interactions transfer energy from the brain to the mind.

Clement: If the mind can have energy, can it also have mass? Can it have a physical position? If so, in what sense is it not physical?

Daniel: It could have some of those things, or none of those things. It is not physical in the sense that experience is essentially not physical, in other words, experience is an extra property not accounted for yet by physics. Or maybe it’s dark energy.

Clement: Dark energy? Are you serious?

Daniel: No. I mean, no and yes. Dark energy shows that there are some gaps in our understanding of energy as well. Sean Carrol (a strong materialist, by the way) has recently suggested that energy is not always conserved. Or maybe it *is* dark energy. That’s my point, we just don’t know. The conservation of energy is not, in and of itself, a reason to stifle scientific inquiry into the nature of the spirit.

Clement: OK, let’s leave energy aside for a moment. If immaterial souls can causally influence the internals of brain, why can’t my soul control your brain (and thus, your body)?

Daniel: There could be many reasons why. At this point, we don’t have enough empirical data to suggest an answer to such specific questions.

Clement: Can you think of a reason why? Even without evidence, can you imagine a dualist physics that might count as a coherent answer to that question?

Daniel: Good question.  Give me a minute to come up with something, willya?

Clement: No problem. I have all the time in the world.  I'm a fictional character, and the reader won't notice the time passing anyway.

Daniel: Hey Clement, you know what?

Clement: No, what?

Daniel: Nothing's coming to mind.  I think I'll have to get back to you on this one.

Clement: Good luck, Daniel.  Note that I'm not holding my breath.

Materialist Heaven

Some people (Sean Carrol, for example) assume that materialism implies that we’re not going to heaven. Fortunately, Dennet does not make this mistake. However, I found his treatment of materialist heaven a little bit disappointing. In a book of what, 400 pages? he devotes about a half a page to it, and I found his treatment very vague. Maybe he actually wanted certain people not to notice what he was up to.

To me it’s very simple: if materialism is true, then when we die, our minds get uploaded to heaven.

Now I suppose that’s not materialism in the strictest sense. It posits a heaven that is explicitly not made of matter, or at least the kind of matter we know and love. What I mean by materialism is mind-materialism. Not that *everything* is matter, but that the mind is matter. To posit mind-dualism, we need to actually update physics to include a new category of consciousness, which actually has causal interactions with good old matter. But positing a spiritual heaven does not have this problem, since there’s no reason for heaven to interact with the material world. The heaven arrow goes one way.

Now, the secularists of course would say that we have no evidence for the existence of heaven. I think that is not really an objection to what I’m saying here. We have a tradition that heaven is real, and that’s good enough for the purposes of this discussion.

How to Have Your Idealist Cake, and Eat Materialism To!

I think one of the reasons that it was so hard for me to swallow materialism for such a long time is that I couldn’t figure out how to buy materialism without selling my idealism. Subjective, internal space is what I know; objective, external space is theorized and imagined, almost like a fantasy. So I was afraid that buying materialism would be tantamount to trading in reality for a fantasy. If the objective, external, realistic world that I theorize is to be a materialist world, that means that this imagined material world must include, as part of it, appearances and imagination. It must be possible to account for appearances and imagination, Berkeley’s “ideas”, in physical terms. Otherwise, I refused to buy materialism. I would stick with dualism, and if that as well proved incoherent, I could retreat into my idealism and abandon realism altogether.

I believe in Berkeley’s ideas. Could Berkeley’s ideas be matter?

Well, all of the information about the “ideas” can be encoded in matter. Matter is very good at encoding information. It can encode whatever information you want.

So all the information about how the world appears to me can be encoded in matter. “I see a computer screen” could be equivalent to there being a data structure in my brain with an instance variable, {‘visualField’: ‘bitmap with computer screen’}.  All you have to do is give up on the meaning of the term “to see”. The relationship of me to my visual field is just a quale: it has no informational content.  To make materialism work, you simply have to assume that it has no essence either.  This is an easier job than trying to insist that it *has* an essence!  Assume that imagination is just an instance variable, and suddenly it’s very easy to understand how all mental theorizing can be interpreted as information, digitally encoded in the brain of the theorist.