Dualism, non-reductive physicalism, and strong emergentism
What is the difference between these three positions? If non-reductive physicalism is the case, then that means certain things can't be reduced to physics, in principle. If they can't be reduced, then how are they physical?
With strong emergentism, new ontological categories come into existence at certain stages of complexity, which in principle could not have been predicted beforehand by a God-like being who knew all the physical facts.
If something fundamentally new is coming into existence, something that couldn't be predicted knowing everything about physics beforehand, how is this new domain physical?
To put it another way, the physical state of the universe does not logically determine strongly emergent or non-reductive properties. They could not in principle be deduced by all the rules and facts of the entire state of the universe before they came into existence.
Both seem like a form of dualism to me. I'm wondering in what sense physicalists consider these sorts of properties, events, domains to still be physical?
With strong emergentism, new ontological categories come into existence at certain stages of complexity, which in principle could not have been predicted beforehand by a God-like being who knew all the physical facts.
If something fundamentally new is coming into existence, something that couldn't be predicted knowing everything about physics beforehand, how is this new domain physical?
To put it another way, the physical state of the universe does not logically determine strongly emergent or non-reductive properties. They could not in principle be deduced by all the rules and facts of the entire state of the universe before they came into existence.
Both seem like a form of dualism to me. I'm wondering in what sense physicalists consider these sorts of properties, events, domains to still be physical?
Comments (53)
If I understand Lewisian supervenience correctly (of course there's many different views), it's that something is "physical" or "supervenes on the physical" just if every possible world with the same organization of physical substrates has the same supervening phenomenon. C is physical iff A and B are physical and A + B = C in all possible worlds that A and B are organized in the same manner.
Of course the biggest issue with physicalism is that there isn't any good definition of what the physical is supposed to be. Usually physicalists, or "materialism" in the vogue sense, is more of a reaction to what is seen as "spooky" dualism. They don't want to admit into their ontology "spooky" minds, so they shift in the exact opposite way and reject anything "like that". It's really more often than not a metaphysical view held for political and aesthetic reasons (a la Jamesian psychology of metaphysics), one that isn't as open-ended as naturalism (which is also less politically powerful). But since they have a hard time explaining what the physical is (and not just what it's not), "material" or "physical" become just as spooky as the apparently-spooky dualism they are against.
I don't agree that physicalism is a reaction to dualism it is simply monism for the sake of not multiplying beyond necessity.
We don't need dualism to describe the world, it is not necessary.
Nothing spooky about that.
Physical descriptions may be incomplete at this point, but there is substantially more physical description of what is than we find offered by dualism with regards to the non-physical.
So it is interesting to me that you feel physicalism has a hard time defining the physical.
Why would an external agency be unable to reconcile emergentism with downward causation?Schrödinger equation? Quantum descriptions may contain principles distinct from physical samples but that is because we restrict it to a mere collection of independent and probabilistic classical samples; from a dualistic point of view, probabilistic calculus and QM formalism encounter a similar dilemma by attempting to explain the link through things like identifying the physical of mental data
This is the advantage of a pansemiotic physicalism.
The meaning of symbols cannot be read off the physics of marks. The realm of sign or code is opaque from the brute physicalist point of view.
And yet physicalism predicts the constraints to which the freedom of any naturally arising code system will respond. Any symbolic form of existence will have to have the general purpose of furthering the goal of the second law of thermodynamics.
So physicalism predicts the existence of symbols - the zeroed dimensionality of a code being a physical freedom that can't be constrained (because how can you restrict dimensionality to less than nothing?).
And then physicalism predicts what will happen as a result of the evolution of symbolic complexity. Global entropy will be significantly increased.
Dude, what are you talking about?
I'm asking in what sense strong emergentism and non-reductive physicalism are not forms of dualism, as laid out in the OP.
Reductive physicalism is type identity physicalism. Non-reductive physicalism is token identity physicalism. According to reductive physicalism, the type of mental phenomena is reduced to the type of physical phenomena. Non-reductive physicalism says that some tokens of mental properties are matched with some tokens of physical properties.
Give what a go?
They certainly all suffer the same issue of severing causality and so creating disconnected realms. But strong emergentism and non-reductive physicalism would still presume that mind arises from material systems "somehow" (a material system is all that is needed for the magic to happen) while dualism usually would be taken to be a claim about the need for a proper "other" to the material ... ie: the spiritual, the divine, etc.
So it boils down to whether mind is being considered as a property of material organisation, or a property of an immaterial substance. And both break down in the same way because they do reductively think about nature only in terms of "substances with properties".
That is, they both fail when it comes to explaining the causes of causes. They both in the end point only to the existence of "brute unexplained properties".
This again isn't clear. Physicalism doesn't amount to some sort of endorsement of the science of physics (which we can see as a set of social facts/social activities). We need to better define just what reductive versus non-reductive physicalism is. And part of the problem with this is going to be that reductionism versus holism isn't necessarily defined that rigorously. It's often defined by holists in a straw man-like fashion rather.
Reductionism aims to reduce all causality to material and efficient cause - ie: bottom-up constructive cause. The story of substantial parts in contingent combination.
Holism reduces causality to Aristotle's four causes. So formal and final cause are taking to be (physically) real as well. And together they are the downwardly acting constraints. So a difference in kind is recognised (as cause via constraint is fundamentally difference from cause via construction).
Advanced holism shows how upwardly acting material freedoms and downwardly acting formal constraints are then each other cause, so closing the circle. Each is the emergent product of the other.
Constructive cause is made possible by a restriction on local material degrees of freedom (parts gain particular properties because they are prevented from trying to do "everything").
Global constraints are then the states of general coherent organisation that collections of these parts must consequently exhibit, or perpetually re-construct.
I'm skeptical that a majority of people who identify as either holists or reductionists would see the issue as being about causality and that they'd be Aristotelians with respect to an analysis of causality. In my experience Aristotle's analysis of causality is seen as a museum piece by most philosophers.
That's a good support of most people who identify as holists or reductionists seeing the issue that way and not seeing Aristotle's four causes as a museum piece. ;-)
Maybe you meet all your "holists" down at the yoga retreat. But your arguments from personal incredulity are not actually any kind of argument you realise.
You're not under an impression that you presented any sort of evidence or argument that that's a common definition though, are you?
Again, if you have a complaint about my definition, then back it up. As usual, your complaint amounts to "this is all news to me".
But I guess from your comments that you haven't even caught up with Bacon's definition of reductionism in the New Organon. (And who do you think wrote the old Organon?)
Because the job is to capture what it is that people idenfitying as reductionists and holists are talking about. Not to make up your own thing that you think they should be talking about.
And re Bacon, why would we be focusing on 400 years ago rather than how people use the term now?
Perhaps you can explain what has changed?
Check! No problems there. But one question I would ask is this - if the source of the 'upwardly acting causes' - material and efficient - is the ground beneath our feet, what is the source of the downwardly-acting constraints? In some sense they're like rules, or the way things have to be in order to exist. But, to a reductionist they seem suspiciously like Dennett's 'skyhooks':
from Darwin's Dangerous Idea
The obvious analogy is that armies need to be composed of soldiers to really exist. So armies recruit young people (those with the most degrees of behavioural freedom or plasticity) and mould them to fit. As a set up, the army exists because it has narrowed human variety to produce some interchangeable set of near identical military parts.
And then all those soldiers, acting together in ways that manifest their highly specific military properties, reconstruct the very system that made them. Good soldiers become drill sergeants, captains and generals. Good soldiers take their soldierly habits even back into civilian life. So soldiering perpetuates soldiering.
Thus there is a synergy of the local and global in which a limitation of variety creates the components that are then able to self assemble into systems that keep churning out said components.
Strong reductionism of course just presume components exist already formed. Thus anything they collectively construct is an accident without purpose. However a holist or systems view says components - the kind of regularity that gives us the many similar parts that could have a collective behaviour - must be deliberately shaped.
Contingency has to be limited for there to be these parts. So already their existence is dependent on the reality of some global reason for being, and even an idea of the form of the part that would be necessary to the job in mind.
(Y)
If the constraints are immanent, then they must be inherent within the matter itself, so really it's all bottom up. There is no top down constraint, that's imaginary. There is no "the army", which constrains the soldiers from the top down. The soldiers unite willingly, creating an army from this willful act of unification. What appears to you as a top down constraint is really just a deeper, more fundamental form of bottom up constraint. It is necessary to assume this deeper form in order to account for the existence of matter itself.
If you'd simply read the IEP or Wikipedia entries on reductionism, you could easily learn some different ideas re what it refers to.
I've been puzzling over this. Is there a name for physicalists who admit dualism, but not in public?
I supplied my rigorous definition (one that I have to say is commonplace among the systems scientists and hierarchy theorists I know).
You continue to reply with fatuous irrelevancies. And there we have it. :)
Yeah, but I'm talking about relative to the views of (a mass of) folks who identify as holists and reductionists. Obviously someone could just make up a rigorous definition if it doesn't have to have anything to do with what most of the folks who identify as the thing in question would say about their views. But that's not what I was talking about.
Sounds legit.
What am I calling myself that I aren't able to define?
An explanation of? (Maybe that would work for producing an answer to what I'm calling myself that I'm not able to define.)
Not a reductionist or holist. I figure you had something specific in mind.
The problem is, you haven't justified your claim of downward causation, or that anything such as "the army" is a real, natural entity, rather than just an abstraction. If it's just an abstraction, then your claim that it acts causally through constraints is unsupported. I do not see how the real existence of "the army" could be understood as anything more than individuals acting. There are individuals who chose to act together toward a common goal, and we goal this an army. There is no "army" which is causing the individuals to act, they act of their own free will.
There is a common problem in modern philosophy, that philosophers assume something called "inter-subjectivity". From the premise of inter-subjectivity, they claim the real existence of many unnatural entities such as "society", 'the state", even "objective moral principles". The problem is that observation and empirical evidence indicates that such entities, unities which are said to be created by inter-subjectivity, are reducible to the activities of individuals. This reduction is a verifiable reality. Inter-subjectivity, and therefore all the artificial entities which follow from it, such as "the state", and "the army", are reducible to the particular activities of individual human beings. There is no evidence that such abstract entities called "the state", or "the army", are actually constraining the people. Such an idea is actually rather absurd, because it is the activities of the individuals which do the constraining. People constrain other people through the use of authority, rank, position, force, etc..
So we have two possible directions to proceed here. We could overlook the facts of the valid reduction, and insist on the absurdity, like you do. This absurdity is supposed to justify your claim of top-down causation. Or we could accept the validity of the reduction, and look for the principle of unity within the individuals. In this way we proceed toward understanding will and intention as the real cause of existence of these abstract entities ("the state", 'the army"), which have a real presence, and real power. Then we seek the internal source of this causation rather than looking for some phantom external top-down causation.
Yep. I get you don't see it and likely never will.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So there are freely chosing individuals and then ... somehow ... the separate thing of a common goal.
Let's put aside your fanciful notion that drill sergeants offer raw recruits a lot of free choice during boot camp training. We call an army an army (and not for instance a rabble or a rout) because it really is being regulated by some actual state of form and purpose.
And again, my account explains why soldiers exist individually such that they can exhibit collective behaviour. It explains the atomism involved in terms of global limitations on personal freedoms, such that the individual also becomes the interchangeable.
So what you think is so critically important is exactly what I explain for you in causal terms.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So what I said in the end, eh?
Any raw recruit can choose not to follow the instruction of the drill sergeant, and suffer the consequence. When the choice to follow the drill sergeant's orders is a free will choice, made by a free willing human being, how can you say that the drill sergeant "causes" the recruit's actions to support your downward causation? Sure, there's a special relationship between the sergeant and each recruit, but where is this thing called "the army" which is supposed to be applying downward causation here?
Even your wording betrays that you know that the true reality is other than how you describe it: "we call an army an army ... because it really is being regulated by some actual state of form and purpose." See, the army is being regulated, by some form or purpose (purpose existing within individual human minds). You reveal with your words what you really believe, that it is not the army which is doing the regulating, the army is the passive, artificial thing, which is being regulated by the intentions of human beings.
Quoting apokrisis
Sure, it's what you said, but at the same time you describe what you said in a completely different way, thereby contradicting yourself. That's why I interjected into the discussion. You said "the constraints would have to arise immanently". But then you went on to describe those constraints as the constraints of the whole, the army, acting inward onto the individual soldiers, as a downward causation. This contradicts constraints arising "immanently", which implies that the constraints come from within the individual part, as I described by referring to intention and free will. So you haven't explained how two apparently opposed processes, "constraints arise immanently", and "constraints of downward causation" are supposed to be the same thing.
So they can't choose not to suffer the consequences?
The consequences are thus quite real as the corollary of their choices. It is all a bit like choosing to jump of a tree and fly, then having to accept the consequences that the law of gravity mandates. Nothing you can do will change anything about the consequences in either situation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Nope. You just again show a problem with reading skills.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Another thing I have explained to you a thousand times, a thousand ways.
My position is based on the causal notion of synergy. So parts construct the whole, and the whole shapes the parts. There is a dichotomistic mutuality at the heart of all things systematic.
Things are happening in both directions. You only notice them happening in the one direction.
The most simple way to choose not to suffer the consequences, is to choose to follow the orders. It's not difficult, just like the law, choose to obey and you do not suffer punishment. If you choose not to obey the law, you might prepare yourself to suffer the consequences. But you may try to find a way to disobey and not get caught, as well as multiple other options..
Quoting apokrisis
How is this relevant? The consequences we are talking about, are those punishments inflicted upon us by other human beings, not by natural forces like gravity. Do you not respect a difference between these two? Are you trying to say that the army is a thing like gravity, which will punish you if you try to disobey it? Don't you see that it is the individual human beings within the army which will seek to have you punished? Just like if you disobey the law, it is certain individuals who will seek to have you punished. It's not the law itself which acts to punish you, it those who enforce it. Nor is it the army which acts to constrain, it is those members of the army which act in this way.
Quoting apokrisis
I understand synergy to an extent. But synergy is parts working together, toward some sort of unity, similar to how I explained individual human beings producing an army. Can you explain how synergy is compatible with top-down causation, the whole, (the army for example) constraining the parts? I don't see how this notion of the whole constraining the parts is a valid notion.
So by choice ... one simply chooses not to have freewill and the constraints are thus rendered an abstract illusion that you never really took seriously. Gotcha.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So these avatars of the global order - do they have the same kind of freewill. It is their choice to line you up against the wall and shoot you? The constraints are no more real for them either.
Gawd, I would feel really pissed off about that firing squad that just decided to make an example out of me for the hell of it, or whatever.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
True that.
We all have choices, and some people choose to write and say that they do not and some write that they do. Both are a manifestation of creative ideas that we can create.
You've lost me in your contradictory ways. Free will is a constraint? That's the problem with your position, you portray the creative results of free acts as the effects of constraints. Do you not see the inherent contradiction? Or are you a determinist denier of free will?
Quoting apokrisis
How could it not be?
Quoting apokrisis
Finally! We agree on something. Now maybe we can start to discuss these topics in some sort of rational way.
Why would you think that is what I said?
As Rich says, we can certainly treat our own freewill as a constraint over our actions and their intended outcomes. That is why we credit our "selves" with top-down causal agency.
I mean you believe you exist, right? You're not just a collective fiction of the independently-acting cells of your body.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Probably not so much. It was the bit about you not seeing where I was agreeing.
I see the causal agency of my self as explained by intentional, free will acts. How do you understand this as a case of top-down causal agency, defined by constraints, rather than as a bottom-up causation defined by a freedom inherent (immanent) within my material being?
Who is this "my" you speak of? I only see a reductionist accumulation of cells.
ON NON-REDUCTIVE PHYSICALISM
Non-reductive physicalism is wrong - claiming that thoughts cannot be reduced to physical world processes. Without your biological platform operating in the physical world, you will have no thoughts (and you will not exist). This may change with technology, but it is still reductive.
On a related note (the underlying assumption of non-reduction), just because a phenomenon is currently beyond our understanding (which is understandable - since we have 'just awakened' to the universe), it does not mean the phenomenon (in this case the thought-biology connection) does not exist. To claim that thoughts do not need our biological platforms simply because we cannot figure it all out is doing just that - claiming a connection does not exist 'just because' it is still beyond our understanding.
ON THE DUALISM
Therefore, since one philosophical school of thinking is wrong, that negates the dualism.
ON STRONG EMERGENCE
Strong Emergentism reflects reality - where a new higher system is created by smaller parts. A car engine is a good mechanical example - the overall function is different than the function of any of its component parts. The liver is a good biological example. It performs a higher function that any of its component parts (cells) do individually - in other words it takes a team effort.
I've found Strong Emergence in human societies (shush - it is a new insight of mine) - where human institutions take on a life of their own - becoming self-sustaining and performing societal functions beyond any one of its component humans (we refer to the worst of them as 'self-serving bureaucracies').