Is physical causality incomplete?
George F. Ellis makes the following argument
"The higher-level feature of human consciousness is clearly causally effective in the world around us: we live in an environment dominated by artifacts that embody the outcomes of intentional design. The issue is that the present-day subject of physics has nothing to say about the intentionality resulting in the existence of such objects. Thus it gives a causally incomplete account of the world. Even if we were to attain a 'theory of everything', this situation would remain unchanged: physics would still fail to comprehend human purpose and hence would provide a causally incomplete description of the real world around us. This situation is characterized by the self-referential incompleteness of physics: there is no theory or experiment that can determine what will be the next experiment to be undertaken by the experimenter or theory to be created by the theorist."
What do you think? Is this argument flawed?
My guess is that "intentionality" is an emergent capacity. Just as "being able to fly" is nowhere to be found in the parts of an airplane, but the airplane as a whole can fly nonetheless, "purpose" and "intentionality" are a capacity of the human mind, which itself is a function of the human brain, but physical laws only cover the elements of the brain (atoms, particles, electric currents etc...), not the whole of the brain.
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Whether intentionality is emergent or not, I believe that Ellis makes a good point. There is no scientific understanding of conscious awareness or intentionality, and there will never be as long as science continues with its “self-referential incompleteness”.
A robot can be set up to make decisions. If equipped with enough information and the right programming a robot can appear to exhibit intention. But we know that a robot’s decisions are determined by its memories, its software, and possibly by a random number generator and that it has no conscious awareness of self. In fact, it has no “self”. A robot is nothing but an assemblage of parts, no more aware than a rock. In the same way, organic bodies appear to make decisions, but in the case of organisms those decisions might sometimes be guided by conscious awareness, something that no one understands.
WilliamFleming
Level 8
Oct 17, 2019
1
@Matias I agree that it is a deep mystery. It amounts to telekinesis which is very difficult to swallow. However I don’t think of it in a dualistic way—dualistic thinking is a mental tool that helps us survive but from a greater perspective the two poles are seen as artificial constructs.
In the case of the so-called physical world vs.some sort of spiritual or higher plane based on universal consciousness, it can be intuited that the physical exists only as a symbolic creation of the mind and that in reality only that higher plane exists. After all, everything that we experience in the physical world is nothing but our own nervous systems.
Maybe another way to look at it if you want to think only in terms of the physical—our bodies pick up a special kind of intelligent information from the environment and we interpret that as consciousness.
I do think Ellis has some interesting thoughts on the matter of science and revelation itself.
In his piece The Thinking Underlying the New ‘Scientific’ World-views, he says
“Issues such as the existence of God lie forever outside the competence of science to adjudicate, although the weight of data and experience can influence one’s opinion.”
A very valid assertion I would suggest.
Geoffrey51
Level 8
Oct 17, 2019
2
This argument is flawed for the following reasons:
It assumes intentionality is a physical property of the universe instead of an emergent one as you have stated.
It also assumes a deterministic universe. This is not really the case, because the reality is that a pseudo deterministic world emerges from quantum uncertainty.
The biggest flaw in this argument, although not necessarily a logical error is it doesn't give credit to the ridiculous complexity of the human brain. If you asked top neurologists how complete our understanding of the brain was, they would say things like "if our understanding was represented by a mile, we have traveled no more than an inch".
His observation that we can't determine the next experiment we will do is a valid one, but it can be accouted for in physics with a basic understanding of entropy and information. To over simplify here, things need to interact with other things before they can know of the others existence. Because we don't have complete information about the universe, we can never know everything about it, thus we can not know what the next experiment will be.
This argument is logicaly coherent but fundamentaly wrong because it doesn't grasp how actual causality works.
Happy_Killbot
Level 7
Oct 17, 2019
0
@Matias They can't because the world isn't deterministic and they can never have perfect knowledge. No matter what there is always quantum uncertainty, and that uncertainty can have real world consequences.
Suppose you don't know what you want for dinner tomorrow, so you got to a quantum random number generator, label everything you might eat and pull a truly random number from the generator to chose what to eat. Now chaos theory takes over and that choice has compound future effects that right now, are fundamentally unpredictable. Doing this in reverse however, is possible because once you have the information you can trace it backward, so you can determine what the origin of life is, although it gets harder and more exponentially energy intensive as you move backwards.
No matter how much you know, you can never predict what the next numbers will be.
@Matias not to long ago, a xenon particle in a neutrino detector decayed and was detected. This particularly rare event had a macroscopic change because of all the news coverage and even this conversation.
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