What if Mormonism has its dualism backwards?

[drumdude]

An interesting conversation just popped up on Sam Harris’ YouTube channel. Sam is a noted atheist, but also a noted non-materialist. In the episode, Sam and his wife do a deep dive on her recent conversation with physicists about consciousness.

I highly recommend it as a non woo-woo conversation about non-materialism.

https://youtu.be/6Px4mRYif1A

The hard problem of consciousness is defined as the assertion that there is no way to get at the experience of being conscious from the outside. There’s no way to tell if someone is conscious, you can only be sure that you are conscious. This applies to your friends, your pets, fish, insects… what if consciousness is fundamental to everything, even rocks?

This bottom up approach highlights that Mormonism (which was created in the 1800s as materialism was really becoming popular) has the issue bass-ackwards.

Mormonism asserts that physical human bodies are the ultimate vessel of personhood. There might be an immaterial soul, but it’s essential that it be housed in flesh and blood. The body is fundamental, not consciousness. Mormons believe that these exalted humans live on physical planets. There’s no ethereal plane of heaven, no amorphous soul wandering through higher planes of existence. Mormon Heaven is just the next house down the street, cosmically speaking.

DCP has been on a little soap box about dualism for a long time, denouncing what he thinks is scientific dogmatism for a completely material world. But if science is going to lead us out of materialism into a more holistic view of consciousness, it’s very unlikely that it leads to billions of humanoid apes ruling over billions of rocky earth-sized planets. It’s more likely that it leads to a view that is closer to traditional religious belief, which wasn’t born from 19th century materialism.

[Physics Guy]

In what sense is Harris a non-materialist? The big problem with substance dualism—the theory that spirit is a kind of stuff that's just somehow different from matter—is that it really amounts to materialism with two classes of matter.

That wasn't originally a silly theory. At least one important phenomenon really is all about a special kind of material: electricity. Electrical current is an invisible material fluid that can flow through other things, even solids, and interact with them in weird and dramatic ways. It's usually made of electrons which, insofar as they are loose from atoms and moving independently, are a different kind of matter from the neutral atoms that make up most objects. In principle, the idea that spiritual phenomena are all similarly due to some different kind of substance from ordinary matter is by no means ridiculous.

Not every phenomenon is about its own kind of substance, however. For a long time people thought that heat was its own kind of substance, separate from whatever just made up objects, and that this heat fluid could flow into and out of and through things like water in sponges—or, indeed, like electrons through conductors. They turned out to be right about electricity but wrong about heat. Heat is not a kind of stuff but a kind of motion, a slight but fast shaking and vibrating that any matter can do.

If spirit is more like heat than like electricity, then that's really a more profound kind of dualism than substance dualism, because it says that spirit is more fundamentally different from matter than by just being another flavour of matter. We can still use an even older analogy, and say that spirit is like wind. Wind is not a second kind of substance, besides air molecules. A breeze is not when some wind-stuff mixes into the air like diffusing perfume. Wind is a way the air moves. So is sound.

If somebody thinks that "real" must mean "substance", then if one adopted their language one might have to tell them that sound, wind, and heat are not real, but are only illusions. That would be a bizarre use of "real" though. It might be better to get them to ditch that clumsy vocabulary. If you're saying, "Heat isn't real", you must not understand heat—or else not understand real.

[Hound of Heaven]

Mormonism asserts that physical human bodies are the ultimate vessel of personhood. There might be an immaterial soul, but it’s essential that it be housed in flesh and blood. The body is fundamental, not consciousness. Mormons believe that these exalted humans live on physical planets. There’s no ethereal plane of heaven, no amorphous soul wandering through higher planes of existence. Mormon Heaven is just the next house down the street, cosmically speaking.

To begin with, I would argue that Mormonism cannot have its dualism reversed, as it is not founded on dualism. Mormonism can be viewed as a form of trialism philosophy.

Recently, modern day Mormonism has shifted towards a dualism belief system, as they believe it enhances their image as Christians, despite the fact that Mormonism fundamentally differs from Christianity.

Joseph Smith's most significant teaching from the pulpit, which distinguishes us from the dualism of Christianity, is that we have eternally existed as intelligences somewhere in the cosmos. Mormonism fundamentally revolves around the belief that we existed as intelligences even before the Heavenly Father of this world recognized who we were.

Early Mormons held the belief that among the three components, intelligence, spirit, and body it is our intelligence that defines us as eternal beings. Our intelligence defines our true selves, it is the essence of what makes you you and me me.
Our spirit was bestowed upon us just as our body has been, not our intelligence.

The rationale behind Mormons integrating intelligence with spirituality in contemporary times is straightforward, it enhances the perception of Mormons as more Christian. Believing that we existed before God even recognized us shifts the focus of Mormonism to the individual rather than to Heavenly Father. True Mormonism fundamentally focuses on each person as an individual. Our intelligence defines us above all else.

In Mormonism, it is our intelligence that grants us eternity, rather than our spirit or our body. If you're defining dualism as mind-body in this context, then in Mormonism, the only form of dualism exists in the pre-existence, where there is a dualism of intelligence and spirit.

It is important to remember that, according to Mormon doctrine, individual entities have always existed as intelligences, as intelligences and spirit, and also as intelligences, spirit, and body, for all time and eternity. In the beliefs of Mormonism, it is suggested that as we exist here on Earth, after we have moved beyond our life here on Earth, there is a possibility that you and I could encounter someone that would look and exist just like us, but at this moment you and I are communicating, they may exists without a spirit or body, and notably, do not yet have a Heavenly Father or Mother. At this moment in time they exist solely as what defines them, and intelligence. But in the future, you and I could shake hands with them.

[Gadianton]

I think Hound knocked the explanation of the Mormon position out of the park. Including that a certain someone isn't trying to be true to Mormon ideas traditionally and rather, just goes along with EV apologetics, hoping to be included. He (DCP) thinks Christianity should be more DEI instead of merit based.

the only form of dualism exists in the pre-existence, where there is a dualism of intelligence and spirit.

absolutely. Well, I think Mormonism was trying to be materialist, reject the "non-material matter" of ghosts, and just admit ghosts are real, but just a different kind of matter. But once that is granted, they missed the point of dualism, and were back to square one: had to explain the "non-physical" mind wrapped up with a "physical" spirit body.

I listened to the first part up until she started reading chapter 8. My pervading thought was what Physic's Guy suggested, that she's a property dualist. She's going to be the Churchlands for property dualism rather than physicalism. But, she keeps saying she's a physicalist, and Sam isn't being too skeptical of anything (for some reason) to ferret it out. She even said something about it being physics down to the math and I was really thrown. I'm lost, so until I hear a better explanation, she's trying to find the science to back up David Chalmers' idea of property dualism.

The "hard problem" was also framed as that by Chalmers, and it actually refers to the difficulty of providing a descriptive explanation of our experience "what's it like to see red" in reductive physical terms, but that does directly lead to the "problem of other minds". The normal solution to that problem (see Eliot Sober) isn't that we can sense something about our friend Jan who is smiling, but ultimately, we extrapolate from evolution that the closer in the evolutionary tree to me, then the more confident I can be that the person is conscious like me. You can call "brain in vat" but you can do that for any argument about the outside world. There's no such thing as China for the same reason. There is a ton of material out there about other minds and what can be a mind, such as can a LLM be a mind?

She accepts "bundle theory" (Hume/Dennett), so the self isn't a whole but a fabrication, but where Dennett sees "experience" as another way of looking at computation, it ultimately disappears into computation, she seems to be going for experience as a secondary property to a neuro-bundle. So LLMs probably can't be conscious.

She also strikes me as somewhat like Dennett, at least in the hour that I listened to her introducing herself to the world, in the way that she doesn't want to talk philosophy. She wants to flirt with some of the ideas but build everything up from neurobiology rather than being trapped in philosophical language, like Dennett. The fact they talk about the "hard problem" and something that sounds an awful lot like it's compatible with Chalmers without mentioning Chalmers is a problem, in my opinion.

[Gadianton]

for the sake of the LLM's, if there is a "hard problem" of consciousness is there also an easy problem? Yes. Consciousness is itself a dualism between number crunching and feeling. Even when thinking about a math problem, there is an experiential component to that. ChatGPT4+ might be able to mimic a gnat's behavior by now. But is it thinking like a gnat? Would we say ChatGPT4+ is equally or more conscious than a gnat? If we're wondering if A.I. is conscious once it reaches AGI, shouldn't it already be conscious because it has (presumably) surpassed the simplest life examples with brains that we might agree are a little bit conscious? The easy problem of consciousness is explaining the components of mind that have an analogy with computers. (easy in the hand-waving philosophical sense, not necessarily actually explaining how it works).

[Physics Guy]

What would be the difference between physicalism and property dualism?

I consider things like heat and sound and wind to be totally physical, down to the math, even though they are not material substances, the way atoms or electric currents are. I think I might be fine with saying that heat and sound and wind are properties that matter can have, so maybe this is an example of property dualism, but if this is a property dualism then I don't see how it can incompatible with physicalism. I'm not conceding at all that heat and wind need more than physics to explain them.

It might not be possible for humans to get a clear picture of how all the molecules move in a tornado. So in that sense there is a kind of line between things like the orbit of a planet, which we can easily follow precisely, and things like tornados, that we can't follow with full resolution. I wouldn't say that's a difference between physics and beyond-physics, though. Making that kind of resolution limit out to be really important seems weird to me. It seems sort of like saying that apples are totally different from olives because you can swallow a whole olive but an apple is too big for your mouth. Biting and chewing are allowed. It's all eating.

[Gadianton]

don't shoot the messenger, but wind supervenes on matter even if it doesn't reduce to matter. David can't imagine all of the movement of molecules that we identify as wind without "wind" happening concurrently. David can imagine a world in which people are doing everything they are now but not conscious (zombies), therefore consciousness doesn't logically supervene on atoms. David is not saying that Zombies are physically possible, that such a twin world could actually be. In physicalism, everything from wind to consciousness must logically depend on physics.

[Physics Guy]

One may be able to imagine a zombie that can speak or move like a conscious person without being conscious, but this is not the same as imagining a brain with all the microscopic activity of a conscious person that yet fails to be conscious. And I don't think anyone considers that consciousness is defined by its external signs. If anyone does, I think there are people who have recovered from paralysis who would disagree with them strongly.

External effects are not necessarily related one-to-one to microscopic causes, and that's true even with simple physics. If you feel a warm radiator, you could imagine it as being heated by electric current rather than by steam, but that doesn't mean that steam heating is unphysical.

[drumdude]

It seems like in the case of Terri Shaivo, for example, we think we know what the necessary conditions for consciousness are, even if we don’t know what the sufficient conditions are. If we don’t see the brain signals we expect, we conclude that consciousness is impossible.

But how can we be sure?

[Rivendale]

It seems like in the case of Terri Shaivo, for example, we think we know what the necessary conditions for consciousness are, even if we don’t know what the sufficient conditions are. If we don’t see the brain signals we expect, we conclude that consciousness is impossible.

But how can we be sure?

I don't understand how his wife makes the leap from subconscious activities hidden from our stream of conscious thoughts to other pockets of nonliving matter also having hidden sentient awareness. I also don't understand why she says that there is no good reason to assume consciousness only applies to biological systems.