05.10
Drudge linked a story this morning that recounts a new study on morality awareness in 6-month old babies. It turns out that babies are aware of good and evil as early as the 6-month mark. This led the researchers to conclude “that the difference between good and bad may be hardwired into the brain at birth.” While this may be a valid statement from a functional standpoint, I have a feeling that they mean it in a more fundamental way. Usually when the phrase “hardwired into the brain” is used, the person saying it is describing the brain as being somehow capable, on a physical level, of producing the function in question. But, that clearly can’t be the case with something like moral judgements, because moral judgements are non-physical things.
To understand this better, let’s do Leibniz’s “thinking machine” thought experiment. Imagine for a moment a large wooden box. It’s so large, in fact, that it has a door in the side of it. This box is a thinking machine. It’s a device that is capable of thinking, just like humans do. Now, in order to see how this machine works, you enter the doorway. What will you see when you get inside? Will you see gears? Vacuum tubes? Circuits? What configuration of these parts produce the thoughts? The fact is you can’t imagine what the inside of such a machine would look like because thoughts aren’t the type of things that machines do. You can’t even sit down with a piece of paper and create a schematic of a thought producing machine, because there is no way to represent thoughts in space. They are non-physical. They can’t be mechanized, because they have no extension in space as physical objects do. And, as Alvin Plantinga says, “thinking doesn’t arise by the mechanical interaction of parts.”
And, it’s important to remember the details here. Thoughts are themselves. They aren’t representations of things. They aren’t symbols or perceptions. They are thoughts. You can diagram a syllogism after you think of it. But, what you are diagramming isn’t the thought itself. You are diagramming the thing being thought of. This is because thoughts have a property that physical things don’t have. They have the property of being “about” something. You are thinking about an argument. The argument you are thinking of isn’t the thought itself. Think of it another way. Instead of diagramming a syllogism or progression of declarations, this time imagine taking a sheet of paper and diagramming “being afraid.” You can’t. You can write down “I’m afraid of heights,” but you can’t diagram the thought of that fear itself.
I’ve blogged about this topic before, but it’s necessary to keep these things in mind as you read articles on brain science. Neurology is understandably prone to attribute all thoughtiness to the brain, and in a sense it’s understandable, since they are neurologists and not psychologists. But, that just means we have to do a good job of remembering that they are wrong when they make those conclusions. The body interacts with the soul on such a fundamental level that it’s hard to separate what one is doing from what the other is responsible for in many cases. These types of thought experiments help to reinforce the distinctions.
