Octopuses, aliens, squirrels and AI

I’ve been toying with an argument for dualism along these lines:

1. Octopuses are conscious.

2. Technologically advanced aliens are or would be conscious.

3. Squirrels are conscious.

4. Current LLMs are not conscious.

Claims 1–3 require a pretty strong multiple realizability. On materialism, our best such multiple realizability is a functionalism. But it is likely that our current LLMs have more sophisticated general intelligence than squirrels. Thus, a functionalism that makes 1–3 true also violates 4.

Dualism, on the other hand, can allow for all of 1–4 by supposing the hypothesis that all and only intellectually sophisticated living things have souls.

Could a physicalist do the same? I think the difficulty is that life is very fuzzy on physicalism, in a way in which consciousness should not be. On dualism, however, we can suppose that God or the laws of nature have a seemingly arbitrary threshold of what life is.

Open theism and the Incarnation

Here is a very plausible pair of claims:

1. The Son could have become incarnate as a different human being.

2. God foreknew many centuries ahead of time which human being the Son would become incarnate as.

Regarding 1, of course, the Son could not have been a different person—the person the Son is and was and ever shall be is the second person of the Trinity. But Son could have been a different human being.

Here is a sketch of an argument for 1:

1. If the identity of a human being depends on the body, then if the Son became incarnate as a 3rd century BC woman in India, this would be a different human being from Jesus (albeit the same person).

2. If the identity of a human being depends on the soul, then God could have created a different soul for the Son’s incarnation.

3. The identity of a human being depends on either the body or the soul.

I don’t have as good an argument for 2 as I do for 1, but I think 2 is quite plausible given what Scripture says about God’s having planned out the mission of Jesus from of old.

Now add:

3. If the Son could have become incarnate as a different human being, which human being he became incarnate as depends on a number of free human choices in the century preceding the incarnation.

Now, 1, 2 and 3 leads to an immediate problem for an open theist Christian (my thinking on this is inspired by a paper of David Alexander, though his argument is different) who thinks God doesn’t foreknow human free choices.

Why is 3 true? Well, if the identity of a human being even partly depends on the body (as is plausible), given that (plausibly) Mary was truly a biological mother of Jesus, then if Mary’s parents had not had any children, the body that Jesus actually had would not have existed, and an incarnation would have happened with a different body and hence a different human being.

Objection: God could have created Mary—or the body for the incarnation—directly ex nihilo in such a case, or God could have overridden human free will if some human were about to make a decision that would lead to Mary not existing.

Response: If essentiality of origins is true, then it is logically impossible for the same body to be created ex nihilo as actually had a partial non-divine cause. But I don’t want the argument to depend on essentiality of origins. Instead, I want to argue as follows. Both of the solutions in the objection require God to foreknow that he would in fact engage in such intervention if human free choices didn’t cooperate with his plan. God’s own interventions would be free choices, and so on open theism God wouldn’t know that he would thus intervene. One might respond that God could resolve to ensure that a certain body would become available, and a morally perfect being always keeps his resolutions. But while perhaps a morally perfect being always keeps his promises, I think it is false that a morally perfect being always keeps his resolutions. Unless one is resolving to do something that one is already obligated to do, it is not wrong to change one’s mind in a revolution. I suppose God could have promised someone that he would ensure the existence of a certain specific body, but we have no evidence of such a specific promise in Scripture, and it seems an odd maneouver for God to have to make in order to know ahead of time who the human that would save the world is.

What if the identity of a human depends solely on the soul? But then the identity of the human being that the Son would become incarnate as would depend on God’s free decision which soul to create for that human being, and the same remarks as I made about resolutions in the previous paragraph would apply.

Dualism, humans and galaxies

Here is a mildly interesting thing I just noticed: given dualism, we cannot say that we are a part of the Milky Way galaxy. For galaxies, if they exist at all, are material objects that do not have souls as parts.

Brains, bodies and souls

There are four main families of views of who we are:

1. Bodies (or organisms)

2. Brains (or at least cerebra)

3. Body-soul composites

4. Souls.

For the sake of filling out logical space, and maybe getting some insight, it’s worth thinking a bit about what other options there might be. Here is one that occurred to me:

5. Brain-soul (or cerebrum-soul) composites.

I suppose the reason this is not much (if at all) talked about is that if one believes in a soul, the body-soul composite or soul-only views seem more natural. Why might one accept a brain-soul composite view? (For simplicity, I won’t worry about the brain-cerebrum distinction.)

Here is one line of thought. Suppose we accept some of the standard arguments for dualism, such as that matter can’t be conscious or that matter cannot think abstract thoughts. This leads us to think the mind cannot be entirely material. But at the same time, there is some reason to think the mind is at least partly material: the brain’s activity sure seems like an integral part of our discoursive thought. Thus, the dualist might have reason to say that the mind is a brain-soul composite. At the same time, there is a Cartesian line of thought that we should be identified with the minimal entity hosting our thoughts, namely the mind. Putting all these lines of thought together, we conclude that we are minds, and hence brain-soul composites.

Now I don’t endorse (5). The main ethical arguments against (2) and (4), namely that they don’t do justice to the deep ethical significance of the human body, apply against (5) as well. But if one is not impressed by these arguments, there really is some reason to accept (5).

Furthermore, exploring new options, like the brain-soul composite option, sometimes may give new insights into old options. I am now pretty much convinced that the mind is something like the brain plus soul (or maybe cerebrum plus intellectual part of soul or some other similar combination). Since it is extremely plausible that all of my mind is a part of me, this gives me a new reason to reject (4), the view that I am just a soul. At the same time, I do not think it is necessary to hold that I am just a mind, so I can continue to accept view (3).

The view that the mind is the brain plus soul has an interesting consequence for the interim state, the state of the human being between death and the resurrection of the body. I previously thought that the human being in the interim state is in an unfortunately amputated state, having lost all of the body. But if we see the brain as a part of the mind, the amputated nature of the human being in the interim state is even more vivid: a part of the human mind is missing in the interim state. This gives a better explanation of why Paul was right to insist on the importance of the physical resurrection—we cannot be fully in our mind without at least some of our physical components.

Simple dualism and animals

According to simple dualism, our immaterial souls are the bearers of our mental states and we are these souls. We have bodies, but the bodies are not parts of us. We are wholly immaterial.

If the motivation for simple dualism is that only an immaterial soul can have mental states, then we should think something similar about higher animals like dogs and octopuses. Thus, in Rover the dog just as in Alice the human, the soul is the bearer of mental states, and the body is not a part of the soul. Now, the name “Alice” on simple dualism refers to the soul, so that “Alice is in pain” means that she is the bearer of the pain and “Alice has a broken leg” means that the leg associated with Alice is broken (compare: “Alice has a broken bicycle”) rather than that a part of Alice is broken. Surely, “Rover is in pain” and “Rover has a broken leg” mean something very close to “Alice is in pain” and “Alice has a broken leg”, respectively. Thus, “Rover” on simple dualism also refers to the soul.

Furthermore, Rover might be Alice’s pet. And the kind of interspecies affection that might exist between Rover and Alice requires that Rover be the right kind of thing to have affections and other mental states, and so, once again, “Rover” must refer to the soul.

But of course we also say that Rover is a dog. The simple dualist now has two options. The first is to take literally the statement that Rover is a dog, and conclude that dogs—and presumably other higher animals—are immaterial souls (if Rover is immaterial and Rover is a dog, then Rover is an immaterial dog; and Rover surely does not differ radically from other higher animals). Thus, strictly speaking, biologists don’t primarily study dogs and octopuses but rather their bodies, and we have never seen any higher animal.

The second option is to deny that Rover is literally a dog. This presumably requires denying that we are literally homo sapiens. Rather, “Rover is a dog” is to be understood as shorthand for “Rover ensouls a dog.”

Neither option looks attractive. I conclude that Rover is not a soul, and neither is Alice.

If you're going to be a Platonist dualist, why not be an idealist?

Let's try another exercise in philosophical imagination. Suppose Platonism and dualism are true. Then consider a theory on which our souls actually inhabit a purely mathematical universe. All the things we ever observe—dust, brains, bodies, stars and the like—are just mathematical entities. As our souls go through life, they become "attached" to different bits and pieces of the mathematical universe. This may happen according to a deterministic schedule, but it could also happen an indeterministic way: today you're attached to part of a mathematical object A₁, and tomorrow you might be attached to B₂ or C₂, instead. You might even have free will. One model for this is the traveling minds story, but with mathematical reality in the place of physical reality.

This is a realist idealism. The physical reality around us on this story is really real. It's just not intrinsically different from other bits of Platonic mathematical reality. The only difference between our universe and some imaginary 17-dimensional toroidal universe is that the mathematical entities constituting our universe are connected with souls, while those constituting that one are not.

One might wonder if this is really a form of idealism. After all, it really does posit physical reality. But physical reality ends up being nothing but Platonic reality.

The view is akin to Tegmark's ultimate ensemble picture, supplemented with dualism.

Given Platonism and dualism, this story is an attractive consequence of Ockham's Razor. Why have two kinds of things—the physical universe and the mathematical entities that represent the physical universe? Why not suppose they are the same thing? And, look, how neatly we solve the problem of how we have mathematical knowledge—we are acquainted with mathematical objects much as we are with tables and chairs.

"But we can just see that chairs and tables aren't made of mathematical entities?" you may ask. This, I think, confuses not seeing that chairs and tables are made of mathematical entities with seeing that they are not made of them. Likewise, we do not see that chairs and tables are made of fundamental particles, but neither do we see that they are not made of them. The fundamental structure of much of physical reality is hidden from our senses.

So what do we learn from this exercise? The view is, surely, absurd. Yet given Platonism and dualism, Ockham's razor strongly pulls to it. Does this give us reason to reject Platonism or dualism? Quite possibly.

The most fundamental and what matters most

What matters most are things like people, love, understanding, courage, friendship, beauty, etc. According to many contemporary metaphysicians, what is most fundamental are things like sets, points, photons, charge, spin, the electromagnetic field, etc. It's almost as if the metaphysicians took the fact that something matters to be evidence that it isn't fundamental.

But here is a plausible hypothesis or at least heuristic:

• Fundamental predicates apply primarily to fundamental entities, and derivatively to other entities.

While a table can have mass or be charged, it has mass or is charged derivatively. It is particles that primarily have mass or are charged. Now, some value predicates like "matters" or "is valuable" are fundamental. (Of course, this is the controversial assumption.) Thus we have reason to think the kinds of things they primarily apply to are themselves fundamental, and they apply only derivatively to non-fundamental things. But the value of a person is not derivative from the value of the person's constituents like fields or particles, and the way in which a person matters does not derive from the ways in which fields or particles matter.

Thus, either persons will be themselves fundamental, and primary bearers of value, or else persons will be partly constituted by something fundamental which is a primary bearer of value. The best candidate for this valuable constituent is the soul. Hence, either persons are fundamental or they have souls that are fundamental.

In fact, I would conjecture that we should turn on its head the correlation between fundamentality and not mattering that we find in much contemporary metaphysics. The more something matters, the more reason we have to think it is fundamental, I suspect. This may lead to a metaphysics on which there are fundamental facts about persons, their psychology and their biology, a realist metaphysics with a human face.