Reasons as causes are not accounted for under naturalism, in a way similar to our concern about beliefs/thoughs as causes. In fact, reasons as causes actually rely upon beliefs/thoughts so the argument lends quite a deal of weight to the Plantinga version.
The conclusion is certainly the same – N&E is self-defeating.

I’m certain that many have sorted out the details of the causal chain but my understanding is it goes something like awareness=>comprehension=>(something)=>reasons=>(something)=>behavior

Tests have shown, and we know from experience, that we can interrupt most of these causal chains *at will*. This is no random feat. I can will myself to become unaware of external causes or I can will myself to not comprehend something or I can will myself to reason incorrectly. All of these effect my behavior and thus my evolutionary future.

The cause of the will has no definitive link to any external source. We can test this, and have tested this, under countless physical conditions and the will shows up again and again – just as predicted. If the will is a caused physical brain state, it looks as if no definitive thing outside the brain is causing it to appear – and it’s appearance can become as non-random as a clock.

If the content of the brain state (thought) is *identical* to the brain state in *every conceivable way* then one or the other is unnecessary as a means to explain causation.

Since the brain state == thought neither is unnecessary because there are not two things.

When it comes to determining what the brain will process, the mind (through the mechanism of selective attention) is at least as strong as the novelty or relevance of the stimulus itself. In fact, Attention can even work its magic in the total absence of sensory stimuli. If an experimenter teaches a monkey to pay attention to a certain quadrant of a video screen then single-cell recordings find that neurons responsible for that area will fire 30-40 percent more often than otherwise, even when there is no there there – even, that is, when the quadrant is empty. So here again we have the mental act of paying attention acting on the activity of the brain circuits, in this case turning them up before the appearance of a stimulus. fmRIs fins that activity spikes in human brains, too, when volunteers wait expectantly for an object to appear in a portion of a video monitor. Even before an image appears, attention has already stacked the neuronal deck, activating the visual cortex and, even more strongly, the frontal and parietal lobes – the regions of the brain where attention seems to originate. As a result, when the stimulus finally shows up it evokes an even greater response in the visual cortex than if attention had not primed the brain. This, says Robert Desimone (who happens to be Leslie Ungerleider’s husband) , “is the most interesting finding. In attention without a visual stimulus, you get activation in the same cells that would respond to that stimulus, as if the cells are primed. You also get activation in the prefrontal cortex and parietal lobes. That seems like strong evidence [he chose his words carefully ] that these lobes exert top-down control on what the sensory system processes.” To summarize, then, selective attention – reflecting willful activation of one circuit over another – can nudge the brain into processing one signal and not another.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind And The Brain, page 330, 331

But then the study turned up what has become a key finding in the science of attention. Active, focused attention to a specific attribute, such as color, the y discovered, ramps up the activity of brain regions that process color. In other words, the parts of the brain that process color in an automatic, “hard-wired” way are significantly and specifically activated by the willful act of focusing on color. Activity in brain regions that passively process motion are amplified when volunteers focus attention on motion; areas that passively process shape get ramped up when volunteers focus on shape. Brain activity in a circuit that is physiologically dedicated to a particular task is markedly amplified by the mental act of focusing attention on the feature that the circuit is hard-wired to process.

333

The following year another team of neuroscientists confirmed that attention exerts real, physical effects.
…
The researchers found that, in the subjects paying attention to the vibrations, activation in the somatosensory cortex region representing the fingertips increased 13 percent compared to activation in subjects receiving identical stimulation but not paying attention. 333
… We can go further: not only do mental states matter tot he physical activity of the brain, but they contribute to the final perception even more powerfully than the stimulus itself. 337
…
Let em repeat: when stimuli identical to those that induce plastic changes in an attending brain are instead delivered to a nonattending brain, there is no induction of cortical plasticity. Attention, in other words, must be paid. 338
…
The role of attention throws into stark relief the power of mind over brain, for it is a mental state (attention) that has the ability to direct neuroplasticity. 339

So now we have ruled out both thought and external causes as being necessary to cause a significant portion of human behavior. All we need are brain states. Plantinga and Lewis are right.

Making more of something than what it needs to be.

Thanks. I didn’t do that.

Why is there no need to describe information as I have? Does materialism suddenly explain the whole shebang and the only thing that makes sense of the question, immaterial propositional content, is suddenly unnecessary? How so?

I guess that is our disagreement, just re-stated.

But it isn’t, not quite. Given materialism the placebo effect, for example, is the number one unexplained thing on New Scientist’s list.
How can you tell me that we don’t need to address information content or that I am making too much of it when without it there is no explanation? How could you possibly know what is or is not needed for the explanation when, in your view, we don’t have the explanation?

A defense of materialism cannot require knowledge of the specifics of every single materialistic effect, which would eventually amount to knowledge of the entire material universe. It only has to be possible in principle, and I laid out the principle to you: the doctor says “here’s a pill,” those airwaves start some neurons going, which changes some hormones, etc.

No, you’ve laid out nothing.
“Here’s the pill” is not airwaves, its information. I’ve said this many times now – he could have written “here’s the pill” or typed it, or you could have imagined it, or used any other mode of transference. Somehow, with the material changing, and the information staying the same, the result is the same. If A + B = C, and A + D = C, what does that tell you about A with relation to C? What does it tell you about B and D? The constan factor is the immaterial, not the material.

“and the reason my girlfriend cries when she takes a certain phone call and not another”
More airwaves (specific ones) and neurons.

Specific airwaves. What’s so specific about them? Just the right amplitude? Harmonics just right? Specific airwaves with the same content, somehow, as a specific telegram (with just the right ink to paper ratio), or email, or face to face meeting.
With no reference whatsoever to information or proposition you are avoiding the one thing that can specify one of these from another of its genus and yet be held in common with each of the others.

“Just binary digits causing atoms to move, right?”
Your understanding of materialism doesn’t completely conceal your distaste for it.

Your vague use of language doesn’t conceal your ad hominem

“How do you define qualia”
The standard way.

Thanks. There is no standard way.
This the wiki:
“There are many definitions of qualia, which have changed over time.”.

I can’t see where the “feeling” part of the qualia is in materialism.

Feelings are brainstates, are they not? Surely, if thoughts and beliefs are there is no reason feelings aren’t.

Said in a better way, there is an essential subjective element to qualia that is not required for thoughts.

I think they are equally subjective. Qualia are not merely feelings, they are knowledge experiences. They must be distinguished from the properties of an object – in the same way that a “thought” is, in your scenario, not a property of the specific airwave, but is directly intuited from it. It is a given, and yet subjective. No two people can have the same thought in the same way. No physical description of a brainstate or airwave or ink on paper can convey the actual knowledge of having the thought.

“John Searle has rejected the notion that the problem of qualia is different from the problem of consciousness itself, arguing that consciousness and qualia are one and the same phenomenon.”

Other than that I’m going to leave this issue with you as I don’t think it’s that important to this conversation

Another strange property of this ‘law’ is that a seemingly countless number of physical causes can render the first cause ‘obsolete’ and uncaused. Such is the case when the doctor says “take this pill now” and your wife says “do it later”

the doctor says “here’s a pill,” those airwaves start some neurons going, which changes some hormones, etc.

It’s no problem for you that vastly different airwaves (voices, languages, accents) or vastly different wavelenghts (ink on paper) are capable of producing the same result time and time again? A seemly countless number of physical causes can produce the same outcome. What kind of law of physics is this? This is a theory so steeped in non-science and non-evidence as to nearly be blindly religious.

“Reify” is a very trendy word. What do you mean by it here?

Making more of something than what it needs to be.

Why is there no need to describe information as I have? Does materialism suddenly explain the whole shebang and the only thing that makes sense of the question, immaterial propositional content, is suddenly unnecessary? How so?

I guess that is our disagreement, just re-stated.

Not so, not in the least. Information is not just patterns, information is meaning, “aboutness”, communication. These are not properties of matter.

I’m loathe to equate information and meaning, they are distinct. But that just shifts what you claim can’t be accommodated by materialism further down the road, from information to meaning. Now you’re making meaning into Meaning.

If it works so well for us then you can explain the placebo effect

A defense of materialism cannot require knowledge of the specifics of every single materialistic effect, which would eventually amount to knowledge of the entire material universe. It only has to be possible in principle, and I laid out the principle to you: the doctor says “here’s a pill,” those airwaves start some neurons going, which changes some hormones, etc.

and the reason my girlfriend cries when she takes a certain phone call and not another

More airwaves (specific ones) and neurons.

Just binary digits causing atoms to move, right?

Your understanding of materialism doesn’t completely conceal your distaste for it.

How do you define qualia

The standard way.

and why is it unexplained by materialism?

I can’t see where the “feeling” part of the qualia is in materialism.

Why does this un-explanation not apply exactly as well in exactly the same manner to “thought” or “belief”?

Because a feeling “feels (a certain way),” but a thought doesn’t “think” (?) a certain way, it just is. Said in a better way, there is an essential subjective element to qualia that is not required for thoughts.

Edited: Checking out the Wikipedia page on “qualia” confirms the distinction that should be made between qualia and thoughts for materialism. Charlie, check it out if you can, or I’ll summarize if you ask me.

What caused the initial thought. This is the same question I’ve asked from the beginning, on both these threads, and which cannot be answered by you or Paul or materialism.

They have answered it, but as I said here, and echoing your comments, their answer renders the content of the brain state (the thought) powerless to accomplish anything.

I think this reply answers that: Quentin Crain replied on August 22nd, 2008 3:53 pm

Please quote or link, these replies are threaded all over high heaven.
I’m sure it didn’t answer the question, since I went ahead and asked the question anyway and was inspired by reading just that post to ask my question.

I am not sure what you are asking me. This question could be difficult to answer if we want to be exact. Do we consider a single water molecule that evaporated from the ocean a “cloud”? I am ok with that. I am even ok with calling lakes “clouds” or clouds “lakes”. But I am not sure if any of that is what you are looking for. It seem like here we are debating terminology.

I was using your little metaphor, I wasn’t asking about the water cycle.
I’ll put those two sentences back together so you can see what I meant:

What caused the thought/brainstate “this can help me”?
What caused this little cloud? Why can you never answer this?

What caused the initial thought. This is the same question I’ve asked from the beginning, on both these threads, and which cannot be answered by you or Paul or materialism.

A few more add-ons for Quentin’s latest.
You said that the patient received the “thought” via airwaves. And Paul has told me that I need not “reify” information.
But let’s see about that.
What if the patient received the thought via written instructions? Or had them implanted by Rekall? or what if he just generated the belief himself?
How can all these completely different material preconditions result in the exact same result? Why would this coincide with the (irrelevant) fact that the “information” never changed? What are the odds?
Obviously it is content and proposition that has the causal influence here, and not material.

If it truly were the placebo doing the work, or the airwaves, or the ink on paper, then a person could be told “this will help” and be cured even if he actually heard “pink elephants rendezvous on the moors”. Strangely, he doesn’t report that this is what he thought. His thoughts, somehow, coincide with the intent of the doctor and the experiment. In the world of adaptive selection, it is his thinking that has affected the cure, and none of the material causes.

What caused the thought/brainstate “this can help me”?

I think this reply answers that: Quentin Crain replied on August 22nd, 2008 3:53 pm

What caused this little cloud? Why can you never answer this?

I am not sure what you are asking me. This question could be difficult to answer if we want to be exact. Do we consider a single water molecule that evaporated from the ocean a “cloud”? I am ok with that. I am even ok with calling lakes “clouds” or clouds “lakes”. But I am not sure if any of that is what you are looking for. It seem like here we are debating terminology.
Also, thanks a ton for those explanatory paragraphs! I have read it twice and totally do not get or understand the argument and how the conclusion follows. I will keep re-reading until I think I do.

The doctor has the brain pattern that a placebo is an appropriate remedy in this particular case.

A brain pattern that is what?
How can a pattern be “that” anything?

The patient now is given both the sensation of taking physical medicine and the thought (via airwaves) that they should now get better.

Airwaves are not thoughts. What is the “thought” here. You’ve mentioned airwaves to try to give this some materialistic grounding, but you’ve ignored the distinction between airwaves and thoughts.

This together begets other brain states that effect other bodily states detailed by Charlie.

This fine now. Away goes a cascade of brainstates to do what they do.
But they never got started in your materialistic account because a brain pattern can not be “that a placebo…” and an airwave can not be a thought.

And a question: Is the believe in the placebo affect a false belief?

No, but peopel are not cured because they believe in the placebo effect. They believe that they have received medicine r treatment that has curative properties of its own. This is a false belief. The belief itself is the cure and, once again, need not correlate accurately to any environmental reality and therefore correlation is not necessary for selection and therefore ….well you know by now.

Does materialism suddenly explain the whole shebang and the only thing that makes sense of the question, immaterial propositional content, is suddenly unnecessary? How so?

The naturalistic view, which is the scientific view, requires that matter have these (currently) non-scientific, non-traditional properties. If the current, best explanation is that brain matter can have the property of ‘information’ or ‘truth’ or ‘intent’ or ‘aboutness’ then it makes sense to publish this in the scientific media and teach it as current theory in the classrooms. Maybe this is happening and I just don’t know it. The first scientist to discover how to measure these properties gets my vote for a Nobel.

The thought/brain state that you are taking a substance that can help you caused other thoughts/brain states some of which cause other material matter arrangements such as simulating the immune system or whatever.

What caused the thought/brainstate “this can help me”?
What caused this little cloud? Why can you never answer this?

Paul, I don’t see the problem you’re having with figuring out that if a thought can be caused under materialism, especially when thoughts are reducible to a brain state under materialism anyway … then that thought is irrelevant to the whole procedure and how that destroys any reason to accept beliefs as true, or even potentially true.

Yes, I definitely am not figuring this out. Do you mind cutting and pasting a couple of paragraphs where you have explained this? Is the paragraph of yours directly above this quote an example? Also, this is what Plantinga purports to show right?

Neaurons fire or they don’t fire, or they fire more or less, or the uptake of chemicals is increased or decreased. These states do not have content. These states can cause behaviour by causing other neurons to act, thereby releasing chemicals, flexing muscles, etc.
Everyone’s with me so far.
But this is as far as Paul and Quentin need to go, because this is all there is for them.

But wait, there are also “thoughts” associated here. We are not just machines chugging along, reacting to stimuli, we are conscious. We have beliefs about those stimuli, and we have beliefs about our actions.
Those beliefs, to Paul and Quentin, are exactly and nothing more than the brainstates as described above.
But those brainstates have already accomplished the work necessary. Therefore, these “belief” brainstates are either 1) the exact same thing as the ones already described, in some mysterious way merely interpreted by, I presume, other brainstates, as thoughts or 2) these thought brainstates are created by the brainstates described above as part of the chain reaction.
In neither case is the content of the thought relevant to the firing of the neurons in the chain reaction to release hormones or to flex muscles – that is already accomplished by the chemico-physico process. The thought content, according to this materialistic view, can be anything, or nothing. Neuron A fires causing Neuron B to fire, causing Chemical C to release, causing Muscle D to flex, etc.
Oh wait, says the materialist, maybe the thought affected that procedure somewhere. Okay, says I, let’s insert Thought T in there. But Thought T is just a brainstate, anotehr sequence of determined firings of neurons. What the conscious mind is somehow determined to think of Thought T is irrelevant and merely a side-effect of the sequence. It “thinking” can never be separated, in any number of attempts, from the fact that Neuron A caused Neuron B to fire.
Once again – thought content is irrelevant, it need not correlate to true events, it’s not even obvious that it could have the property of true/false, or even “aboutness”. Therefore, there is no reason to accept that our thoughts and beliefs have any relation tot he outside world, or even any bearing on our actions.

Except that we know they do. We know our thoughts cause the placebo effect and we know that our thoughts determine our actions to at least some degree some of the time.